Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012)

Jonathan Haidt.  The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.  New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.  xvii + 419 pp.  $282.95 (cloth)

         The Righteous Mind is a apt to garner media attention in an election year, especially given the success of Haidt’s previous book, The Happiness Hypothesis.  But the book is badly flawed.

 

         Haidt’s major claim is that liberals and conservatives talk about morality differently.  His efforts to analyze moral discourse are badly hampered his ignorance of virtue ethics, which (consciously or not) continues to shape how any of us talk about morality.  He argues that liberals value compassion and integrity (my labels, not his).  Conservatives value not only compassion and integrity but also group loyalty, respect for authority, and reverence (again, my language not his).  Liberals lack physiological “receptors” for conservative values, he proposes, and that explains the hostility between liberals and conservatives. It wasn’t clear to me whether that his comments about “receptors” was metaphorical or literal, but given his emphasis on evolutionary psychology I think he means this literally.

         Haidt’s bases his Moral Foundations Theory on the results of several online surveys accessible to anyone at all. Such surveys are gossip, not research.  It's modestly interesting gossip, perhaps, but that's all it is.  He asserts that his six paired terms (what tradition calls virtues/vices) reflect "mental modules" created by evolution.  Evolution, then, is the ultimate “foundation” of human morality. 

        

         Unfortunately, Haidt’s supposedly biological “modules” are pure supposition.  That’s not to deny that morality plays a role in human reproductive success.  Clearly it does: religions make for healthy group dynamics, and that’s vitally important for human well-being.  (That’s the claim made by David Sloan Wilson in Darwin's Cathedral (2002), to which Haidt refers at one point.)  But Haidt offers no basis for his own claim that his six “modules” have a physiological basis that might have been shaped by evolution.

         In fact, he either ignores or misrepresents the work of thinkers who are investigating the neurology of moral judgment. He argues at length  

that intellect plays absolutely no role in moral behavior, incorrectly basing that assertion on the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio.  Despite Haidt's interest in evolution, he ignores relevant work in “animal morality” by figures like Frans de Waal (although he lists de Waal in his bibliography).  de Waal argues that complex cooperation in social groups arises  only with the neurological capacity for critical judgment.  Haidt instead instead attributes human groups to the persistence within us of insect-like “hive” behavior, positing a “hive switch” that reverts us from primates to bees.  Again I wasn’t sure whether he was speaking literally or metaphorically, but the claim is nonsense either way.

            Rancorous debate between "conservatives" and "liberals" is certainly a problem, but Haidt doesn't have much to offer.  If the biological evolution of a capacity for morality interests you, I would more confidently recommend Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolves.  On the social construction of morality, I recommend  Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue.  And on politics and religion, Robert Putnam and David Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.