If the synopsis wasn't enough for you...

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Final Synopsis Take-Aways from Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"

*Realize I may not be getting credit for this blog post but nonetheless find it important*

Haidt's final chapter, "Can't We All Disagree More Constructively?" presents a few final quips of wisdom and some intriguing visual diagrams of major ideological moral matrices.

The underlying "most sacred values" Haidt presents for the three major ideologies are particularly poignant:

1. The Liberal Moral Matrix values "care for victims of oppression" most.

2. The Libertarian Moral Matrix regards "individual liberty" the highest.

3. The Social Conservative Moral Matrix prizes preservation of "the institutions and traditions that sustain a moral community."

Underhandedly promoting Conservatism above the other two ideologies, Haidt still asserts that all three ideologies are meant to evolutionarily coexist. With this, he provides readers with the advice to have a "suspicion of moral monists" because "human societies are complex" and though this does not warrant ethical relativism, morality cannot be determined based solely off of one moral matrix. Referring back to the words of Rodney King in his introduction, Haidt concludes with his follow up of the question "Can we all get along?" with the response "We're all stuck here for a while, so let's try to work it out."


This conclusion offers a powerful close to his heavy and lengthy work, but in ending my synopsis, I'd like to refer back to one of Haidt's lines from "The Hive Switch:"

Asking, 'does happiness come from within or without?,' Haidt decides --
"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…"

In the rest of my blog, I'd like to investigate this quote as a few others to develop my application of Haidt's theory to the happiness I hope to find in my vocation.

"Morality Binds and Blinds" -- Delving Into Haidt's Thesis

In his chapter "The Conservative Advantage," Haidt tries to convince readers through some compelling statistical evidence that political conservatives place greater emphasis on all of the moral foundations than do liberals, who focus only on the "care/harm" and "fairness/justice" foundations. Though his conclusion is compelling, however, I tend to disagree because his data does not seem to be based on a normative mean. Basically, it looks to me like he assumes correlation implies causation for his experiments, but the steps he has to take to get there seem too numerous and far-reaching for his conclusion to be sound. Or perhaps his work is just orienteered specifically to a liberal audience in defense of conservatism. Either way, for this reason, I have difficulty applying this part of the book to my vocation. The subsequent chapters of the book also posed this problem because I think that Haidt extrapolates on his numerical findings too much.

Moving forward, though, Haidt proceeds to discuss how evolutionary processes have given humans a tendency to act altruistically in groups. He then explains how "group-think" and groupish-ness promote close-minded self-righteousness not just on an individual level but also when people associate themselves with organizations, parties, or more historically -- tribally. To give humans a little more credit, though, Haidt develops something called a "hive-switch," a state that Haidt believes people go into about 10% of the time to transcend their selfish mental states and aid others for no personal benefit.

Applying these group notions to politics, Haidt elucidates how politically, each party is "partially right and partially wrong," but when logical agreement no longer seems attainable, we should cater to the emotion of the riders to find cooperation and understanding across party lines.

Applying these group notions to religion, Haidt rebukes his atheistic worldview to pronounce that the human "extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves" and "circle around those things with other people" is "what religion is all about."

By illuminating the ability of morality to work in tandem with humanity's groupishness in "binding" and "blinding," Haidt develops the brunt of his thesis -- that psychologically, people should work to trigger the "hive switch" in others in order to bring about a greater sense of shared intentionality with fellow humans. This, he believes, will bring a more tolerant and truly righteous earth.

Continuing with the Righteous Mind -- Can Psychology Explain Religious Moral Belief?

In my reading of the first half of Haidt's “The Righteous Mind” thus far, I have examined the fundamental tenets of Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. 

After establishing a dual processing model through the analogy of an elephant and a rider (the elephant serving as all intuitive processes and the rider acting as logical cognition,) Haidt draws his foundations theory off of the assumption that humans are motivated primarily by intuition and then justify their intuitive behaviors through rational thought. Applying this model to the confirmation bias present in modern-day partisanship, in his fourth chapter, Haidt argues "moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth." 

