My understanding of this section was that the reviewer wasn't talking about "philosophers, religious figures, and theologians", they were talking only about *the religious people they grew up around and talked about religion with*. (See the paragraph above, that starts "I grew up a religious conservative, surrounded by religious conservatives...")
In practice, I think most socialists may be motivated by the care foundation, but in theory, many forms of socialism are *supposed* to be motivated by opposition to exploitation, which seems like a liberty or fairness concern.
Interesting, I would suggest the opposite. Given that most socialists tend to attack the very rich, and are only rarely directly interested in compromises which would actually help the poor (but without destroying the rich), it seems to me that the primary motivation of most socialists is in fact a belief about fundamental equality.
I agree with the presenter, however, that Haidt’s moral foundations don’t cover this very well. I think it is closest to opposition to exploitation, but “equality above all” seems an entirely different political value.
Thank you for the link, that's an amazing piece of intellectual history. Another reason to love the internet: you really can see the debate happening right in front of your eyes. Between them, Pinker and Dawkins seem to cover every angle.
I have to say, though, that Everett's response was an interesting complication. Not much more than a complication, but language certainly does raise a number of evolution-related questions.
You are right that acting “for the benefit of the group” must have some inclusive fitness value for the individual/s acting in that way. But given that you can find a mechanism making this happen, group selection exists.
…Meaning that a group where the individuals have managed to find a way to reap individual inclusive fitness points by acting for the benefit of the group, will out-compete groups where individuals have not been able to develop such a mechanism. (For example, they may more easily kill off the individuals who are less able to commit to their own group.)
As regards the (major) mechanism at play here, my money is in “generalized reputational rewards” (which is something more than reciprocal altruism). An individual that comes across as self-bound to other-oriented behavior, is likely to be seen as more trustworthy by “interested others”, and hence able to enter into more mutually beneficial exchanges, which enhances the individual’s inclusive fitness.
Already Darwin hints at this mechanism, in his attempt to explain the existence of “involuntary blushing” among humans (in The expression of the emotions in Man and the Animals). 2500 years earlier, Socrates’ did something similar, according to Xenophon. Socrates first notices that it is of private benefit for a man to have a good reputation, and then states: “The easiest way to acquire a good reputation in the eyes of others, is to become the man you want others to believe that you are”.
…My point: Many who believe in the existence of “group selection” simultaneously agree with you (and people like Dawkins) that group selection only works if it is possible to identify mechanisms that “makes it worth it to be other-oriented” for the individual/s who act for the benefit of the group. Don’t mix up this brand of group-selection with the type of group-selection you hate.😊
We are on the same side, but you apparently do not understand that.
I.e. human group-oriented behavior, even if (or rather: particularly when) it is - psychologically speaking -genuinely other-oriented, must – one way or the other – enhance the inclusive genetic fitness of the individual displaying the observed behavior.
Thank you. I came here looking for someone to shot down the group selection stuff. I've been reading "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins. And he definitely has his willow switch out and is beating group selection... to death. I love EO Wilson, but we all make mistakes.
Obama also seemed to see himself as above compromise at various points in his presidency, and in many ways the era of progressivism that he exemplified held as an article of faith that the arc of history would inevitably bend toward their vision of justice, transcending the backward and irrelevant conservatives at a gradual but sure clip.
Against that backdrop, Haidt’s willingness to open himself to more conservative moralities in other cultures (and in himself at times in his life, such as the immediate aftermath of 9/11) and acknowledge that their might be some amount of virtue to them in certain contexts such that one could expect them to persist in a way that ought to be understood rather than dismissed makes him seem rather enlightened relative to his contemporaries.
Agreed. I think there's a certain lack of self-awareness in complaining about books that go on tangents and anecdotes about the author's personal life... in a review that starts by doing exacty that.
A lot of reviews in this contest have the problem "Author didn't want to write a review, author wanted to talk about their personal politics", and this is definitely the case here.
Many extremely popular authors launch on tangents and personal anecdotes. Scott does it a lot. It was David Foster Wallace's main shtick in his essays. The magic trick is writing it so that is entertaining and engaging ... which is difficult.
I don't understand your system. Is the maximum review a rating of 1? If the review was only 10 words and one Pat, the score would be 1/10? But if it was 100 words and one Pat, it would be 1/100?
I think a better system to complain about pats on backs would be 10 - ((abs(word limit-5000))/1000) - number of pats on back.
And his formula cannot return a value of zero, so long as 1 is being divided by a real number.
We might assume the use of Floating-point arithmetic and that he is assigning a value of infinity to the denominator (Wordcount * Pats on back), which again does not make any sense unless we assume either “wordcount” or “pats on back” is infinite (which they are not).
If we are being generous to Turin, we might say he was just trying to casually indicate that the “Wordcount” and “Pats on back” are sufficiently large so as to warrant an answer to his formula that approaches zero. I don’t knock the imprecision so much as just seeing this as being a bit too harsh on the author :)
P.S. I found this book review, with some reservations, a rather enjoyable read.
It's true that Haidt may have exaggerated how much the moral intuitions actually drive the political leanings, but that doesn't mean these moral intuitions are completely fake either. He pointed to how widespread they are in different cultures and claimed they can serve some purposes sometimes.
It seems like it hasn't really replicated. And if you look at the raw data, especially with further studies, you basically get collapses onto two dimensions: Care-Fairness and Loyalty-Authority-Purity. So Haidt was onto something, but his initial categories were sorta made up!
There's a page on Haidt's website about criticism of Moral Foundations (https://moralfoundations.org/critiques/) but it doesn't appear to be up to date. It doesn't reference "Replacing the Moral Foundations" by Sinn and Hayes, for example (https://www.jstor.org/stable/45094407). Thanks for giving me more summer reading :)
Even beyond that, life is complex enough that how you translate "fairness is important" into the details of tax law can veer off in a thousand different directions...
To me these sorts of fundamentals are like saying "life is constrained by the conservation of energy". Well, sure, that's true – but evolution as based on historical contingency has a lot more predictive/explanatory power than the generality of conservation laws.
Is it against the spirit (and/or the actual rules) of the contest to start researching and working on a review for next year's contest, in advance (like up to a year in advance)?
I don't see any reason why that would be a problem. Personally I'd be happy knowing I'm reading something that someone worked very hard on! FYI, here are the rules that were posted for this contest and the previous:
I generally liked this review, but I think it would have been better if the author had started working on it substantially in advance, and had a chance to thoroughly rewrite it to condense some points that are repeated, and generally shorten it to give it clearer focus.
Kenny! Imagine bumping into you in a thread like this (chatted with you a few times at usc about bayesianism and philosophy so I guess the odds aren't that low)
If anyone was wondering about Lambesis, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Lambesis it sounds like the steroids probably had more to do with him trying to recruit a hitman at his gym than any atheism, and he may've converted back after rejoining his band post-release (apparently they didn't mind)? In any case, good luck to his second wife.
It honestly explains a lot. People who like new experiences are likelier to go to college, likelier to move to a big city, etc. so it's not surprising that's correlated with liberalism. It's also not surprising that people who feel a strong sense of duty and have a high level of self-discipline would skew conservative.
Is that really true? At 71, I find myself getting bored with foods I'm used to eating, and wanting different ones. Of course, that could be taste buds becoming less sensitive as I age.
I dunno. I grew up in a very rural area in the south, but within an hour drive of a city that had "ethnic" restaurants. And if you split my (very working class, very white, very rural) high school class into "kids who would drive an hour to eat Thai food" and "kids who would not eat Thai food," it would probably line up pretty closely with their Biden/Trump vote, with who went to college and who didn't, and with who now lives in cities vs who still lives in our hometown. I don't think that eating Thai food is more moral than not eating Thai food, but willingness to try new things in general does seem to be highly correlated with a bunch of other stuff, including liberal political views. Obviously, that's just anecdotal evidence, but it lines up with the actual data.
Right. When I started writing about immigration policy in 2000, I was struck by how many other public intellectuals' views on immigration policy were largely driven by how much they liked Thai restaurants. I'd liked Thai restaurants a lot since 1983, but that struck me as a mostly trivial factor. But I noticed that many pundits hadn't really thought much about the effects of an immigration policy other than if it made Thai restaurants cheaper they were in favor of it.
To what degree is this openness, and to what degree is it simply IQ? I think you're capturing some of both there. As I understand it, if you're low-IQ, high openness, there's a good chance you're not interested in driving an hour to try Thai food either -- you're more likely to just experiment with sex and drugs.
Most of my high-IQ friends from growing up are either libertarian or leftist, and usually not a very exotic flavor of leftist but someone who would fit comfortably towards the middle of the Democratic Party. Those who are rightists, however, usually believe a large number of things that are outside the Overton Window (and I'm such a rightist myself). I don't know anyone particularly intelligent and under the age of 50 who would qualify as anything close to a mainstream Republican, or who has a high opinion of Fox News.
At that point we might want to start trying to distinguish between "rural/conservative people seem less open to experience because of the way it's being measured" and "rural/conservative people are *actually* less open to experience because of their environment/upbringing."
I think the kind of liberalism you’re discussing is correlated with, but not the same as, the kind of liberalism Haidt is discussing. But then one of the review’s criticisms is that Haidt himself does not make this distinction as well as he should.
That said, I am a conservative with an unadventurous palette who nonetheless scores high in openness and low in conscientiousness. My experience of the liberals I know is that many have become less accepting of eccentric ideas at the same time as they have become more liberal in Haidt’s sense, so I am skeptical that temperament is driving their political shifts.
Re: conservative foodies- there are an awful lot of rednecks who know twenty kinds of ghost peppers, ass-blasters, horseradish and so forth. And they really accept pain at both ends learning more.
I don't think so. Foods, travel-related items and books are only a small part of openness to experience. Also, the number of book and travel-related items is only one data. What about the diversity in the genre of books? Or how often they buy books from new authors? The date of publication of books?
My impression is that people who were interested in artistic trends (e.g., Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot) tended to be on the right politically up through the stock market crash of 1929. They tended to be elitists from wealthy families, so it was only natural that they could afford to follow aesthetic movements while the poor proletariat could not. During the Depression, businessmen could no longer afford to patronize the arts, so artists turned to the left as potential patrons, and that presumption has endured ever since.
This is a good observation, but the completeness of the change leads me to think it was more a civilizational turn than happenstance. If it hadn't been the '29 Crash that did it, it would have been something else not far removed in time.
In the early, expansionist, self-confident stages of a civilization, art serves largely to exemplify and glorify traditional values. As a civilization loses its self-confidence and begins to cast aside those traditional values, its art serves to amplify the self-doubt and decadence.
I recall Scott making a point before, that conservatives can try to force art to be conservative, but in practice it almost always ends up gross and kitsch. This seems largely true, and it's very difficult to use art to renew civilization. But if a civilization is renewed, its art will naturally be renewed as well.
Over the course of the 19th Century, young artists and writers became more self-conscious about stylistic innovation as what is expected of each new generation. Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 are an early example.
Because 1) it's easier to have new experiences when you have the social and financial capital to pay for them. 2) openness to experience is costly and thus is a good if you want to signal you are high class. 3) random contingency (never underestimate random contingency)
As someone who likes trying new foods, I'm suspicious that's just another measure of urban culture and not a measure of innate openness to new experiences. As a counter example, if a rural academic invented a survey trying to measure openness and had questions such as:
Would you like to try fly fishing?
Would you like to try ice fishing?
Would you like to try spearfishing?
Would you like to try tidal water fishing?
Would you like to try trolling?
etc.
We'd clearly see it as a bad measure as "interested in fishing" is part of rural culture and different survey results between rural/urban people would clearly just be telling us that rural people liked fishing more, not that they were more open to new experiences.
And thinking about this more, 'sampling other cultures' is clearly part of the urban culture but with a clear rule that you're always sampling from other cultures that are far enough away so as not to be a political threat. For example, liberal elites seem much more likely to try sampling cricket than Nascar, or lutefisk than kool-aid pickles, foreign music than country music, etc.
As a cosmopolitan liberal elitist I hadn't previously considered any of those kinds of fishing, but now you ask, yes please to all! I occasionally catch mackerel off beaches and like to think I'm a dab hand at trolling 👹
IDK. I was just listening to a podcast in which truck drivers talked about thinking through solutions to world hunger or composing music during drives. Tons of ingenuity has been applied to problems on farms. I don't think any of these attributes are biased toward urbanites except for "sophisticated in art, music, and literature", but nowadays with Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and so on even people in many rural communities can access sophisticated music, literature, etc.
Sort of an unrelated anecdote, but I have been really shocked by the number of urban professionals I know who had long commutes and didn't use books on tape or podcasts at all, but then I have a few trucker friends too (yay men's league sports for creating heterodox friend groups), and they all LOVE books on tape.
