I first saw Jonathan Haidt in a TED talk back in 2009 or so talking about the moral differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of psychological differences. There does seem to be psychological and biological influence on people's political views as there is a consistent left-right divide in democracies throughout the world which usually make up the majority of the electorate. This was enlightening to me as the media often portrays the left right divide at best as a contest of ideas or at worst crass self-interest. That people may decide political views based on personality put things in perspective for me, and has given me a basic sort of humility towards those with different views who may be unaware of why they feel a certain way about things and aren't just bad people. It also means we ought to have an honest dialogue with others who may be predisposed to ideas which aren't in their interest and seek not to change their mindset but the conclusions they are motivated to reach.
As sensible as this view of morality and politics is to me, academia has taken a while to get there. Haidt has helped to revolutionize this moral psychology for the twenty first century, especially for a popular audience. Haidt in collaboration with professors and grad students of UVA, UCI, and USC runs the website YourMorals where you can take a quiz to gauge your own moral psychology, and further their research.
Haidt entered college in 1987 and became a professor at UVA in 1995. When Haidt started college, the reigning view of moral psychology was that morality was developed through reasoning with others on the universal foundations of care and harm. Jean Piaget came up with his famous theory of mental development, in which children self construct morality with other children linked to their understanding of the physical world. We have an egotistical understanding of the world early in life and learn empathy just as we learn object permanency, that things exist behind our perception of them. Lawrence Kohlberg came up with three stages of morality: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Before social conventions we act egotistically expecting others to provide for us, then we learn dependency on others and we take moral rules to be obedience to rules which is a sort of realism, and then we reach postconventional morality which is based on norms independent of the arbitrary commands of others. A student of Kohlberg Elliot Turiel argued that the values of harm and fairness were universals from which all moral rules were ultimately based on. These foundations were opposed to social convention and authority from earlier stages of mental development.
All of this fitted in nicely with the left-liberal worldview, confirming western notions of how humans think, and so dominated academia from the 70s to the 90s when Haidt came along. The cracks in this idealistic paradigm came Richard Schweder, a cultural anthropologist and advisor to Haidt who did some work in India. What he discovered was that in a non western culture like India there wasn't a clear dividing line between social convention and what is fair or harmful. He used a method of Turiel's, telling stories about individuals who break social rules and asked yes or no questions as to whether the behavior was justified. What Schweder did differently was to tell stories about behaviors not linked to harm and fairness. The results were that Americans thought the acts were permissible, and the Indians thought they weren't. The conclusion: "the moral order is a social order" given the difference between western and non western notions of the relation of individuals to society. Individualistic culture which the liberal view assumes has a clear diving line between social convention and harm/fairness while sociocentric cultures do not.
Turiel himself wrote a rebuttal essay claiming that the stories just had different meanings to different people but the underlying reasoning was the same. Something like disgust and disrespect are aspects of harm, as is adhering to social rules there respect is to fairness. Of course the question comes up whether there can be a case of morality not based on fair or harm which can actually falsify the theory. But research from other non western societies like Brazil bears important differences in what people think is socially acceptable, which can be very different from harm and fairness. So Shweder was on to something.
Further evidence against the reigning paradigm came from cognitive psychology. When asked why something non harmful like eating dogs or being a satanist is wrong, people rationalize their answers in favor of their preferences and not the other way around. People's preferences are formed by unconscious reactions to uncomfortable or ambiguous stimuli which is hardwired in the brain. The almond shaped amygdala supercharges the emotions of the limbic system, linked to hormones, to make quick judgements before the rational cortex has time to make a decision.
Political psychologists John Jost and Arie Kruglanski have proposed that the personality trait of openness predicts liberal and conservative attitudes. Conservatives are more likely to view unfamiliar or ambiguous behavior as threatening than liberals which confounds the line between social order and moral order. This is the subject of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney that came out the same year as Haidt's book, and is an excellent compliment.
The philosophers preceded the cognitive psychologists and so their views still set the debate today. A very influential view has been that reason is separate from emotional functioning, which has its adherents from Plato to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's metaphor was that of the two consuls of the Roman Republic who shared duties domestically and outside the country.
