The three of us just back from a short evening constitutional, after a delicious dinner of chicken soup with dumplings (in order to stike back at the cold I somehow picked up in Wisconsin), and it was dark, although only 8 p.m. What's the world coming to? Cold and cloudy almost all day, with a 30 minute break for some sun.

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“There may be nothing more important than human cooperation. Whenever more pressing concerns seem to arise—like the threat of a deadly pandemic, an asteroid impact, or some other global catastrophe—human cooperation is the only remedy (if a remedy exists). Cooperation is the stuff of which meaningful human lives and viable societies are made. Consequently, few topics will be more relevant to a maturing science of human well-being.

Open a newspaper, today or any day for the rest of your life, and you will witness failures of human cooperation, great and small, announced from every corner of the world. The results of these failures are no less tragic for being utterly commonplace: deception, theft, violence, and their associated miseries arise in a continuous flux of misspent human energy. When one considers the proportion of our limited time and resources that must be squandered merely to guard against theft and violence (to say nothing of addressing their effects), the problem of human cooperation seems almost the only problem worth thinking about.1 “Ethics” and “morality” (I use these terms interchangeably) are the names we give to our deliberate thinking on these matters. Clearly, few subjects have greater bearing upon the question of human well-being.”

Excerpt From: Harris, Sam. “The Moral Landscape.”