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

by Jonathan Haidt

I’m not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments,52 but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law.

Rather, what I’m saying is that we must be wary of any individual’s ability to reason.

We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning

This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).

And if our goal is to produce good behavior, not just good thinking, then it’s even more important to reject rati...

In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD).

The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.

Most people think holistically (seeing the whole context and the relationships among parts), but WEIRD people think more analytically

But if you live in a non-WEIRD society in which people are more likely to see relationships, contexts, groups, and institutions, then you won’t be so focused on protecting individuals. You’ll have a more sociocentric morality, which means (as Shweder described it back in chapter 1) that you place the needs of groups and institutions first, often ahead of the needs of individuals. If you do that, then a morality based on concerns about harm and fairness won’t be sufficient. You’ll have additional concerns, and you’ll need additional virtues to bind people together.

They found three major clusters of moral themes, which they called the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity.10 Each one is based on a different idea about what a person really is.

began to see that many moral matrices coexist within each nation. Each matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders.

We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals.27 And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours.

In 1991, Shweder wrote about the power of cultural psychology to cause such awakenings:

I cannot overstate the importance of this quotation for moral and political psychology.

Pluralists such as Shweder rise to the challenge, offering theories that can explain moral diversity within and across cultures. Yet many authors reduce morality to a single principle, usually some variant of welfare maximization (basically, help people, don’t hurt them).1 Or sometimes it’s justice or related notions of fairness, rights, or respect for individuals and their autonomy.2 There’s The Utilitarian Grill, serving only sweeteners (welfare), and The Deontological Diner, serving only salts (rights). Those are your options.

Neither Shweder nor I am saying that “anything goes,” or that all societies or all cuisines are equally good. But we believe that moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles.3

Moral judgment is a kind of perception, and moral science should begin with a careful study of the moral taste receptors.

But in psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work,

It can be done only by observation, and observation is usually keener when informed by empathy.

I was convinced that the prevailing view in anthropology was wrong, and that it would never be possible to understand morality without evolution. But Shweder had taught me to be careful about evolutionary explanations, which are sometimes reductionist

influence an animal to do things that will spread copies of that gene. But one of the most important insights into the origins of morality is that “selfish” genes can give rise to generous creatures, as long as those creatures are selective in their generosity.

But after that we’re selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those who took advantage of us. Human life is a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation. If we play our cards right, we can work with others to enlarge the pie that we ultimately share.

Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.

The left tends toward universalism and away from nationalism,

26 so it often has trouble connecting to voters who rely on the Loyalty foundation.Indeed,

Conservatives—particularly religious conservatives—are more likely to view the body as a temple, housing a soul within, rather than as a machine to be optimized, or as a playground to be used for fun.

It appears that the left relies primarily on the Care and Fairness foundations, whereas the right uses all five.

Does left-wing morality activate just one or two taste receptors, whereas right-wing morality engages a broader palate, including loyalty, authority, and sanctity?