This view has been undercut by neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio who point toward two pieces of evidence. 1) brain damage to the prefrontal cortex affects emotional functioning. This was demonstrated by railroad worker Phineas Gage in the 19th century who was struck by a railroad spike in his left frontal cortex. He survived with his memory and intelligence intact but his behavior radically changed. He became more impulse and obstinate to the point where he was fired. 2) Split brain operations reveal how stimuli from one half affects the operation of the other half. The left half of the brain is involved in language and abstract reasoning and the right half is involved in spatial and recognition tasks. If a word is flashed to the left eye (controlled by the right hemisphere) the right side of the body (controlled by the left hemisphere) can act without any conscious awareness.
Even more evidence against the separation of reason and emotion came from behavioral economics. The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the late 1970s challenged rational choice models of decision making with bounded rationality. Individuals make shortcuts to decision making called heuristics, rules of thumb. Humans are cognitive misers, meaning they economize their own expenditure of reasoning and available data to patterns of thinking which are familiar. A common heuristic is availability: a preference for information readily available is preferred to what isn't. Heuristics are essentially intuitive and not rational and yet are a regular part of mental functioning.
Haidt's own moral theory from such research is that moral reasoning begins with intuition and reason comes second. His metaphor is of a rider on an elephant, the conscious yielding to the dictates of the unconscious. Haidt's model is the closest to the philosopher David Hume who said reason is slave to the passions. Before advances in cognitive science the disagreements between the philosophers continued on for centuries, but with all the aforementioned developments Hume won the debate. Now it's up to moral psychologists to build working models of this theory.
Haidt's own intitutive model of the mind gives six foundations for moral values, in addition to harm and fairness. These are:
1. Care/harm
2. Fairness/cheating
3. Loyalty/betrayal
4. Authority/subversion
5. Sanctity/degradation
6. Liberty/oppression
Foundations 3-5 are inherently social values as distinct from 1 and 2. The first two are directly related to group authority and and not the individual. Foundation 6 was added to account for the uniqueness of libertarians, and is an inherently political value.
Conservatives score relatively evenly on all six foundations. Liberals score higher on care and fairness and less on the other foundations than conservatives. Libertarians score like conservatives on care and fairness, more like liberals on loyalty, authority, and purity, and higher on liberty than conservatives or liberals.
What Haidt's foundations suggest is that conservatism is the default mindset of most societies. Our moral existence is tied to our social existence rather than the more rational and universal values of care and fairness, which owe to our childhood dependency (care) and basic social existence (fairness) which we all go through. In the evolutionary past, it would have been adaptive to prefer those which serve the ingroup and those which serve an outgroup. Those who are more like us and follow the rules are going to help you and those who are different or outsiders could harm you.
Haidt's theory also means that conservatives are more able to understand liberal psychology than liberals are able to understand conservatives. Liberals have fewer dominant moral foundations. This doesn't bode well for our political discourse, as from the conservative perspective liberals are far more intolerant of conservative opinions than vice versa, especially when they have institutional power.
In the United States a plurality of voters since 1988 have described themselves as conservative, 40%. 20% describe themselves as liberal and most of the rest are somewhere in the middle. This doesn't always translate into conservative victory however. A majority of voters in exit polls in 2012 said they felt ideologically closer to Mitt Romney than Barack Obama, yet liberal Barack Obama won the popular vote. Other factors are at play, though it's safe to say most ideological conservatives vote Republican and most ideological liberals vote Democratic. What confounds psychological disposition is identity. Around 80-90% of black voters have voted for the Democratic Party since 1964. It isn't as if they are all psychologically liberal. Republicans have been confounded for decades in that much of the minority population holds conservative views on certain social issues but vote overwhelmingly Democrat. This is I think the limitation of the moral foundations theory, as politics in a democratic society confounds many of our expectations about human nature. Republicans are overwhelmingly self identified conservatives, as conservatives are more conscious of their ingroup identity, whereas liberals are only a plurality of Democrats.
