A few week ago, I finished reading The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. I found it a good introduction to morality and moral psychology, and it is reflective of research in the field. It has challenged me to examine my own morality and why I judge things to be moral or immoral, right or wrong, and why I am bothered by people who have more different morals than I do.
There are two major ideas from the book that I came away with. The first is unsettling to me, and that is that our sense or moral/immoral comes from a fleeting emotional reaction to someone or something. A moment later, we being a rational process of explaining why we think something is moral to justify and assure ourselves that our emotional reaction was justified, but we claim that is the source of our moral judgement. So, our morality is guided mostly by our emotions, unless we work to separate emotions from the rational justification, and engage in a more objective evaluation of morality.
The second idea is that there are 5 pillars supporting our moral constitution. Moral judgements can be described as being part of the pillars of: providing care and avoiding harm; promoting fairness and stopping exploitation; expecting loyalty and dealing with traitors or apostates; recognizing authority and blocking anarchy; recognizing sanctity and removing degradation. Emphasis on one or two of these pillars is common, and differs between political, social, and cultural groups. Ideally, equal emphasis should be placed on all 5. Disagreement and conflict occur when people who emphasize different pillars communicate or interact because of the different moral determinations and resulting decisions they make.
Yes. In the “Your Top Ten Books of 2021” thread, I said that it was “My favorite non-fiction of the year. Full of insights and food for thought about how conservatives and liberals see the world, and what their/our moral feelings are based on.”
It has been mentioned and discussed in other threads before, such as this one:
Because ‘expecting loyalty and dealing with traitors or apostates’ is a garbage value. It is largely about tribalism and in-group purity, which are not things I highly value. I’m not saying ‘loyalty’ is bad and being a ‘traitor’ is great, but placing a co-equal emphasis on such things implies a closed social system to my mind. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a value at all, just it should be a seriously de-emphasized one.
Similarly and only a little less strongly on ‘recognizing sanctity and removing degradation’ and ‘recognizing authority and blocking anarchy’. What if I’m an anarchist? I’m not as it happens, but reflexive deference to authority is an evil IMHO. And while I’m not necessarily all in on wallowing in unlimited hedonism, I think a fair bit of it is fine - screw purity. Again, I’m not saying they are of NO value, they should just be devalued in the overall balance.
Different people have different world views, news at 11. This is nothing shocking and not really resolvable.
Of course. Everyone’s values are, too. I agree that tribalism can and has been used to maintain purity and and be a reason for denying or destroying other groups or individuals, but there are also times when it is needed for a benevolent group’s cohesion and to guide them away from becoming elitist. In BizSpeak, it’s their core values, vision statements, and their DEI practices. For that group, there would be little emphasis on traitors or apostates because their cohesion comes from a shared value, rather than a siege mentality of “we’re not THEM, and anyone who isn’t with us is THEM.”
With sanctity, it is part of compassion and protection. There are behaviors toward others we find abhorrent because condoning them could lead to us being in danger. But, there are people who have no use for sanctity, who have no boundaries, and destroy whatever or whoever gets in their way. Haidt makes the specific point that authority as he presents it is not about exercising power. It is about knowledge and experience being recognized and sought after. Haidt’s definition of authority is granted by people to an individual or group who they feel is a valued and wanted asset to the community.
Yes, people have unique world views that sometimes collide or are contradictory, and I don’t aim to find a resolution. The problem that I see is that we have made recreational outrage a national sport, with a number of people just waiting for the opportunity to pile on and claim the moral high ground with fury and malice.
I haven’t read the book, but I do read his Substack (After Babel) and I’ve found his framework very helpful in analysing why people do things. Recognising the operation of all of the five values in yourself helps in understanding other people’s value systems that seem alien at first, by providing a point of reference.
For instance, “expecting loyalty and dealing with traitors and apostates” sounds terribly fascist (it’s that word ‘apostate’, I think, it has a real Inquisitiony sound to it) but then we all have family and close friends that we would (I hope) want to be loyal to, and be disappointed if we didn’t get reciprocal loyalty back. Recognising authority … I bet most people on this board obeyed lockdown rules and thought harshly of those who didn’t, even back at the start of the pandemic when nobody really had much of an idea of what was going on. Sanctity … lots of people who don’t have much use for organised religion feel that there’s something particular about, for instance, unspoiled wilderness - something that evokes emotions of being particularly significant. And so on and so forth.
I read it, and ranked it 5 stars on Goodreads, but I read it back in 2018 so I don’t remember much of the specifics of why I found it so good since I neglected to write a review at the time. A few notes on other things that might interest you:
Jonathan Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure is (in my opinion, of course) even better than The Righteous Mind and some of the best, most thought-provoking non-fiction I have ever read. It addresses the idea of not letting your feelings be the be all and end all, and learning to sit with your discomfort, listen to others without getting defensive, and engage in critical thinking.
