In The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues for empirically grounded accounts of the psychological nature of moral judgement, which he calls the ‘social intuition model’ and the ‘moral foundations theory’, and considers some of their implications, including especially their implications for political psychology. While he is not always careful or generous in his claims about philosophers (more about that later), any philosopher working in normative ethical theory, metaethics or (especially) moral psychology should be familiar with his research. Political theorists will also find several points of interest in Haidt's discussion.
The book is divided into three parts, each of which opens with a guiding metaphor. The metaphor of part I, which is titled ‘Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second’, will be familiar to readers of Haidt's earlier The Happiness Hypothesis: ‘The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.’ Haidt's elephant is our automatic mental processes, while the rider represents reason. More specifically, in this context, the elephant represents our moral intuitions. Moral intuitions, according to Haidt, combine affective and cognitive elements. They include our moral emotions, although not all intuitions rise to the level of emotions. When we make a moral judgement, Haidt contends, it is nearly always the case that we first have the intuition that, say, a certain action would be wrong, and then look for reasons why this is so. Haidt believes that intuitions play an even larger role in judgement than does philosopher Joshua Greene, who has also done empirical research on the relation between reason and moral intuitions, and Haidt is less inclined to think that we would be better off without them.
While the rider has minimal influence over whether the elephant will go right or left, once the elephant has decided, the rider can facilitate its progress in various ways, none more important than by doing public relations work and offering up post hoc rationales for the elephant's choice. This, according to Haidt, is reason's main function in the realm of moral judgement; it is the social aspect of the social intuition model. Haidt does credit our motivated or strategic reasoning with some power to affect the moral judgements of others – the rider has more influence over other elephants than over its own – but usually this is accomplished not via rational persuasion but rather by framing the issue differently so as to elicit a different intuitive response. It helps to begin by developing some personal affinity with whomever you are trying to persuade, in order to encourage her elephant to lean towards you; this will make her want to be persuaded.
Haidt marshals various sorts of evidence in support of this model. For instance, he relates that when interviewing subjects who were asked to make and defend moral judgements regarding various scenarios, he and his research team often encountered a phenomenon that he labels ‘moral dumbfounding’. The subjects would be quite confident about what they thought, i.e. the valence of their judgement, but woefully unable to supply any reasoning that might justify their thinking it. Haidt also discovered that moral judgements are not affected by factors that would make it harder for subjects to reason, such as their being under a ‘cognitive load’, but are affected by factors that would influence their feelings. For instance, subjects made more censorious moral judgements when they were made to feel disgust while they were contemplating scenarios, whether via hypnosis or a few quick spurts of ‘fart spray’ in a nearby empty dustbin.
The guiding metaphor of part II, entitled ‘There's More to Morality than Harm and Fairness’, is ‘The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.’ Here Haidt aims to take us beyond WEIRD morality, where ‘WEIRD’ is an acronym that stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. The WEIRDer you are, Haidt claims, the more likely you are to see situations that do not involve possible harm or unfairness as raising no moral issues. Those who are less WEIRD, by contrast, are likely to see a wider range of considerations as morally relevant. Haidt proposes that humans innately possess six ‘moral foundations’, which might be thought of as clusters of issues that we are able to imbue with moral significance: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation and Liberty/Oppression. He offers evolutionary explanations for the existence of these foundations, but he repeatedly reminds the reader that he is using ‘innate’ in a relatively weak sense, comparing what is innate in us to the first draft of a composition that will be revised in various ways by culture and individual experience. This is why those of us who are WEIRDer are less likely to attach any real significance to several of these foundations.
It is also why there are important differences within the members of WEIRD societies in terms of how much relative significance they attach to each of these foundations. Surveys show that liberals tend to be most concerned with the Care/Harm and Liberty/Oppression foundations, somewhat concerned with fairness, and little concerned about the others. Conservatives tend to care roughly equally about all six. Haidt takes conservatives' ability to present messages that hit on all six foundations to contribute to their political appeal to voters.
