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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion Paperback – February 12, 2013
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Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.
In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
- Print length528 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateFebruary 12, 2013
- Dimensions5.14 x 1.2 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100307455777
- ISBN-13978-0307455772
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—NPR
“A landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself. . . . Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes The Righteous Mind well worth reading.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“An eye-opening and deceptively ambitious best seller . . . undoubtedly one of the most talked-about books of the year.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Ingenious prose. . . . Beautifully written, Haidt’s book shines a new and creative light on moral psychology and presents a provocative message.”
—Science
“A remarkable and original synthesis of social psychology, political analysis, and moral reasoning.”
—Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
“Highly readable, highly insightful. . . . The principal posture in which one envisions him is that of a scrappy, voluble, discerning patriot standing between the warring factions in American politics urging each to see the other’s viewpoint, to stop demonizing, bashing, clobbering. . . . Haidt’s real contribution, in my judgment, is inviting us all to sit at the table.”
—Washington Times
“Excellent. . . . An impressive book that should be read by anyone who has the slightest interest in how political opinions are reached.”
—The Daily Beast
“Haidt’s work feels particularly relevant now. . . . Haidt’s perspective can help us better understand our own political and religious leanings.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Jonathan Haidt is one of smartest and most creative psychologists alive, and his newest book, The Righteous Mind is a tour de force—a brave, brilliant and eloquent exploration of the most important issues of our time. It will challenge the way you think about liberals and conservatives, atheism and religion, good and evil. This is the book that everyone is going to be talking about.”
—Paul Bloom, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology, Yale University
“Haidt’s research has revolutionized the field of moral psychology. This elegantly written book has far-reaching implications for anyone interested in anthropology, politics, religion, or the many controversies that divide modern societies. If you want to know why you hold your moral beliefs and why many people disagree with you, read this book..”
—Simon Baron-Cohen, Cambridge University, Author of Zero Degrees of Empathy and The Science of Evil
“A much-needed voice of moral sanity.”
—Booklist
“[Haidt’s] framework for the different moral universes of liberals and conservatives struck me as a brilliant breakthrough . . . The Righteous Mind provides an invaluable road map.”
—Miller-McCune.com
“A well-informed tour of contemporary moral psychology…A cogent rendering of a moral universe of fertile complexity and latent flexibility.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Haidt’s a good thing.”
—The Atlantic
“Jonathan Haidt’s absorbing The Righteous Mind should come with a warning label: ‘contents highly addictive.’ Written in a breezy and accessible style but informed by an impressively wide range of cutting-edge research in the social sciences, evolutionary biology and psychology, The Righteous Mind is about as interesting a book as you’ll pick up this year.”
—The Globe and Mail
“What makes [The Righteous Mind] so compelling is the fluid combination of erudition and entertainment, and the author’s obvious pleasure in challenging conventional wisdom. . . . [Haidt’s] core point is simple and well-made: our morality, much of it wired into brains from birth, at the same time binds us together and blinds us to different configurations of morality.”
—The Guardian (London)
“An important and timely book. . . . His ideas are controversial but they make you think.”
—Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company
“The Righteous Mind refutes the ‘New Atheists’ and shows that religion is a central part of our moral heritage. Haidt’s brilliant synthesis shows that Christians have nothing to fear and much to gain from the evolutionary paradigm.”
—Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution
“The Righteous Mind is an intellectual tour de force that brings Darwinian theorizing to the practical realm of everyday politics. The book is beautifully written, and it is truly unusual to encounter a book that makes a major theoretical contribution yet encourages one to turn its pages enthusiastically.”
—Christopher Boehm, Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California, author of Moral Origins
“As a fellow who listens to heated political debate daily, I was fascinated, enlightened, and even amused by Haidt’s brilliant insights. This penetrating yet accessible book will help readers understand the righteous minds that inhabit politics.”
