Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind -- Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, (New York, Random House, 2012).

"I'm going to tell you a brief story. Pause after you read it and decide whether the people in the story did anything morally wrong.

"'A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.'

"If you are like most of the well-educated people in my studies, you felt an initial flash of disgust, but you hesitated before saying the family had done anything morally wrong."

With these brief words, Jonathan Haidt starts a Very Important Book. Every five years or so I come across a book which brings together ideas that both educates and challenges, and this is one such book.

It is not the story that is new: other moral philosophers of the past decade have used this or other stories to get us thinking about why we feel the way about such stories. Rather, it is where Haidt goes with the ideas.

Haidt tells a personal story of his own journey of discovery and he pays tribute to key persons in this development. The first was Richard Schweder who made him think seriously about the cultural basis of morality. Schweder had become convinced that the Western conception of the person as a "bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational universe . . . is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures."

Challenged by Schweder's thoughts, Haidt wrote a set of 39 stories like the first one and began interviewing people about their responses and reasons for that response to these stories. He found out first that college students -- the favored audience for such studies -- reacted very differently from the working class people at McDonald's that he was able to convince to complete his interviews. And students were very different from the people in India, where he went in search of interviewees to try out Schweder's concepts of the alternatives to these students thinking: the ethics of community and the ethics of divinity. As a result he realized that in a global context, highly educated Americans and Europeans are WEIRD (western, educated, individualistic, rich, and democratic) but the rest of the world is not. Thus, ethical judgment is a highly culture-bound artifact and moral reasoning is often (usually?) a post hoc fabrication.

As he pursued these ideas in his own researches, he became convinced that it is very important to understand three fundamental ideas:

1. In moral reasoning intuition comes first (and fast) and reasoning comes second (and slow, if at all). [The elephant and the rider.]

2. There is more to morality than harm and fairness. [The six moral flavors.]

3. Morality binds and blinds. [We are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee.]

Item #1 This distinction was already very familiar to me from the work of Kanneman and other decision theorists: We often reach our judgments by changing the question. It has been shown, for example, that the winner of a political contest can be determined over three-quarters reliability just by having people pick the more attractive photos of the opposing candidates for governor/senator/congressman -- even though the people making the judgment are from a different part of the country and have never heard of either candidate.

Haidt had an undergraduate who introduced an interesting variation on the moral case method above: the student would simply provide a rational challenge to whatever reason the interviewee provided. Almost unanimously the interviewees would simply respond by giving another -- often equally irrational -- reason for the choice. But what did not happen was that they were convinced to change their first answer.

Item #2 The reasons would usually fall into one of six general categories (which he calls flavors but strike me as tones):

1. Care / Harm

2. Liberty / Oppression

3. Fairness / Proportionality

4. Loyalty / Betrayal

5. Authority / Subversion

6. Sanctity / Degradation

It is an interesting exercise to take each of these items and reread his introductory dog story with only that one as your principal criterion of judgment. I would argue that if you view #4 or #6 as primary, you will be outraged, but the others would hardly find a reason to condemn the action.

What makes this item so important is that by putting items on the web (http://www.YourMorals.org) which tested the strength of one's moral feelings in these areas (originally only five flavors: they later split #2 and #3 into separate flavors) and comparing them to self-assigned political position (8 levels from very liberal to very conservative), the researchers found that with 32,000 respondents there was a clear and striking differentiation: liberals used only the first three flavors; conservatives used all five! Liberals are morally tone-deaf to the last three characteristics. "Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters since 1980. Republicans understand the social intuitionist model better than do Democrats. Republicans speak more directly to the elephant. They also have a better grasp of Moral Foundations Theory; they trigger every single taste receptor."

Item #3 What distinguishes humans most decisively from our nearest biological relatives is that we enjoy and seek out opportunities to be with others and to (sometimes) help others. Thus, the 10% bee in our makeup is extremely important. So important that Haidt argues that human evolution is driven more by group selection than by individual selection. (The arguments are technical and can be skipped, although he is a good writer at making it sound interesting.) It is at this point he finds the fundamental role of religion in human development: "our religious minds coevolved with our religious practices to create ever-larger moral communities, particularly after the advent of agriculture." But it is important to realize that the separation of groups causes out-group conflicts as well as supporting in-group cooperation. Hence the intrinsic moral ambiguity of religion.

One of the most interesting findings is by anthropologist Richard Sosis who examined the history of two hundred American 19th century communes, which he divided into two groups: secular (mostly socialist) and religious. The difference between the two types was dramatic. Only six percent of secular communes were in existence twenty years after their founding, but 39 percent of the religious communes still existed! Furthermore, the success rate of the religious communities was directly proportional to the number of costly sacrifices (fasting, giving up alcohol or tobacco, following a community dress code, or cutting ties with outsiders) imposed by membership. Secular groups generally failed within eight years, regardless of the level of sacrifice required. "The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation." (Emphasis in the original.)

He brings his political narrative together near the end by believing that neither side has a monopoly on moral thought and action, but they emphasize different parts of the moral foundations and we need all of them (the Yin and Yang). For convenience in presenting his findings, he divides the major types of political thought into three groups: Liberals, Libertarians, and Social Conservatives. And then he talks about their major points in the current arena:

Yin -- Liberals:

       Point #1: Governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms.

      Point #2: Some problems really can be solved by regulation.

Yang #1 -- Libertarians:

      Counterpoint #1: Markets are miraculous.

Yang #2 -- Social Conservatives:

      Counterpoint #2: You can't help the bees by destroying the hive.

Perhaps the best overall summary of both our problem and our opportunity is stated by the author in his chapter The Hive Switch.

"When I began writing The Happiness Hypothesis, I believed that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago. You'll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. But by the time I finished writing, I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others,, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

"Once you understand our dual nature, including our groupish overlay, you can see why happiness comes from between."

Amen, brother.