The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt (2012)

In a paragraph

Our minds are righteous as we make moral judgments quickly and instinctively and any reasoning mainly just confirms our intuitions.  Morality can concern harm, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and the sacred, but western liberals concentrate only on harm and fairness.  Morality binds us to groups but blinds us to alternative perspectives. 

Key points

• Moral judgments are made quickly and intuitively while moral reasoning is mainly to support our intuitions.

• This social intuitionist model is well supported, for example by work on affective priming and by Haidt’s work on moral dumbfounding where subjects jump to judgements that they cannot justify.

• The rational mind is like a rider on an elephant. The elephant, the non-conscious mind, leads, and the rider supports like a lawyer.  The rider is the rational tail on the intuitive dog.

• We are self-righteous in morality and politics as we think and speak to confirm our intuitions rather than to find truth.

• Six moral foundations are identified: harm, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sacredness. The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.

• While in most of the world morality is broad, western morality concentrates narrowly on harm and fairness. Western liberals are particularly narrowly focused which gives them a political disadvantage against Conservatives.

• Evolution has made people predominantly selfish but also with conditional capacities to act cooperatively. We are 90% chimp and 10% bee. As Durkheim recognised, we are both individuals and social.

• Cooperative behaviour can produce inspiring experiences where the self recedes in favour of higher group interests, as in churches, collaborative workplaces, communal dancing and battle. It is as if we have a hive switch.

• Religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaption that creates communities with a shared morality. It can invest social conventions with sanctity to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.

• Morality is the sum of the institutions and evolved practices that regulate selfishness and encourage cooperation. Our politics should recognise our hivish and conservative elements to give a Durkheimian utilitarianism.  

Comments

A most impressive and valuable book.  It is exemplary in setting out for the lay reader an important perspective and conveying extensive learning in a clear and absorbing way.  The standards are very high – the writing, the structure, the academic exposition and the use of metaphors. 

What Haidt says is important and much of his analysis also applies to practical reasoning beyond morality.  I accept his description of human moral nature but differ from him on the normative conclusions drawn.  He points out that our reason is limited and biased, but for me this implies that we need to reason more extensively and more carefully and that there is greater potential to do better by overriding our intuitions.  He points out that liberal morality is unusually narrow, but for me this represents moral progress beyond those evolution-produced intuitions that cannot be justified in terms of their effects on welfare.

Notes

Introduction

Rodney King.  ‘Can we all get along?’ ‘we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out’

Our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife

‘Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye’

‘The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.

For most people on the planet morality is broad

1. Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning second

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The elephant is the non-conscious 99% of mental processes

Moral psychology originally part of development psychology

Nativist v Empiricist

Jean Piaget rationalism.  Cognitive stages. Self-constructed.

Lawrence Kohlberg.  Moral dilemmas.  Heinz steal life-saving drug.

Six stage progression.  Pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional

Children as moral philosophers working it out.

Authorities obstacles to moral development.

Elliot Turiel. Moral rules about harm distinguished from social conventions.  Pushing off swing v not wearing uniform.

Alan Fiske Ethnographies

West has stripped down thick moral orders.  Purity rules.

Richard Schweder.  Orissa.

Sociocentric v Individualistic.  Society or individual first.  Welfare state supports individual.

Other practices loaded up with moral force.

Harmless taboo violations.

Disgust or disrespect.

Brazil and PA.  Upper classes similar.  Controlled for harm cases.

Implies cultural learning and innate moral intuitions.

Invent victims. Moral dumbfounding.

Not reasoning in search of truth but to support emotional reaction.

The Intuitive Dog and its Rational Tail

Plato Timaeus.  Man created with rational core but imperfect.

The rationalist delusion

Hume.  Slave of the passions

Jefferson.  Co-rulers

Darwin.  Nativist.  Sympathy, reputation etc.

But fear of Social Darwinism and left desire for blank slate.

Pinker 2002 The Blank Slate.

Edward O. Wilson. Sociobiology 1975.

Human nature constrains limits of morality and institutions. 

Philosophers justifying evolution-produced intuitions

But moral psychology was about development of information processing not about evolved emotions

Frans de Waal. Good Natured

Antonio Damasio.  Descartes’ Error. Emotions necessary to think rationally.

Evolutionary psychology.

Further dumbfounding studies. Cognitive load studies. Reactions quick.