Did not match my expectations at all as I discovered that over the last ~5 years.
I find this dubious as an explanation for the simple reason that your only real "anchor" for what it means to be "a deep thinker" is going to be the people around you. Plus perhaps strawmen of others you hear on the radio or see on the internet.
If we imagine an alien species who spend 80% of their conscious time contemplating The Good, and another alien species for whom the typical member spends 0.01% of their time contemplating The Good, then presumably somebody who contemplates The Good merely 50% of the time would view themselves as not a deep thinker in the first case, and a deep thinker in the second case. Similarly, if some material condition leads people to have more/fewer objective books/art available to them, then the guy who owns ten books to everybody else's one or two is going to see himself as a voracious reader.
<i>> We've got people measuring a purported fundamental personality trait of Openness to Experience by asking participants "I see myself as someone who..."
> ... is ingenious, a deep thinker.
> ... values artistic, esthetic experiences.
> ... is inventive.
> ... is sophisticated in art, music, and literature.
> ... likes to reflect, play with ideas</i>
My first thought on that is that it's actually measuring how conceited somebody is. "Why yes, strange person, I do indeed see myself as an inventive, sophisticated genius, thank you for asking!"
I'm guessing from reading satirical novels that really pretentious people skewed conservative up through about 1929.
For example, I'm currently reading William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel "Vanity Fair" (the impetus for Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities"). Thackeray appears to have been much amused by the racial liberalism of his time -- e.g., the main villain wants his son to marry a rich half-black, half-Jewish heiress from St. Kitts and then tries to marry her himself, and Thackeray is recurrently making fun of rich people donating to African charities, much as Dickens made fun of "telescopic philanthropy" a few years later.
On the other hand, that's merely an undercurrent in the novel, likely because in 1848 it was still a pretty esoteric taste. Most of the more derisible characters in "Vanity Fair" like Jos. Sedley are old-fashioned snobs.
That's more or less true, but, on the other hand, the Big 5 Openness factor is likely a good predictor of where people will want to move to. I'm conservative politically, but I've always chosen to live places where a wide variety of cutting edge culture was close at hand. (E.g., one of the more pleasant memories of my life is going to see Kubrick's "2001" with my staunch Republican father at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood when I was age 9.) But that makes me unusual.
It's fun to compare the Big 5 personality scores of people on Facebook who liked "2001: A Space Odyssey," a genuinely weird movie that, annoying as it is, is also clearly a masterpiece, vs. people who liked "Pretty Woman:"
2001 fans rank very high in Openness, 11th out of the 846 movies. The only famous film that scores higher is David Lynch’s dream-surrealist Mulholland Drive. In contrast, Pretty Woman enthusiasts fall at only the 12th percentile out of the 846 films on Openness. They tend to be rather basic.
Openness correlates with aesthetic interests, so the films at the top tend to be spectacular-looking: I can recall seeing "2001" at the Cinerama Dome in 1968 when I was 9 and being sure I had never been to a movie that looked like it before (and maybe nobody else had either). "Pretty Woman," on the other hand, was directed by sitcom writer Garry Marshall, an efficient helmsman but not one to pioneer lens flare as an art form.
But on Conscientiousness, "Pretty Woman’s" fan base scores at the 97th percentile versus 26th for "2001’s."
The Julia Roberts film’s admirers come in at the 81st percentile in Extraversion, while 2001’s are as introverted as the stereotype about science-fiction buffs implies: They fall at the 2nd percentile.
Not surprisingly, Pretty Woman’s audience is fairly Agreeable (75th percentile), while devotees of the intentionally inhuman 2001 are not (15th percentile).
Finally, both groups are above average in Neuroticism.
In other words, the stats vindicate the stereotypes: People who like "Pretty Woman" on Facebook are more or less "Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion" come to life, and the typical "2001" nut is Comic Book Guy from "The Simpsons."
Granted, Kubrick was probably a right wing nut while I'm sure the people who made "Pretty Woman" were mostly nice liberals. But, here's the thing: almost nobody notices that the great film directors tend to lean right, probably because they rank so high in Openness that their fans tend to lean left.
Openness to experience tracking liberalism was bang on the money 20 years ago, to the point I'd have bought it as a standard explanation of liberalism vs conservatism. It probably still predicts a form of liberalism now.
Conscientiousness seems to have done a complete 180 though - I'd be comfortably willing to bet around $100 that white liberals under 40 are more conscientious than white conservatives under 40. I think that's probably the big change in liberalism over the past 20 years - liberalism became hegemonic in prestigious institutions (particularly education), so now conscientious people become conscientious about their carbon footprints, not being racist instead of religious piety and good housekeeping. That's why purity-signalling and enforcing orthodoxy is now a liberal thing. It may also explain why the new atheists got defenestrated, as they tended to be confrontationally anti-orthodox.
Liberalism didn't become a "social justice religion." Liberalism won, and its prize was conscientious quasi-religious people murdering it and walking around in its skin.
I think you're using "conscientiousness" here to refer to "following and enforcing social norms" which would more appropriately be some sub-factor of agreeableness, not conscientiousness.
Aside from the semantics, I think you're pointing out a real phenomenon: the left has increased its enforcement of ideological purity over the last 20 years. This probably has to do with their social power increasing. The left used to be willing to ally with themselves with people who didn't quite share their views, because they needed allies to fight the right. Nowadays, the need for allies is less dire, and so they can be more discerning as to who gets to be a part of the "good people" club.
Sure, internally in left wing circles there's lots of discord, but not to the extent that people are pushed out of the left for having some different opinion on the finer points of theory.
I was referring to specifically the phenomenon where grey tribe types used to be in good standing on the left back in the day, whereas nowadays the left is very much more just for the blue tribe. The grey tribe is variously painted as right-wing, actually joining the right-wing, or trying to make an identity for themselves as liberals.
I think that we must have very different experiences of left-wing organisations. People must certainly do get pushed out of 'the left', but that is mostly because the group defines 'the left' as what ever they believe and anyone else is a 'class traitor', 'fascist' or 'nazi'.
I can see people being pushed out of a given book club or whatever due to their specific views on whether there should be an armed revolution or not, but that doesn't mean said person is kicked out of the larger political grouping we call "the left". More likely, the person will join some other book club which is for/against armed revolution, but still vote for candidates on the left come the next election, and support the left's talking points in the broader discourse.
"I'd be comfortably willing to bet around $100 that white liberals under 40 are more conscientious than white conservatives under 40."
I could see that. In general, during the Trump Era, outspoken Trump supporters tended to be people who needed some forgiveness.
For example, actor Scott Baio spoke for Trump at his 2016 convention.
The one time I've seen Scott Baio in real life was in about 1982 when a friend came to visit from Houston. We were driving down Sunset Boulevard when we got to the tricky part near UCLA that might well have been Jan & Dean's "Deadman's Curve" when there was a traffic jam. Eventually, we got to the cause of the jam: a brand new Italian supercar was wrapped around a streetlight pole, and the driver, Scott Baio, star of "Joanie Loves Chachi" was stomping around on the curb, dressed head to toe in Fiorucci sportsware, agitatedly talking to somebody (probably his agent) on his car phone (this was before cell phones when they were very rare).
My friend went home to Texas quite satisfied that he'd seen the true essence of Los Angeles.
Right, I'd agree that personality traits traditionally explain a lot of political differences among white Americans. A really interesting application of this was a recent study of movie ratings by Big 5 personality types called "We Are What We Watch: Movie Plots Predict the Personalities of Those who ‘Like’ Them.”
"Surprisingly, the genre most strongly associated with all AFPP dimensions is sports, whose fans are lower on Openness and Neuroticism, and higher on Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness.
For example, the two movies with the most extreme personality profiles are the polar-opposite high school cult classics "Heathers," in which Wynona Rider is conflicted over whether or not to finish murdering all the popular girls, and "Friday Night Lights," about a blue-collar Texas football team trying to win the state title. Fans of the football movie scored at the 5th percentile in Openness and the 95th percentile in Conscientiousness, while fans of the kill-the-popular-girls movie scored at the 98th percentile in Openness and the 3rd percentile in Conscientiousness.
Beyond the other things people have stated (age, types of food in your environment, ...) don't forget that people will say what they think is the appropriate answer, not how they actually behave. And in current America, the cool response, the one you're supposed to have, is "openness to new experiences".
How many of these people insisting that they're all about new experiences actually engage in *genuinely* new experiences? I don't see many of them taking a mind-expanding semester at even Brigham Young U, let alone Bob Jones U...
They claim to want new experiences, but everything they do follows a standard script that's replicating all their previous experiences, just in slightly different ways.
Of course you can! It's called dual enrollment (in one of its forms). Or a gap year.
Ask yourself why the version I gave is NOT a thing, whereas the stereotypical version of going abroad IS a thing...
That's my point.
The real issue is precisely what I stated. The exact same people (probably parents, definitely college authorities) who are all for you "expanding your horizons" by partying in London do not want you fraternizing (and god forbid, perhaps even sympathizing) with the enemy by studying in Salt Lake City.
I also read this book, and came to a somewhat similar conclusion to the reviewer, although I think I was somewhat more sympathetic to Haidt's idea that these 5/6/7+ pillars are what the rest of morality is built upon, in part because they are flexible - you can play to any or all of them, and your argument can still work if you phrase it right. Kind of hard to prove though when it's that weak a connection, but I'm reminded of the old quote about everyone being a libertarian, and a liberal, and a conservative, and a communist, ect.
I do think it's worth noting that people seem to have a revulsion to "might makes right" reasoning, and prefer to have things framed in flattering moral terms rather than just openly declaring that they'll do whatever makes their tribe win. Sure, Trump was crass and boorish, but he also talked a lot about "draining the swamp" and "making America great again", depends on how cynical you are but at the very least that was the stated reason for why you should vote for him, and not because he was gratuitously offensive. I'm sure we could construct a group selection just-so story to explain this quirk of in-group identification, but I think that's one of the weaker elements of Haidt's work, it's much more compelling when it's just observing and describing how different people have different approaches to morality.
I also think that the observation that "people have values other than pleasure/pain" is both obvious and very important not to forget, if only because it makes a lot of utilitarian arguments fall flat when you try to persuade normies. That's a shame, isn't strengthening our tribe at the expense of the Kantians the whole reason why we developed moral reasoning in the first place?
I think Haidt really convinced me that moral foundations, just like personality, is a thing that ought to be thought about. But as with personality sitting in your armchair cogitating on your evidence probably won't get you to the truth. I want 5 other people to propose their own schemas for moral foundations. Then have lots of surveys and factor analyses on them and maybe we'll have something as solid as OCEAN. I suspect that Haidt got some things right, like harm working as a moral foundation. But even the four humors theory of personality was able to get extroversion/introversion right. Some factors are easy to tease apart correctly, some hard.
It probably also doesn't have it right ... but as you suggest ... a few people looking at this and getting more questions and we might triangulate on a the right dimensions. Haidt took a good first pass and laid the groundwork, but we'll land somewhere different.
I was fascinated to discover that the medieval four humours theory was the basis for Anglo-American comedy. The English originally saw humor as originating in sketches of different personality types, and then became chauvinistically convinced that English liberty, in contrast to Continental despotism, allowed different personalities and thus humor to flourish.
Moral foundations aren't new to Haidt though; it's just a repackaging of G.E. Moore that Haidt apparently (based on this review) instead tries to ground in a mixture of utilitarianism and evo psych.
Strange that only a portion of the review is about the book and most of it is about the reviewer, but oh, well. His rider must be struggling with his elephant.
Haidt actually lays out that his findings came from his data, not from any theory. His first book was finding ancient wisdom around the world and finding commonality.
Haidt also notes that he began as an atheist leftist. He was surprised by his research. He kept exploring and let his research find the answers rather than impose a framework.
Haidt puts socialists with left/liberals, so it is odd the reviewer couldn't understand that. That is Haidt's own area.. And again, he let his data guide where each side went rather than impose it.
The 5 MFT model isn't as good as his 6. He breaks out Libertarians from left/liberals. And it works pretty well.
You can take a Moral Foundations Test online for free. From my experience, everyone lines up pretty well according to their political nature.
The key takeaway really is that left/liberals/socialists really struggle to understand what drives conservatives and usually project false motives on others. "Look, this statement was a secret dog-whistle for hatred". Or maybe the person believes it is the moral choice....
Is the book a little dated? Sure. This was written before the Woke took over the world, when the phrase "trans rights" could more likely relate to transportation issues that anything else. And like so much else, it was pre Trump and pre BLM. That doesn't mean the theories are incorrect.