Libertarians are pretty interesting in that they seem to operate on fewer moral foundations than liberals or conservatives. Libertarians seem to be the most tolerant in their view of what constitutes right and wrong but are also more narrow. This explains their view that government shouldn't do much else than protect individual's right to their own property, even if it isn't fair or it offends others. Paradoxically, libertarianism would work best in a society in which everybody is a libertarian, which would preclude a lot if not most people who would have to put up with what they see as wrong or evil. That's a hard bargain for a social and hierarchical species. That would require a "higher" and more limited level of moral reasoning than the foundations suggest.
In the final part of the book Haidt ventures outside of psychology into evolutionary theory to explain the process of how moral foundations came to be. This is the most contentious part of the book. Haidt defends group selection as the mechanism for moral sentiments. Haidt's metaphor is that humans are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee. Moral foundations were adaptive to advance our own group versus others, and more moral groups won out. If this is true then the moral and social order are intertwined on a biological level.
The reigning view of Neo-Darwinism is of inclusive fitness: the gene is the level of selection which individual organisms exist to promote and altruism occurs toward kin who share genes and reciprocally to benefit oneself in return. Most mammals including our ape relatives operate with inclusive fitness. Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, termites) are eusocial, truly altruistic, sacrificing their interests for that of the hive. Eusociality is rare even among insects, but when achieved is very successful at least in terms of numbers. Haidt argues that humans have aspects of true altruism which are how moral sentiments evolved, not as unconscious motivations for the interest of our genes. Humans are intensely social in a way the apes aren't and have shared intentionality. Intelligence itself evolved to live in extended social groups some have argued.
There are I think two limits to this: 1) humans evolved in small groups of relatives with coercive altruism and 2) unlike hymenoptera we do not limit reproduction to a single queen or alpha pair. We are not as altruistic towards other people as we are towards our family or those who benefit us. Communism doesn't work well on a larger level than a commune of devoted (often religious) followers while markets have created a system of global economic integration based on self-interest. Group selection is a factor but I don't think is sufficient. Morality is a meme: a unit of evolution which can evolve, adapt, outcompete other memes and reproduce itself, all on a collective level, but it isn't itself biological. Moral memes are driven deep down by selfish genes. This doesn't mean that we don't behave altruistic or don't consciously believe in our ideals, but in a narrow way tailored towards certain interests often hidden to ourselves. We are chimps who try and imagine ourselves to be like bees.
Haidt gives us his own descriptive and normative view of morality: "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 cooperative societies possible." He calls this "Durkheimian utilitarianism" which calls for a social order based on all the moral foundations, considering both the social nature of morality and the rationality of moral rules. Whatever works best, given the constraints of the social order. This definition is supposed to combine conservatism and liberalism, tradition and reason. This is I think very much an ideal view as people are going to believe in certain moral memes above others given their differences, and so content matters. We are social but essentially tribal and so its operation is going to be more than what "works" or is agreeable for all people. We have to make choices on moral memes which serve our own purposes, a view which identifies me as a conservative. And so to me Haidt's consilience between liberals and conservatives means he's a liberal.
I accept Haidt's moral psychology and I'm led to a pessimistic but I think realist conclusion regarding the book. Morality is rooted in intuitions from our physical makeup and evolutionary history which reason is the servant to. Because of this, the particular moral, cultural, religious and political memes we are attracted to are shaped by unconscious forces which may not be in our best interests. We can adopt memes which run counter to our individual natures, but we will face great difficulty. Though we promote honesty, fidelity, and nonviolence, nevertheless we do lie, cheat, and harm others if in our interests, conscious or not. Nevertheless we should respect the moral views of others as being due to personal differences and not intellectual defects. We should heed the words of Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene: "let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish." Quite a conservative view.
Another conclusion from Haidt's moral foundations is that the cultural Marxist meme that right wing political views are the result of an "authoritarian personality" is false. Conservatives simply have more or different moral concerns than liberals do, which are also oriented, consciously or not, towards the good of the group. Conservative individuals aren't selfish or unempathetic but put different values above or alongside care and fairness. The same goes for libertarians who value liberty very highly. It is left-liberals I expect that will be the most troubled by Haidt's moral psychology and he seems to have written it for them. Haidt unfortunately has come under vicious attack from cultural Marxists for being politically incorrect regarding the censorship of unpopular political views.
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