Thursday, February 7, 2019

The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, 500 pages


Haidt is a social psychologist who has studied moral psychology for more than twenty-five years. He divides his book into three sections. Each section has an accompanying metaphor. At the end of each chapter he summarizes the main points of the chapter.

The first section is: Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second. Haidt provides evidence for the contention in the title. This quote is an appropriate summary for where morality comes from: “We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.” Much as we might think we can be dispassionate, we need emotions to make decisions. And it seems that social and political judgments are particularly intuitive.

The second section is: There’s More to Morality than Harm & Fairness. Along with care/harm and fairness/cheating foundations, Haidt has identified four other foundations for morality. The other four are loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation and liberty/oppression. According to the studies Haidt, along with other in some cases, conducted liberals base their morality more on the care and harm foundations while conservatives base their morality on the first five but more so on loyalty, authority and sanctity. Basing their morality on more moral foundations has given Republicans an advantage over Democrats when trying to sway voters. This is part of what divides people. The second part is what he talks about in section three.

The third section is: Morality Binds and Blinds. The title of the section doesn't need a lot of elaboration. Shared morality binds groups of people together. Haidt provides multiple reasons for why we are so groupish. The blinding part means that as part of the group we become blinded to valid arguments of the other side.

The first two sections are great and are well supported with evidence. The third is good but is more speculative and harder to confirm. I liked this book a lot and feel that it is very insightful.
I would recommend this to anyone interested in the current state of public discourse.

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