Howard Margolis.  Patterns, Thinking and Cognition

Seeing-that v Reasoning-Why

Muller-Lyer illusion

Wason 4-card task

Judgement and justification separate processes

Pattern matching

But moral reasoning needs to be justified to others

Cognition v emotions unhelpful as emotions involve information processing

Key distinction is Intuition v reasoning

Elephant as bigger and smarter than a horse

Rider for future, new skills.  Full time public relations firm useful in gossipy society

More a lawyer than a slave

Social intuitionist model 

Exploratory and Confirmatory thought

Sociometer – internal self-esteem gauge

Confirmation bias.  Can I believe it? Find one reason to do.  Must I believe it?  Find one reason not to do

Good reasoning mainly social

MPs thought they had the ring of Gyges

2. There is More to Morality Than Harm and Fairness

Moral Foundations Theory

The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.  Harm, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, sacred.

Developed by seeing fairness as about proportionality rather than equality and adding liberty/oppression

WEIRD morality.  Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic

World of objects rather than relationships.  Analytical rather than holistic.

Individualistic rather than sociocentric

Ethic of divinity.  High/pure/sacred/moral elation v low/dirty/profane/moral disgust

Systemizing

Bentham may have had Asperger’s syndrome.  Kant.

The True Taste restaurant, serving up a one-receptor morality.

The world’s many moral cuisines

Male mind innately tribal.

Pecking order. Legitimate asymmetries.  Obligations of station.

Chimps hierarchical. Strength.

Hunter gatherers more egalitarian.  Rein in alpha males.  Boehm ‘political transition’.   Weapons, social coalitions. Evolved self-domestication.

Agricultural societies hierarchical. Property.

3. Morality Binds and Blinds

We are 90% chimp and 10% bee

Groupish. Strategically altruistic.

We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players

More about looking good than being good

Group selection.  Natural selection works at multiple levels

The Hive Switch. 

Hive hypothesis; Human beings are conditional hive creatures

Primate minds with a hivish overlay

Communal effort in battle as high point in lives

Barbara Ehrenreich.  Dancing In The Streets.

Binding biotechnology dismissed as savage.

Emile Durkheim

Social facts real and worthy of study (by sociology)

Homo duplex.  Creature who exists at two levels, as an individual and as a member of society.

Can act as part of a social whole.

Sacred – self disappears and collective interests predominate – v profane. Lose ourselves

Awe in nature

Hulucinogens

Raves

Transformational rather than transactional leadership.

Hivish employees work harder and have more fun. Membership.

Similarity not diversity helps.

Healthy competition among teams not individuals

‘ask not’

Fascist rallies spectacles not festivals

A hivish nation with many cross-cutting hives is good

Religion is a team sport

College football game analogy.

New Atheists explain religion from hypersensitive agency detection device and competition between supernatural concepts. Memes spread despite costs to hosts.

Gullible learning module.  Circuitry for falling in love.

Paul Bloom.  Minds designed for dualism.

Religions spread to the extent they make groups more cohesive and cooperative. Moralistic gods who see everything and hate cheaters and threaten to punish group – stops cheaters.

Richard Sosis study of communes.  6% of secular ones survived, 39% of religious ones.

To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity

David Sloan Wilson.  Darwin’s Cathedral.

Calvin, Judaism, Balinese water temples.

Lower market transaction costs.  Orthodox Jews as diamond merchants.

Religious Americans better neighbours and citizens

Religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaption that creates communities with a shared morality

[Haidt is not justified in criticising the New Atheists.  Atheist explanations for religion may be overdetermined, both may be right in part.]

Definition of morality

Durkheim ‘everything that is a source of solidarity’

Haidt: ‘Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to supress or regulate self-interest and make co-operative societies possible’

Functionalist definition.  Other approaches parochial.  Descriptive definition.

Normative views

A Durkheimian Utilitarianism would recognise that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness.

Not sure on private morality, perhaps virtue-based.

In public life in diverse democracies no compelling alternative to utilitarianism.

Produce greatest total good but recognise that we are Homo duplex

Can’t we all disagree more constructively?

America’s hyperpartisanship.   ‘oppo’

Ideology: ‘a set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved’

Right or left.  1789 Assembly.  Preserve current order or change it.

Self interest poor at predicting politics, contra Marx

Threat sensitivity and openness to experience

Dan McAdams. Dispositional traits and characteristic adaptions

Brother and sister.  Only point of political agreement that must not talk politics.

Life narrative

Keith Richards rebelled when drop by choirmaster.

Liberal progress narrative.  Struggle for the good society.

Regulating business. Unleaded petrol.

Liberals think group loyalty shrinks the moral circle, authority is oppression, sanctity is untrue. [I agree.  Liberals consider their values to be more rational.  Singer’s arguments for moral debunking. Generally, slips from is to ought.]

Modern conservativism part of enlightenment project.  Distinguish from orthodoxy – transcendent order. Hume, Smith, Burke. Hayek, Sowell.

Limits of reasoning, good institutions to be cherished, Liberal overreach etc

Mill: party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform are both healthy elements of political life

Moral capital – the resources that sustain a moral community.

[But Trump and populists are the opposite of safety-first conservatives.]