—Larry Sabato, University of Virginia, author of A More Perfect Constitution
“A profound discussion of the diverse psychological roots of morality and their role in producing political conflicts. It’s not too much to hope that the book will help to reduce those conflicts.”
—Richard E. Nisbett, University of Michigan, Author of The Geography of Thought
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
“Can we all get along?” That appeal was made famous on May 1, 1992, by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by four Los Angeles police officers a year earlier. The entire nation had seen a videotape of the beating, so when a jury failed to convict the officers, their acquittal triggered widespread outrage and six days of rioting in Los Angeles. Fifty-three people were killed and more than seven thousand buildings were torched. Much of the mayhem was carried live; news cameras tracked the action from helicopters circling overhead. After a particularly horrific act of violence against a white truck driver, King was moved to make his appeal for peace.
King’s appeal is now so overused that it has become cultural kitsch, a catchphrase1 more often said for laughs than as a serious plea for mutual understanding. I therefore hesitated to use King’s words as the opening line of this book, but I decided to go ahead, for two reasons. The first is because most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.
The second reason I decided to open this book with an overused phrase is because King followed it up with something lovely, something rarely quoted. As he stumbled through his television interview, fighting back tears and often repeating himself, he found these words: “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”
This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.
###
People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything. Books have been published in recent years on the transformative role in human history played by cooking, mothering, war . . . even salt. This is one of those books. I study moral psychology, and I’m going to make the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible. I don’t mean to imply that cooking, mothering, war, and salt were not also necessary, but in this book I’m going to take you on a tour of human nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology.
By the end of the tour, I hope to have given you a new way to think about two of the most important, vexing, and divisive topics in human life: politics and religion. Etiquette books tell us not to discuss these topics in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity. We are downright lucky that we evolved this complex moral psychology that allowed our species to burst out of the forests and savannas and into the delights, comforts, and extraordinary peacefulness of modern societies in just a few thousand years. My hope is that this book will make conversations about morality, politics, and religion more common, more civil, and more fun, even in mixed company. My hope is that it will help us to get along.
BORN TO BE RIGHTEOUS
I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to “do” morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.
The word righteous comes from the old Norse word rettviss and the old English word rihtwis, both of which mean “just, upright, virtuous.” This meaning has been carried into the modern English words righteous and righteousness, although nowadays those words have strong religious connotations because they are usually used to translate the Hebrew word tzedek. Tzedek is a common word in the Hebrew Bible, often used to describe people who act in accordance with God’s wishes, but it is also an attribute of God and of God’s judgment of people (which is often harsh but always thought to be just).
The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is captured in some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” The link also appears in the term self- righteous, which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self- righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.
Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.
WHAT LIES AHEAD
This book has three parts, which you can think of as three separate books—except that each one depends on the one before it. Each part presents one major principle of moral psychology.
Part I is about the first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.
The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior. I developed this metaphor in my last book, The Happiness Hypothesis, where I described how the rider and elephant work together, sometimes poorly, as we stumble through life in search of meaning and connection. In this book I’ll use the metaphor to solve puzzles such as why it seems like everyone (else) is a hypocrite and why political partisans are so willing to believe outrageous lies and conspiracy theories. I’ll also use the metaphor to show you how you can better persuade people who seem unresponsive to reason.
Part II is about the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. Secular Western moralities are like cuisines that try to activate just one or two of these receptors—either concerns about harm and suffering, or concerns about fairness and injustice. But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. I’ll explain where these six taste receptors come from, how they form the basis of the world’s many moral cuisines, and why politicians on the right have a built- in advantage when it comes to cooking meals that voters like.
Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.
But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.
Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion. I’ll show that our “higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the “New Atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
(A note on terminology: In the United States, the word liberal refers to progressive or left- wing politics, and I will use the word in this sense. But in Europe and elsewhere, the word liberal is truer to its original meaning—valuing liberty above all else, including in economic activities. When Europeans use the word liberal, they often mean something more like the American term libertarian, which cannot be placed easily on the left- right spectrum. Readers from outside the United States may want to swap in the words progressive or left- wing whenever I say liberal.) In the coming chapters I’ll draw on the latest research in neuroscience, genetics, social psychology, and evolutionary modeling, but the take- home message of the book is ancient. It is the realization that we are all self- righteous hypocrites:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? . . . You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. (Matthew 7:3–5)
Enlightenment (or wisdom, if you prefer) requires us all to take the logs out of our own eyes and then escape from our ceaseless, petty, and divisive moralism. As the eighth- century Chinese Zen master Sen-ts’an wrote:
The Perfect Way is only difficult
for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike;
all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference,
and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be for or against.
The struggle between “for” and “against”
is the mind’s worst disease.
I’m not saying we should live our lives like Sen-ts’an. In fact, I believe that a world without moralism, gossip, and judgment would quickly decay into chaos. But if we want to understand ourselves, our divisions, our limits, and our potentials, we need to step back, drop the moralism, apply some moral psychology, and analyze the game we’re all playing. .
Let us now examine the psychology of this struggle between “for” and “against.” It is a struggle that plays out in each of our righteous minds, and among all of our righteous groups.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (February 12, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 528 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307455777
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307455772
- Item Weight : 1.07 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.14 x 1.2 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,981 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years before moving to NYU-Stern in 2011. He was named one of the "top global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the "top world thinkers" by Prospect magazine.
His research focuses on morality - its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental course. He began his career studying the negative moral emotions, such as disgust, shame, and vengeance, but then moved on to the understudied positive moral emotions, such as admiration, awe, and moral elevation. He is the co-developer of Moral Foundations theory, and of the research site YourMorals.org. He is a co-founder of HeterodoxAcademy.org, which advocates for viewpoint diversity in higher education. He uses his research to help people understand and respect the moral motives of their enemies (see CivilPolitics.org, and see his TED talks). He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom; The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion; and (with Greg Lukianoff) The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting a generation up for failure. For more information see www.JonathanHaidt.com.
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I really did love this book; but as I was reading it I kept getting the nagging feeling that something about it was just a bit off -- something that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Now I don't want to leave the wrong impression; so I want to say up front that this is a wonderful, well-written, thought-provoking book that everyone ought to read. I've given it five stars because I genuinely believe it's worthy of the highest possible rating. Haidt's theory of political affiliation is original -- one might even say radical -- flying in the face of much of the conventional wisdom within the social and behavioral sciences; but if you are willing to consider Haidt's argument with an open mind, it actually makes a whole lot of sense. So, when I say that something about this book felt a bit off to me, please don't interpret this as a criticism of Haidt's theory, his approach to the subject, or his writing style. This is a book that you really ought to read, and that you will probably enjoy. That said, I still felt slightly dissatisfied after reading it; but it was hard to say exactly why.
After some reflection, I think that my dissatisfaction was due to three things. First, I felt that Haidt's argument was a bit anticlimactic. Haidt spends most of the book laying the foundations for his theory of political affiliation; and the theory he finally presents is, at least in my view, quite compelling. But, after all that setup, I was expecting more of a discussion of how this theory can be applied to help us understand why different people hold such radically differing views on such a wide range of political issues. But Haidt skimped on the application of his theory. The main insight that Haidt gives us into why some people are liberal while others are conservative or libertarian is that a combination of nature and nurture has predisposed some people to build their morality primarily on just three core principles -- care, liberty, and fairness -- while predisposing other people to build their morality on six principles -- care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity -- and still others to build their morality on a single principle -- liberty. As I'm sure you've guessed, those in the first group become liberals, those in the second group become conservatives, and those in the third group become libertarians. This is certainly an important insight; but I was hoping for more. For example, I wish Haidt had given us a bit more insight into how the three liberal values shape liberal policy positions, how the six conservative values shape conservative policy positions, and how the lone libertarian value shapes libertarian policy positions. He did briefly discuss some of the differences between liberal, conservative, and libertarian views of the economy; but he didn't really have all that much to say about the myriad other policy issues that liberals, conservatives, and libertarians routinely fight over -- e.g. abortion, equal pay, gay marriage, affirmative action, collective bargaining, voter access, immigration reform, taxes, entitlements, gun control, civil liberties, criminal justice, drug laws, military spending, the conduct of foreign policy, the appropriate use of military force, etc. Haidt's theory does provide a framework that can help us to understand why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians might take different positions on these issues; but he doesn't spell it out for us issue by issue. I really wish he had. I think it would have been very useful, and would have made his excellent book even better.
