The Righteous Mind: Part 1
Book Review (Jonathan Haidt)
After reading Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, I wanted to figure Haidt out a bit more as an author. I know he's quite well known, that he's a big selling author, and that he is (surprisingly?) popular among people I think of as conservatives. That surprises me because, while The Anxious Generation can certainly be seen as a right-leaning intervention, what I know about Haidt does not come across as particularly palatable to the right (he would identify as a Jewish-Atheist with progressive politics).
So I decided to read his The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. This is a book that is equal parts fascinating, disturbing, challenging, and puzzling. I'm going to write about it over three (I think) posts, so that we can dig a little bit more into his arguments.
This book is an extended argument made on the basis of moral psychology, about how our minds thing about morality, and why this makes it so hard for us to have civil concord, especially across the lines of politics and religion. That's a topic clearly of heightened pertinence to the American social landscape, especially in recent years.
Haidt's overall argument can be framed like this: humans evolved certain moral capacities in their thinking as evolutionary adaptations, and this provides an explanatory framework for how we think about morality. We'll come back to the meta-argument several times. Today I'm going to explore part 1 of his book, which argues that moral intuitions precede moral reasoning.
Haidt's central metaphor here is that we are like a rider on an elephant, with the elephant representing our moral intuitions, and the rider our rational reasoning. The rider serves the elephant, not the other way around.
Chapter 1 is very narrative in structure. It lays out the development of the field of moral psychology in the last 50 years or so, and Haidt's entry into it, and his early research in grad school. In particular, Haidt is telling the story of why rationalism ("that morality is self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm") is wrong. The main bulk of this is his research on asking people "harmless taboo stories" in 3 different contexts. That is, Haidt had subjects interviewed about situations in which (a) it was clear and uncontestable that no-one was being harmed, but (b) they broke some kind of taboo. E.g. "cutting up a flag in the privacy of your own home and definitely no-one could see". Subjects who felt that it was wrong, generally struggled to articulate why it was wrong. They came up with post-hoc arguments. More western, educated, and individualistic cultures were less likely to consider these cases wrong. Why this argument? Haidt is working to show that morality is both innate and learned: we are the type of creatures that have evolved to have moral intuitions, but those intuitions are shaped by our cultures.
Chapter 2 begins with talking about ancient philosophy. Haidt talks through various models of the human mind mostly from philosophers: reason dominant (Plato, for instance), Passion dominant (Hume), and reason and passion as independent co-rulers (Thomas Jefferson). Then he turns to Edward O. Wilson, who argued that "what the rationalists were really doing was generating clever justifications for moral intuitions that were best explained by evolution." (p.32) We then move on to a second set of experiments and research that Haidt performed, attempting to evaluate the 'Jeffersonian' model, alongside other experiments examining 'moral dumbfoundedness' - situations were subjects said something was wrong, and had their post-hoc reasonings challenged or discredited, and still stuck to their guns. All of this comes to the point where Haidt's model is "social intuitionism" - we produce an almost immediate intuition about what's right/wrong, and then formulate a reason for it, which we may deploy to persuade others of our position.
And here's where I want to pause for a second. I think Haidt sometimes engages in category confusion. Philosophers, ancient and modern, often do talk about how the mind works. And they talk about morality. And they can often be wrong about how the mind works. But philosophy and psychology answer different questions. Even if you accept this whole book's argument, about moral psychology being a product of evolution, and our moral reasonings are post-hoc justifications for our moral intuitions, this doesn't do the job of moral philosophy. It doesn't actually tell us (a) if there is such a thing as right and wrong, (b) what is right and wrong. That we tend to reason in certain ways, doesn't tell us whether such reasoning is true or not.
Chapter 3 is one that is kind of depressing, as Haidt presents six research findings that back the 'intuitions come first'. This includes affective reactions - how we instantly have a approach/avoid or like/dislike to things (including people) the instant we notice them, before any thought. Then we look at affective reactions and how this shows up in the Implicit Association Test, which tests implicit bias. Then like how we consider attractive people smarter and more virtuous. Followed by Todorov's work on how we form impressions of people, that people could judge who would/did win an electoral race solely on looking at their photos even for 1/10 of a second. There's that people make harsher moral judgments when subjected to bad smells. The contrast between psychopaths (who reason but don't feel), and babies (who feel but don't reason).
How do we change our moral positions though? Since we are very good at justifying our own position, and in fact cognitively biased to reject arguments against and find arguments for, most change in moral positions come through social interaction, especially when we esteem another or other people, we are more likely to be persuaded by their positions.
Chapter 4 starts off by pitting Glaucon v Socrates. Glaucon's position (in Plato's Republic) is that people are only virtuous for its social advantage, and they fear punishment. Socrates argument is that it is better to be just, even with a reputation for injustice. Haidt's argument is that Glaucon is right: people care more about appearance than substance, and to build an ethical society you need to use that fact.
I think this is another place where the philosophy/psychology disjunct is worth considering. Because even if Plato is wrong about human psychology, there is a whole meta-level argument about what an ethical society is that can only take place by reason, not by intuition. To put it another way, Haidt is describing how we make moral judgments, but this doesn't tell us anything about how we should make moral judgments, because he doesn't have an argument about what is good, what is right. Nor does he need to, I'm okay with that. We'll come back to this point later, especially in part 2.
And so this chapter looks at studies/research that support the position that we care about what others think of us, a lot. This includes people who say they don't. There's a description of the confirmation bias in here, that we are incredibly good at coming up with arguments for our position, and against other positions, and incredibly bad at coming up with arguments in the opposite direction. Education and IQ makes no difference to confirmation bias; smarter people just come up with more arguments for their own position. There's a foray here into the research that we aren't just selfish, we are group-oriented. In terms of public policy, we support what our party or side supports, even if it makes no difference to us personally.
Haidt's part 1 concludes with a rejection of the worship of reason, the 'rationalist delusion'.
Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. p.89
[Mercier and Sperber] concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. (p. 89).
Now, granted, I have a cognitive and confirmation bias in favour of rationalism. But here's my problem with Haidt's conclusion here: it's a truth claim based on reason. Even when you recognise all the ways that reason goes astray, you are still left making a reasoned case about reasoning, and a truth claim about what is true. Haidt's argument is that [individual] reason is untrustworthy, but that collective reasoning produces better results - when we engage in society, they produce better results (whether finding truth or producing policy). We are less nobly rational and impartial than we might want to be, certainly than we claim to be, but this is not an argument against reason itself, otherwise Haidt's argument has no point whatsoever.
Next time: the 5 (6) flavours of moral intuitions
Haidt seems to have read his Machiavelli.