The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
This is one of my top recommends for just about anyone. Unless you just hate discussing or thinking about contentious ideas, The Righteous Mind is a must read for anyone seeking to understand how people hold such different views in good faith.
The author, Jonathan Haidt, is a well respected social and moral psychologist. While being hosted by a family in India, he realized that his hosts had moral sensibilities that he just didn't have. This wasn't a matter of reaching a different conclusion about a moral question. There were things they cared about for reasons entirely alien to him. That's where his key insight came from: people have fundamentally different moral sensibilities.
Haidt realized that many of the moral and political positions held by American conservatives were motivated by some of these same moral sensibilities that he simply lacked. What followed was an attempt to categorize the different types of moral sensibilities and look for patterns in who have which ones.
Moral Tastebuds
Initially, Haidt identified five different moral sensibilities and likened them to tastebuds. People with a particular moral sensibility will perceive certain situations as morally significant, while those without the sensibility do not perceive it as morally significant. A sixth tastebud was added after studying libertarians and realizing just how goddamn weird we are.
The Six Moral Foundations
- Care/Harm
- Fairness/Cheating
- Loyalty/Betrayal
- Authority/Subversion
- Sanctity/Degradation
- Liberty/Oppression
The findings are that each of us have different sensitivities to each of these flavors of morality. There have been some subsequent refinements and additions made in more recent work on Moral Foundations. You can learn about your personal Moral Foundations by taking this quiz.
Political Differences
The part of the book I found most interesting, and the portion that is discussed the most, is describing how progressives and conservatives differ in their moral tastebuds. This explains a lot of why it's so difficult for people to have constructive conversations with "the other side".
Progressives score very high on care and fairness, but relatively low on the others. Conservatives, on the other hand, score fairly high across the board. In one sense, it's not surprising that conservatives have a broader moral palate (they are stereotyped as "moralizers", after all). However, what surprised me is that they seem to care just as much as progressives about the things progressives care about.
Failure to Communicate
One of the follow up experiments they did on that initial research, was to gauge how much understanding each side had of the other. This was done by allowing people to ascribe justifications for their answers to a set of political and ethical questions. Then, subjects were asked how someone in the opposite political camp would answer the questions and what their justifications would be.
The results were exactly as you'd expect from the moral foundations work. Conservatives knew what progressives believed and why, but progressives did not understand what conservatives believed or why they believed it. Conservatives share the moral foundations of progressives, so they understand them. Progressives do not share the other moral foundations of conservatives and therefor don't understand them.
On Liberty
Libertarians were discussed in the book, but most of the research to that point had not included the Liberty foundation. What they've learned is that libertarians are overwhelmingly sensitive to the liberty tastebud and fairly numb to the others.
That result fascinates me, because there's nothing about libertarianism, per se, that rules out broader moral sensibilities. Libertarianism, after all, is not a holistic moral philosophy, but rather a legal philosophy. There's no contradiction in being extremely socially conservative, while also believing that the law should only punish violations of property rights. Similarly, there's no inherent reason why a socially progressive individual couldn't adopt a live-and-let-live view of government.
However, it seems that people, by and large, think force needs to be brought to bear on whatever it is that they care about, but not on anything else.
Too good to be true!? 😂
Bad Bunny