Second, while I admired his efforts to treat liberals, conservatives, and libertarians with equal respect, and not to treat conservatism as if it were some sort of mental disorder (as many political psychologists are wont to do), I ultimately felt that he went a little too far in his efforts to be "fair and balanced", and ended up glossing over some of the biggest moral failings on the right (e.g. sexism, racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, jingoism, xenophobia, demagoguery, anti-intellectualism, and science denialism) in the interest of portraying conservative values as being just as legitimate as liberal values. Besides, the conservatism that Haidt found worthy of praise was old-fashioned Tory conservatism -- a cautious, genteel, intellectual form of conservatism based on the ideals of serious thinkers like Edmund Burke, who mainly just wanted to preserve society against the sort of chaos that often accompanies radical change -- which bears little resemblance to the "red meat" conservatism that prevails on the American right today. So, when Haidt advises us to pay attention to what conservatives have to teach us about what it takes to maintain a healthy, functioning society, he's really talking about old-school conservative intellectuals of the center-right, like George Will and Colin Powell, not the dogmatic culture warriors of the far-right, like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. In fact, Haidt has relatively little to say about the conservatism represented by the evangelical Religious Right or the Tea Party movement, where ideological zeal often manifests itself as an ugly form of demagoguery. It's almost as if he wants to sweep this under the rug so he can sell the idea that mutually respectful civil discourse and bipartisanship are actually possible in this day and age. I think this book would have been better if Haidt had stuck to trying to explain partisanship rather than trying to find a cure for it.
And third, although I found Haidt's argument quite compelling, there are certain aspects of it that might alienate some readers, causing them to simply reject Haidt's conclusions out of hand without much critical thought. The last thing I would ever want to do in a classroom is to alienate any of my students so they stop listening to what I have to teach. So I'm more than a little reluctant to assign a highly controversial text that many students will likely have a knee-jerk reaction against. Why might this book be controversial? For one thing, Haidt's theory draws heavily on evolutionary psychology, which is rejected by many on both the right and the left. Many progressives decry evolutionary psychology as "politically incorrect" because it argues that much of human behavior -- including such things as gender differences, xenophobia, and aggression -- may be innate parts of human nature that can never be changed by social engineering. Many conservatives, on the other hand, reject evolutionary psychology because they don't believe in Darwinian evolution at all. So Haidt's use of evolutionary psychology may be enough to cause some readers to reject his argument outright. In addition to this, he bases much of his argument on the evolutionary principle of "group selection" -- a theory that has been pretty firmly rejected by biologists for several decades now, but which Haidt argues ought to be reconsidered. But perhaps the most controversial part of Haidt's argument is his treatment of religion. Haidt himself is an atheist; so he makes no pretense of actually believing that any religion is "true". He looks at religion purely from a psychological and sociological perspective in an attempt to figure out what function religion has played in human society throughout history. Yet he forcefully rejects the anti-religious fervor of the so-called "New Atheism" popularized over the past decade by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, among others, with its assertion that religion is a dangerous "meme" -- a "virus of the mind" -- that is inherently harmful to human wellbeing. Haidt devotes an entire chapter to refuting the New Atheists' claims about religion, arguing that religion has actually been a force for good in the world which serves to strengthen social bonds and discourage individual selfishness, and that religion is actually a product of natural selection. So, his treatment of religion is unlikely to win Haidt any friends from among either the devoutly religious or the fervently irreligious. And, on top of all this, Haidt defends conservative values that many liberals find abhorrent, arguing that they are just as vital to the wellbeing of society as are liberal values. So, suffice it to say that this iconoclastic book is liable to alienate many different people for many different reasons. Haidt butchers a lot of sacred cows in these pages. So, I suspect that plenty of folks will simply reject everything that he has to say out of hand. While I am an advocate of open-minded critical inquiry, I'm also a pragmatist. I know that many of my students are not going to be as open-minded as I would like them to be; so, as an educator, I have to be sensitive to this if I want to help them learn. A little controversy in the classroom can be healthy; but too much can derail the entire lesson plan. I wouldn't want the class to get sidetracked by debates over tangential issues that are not directly relevant to the subject I'm trying to teach. So, if I were to teach a course on political psychology, I would be a bit hesitant to use this book as the main text for fear that students would get too distracted by some of its more controversial elements. However, I would consider using this book as a supplemental text, and would definitely put it on the recommended readings list.