Through a narrative of his eye-opening trip to India, Haidt, a self-proclaimed liberal, Atheist academic, explains how he came to realize the worth of alternative value systems not present in American liberalism today. An extension and revision of social anthropologist and psychologist Richard Shweder's three ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity, Haidt outlines his moral theory basing all human intuition on the following five foundations:

1. Care/harm

2. Fairness/cheating

3. Loyalty/betrayal

4. Authority/subversion

5. Sanctity/degradation

To provide evidence for his theory, Haidt describes numerous psychological studies where subjects are forced to deal with moral ambiguities. Some interesting take-aways (there are WAY too many to list,) are:

1. When no one is watching, everyone will cheat (but just a little bit.)

2. The only people who don't care what other people think are sociopaths. 

3. Everyone is just a little bit racist. Don't believe him? Take the implicit association test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

4. The more education a person has, the more justifications they can find for their moral intuitions. The moral intuitions underlying the logical justifications of all individuals across different backgrounds, however, does not change. 

5. If a person answers moral questions near a garbage can or foul-smelling area, they will feel more disgust for ethically ambiguous situations.

6. If a person answers moral questions after putting on hand sanitizer, they will feel more respect for sanctity and purity for ambiguous situations and weigh their answers as such.

7. Both political ideologies think all five foundations are important, but American liberals prize the care/harm foundation and fairness/cheating foundations above the other three, while American conservatives value all five equally.

 On this last point, though I agree with this fact presented by Haidt, I think he extrapolates too much to reach an over-arching and therefore unsound moral conclusion. Since American conservatives value all five moral foundations, Haidt concludes that they are morally superior to liberals in terms of policy in covering a broader span of human ethics. I disagree, though, because Haidt doesn't establish a baseline for an ideal level of value of each of the foundations. His conclusion hence isn't very normative. Having an equal value of all five foundations doesn't imply superiority -- Haidt fails to investigate whether or not some moral foundations may be more crucial or fundamental than others. 

To apply this reading to Biblical Heritage class, I will now compare one aspect of Haidt's theory to a Biblical outlook. 

From a Christian perspective, Haidt’s deriving of the sanctity foundation solely from the disgust emotion triggered by “waste products and diseased people” and “taboo ideas,” presents a narrow-minded assessment of the human morality underlying genuine religious belief (146). As I referenced before, through his research trip to India that changed his previously secular, atheistic worldview, Haidt portrays how he awoke this latent moral foundation within himself, placing a greater value on traditional societal structures and the notion of purity. Through interviews with Hindu priests and a first-hand look at the impact of religion on Indian culture, Haidt explains how the ethic of divinity implies “an order to the universe,” and that all things “should be treated with the reverence or disgust that they deserve” (122). He then reduces the motive for all religious consecration to this proper treatment of objects and people with regard to their deserved reverence or disgust. Any religious believer, however, might tell you that there is a much more intuitive element to his or her innate divinity foundation. The inborn notion that the complexity, simplicity, or beauty in form of some entity can turn one’s thoughts to a divine creator, a term deemed  “sensus divinitatis” by John Calvin, represents an emotional moral intuition that Haidt’s theory fails to address. Throughout history, the tendency of different cultures to develop religious faiths may aid in “binding groups together,” but it does not completely explain the universal conception of these groups to bind themselves around metaphysical deities instead of simply sacrilegious objects. On both the group and the individual levels, therefore, Haidt’s theory provides no interactive explanation for “sensus divinitatis.” In approaching the sanctity/degradation foundation from a purely psychological perspective, Haidt succeeds in appreciating religious belief but fails to identify with it, explaining the external reasons that an individual might value the purity of life but neglecting to fully realize the internal virtue inculcated by this moral foundation; hence, Haidt misses a piece to the puzzle of human morality, or he at least misses the mark of identifying with Evangelicals. 

This critical reading of the "The Righteous Mind,' is important in synthesizing its key points with my vocational aspirations. Though I think conceptualizing human thought categorically through the moral foundations theory could prove incredibly beneficial in being an attorney, someone who is expected to determine the motivations of people in regard to legal issues, it is also important to recognize that Haidt's words are not an infallible holy grail.  

Psychology may explain the span of human intuitions, but can it explain the depth?  Is there more to human thought and ideological disagreement than explanatory power?     

These are questions I hope to investigate as my reading continues.