Not really. He didn't come with preconceived notions. He just wanted to see where people were morally. He had to come up with groupings and categories from the data.
You could say the data was flawed because Haidt was a leftist Jewish atheist social psychologist, but nothing indicates he tried to shape data to reach an outcome, unlike so many others.
It's been several years since I've read the book, but my reaction then is the same as it is now: it's a really interesting idea that has impacted the way I look at the world, and, hey, it might even be true!
What I mean by that is that I'm fairly agnostic as to whether Haidt's arguments about natural selection and the heritability of morality are correct. The value for me was in thinking of morality (others and my own) in terms of different axes and how those might express themselves in different individuals and cultures.
I don't really understand your objection to the way Haidt discusses conservatives. Isn't he just applying intuitionism, an idea you seem to agree with? And doesn't he do that across the board, not just with religious conservatives?
My review from a half decade ago largely agrees with you, though in a lot less detail. Actually it's almost scary how many of the same beats we hit, down to referencing Hume's is/ought distinction as a problem for Haidt.
I'd just add that in social Darwinist terms the parts of the west that are cosmopolitan and produce new technology have done pretty darn well at conquering stuff when they put their minds to it. And while Haidt showed that while the Harm foundation is what liberals use to justify moral decisions that's adaptive because in a cosmopolitan society you can't count on other people agreeing with you about what's Clean or Sacred or whatever. Heinrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is useful here.
Also, for all his calls in the book for a thicker, less rational version of liberal thought Haidt sure failed to appreciate "wokeism" as exactly what he was hoping for when it came to prominence.
To be fair to Haidt the is/ought distinction is a problem for pretty much everybody all the time. Almost no one ever gets past it, and those that do typically have a pretty underwhelming "ought".
That was really excellent. I read Haidt's book twice, a few years apart and loved the first section showing that our moral intuition isn’t some reasoned idea. I could never quite explain what felt wrong about the moral foundations aspect, which is kind of his main premise. The reviewer lays it bare. Especially the sacred values of the left after Trump arrived. That has intrigued me since he jumped out of the clown car in 2016. But it didn’t register that this was a death blow to Haidt's theories, perhaps because I’d already put the book away by then.
I liked this review a lot. It's the only review so far that is sharply critical of the book it's reviewing. I think it's really helpful that it even says how the book tends to go wrong.
I do think the review could have benefitted from being rewritten a month or two after this draft was put together, so that it could be in a more distilled form.
I agree with this. Both that the criticism is good and that it could have done with some re-writing. But I'd add that this is really a review - so much more than many of the other recent entries.
His descriptions of the moral foundations of political sides in America in the 90s/00s are obviously subject to change as the politics do. If anything, the re-discovery of sanctity, group loyalty, and authority within wholly liberal enclaves in the last decade* (ie wokeness) reifies Haidt’s argument. And shows how wobbly certain moral orders can be if they don’t hit the taste buds in the right way.
*haven’t seen any data on this but it seems apparent
"People genuinely thought that at a base, normative level, there could be no morality without explicit instruction from God"
I used to be religious and now as an atheist still think there's no objective morality without a God to impose it. Hume's is-ought gap just seems unbridgeable.
I don’t understand the argument. How exactly is « do what God said in His scripture » more objective that for example « maximize some form of utility in the group »?
Or may be my question should be what you mean by objective in this context?
I worry about the sustainability of the belief that minimizing harm is a preferable goal within an explicitly materialistic framework
Without some kind of possibility that there is an external standard mandating that there is the existence of moral and immoral decisions the reliability of belief in them existing and certainly the extent that people reliably hew to those distinctions in their personal life is something that I worry about
Materialistically there is no reason to prefer for a rock to roll down one side of a mountain instead of another. By the same token I don't understand how there can be a materialistic standard that can distinguish between an action that increases utility and one that decreases it. In absolute terms there is no fundamental difference between the direction a rock rolls and the direction an action takes in terms of utility on materialistic grounds
My answer is that we should encourage the literal Biblical God vs materialistic reality dualism we overly default to to fade away and allow the concession that we cannot know that there is no supernatural underpinning to reality. It still doesn't matter which way a rock rolls down the mountain but no one can claim to prove that it doesn't matter what that rock rolls over because a distinction between rocks and things which can experience utility may exist in absolute and consequential terms
No, I don't see that you can. If you were to write and publish a story today, and state implicitly or explicitly in that story that murder is good, that would not make murder good, *even within your story.*
Or if you set up a Squid Game island, and over three generations raise a bunch of human beings to believe that murderous conflict is the only good (sounds a bit like ancient Greece!), that still won't make it good.
To the extent that morality means anything (I'm not sure it does mean anything, but *if* it does), then it means something other than, "the rules set for X by the entity that created X." There's a million theories of what that 'something other' is, and I won't try to distinguish between them here. But it seems clear that predating or ownership or being bigger than are not criteria that allow you to arbitrarily determine what morality is.
But because God is perfectly good, He wouldn't decide something bad like that.
Are things good because God decides they are good, or does God decide they are good because they are good? This is probably a deep question in Christian theology, but I think the obvious answer is to say "yes, both".
> To the extent that morality means anything (I'm not sure it does mean anything, but *if* it does), then it means something other than, "the rules set for X by the entity that created X."
You cannot refute a theistic axiom equating morality with a deity's will with any arguments from ethics or metaethics, because such fields already implicitly accept that "morality" is an orthogonal question. They cannot prove it though, the best they can do is argue that people seem to behave morally even without belief in god, but what would such behaviour imply anything about moral truth?
Think about the difference between the two 'should's in "Which way should I go to get to the grocery store?" versus "How should I live my life?" The first is mere practical geography, while the second is ethics. Same thing with 'best' in "Who's the best soccer player?" versus "What's the best way to live?"
What does it mean for something to be "better" in the absence of a specific, concrete goal? Just "better" universally, for all of life and time? And, if "better", "best" and "should" have any meaning at all in this universal sense, who would have the right to say what that is? And how would you know?
Maybe there's no "objective" morality, but it's also pretty easy for most non-religious people to agree on more than an 80/20, golden-rule-style version of it. In the same way, you can say that we don't really perceive reality for a variety of reasons (brain reconstructs vision, blind spot in the eye, don't see the whole spectrum of light, it's all really quantum particles, etc.), but people generally function fine in terms of seeing an object and picking it up. So then if we're not saying that every atheist is going to run around killing people because why not, then what are we actually saying when we say there's no objective morality?
Humans evolved the ability to perceive reality because if what you saw wasn't what was in front of you, you wouldn't last as long. The same is not true of morality. Hypocrisy is adaptive. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/homo-hipocritus.html
The essay you link doesn’t seem to suggest lack of a commonly understood morality, more that bending the rules of that morality can be beneficial. Which is true for religious society as well. I’m not sure what your point is.
It's a matter of how the mind works. We think differently in "near" vs "far" mode because it's beneficial for us to project norms in far mode applied to others, and then act differently in near mode determining our own actions. And our mind is split sufficiently we can do this with conscious sincerity, not thinking of ourselves as being hypocritical but instead easily coming up with excuses. Indeed the reason our consciousness exists is to come up with rationalizations for things we already decided to do for other reasons (as seen in split-brain patients).
I feel like Hume's is-ought gap does not really exists in virtue ethic - which basically defines what you should do what is good for you*. But it's a feeling I would be hard pressed to put into arguments especially in a foreign language.
*The obvious [and difficult] question being of course "what is good for me".
I don't think so. In utilitarianism the is/ought gap is between "what should I do ?" and "maximize global utility (for some definition of utility)". When some sort of utility function has been defined, the only questions left are "is" question. Same thing with virtue ethic : the is/ought gap lies necessarily between "what should I do" and "what is good for you" - deciding what are your goods is a purely a "is" question.
I weakly claim that there is in fact no gap between "what should I do" and "what is good for you".
This is true, but I think virtue ethicists get closer to the "is" than other ethical systems. Like, pick a controversial behavior in some piece of media where there's strong disagreement about whether a character "did the right thing". Then ask yourself "did the character behave in a [loving/faithful/hopeful/prudent/temperate/courageous/just] way?" You should be able to rank the answer to each of those out of 10, and (this is the important part) someone on the opposite side of the controversy probably gives approximately the same answers. They just disagree about the relative importance of prudence versus justice or whatever. Because you can reasonably disagree about the relative merits of the virtues, we're not totally reaching pure "is", but we are getting importantly closer to it than we would be if we were just stuck at the level of "moral or immoral, yes or no?" See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving-the-question
Is-ought gap is always already bridged in any ethical system. "Within moral system X, one ought to Y" is completely consistent with the idea that there is no objective X or Y.
I think it all depends on what you think the strength of the "ought" is. If you view it the way religious people, or Mill, or Kant, or most regular people do. It is totally 100% hopeless.
I tend to not be a moral nihilist, but instead think something along the lines of "morality is a hack together group of mental/individual/psychological/social/environmental ways of handling a related group of issues mostly concerning group action and dealing with others".
There is no one correct "ought".
BUT by looking at what your group of agents (typically persons) believe regarding "ethics/morals", and why they believe it (the IS), we can become a little more knowledgeable about what of those patterns make sense in our current context, what do not, and perhaps with some research explore the bounds of what kind of tolerances you have for where you can have some softer "ought" or more likely heterodox series of "oughts".
"We ought not do that because it will have disastrous consequences in this particular situation", "We ought to do this because it is super important to many people despite its silliness".
While human beings are not clay, they aren't iron either so there is some ability to put square pegs into round holes, but only to a degree.
I do think anyone searching for some unified "Ethical Theory" is just hopelessly going to end up on the rocks. It is a mistake to think it is tractable into some single unified rule like physics (maybe) is.
> I used to be religious and now as an atheist still think there's no objective morality without a God to impose it. Hume's is-ought gap just seems unbridgeable.
What is an objective morality? If arbitrary rules imposed by God count, why don't arbitrary rules imposed by society? If "objective" here requires that the rules not be arbitrary, how does it help if there's a God to impose it?
Even if that claim was true, and I see no good reason to believe it is, I don't see why that's relevant. You can still apply the same question if you just replace "society" with "the society I was born into".
"The society I was born into" has an indexical property, so it's not the same for everyone. Additionally, you can leave the society you're born into. You can't leave the universe.
""The society I was born into" has an indexical property, so it's not the same for everyone."
Why do you assume that an objective source of morals, if it exists, must be the same for everyone? Why can't I have one objective set of moral obligations stemming from one source, and you have a different objective set of moral obligations stemming from a different source?
Furthermore, this claim is only true because I happened to refer to myself using a first-person pronoun. If I had used my name instead, this wouldn't apply.
"Additionally, you can leave the society you're born into. You can't leave the universe."
I fail to see what this has to do with the is-ought gap.
Subjective things vary by observers, objective things do not.
Imagine the case of the last member of a tribe. There are no other members left to have any obligations toward. What is morality to that last member then? Or imagine that somebody discovers they were adopted and were actually born into a different society than the one they were raised in. Do their obligations change?
This review was too long. That said, as a Catholic who has read some of Haidt's work (but not this whole book) I sort of agree with the author in the sense that I think a lot of what Haidt was doing was stumbling backwards into Catholicism.
Evangelical Christians and Protestants generally derive morality from scripture: if it's in the Bible, it must be so. Catholic ethics operate differently - of course there's the whole idea of scripture and tradition. But if you read Summa Theologica, you'll notice that St. Thomas Aquinas repeatedly draws not only on scripture, but also on work by pagan Romans and Muslims. This is because Catholic morality derives from natural law, which is presumed to be "written on the hearts of men." Of course the natural law does not dictate exact outcomes in every case, but like a vector, it points in generally acceptable moral directions. And because natural law is intuitively known to everyone, it is accessible to all: Pagans, Muslims, and even Protestants.
So sure, the Evangelicals don't denounce murder for the same reason as Catholics or Muslims or Jews or atheists. But we all know murder is wrong because "everything naturally loves itself, the result being that everything naturally keeps itself in being, and resists corruptions so far as it can." (ST II Q.64 A.5). One doesn't need to be an evolutionary psychologist to know that our natural inclination is to remain alive, and this insight provides a foundation for moral reasoning that is accessible to everyone. Of course, there are exceptions and outliers (sin exists) but the same moral intuition is available to all.
Similarly, Catholic teaching avoids the tired capitalism/socialism debate with the idea of just price. We are all social beings - no man is an island - and justice is about rendering to each man his due. When we speak of what each man is due, we of course consider the value that transacting parties places on obtaining or providing an item or service (which is why socialism is against CST) but that is not the only consideration. The common good dictates that you are in fact your brother's keeper, even if he is across the bargaining table. Unconscionable contracts, unjust wages, and the like offend the idea of natural justice, but the mere existence of private property does not.