Anyway, these three problems are relatively minor, and do not detract from the overall quality of the book. They simply leave me ever-so-slightly dissatisfied, perhaps because my expectations were unreasonably high. I would certainly recommend Haidt's book. I really do feel that it deserves to be read and talked about. There's no doubt in my mind that it deserves a five-star rating. But I'm afraid that the five stars I give it will have to come with an asterisk.
Haidt is a certified "top world thinker" [wikipedia] so all who think about morality, religion, politics have to read this excellent, challenging, enormously informative book, a powerful contribution to the old "nature-nurture" debate. As it has been widely reviewed and praised, I will focus on some criticisms. His study of a vast range of material from philosophy to neuroscience, and his original research, forms the basis of his "moral science." Is it good science? Less than 40% of psychological research is replicated (scientificamerican).
He boldly makes an argument (chapter 9) in favor of a theory of natural selection at the group level. Group selection isn’t widely accepted by evolutionists, but it's useful for Haidt's theory of innate moral foundations, the "groupiness" of humans coded in their genes and in "gene-culture co-evolution.". For good discussion search Haidt + Steven Pinker / Massimo Pigliucci / Sam Harris / Daniel Dennett /Jerry Coyne / John Jost.
He quotes colleagues who note that "nearly all our research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD)." (96) This unrepresentative set probably skews the results. I think another bias, not mentioned, may result from much of the work being done with college students -- in addition to being WEIRD, they are young and inexperienced in the adult world of work, religion, politics.
He cites (99) previous research which identifies three major clusters of moral values: 1) autonomy cluster: individual liberty, rights, justice, equality. 2) Community cluster: submergence in family, army, tribe, religious sect, nation; values duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, patriotism, self-sacrifice. 3) divinity cluster: sanctity/sin, purity/pollution; soul/spirit/mind is spark of divinity, the body is a holy temple not a playground; individualism is denounced as libertinism, hedonism, disobedience, sacrilege; taboos prohibit acts that degrade a person (miscegenation, homosexuality) or dishonor the Creator or violate the sacred order. "The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights." (106) Cluster 2 and 3 were the basis of social control for millennia; it was a fierce struggle in recent centuries that elevated cluster 1, autonomy. Haidt seems to deprecate this achievement.
Developing this theory further, Haidt identifies five clusters, or "moral foundations." His theory posits innate disposition or intuition, partly genetic, partly cultural, to exhibit values and behaviors on one or more of these five clusters. They are: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation. He finds that liberals rely on the first two predominately; conservatives rely on all five, which may "give conservative politicians a broader variety of ways to connect with voters." (154). Perhaps a game point to conservatives, but does that valorize the code of ancient regimes? An example of politicians exploiting moral intuitions of conservatives is the North Carolina legislature drafting and passing in one day a law which responds to disgust/fear about transsexuals using the wrong bathroom -- a few months before a tight election. Trump expressed disgust at Clinton's use of a restroom--many were embarrassed, but maybe Trump knew what he was doing.
