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Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.

When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

What influences our behavior, and what our level of responsibility is, are very complex issues. And anytime we try to make this simplistic, we don't serve people well.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense.

I'm actually interested in poor behavior. I'm interested in what drives people to poor behavior.

If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the absorption of cultural norms, they should either be stable or randomly drift over time, like skirt lengths or the widths of ties. They shouldn't show systematic change over human history. But they do.