We evangelicals have become a lot more open to natural law in the last couple of decades, though you’re right that it has a status well below the Bible.
To ask a moral foundations followup to your last paragraph, what do you take to be the foundations of Roman Catholic social teaching? From the outside it looks like a jumble of extremely principled positions with weirdly sentimental ones.
What do you mean by foundations? The theological foundations are scripture and tradition as understood via the application of natural reason. If you're talking about the academic/legal work which most completely articulates the natural law from a Catholic perspective, I think it is Summa Theologica, which is repeatedly cited by the Catechism to this day.
I usually see Catholic social teaching used by Catholics to refer to a body of thought laid down over the last century or so, rather than all Roman Catholic teachings on social issues across time, and I hoped that you could clarify the foundations of that body in particular. I certainly can’t define it; the boundaries seem pretty fuzzy.
If you’re referring to all Catholic social thought, or to Catholic thought in general, then of course Aquinas is the first person I’d think of.
Ah, I see. I think of it as being all the Church's teachings that are relevant to social life, so, a subset of the larger doctrine. Obviously there's tons of stuff that goes into that, but the USCCB has an official summary of CST's key themes here:
Not a Catholic here but I think the Vatican II conference, the changes there and the effects among Catholics have been a big deal. Might be overshadowing the prior centuries of teaching & discussion.
Apparently Romano Amerio’s “Iota Unum” is a good source of information on those changes.
I’m sympathetic to a charismatic-style experience of Holy Spirit but I just can’t do biblical literalism; took Latin in middle school, I can recognize the rhythm of clumsy translation. I think a busy monk would be just as likely to write “maketh me to lie down in green pastures” as “maketh me lie down in green pastures” due to the way Latin infinitives work. Considering layers of Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew before that, and literalism just seems impossible. This conflict may end up funneling me into Catholicism.
I’d like to write an effortpost on the discipline of textual criticism, but I am totally unqualified. Instead I’ll summarize its existence:
Both Protestants and Catholics are aware of the reality of scribal error. Textual critics take original language manuscripts and group them into families based on variant readings that reflect a common ancestor. They compare the differences based on the kinds of errors scribes make, taking into account the family and age of the manuscript – older manuscripts had less time to accumulate errors, of course. They also compare with ancient translations, which are sometimes based on original language text families that have not come down to us.
The textual disputes that remain aren’t at the center of doctrinal disputes, and positions on them don’t really break down along denominational lines. Protestants and Catholics do have differences in the canon of the Old Testament, but that’s a dispute about what qualifies a text to be included and not about scribal error.
Yeah but the problem with the Protestant take - at least what I see from Evangelicals - is that they run around being like “tradition is heresy because it isn’t in scripture!”
This seems ridiculous to me. The church fathers compiled scripture, and it developed right alongside tradition. If some aspect of tradition seems inconsistent with scripture, the simple fact that it is definitely not, because the same men - Christ’s first followers - developed both.
I've generally seen Leon XIII's encyclical de rerum novarum as the first text specifically about Catholic social teaching, but obviously it draws from an older tradition.
(It's significance may be overstated in France due to the debates around monarchy and democracy that happened at the same time)
I believe he attends central synagogue in nyc. Judaism, especially the reform branch, isn’t particularly bothered about whether you believe in god’s existence and, yes, my understanding is that he is not a believer. But he certainly has a religious tradition that he is part of and if you want to think about religious influence on his worldview (and there is a lot to mine there), I would look to Judaism.
I also found Haidt to be doing genteel scientific astrology. With that said, I think socialists fit into his model of liberals easily, without much hacking needed at all.
Socialists highly value free-rider punishment, but the free riders are the greedy "millionaires and billionaires" who take more than their share - more than they could possibly deserve. They also highly value care, in wanting to redistribute their ill-gotten gains to the needy. Aren't these the foundations he attributes to liberals? Couldn't he just say that socialists are people with liberal foundations, who take them up to 11?
There are too many socialisms to generalize about them. Even Marx distinguished utopian socialism from scientific socialism. Egalitarian socialists are all about equal income or equal wealth, or equal something. There are market socialists. About the only thing they necessarily agree on is that the bad thing is all capitalism's fault. They don’t even agree on what the bad thing is.
+1. The critiques based on how differently liberals and conservatives are behaving a decade later are much more telling than the points about socialism.
Haidt was born in 1963. Very few socialists existed in the USA until about a decade ago, and this book is a decade old. Bernie Sanders is a freakish aberration who resides in a miniature, desolate state. He appears to have, however, inspired many young people in recent years.
There were plenty of socialists back then. The collapse of the USSR made it slightly more embarrassing to admit it. Much of '60s radical politics was about socialism vs. capitalism. The New Left were all reading Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School. Establishment media tended to smear them and the FBI infiltrated them.
Haidt claimed to have been significantly influenced by political thought from other countries, including India, where socialism is not a freakish aberration.
Well, I haven't read the book and barely read the review because it is too verbose, but I was under the impression the political framing is USA centric. No?
It is USA centric. But the review mentioned that Haidt learned to understand sanctity while living in India. If he uses India as a major contributor for his understanding of universal moral foundations, it is surprising that he has a blind spot for socialism.
It’s been a while since I read The Righteous Mind, but I found the review helpful to think through some things. Certainly the changes to the world since c. 2014 make the book look quite dated. I wonder what Haidt has to say about it now.
I don’t think that reasoning from tribe to foundations exactly works. The social-justice–adjacent folks that I know do seem to feel the violation of sanctity deeply, which Haidt did not predict, but their treatment of authority is less heartfelt and more tactical.
The reflections on Haidt’s utilitarianism are interesting, because I mostly ignored it when I read the book. Unlike Haidt, I am not a utilitarian myself. I understood the possible range of discussion to be limited by the norms of social science. I think that a pretty interesting attempt at a moral–moral-psychological synthesis could be made by a natural law theorist; but if a natural law theorist were discovered at a social psychology conference, would anyone respect him enough to hear him out? He’d be tarred and feathered, then run out of town on a rail.
Similarly, it’s true that Haidt treats religious conservatives as non-agents, but he treats pretty much everyone as a non-agent, so as a conservative evangelical I didn’t feel particularly singled out. It’s also true that we don’t ordinarily reason morally from game theory, but most of the people I consider to be conservative intellectuals don’t either. That’s more common among neoreactionaries and among rationalists trying to steelman conservativism.
There is a failure to distinguish between tactics and foundations in this review. I'm less interested in where the parties are now than whether they will snap back to where they were in the next few decades.
Having said that, I view MFT as a model, not a real theory. Authority scales have always been biased because they focus on non-leftist organizations. And the tail really does wag the dog quite a bit, as tribalism causes path dependencies in ethics.
I’m only halfway through this review but so far it’s making my day (for boring, complex reasons). So this might be credit the review doesn’t deserve but right now I think it’s great.
Liberals concerned with care, fairness & liberty, libertarians with liberty, and conservatives with all of the foundations - that resonates with me. I think liberalism was concerned with all of them at one point, but care taken to extremes conflicts with every policy position, so they had to keep jettisoning foundations (if that’s even possible). Hence any rebalancing looks like reducing care (anathema).
The group evolution bit is also interesting. Thank you to this writer.
Except now I disagree with “tribalism drives morality.” That can’t be the whole story, or there would never be internecine moral conflict, someone married to someone of another political bent but still functioning as a unified whole for other tasks, etc.
It's not the whole story, but it's clearly part of it. I think calling it tribalism is also much more descriptive than Haidt's loyalty. The desire to be the most whatever in your group and do it in a performative way is much more toxic than old-fashioned loyalty.
I’m running into my unfamiliarity with it & feeling stupid but curious. Your description totally makes sense but when I think about group dynamics in the 70s/80s/90s (my formative decades) I think it operated differently. A group was more like an accretion disk than like something sealed in a can. One could be a “group member” simply by showing up often enough (ie to team practice, religious service, extracurricular etc) with leadership or performative belonging not required. Some activities require investment (model rockets, trains, amateur astronomy, mountain biking) but even then one can participate without performativity. Some things are very performative (cheer team for example) but there are lots of things that are not. Some of the best leaders or most invested are the least performative.
Digital-age group styles might encourage performativity simply because if one doesn’t put something online, no one else knows they’re there. Even standing in the back of the room, so to speak, requires performance - an avatar, some type of post, etc. It seems like it might influence the group to take the “can” form rather than “accretion disk” form because the territory available for partial participation is different. In an IRL group the loyalty can be to an individual or to some values, online it seems even the loyalty to the individual is actually loyalty to an abstraction of the individual (more like fandom), and the loyalty to values might glom onto the fandom to create an abstract construct which one can then perform to varying degrees. But IRL groups were/are not entirely that way, so this tribalism shouldn’t be an internal driver of moral/political psychology for pre-digital society.
Wanting to be the best goalie isn’t primarily performative for example.
The group dynamics layer i remember best is the region where the dedicated people mock the performative ones and measure their own devotion specifically inverse to performativity.
I’m not talking about groups like soccer goalies, I’m talking about religious or political groups. In those, you do see people competing to show who’s the purest or strictest. The most devout / most gun loving / most woke. This definitely predates digital life. Just look at the dynamics of religious denominations.
Yes, I agree that (some) people in (most) groups compete to establish hierarchy and that can be along purity/strictness lines.
Sometimes that is congruent with people competing to be better (or to improve) at whatever the point of the group is (ie best goalie). In a political group you might get best orator, most effective canvasser, best campaign manager (whoever is helping Fetterman with the “New Jersey’s Own Dr. Oz” campaign is a genius), etc. This might be a separate axis from the purity. For example in Xtianity you can get the “prodigal” axis on which the extent of one’s prior sin and subsequent redemption is the grounds for competition.
People definitely do compete to be, or be seen as, most hardcore in their group. But when the skaters are just posing and nobody skates anymore, the scene dies. When it’s all posing, no worship, no policy, etc, no forward motion, when the “tribalism” or “seeming” takes over, function declines.
Tribalism might be another name for nationalism, or regionalism, or identitarianism. Unconscious loyalty versus conscious loyalty? I just don’t buy “tribalism creates everything.” It gets kind of chicken-versus-egg. What created the tribes, then? At least one other book review concluded that tribalism was a primary driver of human experience. I’d say yes it’s a factor but it is not alone creating individual moral intuitions from a blank slate. Dynamics of rejection and belonging do factor in - but if it were the only factor, then if there were workers who weren’t socialists, they’d be failing to compete correctly and subject to false consciousness. But there are other axes operating at the same time.
There are also other roles in addition to “best” which matter in a group. President, VP, secretary, treasurer, MP for climate policy, etc, a single tribe may have multiple necessary leadership roles, with nuanced functions, and that function is not identical to “best partisan.”
In other words yes, I agree, people do this but it isn’t the only group dynamic or even the most important for most groups with any longevity.
I agree, it’s a factor but clearly not the only one. If I were in charge of Haidt’s taxonomy, such as it is, I’d consider renaming loyalty to tribalism.
I actually just started reading this book recently myself, though I've known about Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory for years now and I've largely internalized some basic version of it into my overall political worldview. I've finished reading the first two sections of the book, but I haven't made it to the third one yet, and so far I don't see much indication of the motte-and-bailey you're describing. Maybe that's something that mostly comes through in the last third of the book?
In any case, I feel like you're being rather hard on Haidt for not taking the beliefs of devoutly religious conservatives at face value. Unless you're an actual religious fundamentalist yourself and believe that all of the commands in the Bible are the literal Word of God, it's basically impossible to take those beliefs at face value. At most, you can point out that religious conservatives earnestly believe those ideas, but that still just begs the question of *why* those particular ideas are the ones that became central to conservative religious dogma. Maybe Haidt's answer isn't the correct one, but your argument here would apply just as much to any other attempt to answer this question. If these cultural norms aren't a result of individual selection, but they aren't a result of group selection either (and presumably aren't the result of actual divine intervention like the fundies believe), then where did they come from? Random chance? That seems even more dismissive toward conservative beliefs. If you think "these norms were once adaptive, but aren't adaptive any longer" is insulting to the people who hold those ideas, then "these norms were never adaptive, they're arbitrary cultural artifacts that stuck around through pure inertia" is even more insulting.
"Aspects of a social group that make it [...] more reproductively fit at the social level are often aspects that make that social group incredibly unpleasant for almost all or even all of its constituent individuals."
Considering that much of human history was "incredibly unpleasant" for people who weren't part of the ruling class, and in many cases even for the people who were part of the ruling class, I don't feel like this is a good argument against group selection effects on culture. If anything it's all the more proof that cultural evolution all too often wins out against what would be best for individuals.