Ongoing research and criticism convinced Haidt that his five foundations failed to fully explain moral and political values. More analysis is needed on the cluster of values around Liberty/oppression. This oversight is strange, as Liberty is the central moral value of modern liberalism, at the root of the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and our Constitution and Laws. Other values he believes need study are Proportionality (a division of Fairness), Honesty, Property (the main concern of moralists like Abbe Augustin Barruel and Edmund Burke!).
I have seen conservatives misuse this book to say it proves conservatives are more intelligent or moral than liberals. Haidt is not saying which moral cluster is best: the theory is a descriptive analysis of how people think. But he allows such misinterpretation by lecturing liberals on their need to honor conservative intuitions.
In the U.S., he says, these five or six clusters of moral intuition are at the root of the left-right political conflict. Can we explain current political conflict as growing out of genetically embedded feelings? Can we describe as "morality" attitudes based on Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity without evaluating specific attitudes or acts? He says Democrats are naive because they respond to a narrower set of "moral tastes" than conservatives. (157) That's a value judgment. If we are being urged to choose our moral foundation, we need to discuss specifics: appeal to loyalty gave us McCarthyism; appeal to authority gave us a war based on lies; appeal to sanctity gave us slavery and homophobia. The "five moral foundations" are not equal in merit for guiding moral choice. Haidt acknowledges this criticism but does not, in my opinion, make a satisfactory revision of his analysis.
The "research" consists in the questions and stories framed, and the body of respondents selected. I think questions and stories could be framed that reveal liberal embrace and conservative rejection of Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity. Do you loyally honor the President even if he is a black Democrat? Should persons and corporations comply with the authority of the IRS and the EPA to make rules, and respect the authority of scientists on issues like evolution and human-caused global warming and species extinction? Does sanctity (purity, avoidance of disease) motivate citizens to support FDA in protecting the purity and healthfulness of consumer products? Do you approve the disloyalty of the American Revolution? Of the Confederate rebellion? Do you support the authority of the Supreme Court (and the value of autonomy) to say gays have the right to marry?
It is not a great revelation that liberals care more about Care/harm and Fairness/cheating and Liberty/oppression than about Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity. Has Haidt proven that conservatives do not value autonomy higher, or is it merely that they are more easily triggered by the older codes? If one catalogs all the "triggers", gut reactions, fear, hate, superstition associated with each "foundation", it's not hard to see where the higher morality is -- which conservatives and liberals perhaps equally embrace. Surely most Americans highly value the overthrow of millennia of tyranny under monarchy, aristocracy, theocracy and the enshrinement (new content for Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity??) of liberty, justice, equality.
Haidt puts cleanliness, avoidance of disease, and such under Sanctity (purity), and implies liberals don't value this cluster much. That's clearly wrong, and he acknowledges that "the Sanctity item showed no partisan tilt; both sides prefer clean[liness]" (162).
Learned responses are wrongly defined, it seems to me, as "intuitive" or gut instinct. EGGs show the brains of liberals and conservatives react differently to significant words without deliberation. Yes: the brain has already learned the meaning of words, and the meanings vary with one's learning.
His famous metaphor -- the mind is divided into parts, like a small rider (conscious reasoning) on a very large elephant (automatic and intuitive processes) -- is upside down. He says the metaphorical elephant is in charge, but a real rider or trainer of an elephant is clearly in charge of a very powerful animal. The power of intelligence to control atavistic impulses is the foundation of civilization. His other metaphor -- humans are 90% chimp and 10% bee -- is equally misleading. Bees don't think, so where is human intelligence in this metaphor?
