Money Wisdom #445

"Reason will not help. The ethical system implanted in each of us by our upbringing (even a rebel is influenced by what he rebels against) was not derived from any reasonable principles; those who conveyed it to us were rarely able to give any rational account of it, or indeed to formulate it explicitly at all. They handed on to us what society had taught them, in the same way as they handed on to us the language that they had learned to speak."

Joan Robinson Economic Philosophy (1962) p. 17