> In any case, I feel like you're being rather hard on Haidt for not taking the beliefs of devoutly religious conservatives at face value. Unless you're an actual religious fundamentalist yourself and believe that all of the commands in the Bible are the literal Word of God, it's basically impossible to take those beliefs at face value. At most, you can point out that religious conservatives earnestly believe those ideas, but that still just begs the question of why those particular ideas are the ones that became central to conservative religious dogma. Maybe Haidt's answer isn't the correct one, but your argument here would apply just as much to any other attempt to answer this question. If these cultural norms aren't a result of individual selection, but they aren't a result of group selection either (and presumably aren't the result of actual divine intervention like the fundies believe), then where did they come from? Random chance?
An explanation of where an ideas-set comes from is not necessarily useful for understanding why an ideas-set appeals to people, or how people with an ideas-set conceptualize the world.
Evangelicals act, and perceive the world, as if the Christian God described in the Bible actually exists. This is a facts-claim with numerous downstream moral claims (admittedly, sometimes poorly thought out ones, but that's hardly unique to Evangelicals). It's very easy to take these beliefs at face value, much the same as I can take the beliefs of someone who believes torture is a useful interrogation tool at face value. They're just wrong, because they believe a wrong set of facts, which leads them to a wrong conclusion. (Or perhaps I do.) To claim that actually, you believe X because of Y weird esoteric thing, feels more offensive than just to say you believe X.
"An explanation of where an ideas-set comes from is not necessarily useful for understanding why an ideas-set appeals to people, or how people with an ideas-set conceptualize the world."
It probably helps though, particularly if your goal is to find any sort of reasonable compromise with the people who hold those ideas, or to persuade them to change their minds.
"It's very easy to take these beliefs at face value, much the same as I can take the beliefs of someone who believes torture is a useful interrogation tool at face value."
Interesting example, because I think a lot of people (including many "normies" who've never read a social psychology book in their lives) *wouldn't* take that claim at face value. They'd assume that the torturer was either an authoritarian who supported the use of torture as a particularly nasty deterrent to scare people into compliance, or simply a pathological sadist who got a thrill out of causing pain. In either case, there'd be an assumption that "torture is the best way of getting information out of suspects" is simply an excuse, whether the torturer is consciously aware of that fact or not.
Why do people think torture isn't a useful interrogation tool?
It certainly is useful in some circumstances (the person you are torturing knows what you want to know, and checking false info is easy). Lets say you are trying to get into a safe.
Generalized torture, particularly of people who don't know the "safe combo" on the other hand isn't going to be very successful and is going to lead to a lot of false reports.
It's not a useful tool because 99.99% of all cases torture is applied in, it is not "get the safe combo now," which is the only time it might actually be useful.
>Considering that much of human history was "incredibly unpleasant" for people who weren't part of the ruling class, and in many cases even for the people who were part of the ruling class, I don't feel like this is a good argument against group selection effects on culture. If anything it's all the more proof that cultural evolution all too often wins out against what would be best for individuals.
I believe the author is using this to argue against the *normative* part of Haidt's ethics, not the descriptive part. The argument isn't "there are no group selection effects on culture," it's "group selection effects often lead to things that may help in group survival but are terrible for individuals within that group, therefore group selection cannot justify morality."
> "group selection effects often lead to things that may help in group survival but are terrible for individuals within that group, therefore group selection cannot justify morality."
That doesn't follow though. Morality sometimes could require individual sacrifice for the group, like the trolley problem.
I said this higher up in the thread, but the idea that all morality is just cooperation is a very western idea, and one I'm not very sympathetic to. But having said that, I like Curry's model. Much better than Haidts
"I think that political differences are what drive our differences in moral intuition."
Could it perhaps be some kind of generational question, where people have their moral intuition and stick with it, but e.g. are liberal in their teens and gradually change until they code conservative in their 40s (not because of the changing landscape, but because of actual changed beliefs), and possibly a corresponding conversative-in-their-teens becoming liberal in their 40s?
So (for example) people who had strong 'purity' desires in their teens back then are now liberally-minded. The people disagreeing with them are 'pushed' into the conversative camp, because they don't find commonality with the liberal camp.
To be clear, this is extremely shooting from the hip (for added context: I am not even from the US, so I have far less data to work with than most commenters here). I certainly don't think this is plausible enough to save Haidt's categorisation, certainly not in any meaningful way - it breaks the association between the moral foundations and the political camps, even if it would rescue the permanence of the moral foundations - but it was a third option that came to mind as I read the review.
I don't believe this (currently), but I could imagine a world where someone further iterates on this idea and then steelmans it, in which I might be led to believe it.
I disagree with the central criticism of Haidt here based on a normative read of Adam Smith. You can't pigeonhole Smith as making exlcusively normative claims and accuse Haidt of mistaking those for descriptive claims. Smith was in part describing a social phenomenon: people contributing to the common good by following self-interest in cooperation with others.
This is *not* the same as exalting laissez-faire as the "right" economic principle, although Smith may have done some of that as well. A wide range of economic systems are compatible with the insight that the profit motive keeps societies running. The only systems it really excludes are economies that attempt to remove that motive entirely, and these economies have flopped every time they've been tried (to my knowledge).
Haidt is right to criticize some liberals and leftists for demonizing and dismissing the profit motive as a fundamental economic force. It is not merely normatively wrong but descriptively ignorant, and quite comparable to rejection of evolution. Even the Chinese Communists figured this out after their disastrous experience with Maoist economics.
I have yet to read through the whole review but I am extremely concerned that there are only two hits when I ctrl+f for the word "death". As Scott has written about a little in the past, moral intuitions regarding existence vs. non-existence are different from intuitions regarding suffering vs. happiness — in fact they are orthogonal axes and it is possible for people to value one radically more than the other. A lot of moral disagreements rest there.
Great review! Liked your straightforward, slow, methodical style.
Though I didn't read all of it. The atom/boson/RH/LH metaphor got a bit too complex and tedious to follow and didn't get to the point fast enough, so I skimmed to the juicier bits and conclusion.
Especially liked the idea that EA altruists only cared about one foundation. That's exactly my problem with them, that I did not have the right words for:
They care too much and value too little :)
It's a shame that you didn't have time for steelmanning this view. Why do people only care about care? You sorta hinted at "group traits that punish subversion and stabilize hierarchy and grow the group make individuals miserable". Helpful to a degree.
But it gives me a good frame to read up on Singer and such.
I haven't read the book, but I have seen a lot of Haidt interviews. I always got the impression that what he was saying was neither "conservatives come to their beliefs through careful thought about the way heuristics can mold utilitarian outcomes" nor "conservative beliefs include powerful heuristics that might be better for utilitarian outcomes." It always seemed that what he was saying was actually "here is how conservatives think of their morals, and liberal failure to engage with this way of thinking makes it impossible for liberals and conservatives to communicate."
Haidt talking about wiping his butt with the wrong hand and discovering sacredness, silly though it may be, isn't supposed to be justification of the sacredness principle, and it's not supposed to be an explanation of why conservatives believe in the sacredness principle. It's supposed to be a bridge into sacredness for people who justify their morals exclusively through care. So that liberals can win some arguments.
I don't find this as compelling as I did when I first heard it, to be honest: why not take it a step further and just start disingenuously claiming that God wants Medicare for All. But it is absolutely true that even as liberals become more obsessed with "sacredness" in the form of cultural taboos, if you have a conversation with most liberals about why they think Mexican food is cultural appropriation or whatever they're on about this week, they'll give you a care/harm answer. And if you have a conversation with a conservative on how Donald Trump can possibly represent them, they'll tell you that ol' Donny Boy was sent by God Almighty and His Son, Jesus, to own the Godless libs. Don't believe me? Check out this absolutely unhinged article on Prophecy Reform, meant to reign in this impulse (Scott linked something about this like a year ago): https://religionunplugged.com/news/2021/4/28/charismatics-issue-prophetic-standards-to-address-false-trump-prophecies
I tend to be skeptical that this talk is coming from an honest place: I think it's likely that it's more of a cultural passphrase than it is a genuine expression of values. But also, that's me assuming a vast coverup instead of taking the literal messages at face value. I might think it's insane to think that a vaguely China-inspired prom dress is doing harm, and that any outcry is obviously some sort of base revulsion masquerading as utilitarian concern, but that's not what the people doing the outcry are saying. And I might think it's insane that anyone could view Trump as a messenger of God, and not a tool sharpened to a fine point to serve conservative interests, but that's not what the people supporting Trump are saying. I may not be completely qualified to comment on their motives for saying it.
I think anything that tries to argue “conservatives are like THIS while liberals are like THIS” is going to fail to understand political differences, because politics is a messy system of alliances, not an expression of underlying moral values.
You might as well try to understand the moral similarities between Japanese and Finnish worldviews in WW2 to decipher why they fought on the same side.
Another issue I have with this review is the "Where is the Socialists?" section. You wrote: "Where in his six foundations would fit the now very commonly expressed, and historically somewhat influential idea that it’s a good idea for everyone to roughly have the same level of wealth, [etc.]? It either has to show up the same as welfare-queen-punishment, which is its polar opposite, in the fairness foundation..."
First off, I'd question your claim that socialist ideas are "now very commonly expressed." At least here in the Western world, socialism is a fringe ideology. (And no, the Nordic states are not socialist, that's a misconception. The Nordic states are welfare capitalist nations, and while they may have very high taxes and very generous social programs, they also have freer markets than the U.S. does overall.) Sure, socialism is a few orders of magnitude less fringe than Yarvin's bizarre neo-reactionary nonsense, but that's not saying much: it just means that socialists comprise 1% of the population, in contrast to the 0.001% of the population that subscribes to Yarvinism. Certainly, there are far fewer socialists than there are conservatives, liberals, or libertarians, so I can't blame Haidt for excluding them, even taking the last 10 years into account.
But I do agree that socialist ideas were "historically somewhat influential," which brings me to my second and far more important point: The fact that Haidt's framework puts socialism and opposition to welfare queens in the same category is a *feature*, not a bug. Historically, socialism was an ideology for workers, particularly blue-collar manual laborers, and it largely appealed to them for the same reasons that anti-welfare conservatism appeals to the blue-collar crowd today. In both cases, the workers are upset that they're stuck doing hard labor while another group is seemingly getting stuff for free at their expense; the only difference between the old-school labor leftists and modern anti-welfare conservatives is that the former directed their anger upwards at the bourgeoisie for "stealing" the surplus value of their labor, while the latter direct their anger downwards at the lumpenproletariat for "stealing" their wages via government taxation and redistribution.
In other words, while socialism and opposition to welfare queens might appear to be polar opposites on the object level, they both have a similar psychological impetus driving them, which is the fundamental idea that the people who did the work of picking the apples are the ones who deserve to eat the apples. It's important to remember that the core idea of socialism is not "everyone deserves free stuff," but rather "workers are entitled to the full value of the results of their labor." It's an ideology for proletarians who take pride in their work, not for lumpenproles looking for a handout. Socialists opposed the bourgeoisie precisely because wealthy property owners were perceived as the ultimate free riders, making money off the labor of the working class without doing any real labor themselves. This fits in very well with Haidt's emphasis on fairness and proportionality.
I'm defining socialism as it was defined by the ideology's foundational thinkers, by the overwhelming majority of socialists in the West up until the 1960s, and by the overwhelming majority of socialists in the world today. Just because it's not how modern college activists in the U.S. and Western Europe think of socialism doesn't mean it's wrong, especially since first-world college activists are an infinitesimally small minority on the global and historical scale.
The reviewer himself even says that his experience with socialism in college was mostly just about various social/cultural issues, and that the economic aspects were largely ignored. But socialism is an economic ideology first and foremost, and entirely orthogonal to social and cultural issues. (In fact, most socialists throughout history have been quite culturally conservative, and this is still very much the case in non-Western countries today: China is hardly a bastion of social progressivism, and the Soviet Union's policies on Culture War issues were reactionary to an extreme that makes the average American conservative look downright tolerant by comparison. Even in the West, socialist activists and labor organizers intentionally distanced themselves from feminism and the LGBT rights movement for most of the 20th century.) So the idea that you can be "socialist, but not on economic issues" is nonsensical - the ideology is entirely about economic issues!
It's true that there are many different variants of socialism. It would be a "No True Scotsman" argument if I said that only Marxist-Leninists were real socialists and the DemSoc types didn't count, or vice-versa. But for all of the disagreements between the MLs, DemSocs, syndicalists, and anarchists, they all agreed that the core foundation of socialism was economic in nature. So if you're a college activist who doesn't care about worker ownership of the means of production at all, and simply identifies as a "socialist" because you have left-wing stances on Culture War issues that neither Marx nor Bakunin would've given a damn about, then I think it's fair to say that the label doesn't fit.
