The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. The author is Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
I got interested in this book after reading some comments on another book called “The power of regret”, in which the author said that “The Righteous Mind” is one of those books that change people’s ways of thinking and this is what got me into reading the present book.
The origin of morals is something I find fascinating because, though moral beliefs are common to everyone, people with different morals can see the world in strikingly different ways.
Another aspect that fascinates me is the fact that moral reasoning is completely different from, say, logical reasoning. For example, while Artificial Intelligence is able to produce detailed and complex programming codes to solve mathematical problems, a machine is unable to solve classical moral dilemmas, like that of Abraham when God asks him to kill his own son. Should Abraham prove his faith by killing his own son or should he disobey God and spare his son’s life? This moral problem has puzzled academics and clergy for centuries.
Before reading this book, I believed moral theory had reached a high level of development, especially through the work of Immanuel Kant, one of the most famous scholars in this area. Kant proposed a universal moral theory based on what we now call the “categorical imperative,” a concept that transcends cultural boundaries and guides human decisions. However, I learned that evolutionary social psychology offers a modern and comprehensive way to understand how humans distinguish right from wrong.
In Haidt’s book, the emergence of moral reasoning is explained through the analogy of the elephant and the rider. In this comparison, the elephant symbolizes our primal instincts which although powerful, are basically stupid and incapable of logical thinking. Contrasting this, the rider’s task is not to exert full control over the elephant, but just steer it in such a way to cause the least possible damage. Our reasoning serves as a safeguard against our innate impulses: sex drive, anger, hunger, and more.
The chapter on political alignment explores why people choose to identify as liberal or conservative (or Democrat and Republican in the U.S.), examining why people with the same culture and language often have different political views. Haidt describes several foundational pillars of morality: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression.
The experimental evidence shows that liberals and conservatives differ quite robustly in their responses to these foundations of morality. For instance, while liberals are more concerned with care and fairness, the conservatives pay more attention to loyalty and authority. This is why often the liberals propose universal care and income, while the conservatives develop policies to protect veterans and border security.
Furthermore, the notion of fairness carries nuanced interpretations for liberals and conservatives. For liberals, fairness is synonymous with equality, asserting that all individuals should be treated equally and afforded the same opportunities irrespective of their circumstances. In contrast, conservatives view fairness through the lens of proportionality, contending that individuals should be rewarded based on the effort they invest.
Shared intentionality marks a crucial turning point in human evolution, sparking the rise of teamwork long before agriculture, the invention of the wheel, or even the development of language. Sharing an idea with someone requires a basic level of trust, which became a foundation of our moral codes. When early humans began to share mental pictures of intentions, they could work together in groups to gather and hunt. This shift, which occurred about 600,000 years ago, is supported by archaeological evidence like hunting tools and hearths for cooking—clear signs of communal cooperation. This spirit of collaboration not only enabled early humans to divide tasks but also helped establish shared standards for judging individual behavior. This mix of principles, virtues, norms, practices, identities, and institutions—referred to as moral capital—provides societies with the means to control selfishness and make cooperation possible.