These statements are a bit crude and exaggerated version of what I had in mind, but they're actually not that far off the mark.

The basic human folk ethics, shaped within certain bounds by culture, is amazingly successful in ensuring human coordination and cooperation in practice, at both small and large scales. (The fact that we see its occasional bad failures as dramatic and tragic only shows that we're used to it working great most of the time.) The key issue here is that these coordination problems are extremely hard and largely beyond our understandin... (read more)