It's fallacious for the Glaswegian to say that the Edinburgher isn't a true Scotsman. It's not fallacious for either of them to point out that Idi Amin isn't a true Scotsman, despite his claims to the contrary.
While you’re absolutely right about socialism in terms of the historical roots of the philosophy, “socialism” in the modern context bears little relation to that working class foundation. It got co-opted and bastardised long ago by “champagne socialists”. It’s now an ideology of academics and students, not manual labourers. “Socialists” these days advocate for student debt forgiveness, rather than the 40 hour week.
> It got co-opted and bastardised long ago by “champagne socialists”
Maybe I'm just not moving in the right circles, but it seems to have been bastardized, at least in America, when Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016. Before that year I had never heard anyone in the US self-identify as a socialist who didn't earnestly mean that investor-capitalism should be completely replaced by 100% worker-owned coops and nationalized corporations. There should be no stock-market and no private investors.
Now if you are telling me that, well, Social Democracy is basically Democratic Socialism, I'm really, really confused AND I don't trust you, because actual socialists do exist in your political coalition. Part of the confusion is that I'm all for Social Democracy and all against Democratic Socialism. I view them as radically different: one good, the other bad. If you conflate these two things, it makes my head spin.
I recommend that all the young people who are really for Social Democracy start saying that is what they are for and not Socialism, because not many people who grew up during the Cold War want anything to do with self-identified Socialists. You may as well call yourselves Fascists and then say, you know, like Norway...
"Now if you are telling me that, well, Social Democracy is basically Democratic Socialism, I'm really, really confused AND I don't trust you, because actual socialists do exist in your political coalition. Part of the confusion is that I'm all for Social Democracy and all against Democratic Socialism. I view them as radically different: one good, the other bad. If you conflate these two things, it makes my head spin."
This is exactly how I feel too. The conflation of center-left welfare capitalism with full-on socialism is one of the worst failings of modern political discourse. It only serves to benefit two groups: Conservatives (who can then point at anyone left of Reagan and say "see, liberals are socialists, just like Stalin!"), and actual revolutionary socialists (who can then rally social democrats to their cause by claiming "we just want the country to be more like Norway," despite actually wanting it to be more like China). And maybe also some pandering left-wing politicians (who can claim they're "socialist" to rally support from hip young anti-establishment activists, despite their actual policies being more in line with social democracy).
Ideological socialism was never a proletarian ideology, but was always led by the equivalent of the modern college students, eg. Marx, Lassalle, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Berger, Debs, the Webbs. Its major motivations were "capitalism is inefficient" and "we must do something to help the poor workers."
They then became the intellectual wing of various union-based parties in Europe, which in practice became social democratic as none of their proletarian supporters actually wanted socialism all that much, but were quite keen on collective bargaining and welfare.
These groups had "punishing free riders" as their principle motivation to the extent they thought of capitalists as free riders. The socialist intellectuals were clearly motivated by something like the care foundation, and the labour voters are motivated by fairness in the sense of "it's not fair that I don't get paid holidays," which doesn't seem to be what Haidt is talking about.
This is correct. The vast majority of socialist leaders were intellectuals who were often quite hostile to reforms to improve the worker's lives because it made their overall project of remaking society less likely.
We need the bourgeoise to exploit the workers really badly, or otherwise won't want a revolution!
Haidt claims to be heavily influence in his political thinking by living in India. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) regularly wins power in major states, including Kerala and West Bengal. I don't think that you can characterize socialism as fringe ideology in India.
So, one thing that the review didn't really touch on is Haidt's distinction between individualistic and sociocentric cultures. The modern Western world is individualistic, whereas nearly all non-Western and pre-modern cultures are/were sociocentric. Sociocentric cultures tend to value loyalty, tradition, and purity, similar to conservatives within individualistic cultures, but to an even further extreme. This discovery is a big part of what made Haidt develop his theory of moral foundations to begin with!
Haidt considers both fascism and the sort of authoritarian, nationalistic, patriarchal socialism found in non-Western nations (e.g. Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam, and very likely the Marxists in India too) to be "ultra-sociocentric," implying they would value loyalty, tradition, and purity to an even greater extent than Western conservatives. It's definitely an idea rooted in horseshoe theory, since it portrays literal communists as being even more *right-wing* in their values than the average right-winger and akin to literal fascists. But I think the use of horseshoe theory is justified here, since (as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread) most communist regimes were actually quite regressive on social and cultural issues.
It depends on which social and cultural issues you mean, though.
Yes, starting in the 1930s communist regimes became generally 'sex-negative' in contemporary terms--although Soviet ideology was generally pro-free-love during the '20s. Communist regimes were hostile to homosexuality as part of this general turn toward sex-negativity.
But they never abandoned their theoretical commitment to gender equality, despite glorification of "family values" and women's traditional roles as mothers alongside their new roles as workers. A lot of communist sex-negativity was at least rhetorically justified on what we would now call sex-negative feminist grounds: protecting women from exploitation and degradation.
Similarly, communist regimes remained consistently anti-religious. (I mention this because the author of the review mentioned opposition to Sharia courts and religious instruction in schools among activities his socialist comrades engaged in--such activism would be completely in line with the traditional attitude of communist states toward religion.)
I have my own political framework theory based on 3 axes: conservatism, socialism, and liberalism. After reading this review though I realise it could be adapted to a moral framework theory too: trust, fairness, and freedom. I will briefly try to see if I can rescue Haidt's idea that morals drive politics rather than the other way around by changing what the moral groups are.
A high trust society is useful because it massively reduces transaction costs and has a greater chance of ensuring long term group survival (group evolution theory). High trust is obtained through expressing the group's religious statements, low immigration, conformity, etc.
A high fairness society is useful because everyone gets their basic needs tended to, everyone gets a chance to "make it" (individual evolution theory). High fairness is obtained through major redistribution by government and building infrastructure.
A high freedom society is useful because people can do what they want to, either in their personal life or in business (individual evolution theory). High fairness is obtained by having a strong and independent judicial system and clear property rights.
Each moral is useful, sometimes more useful in one situation versus another (think rural versus urban or ex-slave states versus not), but when one is emphasised far beyond the others in politics it makes for an inefficient system of governance.
I have no idea if these categories fit the data, this is just observational.
As for does it fit the US? The world is complex, there is more than one thing going on. In the case of the US the main issue I see is that, despite the name, it is a state of nations and everyone would be a lot happier if it was broken up. The political structure there is very dualist but I see political (and maybe moral?) theory as trialist is nature, at least in the industrial epoch. This would predict an unstable party system in the US.
Thank you! I've been reading Haidt for nearly 20 years, and "The Righteous Mind" is amazingly bad (with some good points, as you've noted). It's incredibly gratifying to have someone identify many of the same points that have bugged the sh!t out of me.....
I really enjoyed this review, I loved and recommended the book when I'd read it long ago and this helped me reappraise many of my naive reactions to its (to me) very persuasive prose. Looking forward to finding out who the author of this review is as I'd like to read more.
About the objection to omitting socialism, I found that after reading the book I actually started understanding socialism more easily within a moral emotion framework. When socialists say things like "obscene wealth" or "billionaires should not exist," I understand those most easily as irrationally strong emotional responses to an evolved fairness sensitivity. That's the only thing for me that justifies the intensity of those positions as expressed, they're associated not with a cool assessment of the correct distribution of resources but a visceral disgust at the outliers. Having not read it in some time I'm sure you're right that Haidt doesn't make this interpretation explicit, and it may be a case where his framework can be bent to 'explain' anything you like, but it sounds basically right to me. Am I missing something that disqualifies socialists completely from his framework, even if he groups them with other seemingly opposing factions?
> With 89 samples, 605 effect sizes, and 33,804 independent participants, in addition to 192,870 participants from the widely used YourMorals.org website, the basic differences about conservatives and liberals are supported. Yet, heterogeneity is moderate, and the results may be less generalizable across samples and political cultures than previously thought. The effect sizes obtained from the YourMorals.org data appear inflated compared with independent samples, which is partly related to political interest and may be because of self-selection. The association of moral foundations to political orientation varies culturally (between regions and countries) and subculturally (between White and Black respondents and in response to political interest). The associations also differ depending on the choice of the social or economic dimension and its labeling, supporting both the bidimensional model of political orientation and the findings that the dimensions are often strongly correlated.
> The main evidence for these claims [of the MFT model of (potentially evolved) discrete cognitive modules] comes from researcher-constructed scenarios of ‘‘harm’’ (e.g., murder) and ‘‘purity’’ (e.g., chicken masturbation) that reveal different patterns of judgment (Graham et al., 2013). However, our research finds that these scenarios fundamentally confound moral content (harm vs. purity) with domain-general dimensions, including severity and weirdness (among potential others; Gray & Wegner, 2011). In our controlled studies, purity per se demonstrates no special effect on moral cognition, nor does it appear to be distinct from harm—or even pass manipulation checks—all arguing against MFT modularity (Gray & Keeney, 2015).
2014 finding that authoritarianism and social dominance orientation mediate liberal-conservative differences in moral intuitions (https://t.co/y7g1xuZDKj):
> We demonstrate that liberal-conservative differences in moral intuitions are statistically mediated by authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, so that conservatives’ greater valuation of ingroup, authority, and purity concerns is attributable to higher levels of authoritarianism, whereas liberals’ greater valuation of fairness and harm avoidance is attributable to lower levels of social dominance. We also find that ingroup, authority, and purity concerns are positively associated with intergroup hostility and support for discrimination, whereas concerns about fairness and harm avoidance are negatively associated with these variables.
My impression as an outsider is that MFT isn't really holding up scientifically, partly for reasons the reviewer identifies—it's anchored in contingent politics, very much a product of its time, and the model is theoretically and philosophically incoherent. I like this review (it's my favorite among all the submissions I read, alongside Albion: In Twelve Books), but I think it goes too easy on Haidt.
"sanctity"? wtf? my own ethics center on aesthetics. I write beautiful programs. I try to lead a balanced life. &tc. you can go from aesthetics to sanctity, but not the other way around. talk about loading the dice before rolling.
Many of these reviews have erred on the side of being a synopsis rather than a review. This one errs a bit too much on the other side, seeming to be mostly designed for people who have already read the book, or are at least familiar with its arguments.
On a more general note, I feel like 80% of the book reviews (both from Scott and the competition) I read on this site come down to "This book has the right sort of general idea about a lot of things, but the details are all wack".
As others have said, Haidt is onto something important here, but his ability to understand the right is limited by not actually being on the right. As such, let me offer my (probably equally blinkered) view of what things look like from the right of what he's missing: I've always thought of the main difference between the moral frameworks of the right and the left is that the left has what I'd call an unreasonable and pathological sympathy for losers, at the expense of treating people by consistent rules.
"Both perspectives are wrong, but it's useful to see how it looks from the other side."
They're both wrong, but they also both contain a bit of truth. Conservatives would prefer to err on the side of being too harsh, liberals would prefer to err on the side of being too lenient. It's probably the single most consistent psychological difference between them, even more so than Haidt's moral foundations. Of course, most people aren't extremist caricatures, so "unreasonable and pathological" behavior on either side is thankfully rare (not that it ever stops the other side's media from signal-boosting those rare examples until they start looking commonplace).
I wonder if the real driver isn't the conservatism = survive mindset, liberalism = thrive mindset dichotomy. If you view civilisation as fragile and liable to collapse at any time, you need to be harsh to force everyone to pull their weight and obey the rules, because if they don't it could literally bring about the downfall of society. If you take civilisation as more or less a given and assume it will always be here, then the main question isn't how to maintain civilisation but how to distribute its benefits, and you don't need to worry so much about free-riders and inefficiencies, because they don't pose an existential threat to society.
Well, on this point as well, as the reviewer points out, left-wingers have started to resemble right-wingers. "Cancel culture" can be extremely harsh: if you've uttered the n-word (and not even as an insult, only to refer to it), for example, you would deserve to lose your job, lose your friends, and never be able to find another job or other friends? But the same people would then urge leniency towards people they feel sympathetic to. So can right-wingers, by the way. So I'm not convinced this is really a difference between the left and the right.
“ human beings don’t naturally reason their way to moral decisions, but make them pretty much based on instinct”
I think “instinct” is a mistake here. I interpreted Haidt to be talking about something like system I and system II, which does not map onto instinct and reason. Instinct is genetic and static, system I can learn.
I just wanted to comment that I found this review extremely pleasurable to read. I was literally laughing with happiness in a few places. I also think it made a lot of solid arguments, but I was very struck by how much I enjoyed it... The author reveals (I think?) that they are British, and maybe that has something to do with it: perhaps it's just that style of Britishness that feels like home to me.
