Moral Foundations - A Synopsis of the 1st Quarter of "The Righteous Mind"

In the introduction and first two chapters of his work "The Righteous Mind," moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt prefaces his conception of social empiricism with schools of thought that serve as past precedents for his landmark social theory, proceeding to explain the initial tenets upon which his theory rests – the illusions of absolutely objective reasoning and moral judgment.

Haidt begins quoting the cliché phrase coined by Rodney King “Can we all get along?” following it up by explicating his authorial intent to provide a framework to think about the divisiveness of politics and religion given the premise that “human nature is not just intrinsically moral” but “intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental” (XIX). Describing human cognitive faculties as “primate minds with a hivish overlay,” Haidt elucidates his hope to provide tools to help his readers better understand themselves and their neighbors, in order to avoid the hypocrisy detailed in his reference of Matthew 7:3-5  (XXII, XXIII).

Opening Chapter 1 with a coming-of-age narrative of his venture into moral psychology, Haidt explores the field’s foundations. First, he defines a nativist approach to moral reasoning, the notion that ethics are innate entities bestowed to individuals by genetics or God. He moves onto an empirical approach, the view that humans learn all moral reasoning from authority figures and societal structures. Next, Haidt examines a rationalist approach, the prevailing popular social theory among modern psychologists of the past three decades. A rational model holds that “kids figure out morality for themselves” primarily through interactions with other children, and its precepts were established through Jean Piaget’s studies of ethical developmental stages in children (6). After delineating these three precedents, Haidt initiates his argument for a new moral psychology model, social empiricism.

Through a series of anthropological examples, Haidt proves that often human intuitions override logical reasoning, showing that our reasoning cannot be understood simply in terms of inherent and acquired learning but must also be comprehended through six natural moral foundations that meld somewhat by learned social conventions. Declaring the interdependent relationship between objective reasoning and moral judgment, Haidt establishes his resolve to prove that oftentimes our perception shapes our logic, and our logic justifies our natural emotional responses, not the other way around. In this way, he starts to justify his tongue-in-cheek title that our minds are naturally righteous in the sense that they have distinct ethical underpinnings but also in the sense that they are self-righteously predisposed to clinging to their beliefs as exclusively right and the opposing beliefs of others as objectively wrong.

This book, expectedly, is pretty heavy, and though I enjoy it, I think it’s important after reading its contents thus far to reflect not only by summarizing them but also by relating them to my own life, so as to understand Haidt’s scientific theory on a more personal basis. Though I plan to do this more extensively throughout my reading, I’d like to lay out my reasons for choosing this piece in the same way that Haidt introduces his conception of the social empiricist theory.

First, I have always thought of myself as a relatively open-minded individual but struggled to reconcile this disposition with concise personal ideologies. In other words, I feel that when I don’t “take a stand” on an issue because I can see both sides, perhaps I am seeing both sides all too well, because my motivated fellow Poli Sci major classmates perceive my views as wishy-washy or weak.

In many ways, Haidt’s model justifies my logical “wishy-washy” decisiveness because before reading this book, I had already distinguished essential moral foundations in my own life but recognized that other people have different motivating factors. Haidt’s theory has clearly expounded and interpreted these factors as moral foundations in a way that makes sense to me, but it hardly remedies the hypocrisy seen in exchanges between individuals who don’t appreciate the ethical foundations of others, a subset that I would classify as the hefty majority of people.

To this point, even though I don’t think Haidt’s theory offers the alchemical gold of remedying ideological disagreements, I do think that it will at least help me pursue the vocation I already wished to practice as an unbiased and judicial defender of legality and pursuant of objective justice in a very subjective world. Through the lens of social empiricism, I hope to learn to better logically deduce and negotiate between differing ideological realities in order to one day be a more effective attorney, and I can’t wait to read more to work towards this goal.