"Democrats often pursue policies that promote pluribus at the expense of unum, policies that leave them open to charges of treason, subversion, and sacrilege." (185) He doesn't say the charges are fair, but he says Ann Coulter's book "Treason: Liberal Treachery" "says it all" (141) What it says to me is that hateful slanders of liberals are popular among conservatives. What does Haidt think it says? Such charges are bogus (McCarthyism) and a "morality" that motivates them is atavistic. The thesis of the book is that Republicans successfully appeal to these (atavistic--my word) impulses. If liberal politicians decline to push these effective (atavistic) triggers, is that evidence of truncated moral foundations?
In chapter 11 Haidt criticizes three scientists, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for books denouncing religion as delusion. (He omits Victor Stenger, physicist, philosopher, atheist, who has written a dozen books on science ["flies us to the moon"] and religion ["flies us into buildings"].) Haidt faults them for focusing on belief in supernatural agents. Haidt says that is not the principle function of religion, which is to create community. But state churches created warring communities until our new constitutions disestablished religion. Haidt is advocating a "Durkheimian model" is which humans are fully human only as part of a social group. He acknowledges the danger -- the value creates fascist societies too (271) but still he defends group loyalty and authority as a necessary foundation for morality. Don't liberals support building social cohesion? Doesn't the American "creed" enshrined in our Constitution and Laws give us a superior unity without blind loyalty or obedience to (what other?) authority?
Haidt quotes two archetypal narratives on pages 284-285 that give us a clear choice. The "liberal progressive narrative" seeks liberty and justice and has "succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies." The "Reagan narrative" calls on good Americans to "take back" the nation that has been "undermined" by anti-market, anti-American, anti-family, criminal-coddling, flag-burning liberals. [How many liberals have ever burned a flag?!] The merit of the conservative narrative, relying on all five (or six) "moral foundations", where conservatives smear liberals as flag-burners, escapes me. It's a dishonest caricature.
A caricature from Haidt: liberals see only individuals, while conservatives see that essential moral community arises from "the complete community." (292) [But it was conservatives who ridiculed Hillary Clinton for borrowing the African wisdom "it takes a village to raise a child."] Another Haidt caricature, unscientifically taken from conservative rhetoric: liberals think fairness means equal outcomes. No liberal theorist or Democratic leader takes that position.
Haidt defines morality near the end of the book (270) : "Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make co-operative societies possible." He is clear that he is describing, not prescribing, morality. He includes "technologies" but omits "rational guidance for good behavior" or the idea that morality "make good societies possible." But calling bad ideas and behaviors a system of morality is confusing. Morality usually implies the search for ideal or prescriptive values, even if the search is unending and full of disagreement. Here is a better definition, IMO, from the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy -- "morality, an informal public system applying to all rational persons, governing behavior that affects others, having the lessening of evil or harm as its goal, and including what are commonly known as the moral rules, moral ideals, and moral virtues." I think liberals and conservatives would subscribe to this. It addresses the social aspect of morality, in contrast to Haidt's claim that liberals "focus intently on individuals" while conservatives "recognize that human flourishing requires social order" (272) -- a false dichotomy. Hillary Clinton's theme was that flourishing societies are necessary for the development of flourishing individuals.
Despite his disparagement of "the rationalist delusion" (28, 88) his work is rational/scientific and he expects his book to influence rational persons toward civility and cooperation. This is an affirmation of the power of learning to shape morality. It made me more sympathetic toward people who differ from me. This is an important book and Haidt earns great deference -- respect for authority -- for his mastery of a vast literature in philosophy and science, and for his ongoing industry. He is associated with several websites that continue this research.
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Each chapter ends with a clearly defined "In Sum" section. This helps identify the key points if they weren't explicitly clear to the reader. This was extremely helpful for me as I usually take notes while I read any significant book.
To add to the overall feel of the book, I would recommend setting up an account on yourmorals.org (this is presented in the book). It certainly will help the reader with self-knowledge and help place themselves within the context of the book. This is important as the book attempts to help resolve polarization, therefore, knowing where you stand is helpful.