I can't legislate to change human nature.
I'm not naive enough to believe it's in our nature to step outside our comfort zones.
I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.
If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?
You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.
A goat does not eat into a hen's stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.
The guard rails on a highway may restrict some folks from driving the way they want, but those rules mostly end up saving the lives of those other drivers who understand that living in a society means behaving in a commonly beneficial way.
Taboo restrictions are distinct from religious or moral prohibitions. They are not based upon any divine ordinance, but may be said to impose themselves on their own account. They differ from moral prohibitions in that they fall into no system that declares quite generally that certain abstinences must be observed and gives reasons for that necessity.
Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.
The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.
It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.
A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.
Pretty much, you point to a problem and good reasoning about why people are doing what they are doing and what constraints they face in terms of how others will behave, and you're looking at a problem that could be improved upon by game-theoretic reasoning.
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?
In some settings, however, rampant opportunistic behavior severely limits what can be done jointly without major investments in monitoring and sanctioning arrangements.