Anyway, I loved it. Also, have always thought Haidt sounded like he was talking complete nonsense, but could never be bothered to read the book, so it's nice to have some hooks to hang my distaste on now.
I really liked it too - I did have a moment of, "Oh god, here we go" in the first couple of paragraphs, then it turned into a really good review straight after.
So far as attempting to doxx the author, it seems he went to a British university, but was raised Southern Baptist (so almost certainly of American extraction).
I very much enjoyed it also. I had some problems with the language. I have heard, 'normative', 'descriptive', teleological' etc. and I can look up their meaning, but I couldn't use them in a sentence and so it was hard for me to parse the meaning of some of the ideas expressed. So simpler words would have helped me. (I realize this is perhaps my failing and not that of the author.)
That correctly identified much of what I found frustrating about the book too.
To be charitable to Haidt, I'd say that his goal is to *actually* inspire more liberals to be sympathetic to conservatives not necessarily make the ideal rational argument that one should be so sympathetic. Explaining the descriptive reasons why having certain kinds of moral foundations might lead to better behavior in a number of situations probably is a way to make people who don't think about it too carefully to feel more sympathetic to those who take those moral foundations as normative. They shouldn't and it didn't work for me but I do think lots of people tend to be more sympathetic to behavior when they can understand why it might have arisen and see it as at least useful in *some* situation.
I'd add that I thought Haidt's crits of the new Atheists were a bit unfair as well. Many of the new atheists were very open to the beneficial aspects of ritual and other religious behavior. Indeed, some of them seem quite keen on the idea of replicating some of that ritual etc.. in a non-religious context.
The problem is (just as the review describes) that Haidt is often very sloppy about defining the questions/arguments. The new atheists would say: yay yah, all those rituals and stuff are great but the addition of the actual belief in the theological claims is completely harmful. However, Haidt is too eager to label them as small-minded to appreciate that they are answering a different question that he never addresses head on. Maybe you can argue that the rituals are completely impossible without actual belief (I don't think the new atheists would deny that it's harder...religious belief is pretty universal) but, absent such a demonstration, he doesn't actually reject the new atheist's argument. He merely points to something else that's good which goes along with what the new atheists are criticizing.
<<nor the intellectual conservative tradition of “what is good for the masses to believe is not identical to what’s fundamentally true, please consult my 60,000 word essay on decision theory, game theory, computational load, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for details, therefore Catholicism”.>>
Lol! I’d like to read that essay. Can anyone point me in the direction of something like that? Thanks
Read stuff from the Claremont Review of Books. Their politics are generally despicable, but the books they review and the articles they write are always fascinating.
The fun fact is that those kind of ideas (Catholicism as a mean to some "good" society) were condemned by the Catholic church in the 30's (with the condemnation of Maurras and the Action Française).
While I found much of this convincing I think you are recasting Haidt's moral foundation's theory as a theory of partisan politics. Yes, he argues that differences in moral foundations explain differences in partisan affiliation but it's not directly a theory about political ideology.
Haidt's theory is directly predicting moral reactions, not theories. They aren't the same. The data that Haidt's moral foundations are designed to explain are direct emotional responses to situations. He has done empirical work showing that you can predict answers to questions about things like "is it wrong for an adult brother and sister to have consensual sex once using protection." Whether or not he has shown that those 5 categories are somehow special or if there are other basises that you could re-express those categories in terms of doesn't change the fact that discovering these five/six elements are very helpful in predicting what people say are their immediate moral reactions is an important insight.
Now the claims about politics are no different than an analysis of how race affects politics or other features. The political effects of differences in these traits aren't themselves what's supposed to justify them as useful concepts.
A boring, but I think accurate, way of summarizing things is that Haidt is good at psychology, which is his field, but he's bad at political science and ethical philosophy, which are not his fields. In this regard, he's like most scientists who sometimes write outside their fields.
I'm left confused about what we're trying to measure.
Given that we know people have strong tribal affiliation, we should expect that who/what people nominally support in the political sphere will be strongly colored by their tribal affiliations. But the overwhelming majority of human moral decision making/reasoning doesn't happen in the political sphere, it happens in day-to-day interactions at jobs, around neighbors, and with family.
My great aunt's facebook page suggests she's a rabid partisan, but knowing her in real life, the actual moral intuitions that drive her behavior and the behavior she expects from others look totally different. She is, to use the cliché, a kind sweet old lady. She would vehemently disapprove of anyone behaving at her dinner table or the grocery store the way politicians she supports routinely behave. And any knowledge of tribalism would suggest *we should expect this contradiction*. Saying "the tribal intuition overwhelms the moral intuition" in no way invalidates the existence of the moral intuition.
I have no particular views about Haidt's findings, but I'm not sure how the political landscape could be expected to confirm or disprove them.
It's interesting to note how polarized the reviews of the review are.
Anyway, I'm going to be the voice of reason and moderation in this rancorous debate between two sides that I cordially despise and take no great pains to understand, and give it a score that should satisfy both parties:
Many of the studies Haidt talks about have since failed replication. The Macbeth effect failed replication. The Helzer & Pizzaro one failed replication. And so on. The failure of those to replicate makes it hard to know what to take away from several chapters. Are the chapters extraneous to his main point, so the failures mean little? Then why where they included in the first place? Or is his theory fatally wounded?
Also on the question of "why these particular foundations", Haidt has subsequently acknowledged they don't rest on anything. Haidt and his various co-authors "accept that the original list of foundations was 'arbitrary,' based on a limited review of only 'five books and articles,' and never intended to be 'exhaustive.'."
"The way most people make most moral decisions most of the time is on instinct, and then retrospectively justified by argument if necessary. "
I think there's a fundamental mistake here - it's not instinct but emotion (or feeling - what Hume called 'The passions') that underpins most moral positions. Instinct is really something completely different.
On the Christians you talked to not being able to get the difference between being gay is wrong because it just is and gayness is wrong because God said so: I think you are forgetting the part where God made us (according to them) to function in a certain way. It’s a divine design decision and so it can ‘reasonably’ be thought of as both.
> I would never recommend The Righteous Mind to someone who wanted to know what I think is the state of the art in thought on moral psychology, ethics, or politics.
What *are* the state of the art recommendations here?
"Some people under 6 foot are closer in height to some people over 6 foot than they are to some other people under 6 foot. That doesn’t mean height is a myth or even that the particular threshold of 6 foot isn’t sometimes really important (for instance in determining whether you’ll fit through a certain doorway without having to duck)" < thank you for this example!
I agree that the last decade poses a challenge for Haidt's model, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
Some of my family and family friends are Trump supporters. In my experience they value loyalty a lot. They are extremely loyal to Trump and want to punish anyone who goes against him. And they like Trump, in part, because he seems loyal them. They also seem to be deferential to authority. What's changed is that they no longer trust the processes and procedures that have traditionally conferred authority in the US. In place of that they have turned to Trump specifically, who derives his authority from strength and loyalty to his supporters. As for sanctity...OK, I'll admit that's harder to square with Trumps open vulgarity. But I'll say this -- a lot of the Trump supporters I know are middle class Catholics, and when pressed, they'll admit that they don't like Trump's infidelities and meanness. They justify it as necessary for "defending America" from "socialists" who want to destroy the values and traditions that made America great, which they view as sacred. They view Trump as a true patriot (like them), and what's patriotism if not a belief in the sanctity of one's country? They also justify looking past Trump's personal behavior by pointing to his SCOTUS picks. They feel like they made a trade-off to protect the sanctity of life, and you know what? They came out on top of that trade-off.
As for liberals, it's true that they've become more deferential to authority in the era of Trump and the pandemic, but I think it's really a subset of upper class, professional liberals that are in positions of authority themselves. I don't think Haidt would claim that moral foundations always trump (no pun intended) self-interest. But also, over the last decade we've seen perceived harms weaponized to take down people in positions of authority so often that it has a name -- cancel culture. We've also seen victimhood (i.e., being on the wrong side of care/harm) become a type of social capital within the left, so much so that whole hierarchies of intersecting victimhood have emerged.
Moral foundations may not be quite as foundational as Haidt thinks, but it seems like they still explain the last decade of American politics reasonably well. If anything is missing, it's an analysis of what happens when trust breaks down between groups with different foundations, and how inter-group conflict influences the applications of moral foundations theory. (Maybe there is some of that in the book...it's been a while since I read it).
The Trump supporters you describe are what Bob Altemeyer would classify as Right Wing Authoritarians. Despite the name, you can have right wing authoritarianism on the political left as well as the political right. What has changed since Altemeyer wrote <em>The Authoritarians</em> in 2006 is that this is now a reality rather than a theoretical possibility. I would suggest that, from the perspective of a 20 year old, the culture wars are over in the sense that there is a clear ideological winner. So cancel culture is about defending established norms.
If I am right about that, then we should expect to see a lot of similarities between the Trump supporters and the Wokesters. You mention loyalty, which we would expect to see from authoritarian followers. Cancel culture group loyalty and punishing those who threaten the group. I don't know whether Wokesters or Trump supporters value loyalty more, but they both value it highly.
You also mention deference to authority, another characteristic of authoritarian followers. Wokesters have attacked people in positions of authority, but so has Trump. These both appear to be cases of defining an "in group" and then failing to recognize the authority of people who fall outside the group.
The problem I see is that Haidt's loyalty and authority scales might be reflecting nothing more than that authoritarians have been drawn to conservatism in the past. In that case, and authoritarians are now being drawn to the left more than the right, the differences should shrink and eventually reverse. That does leave Haidt's sanctity scale, which doesn't measure a characteristic of authoritarians.
I'm extremely confident in the opposite of your belief about the handedness thing. There is absolutely no way, in my view, that the left and right hand thing didn't start as a practical consideration that then got codified into a religious practice.
Would like to read more about the philosophical concept of “category” and how that relates to things like conservative, liberal, progressive, socialist, right, left, libertarian, etc and how that varies by place and time. All these words seem somewhat meaningful but oh so misleading so often. Book recommendations?
>>Liberals were anti-authority freedom fighters until they controlled a whole bunch of prestigious institutions and sources of authority...(and Conservatives) somehow ended up headed by a brash, shock-and-disgust-to-dominate real estate brawler with a disreputable sex life...<<
The above implies a third layer of causation. (1) Liberals and Conservatives changed their moral intuitions because of (2) the sorts of institutions and politicians they found representing them. Okay. But how did Liberals end up running the universities? How did Conservatives end up voting for Trump? Didn't their moral intuitions influence the political positions in which they found themselves? If not, then what did?
"Perhaps the real lesson is that, viewed tribally rather than nationally, the loyalty foundation actually rules all?"
My just-so evo-psych story is that there are two foundations of morality, one for intra-tribal affairs (kinship and the game-theoretical stuff), and one for dealing with enemy tribes (all's fair in war). But once tribes started to get replaced with entities far larger than the Dunbar number, this framework began to require all sorts of epicycles about who counts as in-tribe or enemy and to what extent. Which isn't polite to admit out loud (or, apparently, even quietly to themselves for many), and so the endless vacillations between the proclaimed ideal of total human brotherhood (which underpins Christianity and Utilitarianism, among others) and the reality of hatred for the outgroup of the day.
At least this is an attempt at a review rather than a summary of the book. Proud of his "socialism," this lad. If he'd lived with Wilson and Callaghan he'd be a little less sure of his political virtue. The reason Haidt declines to analyse socialism is that it is a failed ideology that has always made a mess wherever and whenever it has been tried.
I have recently posted negatively on my substack about Haidt's current stance, but I think this review of his book is unfair. The short way of putting this is that I think that the reviewer goes out of his way to remember ideas in the book that have not held up and to forget the ideas that were most durable. The latter include the phrases "90 percent chimp, 10 percent bee" and "elephant and rider." If what these phrases evoke now seem redundant for today's reader, it is only because they influenced so many pundits that the ideas are now "in the air."
Maybe what is coming next from this reviewer is a dismissal of Isaac Newton. After all, Newton tried to practice alchemy, failed to anticipate quantum mechanics, and nobody has to read Newton to learn calculus.
“Aspects of a social group that make it compete well with other groups for resources, win wars with other groups, resist internal takeover or subversion by individuals within the group, and therefore be more reproductively fit at the social level are often aspects that make that social group incredibly unpleasant for almost all or even all of its constituent individuals.”
This is certainly true, in particular of close-knit groups. "Hell is other people", as Jean-Paul Sartre noticed. But these groups are here (and there are many of them), so there must none the less have been “something in it” for the individual group members, from their individual inclusive-fitness points of view.
Not least the risk of social ostracism – the fate of Spinoza comes to mind.
