Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Harvard University, Gov. 135 “Bureaucracy” professor, author of pathbreaking books on bureaucracy, crime, character, and human nature.
“It is important to realize that humans cannot dispense with a sense of belonging to a small group. Such ingroups are necessarily defined by a process of exclusion - of strangers, foreigners, enemies - that create out-groups. Sympathy …is easily aroused but quickly forgotten…. We are softened by the sight of one hungry child, but hardened by the sight of thousands.”
“Why [do] we believe that moral rules ought to have universal applicability? It is not that modern man is kinder, fairer, or more dutiful than his primitive forbears; in fact, man for man, he may be less kind, less fair, and less dutiful. It is that … they now encompass a larger number of people. The Apache warrior may have been far more loyal to his family and caring to his offspring than a contemporary professor of philosophy, but, where the Apache would kill without remorse a warrior of another tribe, the philosopher would feel obliged not only the spare the life of a sociologist but to go to great lengths to ensure that the latter was given equal opportunity and personal liberty.” -- The Moral Sense (1993), 50, 194.
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