A moral (from Latin morālis) is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim.

As an example of an explicit maxim, at the end of Aesop's fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, in which the plodding and determined tortoise wins a race against the much-faster yet extremely arrogant hare, the stated moral is "slow and steady wins the race". However, other morals can often be taken from the story itself; for instance, that "arrogance or overconfidence in one's abilities may lead to failure or the loss of an event, race, or contest".

The use of stock characters is a means of conveying the moral of the story by eliminating complexity of personality and so spelling out the issues arising in the interplay between the characters, enables the writer to generate a clear message. With more rounded characters, such as those typically found in Shakespeare's plays, the moral may be more nuanced but no less present, and the writer may point it up in other ways (see, for example, the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet).

Sam Harris may refer to:

Alexander Britton "Brit" Hume (born June 22, 1943) is an American political commentator and television journalist. For twenty years he was a correspondent for the American Broadcasting Company, including Chief White House Correspondent. He then spent ten years as the Washington, D.C. managing editor of the Fox News Channel and the anchor of Special Report with Brit Hume. Since 2008, he has been the senior political analyst for Fox News and a regular public affairs panelist on Fox News Sunday.

Alexander Britton Hume was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Virginia Powell (née Minnigerode) Hume and George Graham Hume. He attended St. Albans School at the same time as Al Gore and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1965.

Hume first worked for The Hartford Times, and later for United Press International and the Baltimore Evening Sun. He then worked for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson from 1970 to 1972, and later for Richard Pollak, founding editor of [MORE] (a monthly media review published in the 1970s), as a Washington Editor during the mid-1970s.

Fransiscus Bernardus Maria (Frans) de Waal, PhD (born 29 October 1948, 's-Hertogenbosch), is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler professor of Primate Behavior in the Emory University psychology department in Atlanta, Georgia, and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics and Our Inner Ape. His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing. He is a Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

De Waal studied at the Dutch universities of Radboud University Nijmegen, University of Groningen, and Utrecht. In 1977, De Waal received his doctorate in biology from Utrecht University after training as a zoologist and ethologist with Professor Jan van Hooff, a well-known expert of emotional facial expressions in primates. His dissertation research concerned aggressive behavior and alliance formation in macaques.

Michael J. Sandel (born March 5, 1953) is an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for the Harvard course 'Justice', which is available to view online, and for his critique of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Born in Minneapolis to a Jewish family, which moved to Los Angeles when he was thirteen. A high achiever, he was the President of his senior class at Palisades High School (1971), graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis University (1975), and received his doctorate from Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, where he studied under philosopher Charles Taylor.

Sandel subscribes to a certain version of communitarianism (although he is uncomfortable with the label), and in this vein he is perhaps best known for his critique of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Rawls' argument depends on the assumption of the veil of ignorance, which he claims allows us to become "unencumbered selves".