The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

by Jonathan Haidt

So now we have three models of the mind. Plato said that reason ought to be the master, even if philosophers are the only ones who can reach a high level of mastery.9 Hume said that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions. And Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers, like the emperors of Rome, who divided the empire into eastern and western halves. Who is right? WILSON’S PROPHECY Plato, Hume, and Jefferson tried to understand the design of the human mind without the help of the most powerful tool ever devised for understanding the design of living things: Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin was fascinated by morality because any example of cooperation among living creatures had to be squared with his general emphasis on competition and the “survival of the fittest.”10 Darwin offered several explanations for how morality could have evolved, and many of them pointed to emotions such as sympathy, which he thought was the “foundation-stone” of the social instincts.11 He also wrote about feelings of shame and pride, which were associated with the desire for a good reputation. Darwin was a nativist about morality: he thought that natural selection gave us minds that were preloaded with moral emotions. But as the social sciences advanced in the twentieth century, their course was altered by two waves of moralism that turned nativism into a moral offense. The first was the horror among anthropologi...