I've taken a bit of a break from writing posts on books. Partly I've slowed my reading, partly I'm reading quite a few things that I don't really want to write review-type posts on. Partly the grind of writing was getting to me.
Anyway, today we're back with part 2 of my reading of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. We're looking at part 2 of the book, chapters 5-8. Part 1 here.
Chapter 5
What's the operational principle of morality anyway? The chapter opens with, again, reflections on some of Haidt's early research. In this case, testing moral hypotheses with different demographics. And the WEIRDer (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) you are, the more likely you are to end up with a moral sense that is "individualistic, rule-based, and universalist"; the less WEIRD you are, the more you are likely to see the world in terms of relationships, and have a sociocentric view of morality.
This chapter then goes on to talk about Richard Scweder's work on culture, and three 'clusters' of moral themes, autonomy, community, divinity. WEIRD people tend to see the moral world primarily in terms of individuals wants, needs, preferences, and so rights and liberty dominate their moral viewscape. Community-based morality centres groups, and values such as duty, respect, reputation. Divinity-based morality sees people (and animals and things, sometimes) as imbued with the sacred, so that even if no 'harm' is done, things can still be wrong when they violate divine boundaries.
Again, the WEIRDer you are, and the more western, secular, liberal you are, the more you tend to view morality purely in terms of 'harm'. I think this explains why, about 14 years ago, I had such a hard time convincing people that even if you were trapped in the mountains of Peru after a plane crash, you shouldn't eat people. My fundamental principle was that it was desecrating the dead. The other people in my group considered that since the other people were dead, eating them was fine.
It's very hard to view morality from outside the framework of the culture you've grown up in. It's possible, but it's a kind of cross-cultural learning, to learn to really feel the moral concerns of people with different sets of moral intuitions. It's why, for example, I theoretically understand the sociocentric concerns of Asian friends, but I don't feel the force of the ties that bind them in that way.
Chapter 6: Moral taste buds
I really like the way Haidt develops this metaphor. Just like we have different taste receptors, we have different 'moral' taste receptors, and we can be sensitive to different moral foundations.
By the by, Haidt continues his (deliberate?) confusing of categories when he says that Hume is right about morality. Hume might be right about moral reasoning an d psychology, but this still doesn't make him right about what's right and wrong. More on this another time though.
There's also a section in here which I find rather worrisome. Haidt draws on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen in relation to Autism. Part of SBC's research is that people with autism score higher on Systematising and lower on Empathy. This theory is not without criticism. I'm particularly critical of the way Haidt deploys it as basically redefining Autism as "better through of as a region of personality-space-the lower right corner of the lower right quadrant-than as a discrete disease"; redefining Autism as a personality configuration, or 'extreme male brain', is a deeply worrying approach. Haidt then engages in historical analysis of Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant, suggesting that their extreme systematization is indicative - that Bentham would be categorised as having Asperger's syndrome, and perhaps Kant would be too. Why is this in here? What case does it make to suggest historical figures were on the Autism spectrum? Haidt's main point, he says, is to show how the main drivers of moral theory lacked empathy, and the lack of empathy is their flaw, because they systematised morality down to a single 'flavour'. This is a long, and dubious, way to make that argument.
Much more persuasive is Haidt when he gets on to describing his six 'flavours'; they are:
Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity/degradation
Liberty/Oppression
Chapter 7: morality and politics
Haidt is sensitive to the charge that evolutionary explanations are often "just so" stories that attempt to justify why we think a certain adaptation evolved. But he starts off this chapter with the idea of innateness - that, in Haidt's terms, certain things are 'organised in advance of experience'. We have not 'hardwiring', but a set of modules in us that are pre-wired for certain experiences to create certain patterns in our behaviour. So, then, 'care/harm' works as an evolutionary adaptation because it helps mammals with a long gestation and raising period to attach to their children and protect them until adulthood.
I find some of Haidt's evolutionary theorisation just very hard to swallow. Not because I find evolution hard to believe, but because discussion of evolution so often sounds like it's about design and intentionality. Complex evolution of psychological modules to 'meet' challenges, is a very intentionalist way of talking about the survival by statistical advantage of certain gene mutations.
Interesting in here was the description of how the political left and right conceive of fairness differently. The left understands it in terms of equality, but the right in terms of proportionality.
The intersection of morality and politics involves appealing to the 6 foundations in different ways, but also that the left focuses on Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating, whereas moral appeals on the right tend to embrace the full range of moral 'flavours', which is part of the topic for chapter eight.
Chapter 8: the conservative advantage
This was a fascinating chapter. Haidt argues that the political right appeals to the full six flavours, and so understands moral psychology better than the political left, which (a) keeps appealing to the rational mind, not the intuitive mind, and (b) has a truncated flavour palate.
There's also a lot in here about fairness as proportionality. When you see the political right's concern for fairness as guarding the community against 'freeloaders', and people getting what they deserve, this makes a lot of explanatory sense, as compared to the universalist equality concerns of the left.
Again, what's hardest to swallow in this chapter are the just-so evolutionary stories of how we as a species, or as societies, evolved. It also doesn't do all the work that I think Haidt thinks it does.
What I do find fascinating and persuasive, though, is the six foundation theory, generally. It makes sense of how we process, react, and intuit about morality. I think there's rich material here for thinking about how moral psychology interacts with ethical philosophy, and I don't think Haidt himself is cut out for that task.