Part III of the book, entitled ‘Morality Binds and Blinds’, takes as its metaphor ‘We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.’ Haidt's central claim here is that while humans evolved to be largely self-interested, we are capable of transcending self-interest at least occasionally. We do so, he contends, when our ‘hive switch’ is flipped, which causes us to lose our sense of self and see ourselves merely as part of a larger whole. Among the experiences that he describes as flipping this switch are ecstatic dances around fires, hallucinogenic drugs and raves. Or at least these are experiences that can activate the hiveish part of our nature to the greatest degree; Haidt allows that the hive switch ‘may be more of a slider switch than an on-off switch’ (p. 238) and that various sorts of institutions and practices may be capable of activating it to some extent, e.g. ‘transformational’ management practices in corporations. The evolutionary origins of the hive switch, Haidt maintains, are probably to be accounted for through ‘group selection’. This is a controversial view, inasmuch as many evolutionary biologists consider group selection to be at best a theoretical possibility that almost never occurs in practice.
People who share a moral outlook are more able to suppress self-interest in their dealings with one another. Yet once they conceive of themselves as members of a group or team united around that outlook, they are less receptive to the perspectives of outsiders. Thus morality binds and blinds. In so far as political ideologies reflect moral outlooks, it will be difficult for the members of one ideological party to make sense of the world-views of their rivals. Haidt points to evidence that suggests that liberals may be even less able to understand conservatives’ viewpoints than conservatives are to understand theirs, which Haidt explains in terms of the fact that conservatives attach some importance to all of the moral foundations that underlie liberal thinking while liberals characteristically attach no importance to several of the foundations that matter to conservatives.
It will be of particular interest to readers of this journal that Haidt advocates a utilitarian approach to public policy, but he says that this must be a ‘Durkheimian utilitarianism’, one that ‘would recognize that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness’ and that ‘social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve’ (p. 272). A Durkheimian utilitarian, Haidt insists, would find valuable insights in liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism. She would affirm the liberal belief in the effectiveness of certain types of regulation, especially regulations aimed at large corporations (which Haidt calls ‘superorganisms’). But she would affirm the libertarian belief in the power of markets and the conservative belief in the importance of building and sustaining social capital, too. She would also encourage practices and institutions that encourage transparency. Haidt agrees with Glaucon that we are more strongly motivated to maintain our reputation for moral rectitude than we are to be moral, and transparency helps to ensure that we cannot acquire the reputation without earning it.
At the personal level, Haidt encourages us to try to find some common ground with others before letting the conversation turn to moral or political questions. As he argues in the first part of the book, we can best appreciate the moral reasoning of people who reach different conclusions from ours if something has already caused our elephant to lean in their direction. Haidt describes his own writing style, which is not only accessible but involves heavy use of personal anecdotes, as his way of putting this recommendation into practice; we will be more receptive to his positions if our feelings towards him as a person are warmer. Whether or not this strategy succeeds, the book is very readable and engaging. I have used it in an upper-level undergraduate ethical theory course with good results.
But if one assigns the book to philosophy students, it is necessary to caution them against Haidt's sometimes cavalier treatment of philosophy and philosophers. For instance, he repeatedly labels his social intuition model of moral thinking as Humean, on the grounds that it assigns reason a comparatively minor role in moral judgements. But Hume (1751) says ‘that much reasoning should precede’ judgement, not that the faculty of judgement should only put ‘in a call to reasoning when its services are needed to justify a desired conclusion’ (p. 87). While the claim that Bentham probably suffered from Asperger's syndrome does not originate with Haidt, he may have been unwise in choosing to repeat it (pp. 118–19). To label Mill the ‘patron saint of a contractual society’ (p. 165) is problematic; to say that he ‘came to despise Bentham’ (p. 118) is poppycock.
There are a number of questions that the book raises that it does not answer, although of course this is as much praise as criticism. I will close by mentioning three questions with which I was left. First, while Haidt seems to see his empirical research as contradicting cognitivism about moral judgements, I wonder whether it is consistent with a straightforwardly cognitive view according to which moral judgements are beliefs but most of us, most of the time, treat our intuitions as providing warrant for these beliefs. Second, Haidt presents evidence that suggests that some people are predisposed to be liberals and others conservatives, depending upon whether they are genetically more inclined to enjoy new experiences or to perceive threats. This raises the question, which I do not believe Haidt answers, of precisely how this difference relates to the difference between liberals’ and conservatives’ moral foundations. Third, Haidt offers a Durkheimian defence of religion against ‘New Atheists’ like Dawkins and Dennett, a defence that is based on religion's ability to promote a sense of group membership. But atheists old and new criticize religion primarily on the grounds that religions’ supernatural doctrines are false, a criticism that Haidt is rather quick to dismiss as beside the point. The question whether there could be some functional equivalent of religion that eschews the supernatural is an old one, but it would have been interesting to learn whether contemporary psychology brings us any closer to an answer.