I listened to a critique of The Righteous Mind last month on The Michael Shermer Show podcast. The episode is called “What Are We Really Fighting Over? Understanding Outrage Through Moral Psychology” and it was an interview with Kurt Gray. Kurt Gray’s argument, from what I can remember, is that you have to cherry pick examples in order for Democrats and Republicans to fit into the theory that Haidt laid out. For example, when it comes to respecting authority, Democrats were much more in favor of respecting authority than Democrats when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic. Or when it comes to recognizing sanctity and removing degradation, focusing on preserving the environment (typically a Democratic talking point) would fit under that value.
To dovetail off of that last bullet point, I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was also talking about the limits of assigning values to political parties. This podcast was People Who Read People, and the episode was called “Is the left-right spectrum an illusion that harms us? A talk with Hyrum Lewis.” In this episode, Lewis talks about how Democrat and Republican values don’t neatly align with the values traditionally associated with liberalism and conservatism, such as more government/less government or change/stay the same.
ETA: After posting, I noticed there’s significant overlap between what I talked about in my second bullet point and what Aspidistra said. That was unintentional. @Aspidistra, did you hear/read this critique as well? Or did you two just independently come to the same conclusions?
I don’t know that particular show at all, so that definitely wasn’t in my mind, but I did see a Ted Talk (?or similar?) where someone was talking about the theory, and how progressives really hate purity/sanctity … exceeeept … and then he pops up a picture of a packet of organic food, and notes all the ‘pure’ and ‘wholesome’ and ‘without XYZ’ labelling all over it. So, that’s where that example came from.
Just in general, though, this habit of trying to figure out how to relate other people’s weird thoughts and patterns is strongly influenced by my time spent doing early intervention with my ASD son. At the time he was doing a number of behaviours which would generally be thought of as “autistic behaviour” and were definitely behaviours that I didn’t want him to keep up with, because people would think him weird. So unpicking exactly what it was about this behaviour that was fulfilling his needs, seeing how it would relate to things I do, or people around me do, was very useful (for instance “repetitive scripted speech” - taking whole chunks from favorite TV programs or movies. That’s pretty much like a bunch of geeks sitting round saying “we are the knights who say … Ni!” to each other. Or people who use a lot of classical quotations in their writing. What are we getting out of doing that? In what ways is this just a thing people do rather than a ‘weird autistic kid thing’? And so on)
Humans are humans, pretty much. Any sort of behaviour you find strongly in one set of humans is probably at least mildly present in another lot. Huge apparent differences often boil down to just proportions.
Just to expand on purity/sanctity a bit more - one place where I feel this strongly is in protecting parts of our environment from commercial exploitation. Some things should be just set aside, and we all agree to not exploit them. People shouldn’t be allowed to beam advertising slogans onto the moon, for instance. The moon is special - it is, to some degree, sacred. Hands off! That’s an emotional position, of course, and in order for it to work as a principle, we all have to agree together that it is a principle.
Sanctity is of interest to me as an ordained Deacon. Not only religious sanctity, but the concept that as applied to non-religious cases where something is set aside, having an elevated status because it means something extra-ordinary to us.
In principle I would disagree with that, because I don’t think Haidt was necessarily pigeon-holing either party. Given that this book was written several years ago when the parties were in flux, I would not assume that they fall neatly into the categories he specified. Our morals and explanations for them are allowed to change as we accumulate life experiences and as society changes around us.
Yes, absolutely. When I was in chaplain training in a hospital, I was guided away from pat answers and changing the subject so that I could sit in the discomfort of someone’s crisis. Only then could I deal with my emotions and help the patient understand and work through theirs. Being aware of Haidt’s work then would have helped me help the patient I saw.
I imagine the board average is a fair bit different from the off-board one (I too had my highest results in the ‘left-liberal-coded’ factors)
I don’t know if this is mentioned in Haidt’s book, but there also seems to be a split here between consequentialist ethics and deontology. Care, fairness and liberty work well as ethical frameworks if you’re a consequentialist because they are all the sort of frameworks which ask: if I do an act (of whatever sort) then what is the result of that act?
Authority and loyalty in particular are deontologist-style frameworks - in assessing an act you look at the act itself to see whether it is moral, not on the consequences of it.
. It is largely about tribalism and in-group purity, which are not things I highly value. I’m not saying ‘loyalty’ is bad and being a ‘traitor’ is great, but placing a co-equal emphasis on such things implies a closed social system to my mind. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a value at all, just it should be a seriously de-emphasized one.
.