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.
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