Not happy stories: "Through childhood and adolescence, religion would be used against Snyder. It’s a weapon in her father’s hands. He justifies his physical violence by retelling a story that will, unfortunately, be common to many: obedience to a parent is a sign of obedience to God,
discipline is an act of love, violence is an act of love." But stories that need to be told.
Michael Shermer's 10 moral principles: no 3
3. The Happiness Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s
unhappiness through force or fraud.
Humans have a host of moral and immoral passions, including being selfless and selfish, cooperative and competitive, nice and nasty. It is natural and normal to try to increase our own happiness by whatever means available, even if that means being selfish, competitive, and nasty.
Fortunately, evolution created both sets of passions, such that by nature we also seek to increase our own happiness by being selfless, cooperative, and nice. Since we have within us both moral and immoral sentiments, and we have the capacity to think rationally and intuitively to override our baser instincts, and we have the freedom to choose to do so, at the core of morality is choosing to do the right thing by acting morally and applying the happiness principle. (The modifier “force or fraud”
was added to clarify that there are many activities that do not involve morality, such as a sporting contest, in which the goal is not to seek happiness with your opponent’s happiness in mind, but simply to win, fairly of course.)