Framed differently: “Human happiness” is not the ultimate human desire, as airy-fairy utilitarians think. Survival is. For that reason, humans are “moral” – but only according to the norms of their group. If their perception of these group norms change, their moral change.
To pick one of thousands of examples: If you had survey’d Germans in 1935 if it was right to kill all European Jews, you are unlikely to have got many “agree party/agree fully” responses. Ten years later…
I think the statement is not all that true; the world's leading societies over the past few centuries have tended to be among the most pleasant to live in.
Naively you might expect the world to be run by a bunch of hyper-efficient super-Spartas by now, but the Spartan social model has only been tried once and it wasn't all that successful. Unpleasant societies have some efficiency advantages fall behind technologically, suffer from internal divisions, and willingly surrender to any conqueror that looks less unpleasant than their own rulers.
Yes and no. You do not have to go «full Sparta» to feel the weight of the community on your happiness. Just grow up in any small village community, anywhere.
Novels upon novels have been written on this theme. My personal favorite is the Dano-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose’s “A fugitive crosses his tracks”, essentially a collection of essays about growing up in a small Danish village. This is the book where he launched the famous “Law of Jante”, arguably ruling all small communities. Here are the ten commandments of Jante:
1. You shall not believe that you amount to anything.
2. You shall not believe you are as much as us.
3. You shall not think you are smarter than us.
4. You shall not believe you are better than us.
5. You shall not believe you know more than us.
6. You shall not believe you are grander than us.
7. You shall not believe you can do anything.
8. You shall not laugh of us.
9. You shall not think anyone cares about you.
10. You shall not believe you can teach us anything.
…true, cities can be different. “Stadtluft Macht Frei” (city air makes you free), as the Germans say. But cities have their own cliques, small-groups, and sects. Try not to toe the line with respect to the “issues of the day” in your own group. Most people are cultural/political/religious/moral opportunists, and for perfectly understandable reasons. Including the fact that you usually find your love interest/s in your own community.
I think our reviewer both makes and misses the point when talking about group dynamic driving moral intuitions. He uses Trump as a primary counterexample to argue that conservatives and liberals essentially flipped on the sanctity dimension. He correctly picks up that the arguments changed, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that deeply held beliefs did as well. The left hated Trump for many reasons, but I don’t think they suddenly changed their minds on sanctity. They used those arguments against him because they thought it would be effective because that’s what conservatives actually DO care about. Same thing with regards to loyalty/patriotism. Using Russia Russia Russia as a line of attack was effective with some conservatives until it was debunked.
Did some people change their minds? Of course. I just don’t see evidence it was the wholesale shift posited by the reviewer. I just see lots of situational arguments for or against particular politicians.
As someone who has not read the book, this was such a helpful review for me. I too tend to fall into the same trap Haidt does when he confuses the explanation of why a belief may exist and the actual reality of the belief. Attributing logic when other explanations make more sense moves me further from reality than I want to be, so thanks for challenging that.
I like Haidt a lot now, but he was still very confused when he wrote Righteous Mind and especially when he did the research imo. I think his writing and talks from that time are most useful for seeing someone work through their own political and tribal biases to realize that other people have different values. This experience is what makes Haidt so great today. I first became aware of him when he would annoyingly anti-New Atheist, but he proved himself as someone who wants to know the truth by making very socially difficult updates, and I respect him immensely for how he handled that. I like what he has to say about Durkheim *now* because he’s an expert and he’s able to give the best nuggets that he still believes, but he used to be a total lackey for Durkheim and basically everything he ever said as far as I could tell, including human group selection. I’m curious what he thinks about that now, or if he even thinks he needs to explain why humans form tribes to note that they do…
First, I think this is a terrific review. About half of it could be cut--and you can tell where, because the reviewer tells us how excessively he's going on--but I think it's extremely interesting analysis of a very influential book. I'm posting this after just having read the review, and I may post again, because I kept thinking, "I'm into this; I should be taking notes," but I didn't.
I read Haidt's book a few years ago. I thought it was very interesting but over-formulaic (and, like the review, too wordy). But I came to Haidt's book prepared to recognize a basic validity. I had spent a couple of years as a member of a group called "Better Angels" (now "Braver Angels" . . . copyright issues, I think), which uses Haidt's ideas (knowingly, but not explicitly) to "train" liberal and conservative people to talk and listen to one another, and discover ways to communicate by acknowledging basic differences in worldview. That background convinced me to be open to the idea that cognitive and affective styles across political lines were, as Haidt suggests, more "foundational" than political.
For reasons that aren't germane I didn't read Haidt's book till after I withdrew from that cross-polar group, but when I read it I felt it threw light on my experiences there in 2018-19, well after our political situation further deteriorated (as it has been doing most of my life). So although I also found problems in the research and theories, I was more impressed by the way they seemed functionally helpful. But I did conclude that this was more a rough first draft of a model along "foundations" lines. And, after all, I'm not sure you can get much further anchored in survey research. I see this review as bringing me back to these issues by acknowledging just that: it's a fine first shot, but here's a start at how we challenge it and look for Foundations 2.0 (of course, other reviews may have done this too, but I haven't read them). I found plenty of good ideas, wading through the prose.
I also found ways in which I thought some of the reviewers interesting ideas might, in fact, be rather facile. For instance, he notes that progressive discourse frequently seems to reflect a "Sanctity" foundation--the sort of thing that leads Anna Applebaum to refer to the woke as "new Puritans." But I think that's a misunderstanding of Haidt's idea. Haidt's Sanctity, as I recall it, draws heavily on the affect of physical disgust--a repulsion from anything but functional sex and bodily excretions. The ideological puritanism of progressive discourse is industrial grade intolerance, but not based on the same notion of purity that Haidt was using. When it comes to the Trump "pee tape," I don't think liberals were disgusted by the idea at all: they expected conservatives to be. Some may have been, but most simply didn't believe it existed (which looks like a good bet now), so if they were disgusted by the idea, that disgust attached to liberal use of it. Trump, for a large number of them, is the man in the "Apprentice." (In my time with "Better Angels," this was deeply apparent--the "profane" man that liberals could plainly see didn't exist for most of the conservatives, and our rarely expressed disgust was clearly viewed as a product of our liberal political biases. So I'd say that what may present as "sacredness" in the liberal profusion of shibboleths and taboos is in fact something quite different from the foundational category Haidt posited. (I also think it's something Haidt did not deal with in his book.) Sacredness needs to be grounded in, "Eww--gross!" (Of course, that's precisely how I, and I presume most liberals, view Trump . . . If only we could open their eyes! Or noses.)
Liberals, on the other hand, are seen as championing recreational sex without consequences, "deviant" sexual enjoyment of Eww--gross! body parts, underarm hair and God knows what other smelly human practices. The beautifully (?) coiffed Master of the Apprentice (who apparently doesn't share many of these prejudices, but is happy to advertise that he's a germaphobe) physically hugs the American flag (Hillary never went that far, thank goodness--and it would have repelled her base if she had), promises anti-abortion justices (and delivers, as they hope all who are pregnant will). When it comes to the review comments about 2016 and the Loyalty foundation, I think the reviewer has it all wrong: we all knew the flags were there to protect Hillary from attack as a damn Marx-loving socialist-communist--Trump was the one tootling the Wall, military spending, and that more-than-symbolic symbol of American order: guns.
I also think the reviewer stretches the "Authority" category when he claims that progressives exhibit its expression. In the academy, certain left authorities may be revered by liberals, but it's not because of their rank as professors, it's because their writings have been widely accepted on the left--and are almost sure to be rapidly superseded by the next authority, in a way that God's writings have yet to be for religious conservatives. (And professors on the right aren't authorities at all, unless you're in their class and worry about your grade--prudentially motivated conformist behavior crosses Haidt's foundations; it's on a different axis.) The Authority foundation is expressed in readiness to buy into hierarchy as just, especially in institutions framed by Sacredness, such as, traditionally, the military and the church.
Uh oh. I'm running on. And I started by criticizing that in the review. I'll stop with this: I wouldn't be running on if the review hadn't pumped up my enthusiasm. I think it's terrific.
<i>Probably the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals in Haidt’s view is that the former value sanctity, loyalty, and authority, whereas liberals don’t really care about these at all. So, explain Trump, please!. Trump is the embodiment of the profane. He offends basic notions of the sacred, of dignity in political debate and in human conduct in general, and of respect and decorum, at such a rate that the outrage just can’t keep up.</i>
Isn't the obvious explanation simply that people generally care for *specific* holy things, authorities, etc.? Think of St. Boniface cutting down the pagan sacred tree, or a Jacobite joining in the '45. In a sense, they're offending against senses of the sacred (in St. Boniface's case) or of loyalty and authority (in the Jacobite case), but since they don't recognise the tree as actually sacred, or George II's government as a legitimate authority, it would be fallacious to conclude that they don't care for sanctity or authority per se. In the case of Trump, he was (rightly or wrongly) widely perceived as offending against specifically liberal sacred values, so there was no real contradiction for a conservative to support him whilst also supporting the values that conservatives tend to find sacred.
So generally I would agree with the reviewer that I like Haidt, and where he is coming from in this, but didn't really feel he did a good job exploring/justifying the actual choices for his foundations, and didn't really make a good/comprehensible case for them. Even when I first read it I could tell he was really bright, but also seemed myopically off track.
All that said the reviewer seems overly enamored with utilitarianism, and I say that as someone who thinks complex versions of it are often a decent way to make policy.
What Haidt is right about is our moral intuitions, and in some sense much of our very sense of morality, is just a haphazard cobbled together set of psychological kludges, predispositions, maybe social norms from group selection, historical happenstance, game theoretical considerations to social problems, and 15 other things.
Ethics is a heterodox and in no way consistent sets of beliefs/facts (hell many of them aren't even strictly speaking beliefs. And attempts to treat it as such are doomed to failure.
Which is also why utilitarianism as so many in the EA want to practice it doesn't really work. They want to count up hedons (or anti-hedons), and when you point out that isn't what large portions of morality/ethics are about they just want to say "well that is just stupid holdovers from all the above heterodox crud of our individual/psychological/social/historical evolution". Except that is all any of it is, including utilitarianism, and if you are going to throw out the rest of ethics, there is zero reason to keep utilitarianism either.
This is the point I think Haidt was groping towards.
Telling someone it is more ethical for them to give their surplus wages to starving kids in Africa, than their struggling sister/neighbor isn't just unpersuasive, it is also simply wrong about what ethics is fundamentally. And any attempt to "autistically" excise that from individual moral decision making is doomed to failure. That said complex utilitarianism is still a pretty strong lens to evaluate large scale policy decision making that isn't by individuals, though you always need to be mindful of the context/scope.
TLDR -- well, actually, TL, gave up after a while. I have other things to spend my time on. The author needs to learn the virtue of concision. The review reads like he's just thinking out loud at great length.
(This got long, so here's a TLDR: I am (mostly) a conservative religious person of the type OP is talking about. What OP says about us w/r/t Haidt's book, I agree with. But some other stuff he or she says about us seems very inaccurate to me.)
I come from a very similar upbringing to that of the reviewer; the non-denominational Evangelical churches I favor have a lot of proud Southern Baptists and Pentecostals. There are two paragraphs in this piece that seem to be intended to establish the reviewer's religious conservative upbringing credentials, and I want to offer another perspective on a few things in those paragraphs. But first, let me say that when the reviewer actually draws from their experience of religious conservatives, with reference to Haidt's book, I think they're exactly right. For instance:
"People genuinely thought that at a base, normative level, there could be no morality without explicit instruction from God" -- This ignores what we call "common grace", but nonetheless is definitely something a religious conservative would say to Haidt on this subject.
"I’m pretty sure the average religious conservative feels like these two positions are both pretty offensive ways of just not engaging with their actual beliefs but talking around them like they’re non-agents." -- Yes. The reviewer is exactly right about this.
(And, when I read the Aside on Categories and Axes, I felt like the reviewer was my long-lost brother or sister, and I wanted to sit and have a long conversation with this person who sees things so clearly! Bravo, I say.)
But, on the other hand, the two credential-establishing paragraphs make me feel like the reviewer is some kind of spy or infiltrator, who has learned some of our shibboleths, but not all, and filled in the rest with caricatures taken from enemy propaganda.
For instance, "it did seem that you weren’t really meant to actually read the whole Bible yourself" -- This is insane to me. Spending time reading the Bible on my own is one of the things I've been consistently exhorted to do, from Sunday School right on up to the present! Every pastor always says that one of the most important parts of the Christian life is reading the Bible on your own, for yourself. Like, "read the whole Bible in a year" Bibles are super popular! If there's any activity that Fundamentalist Evangelicals could rightly be said to be obsessed with, it's reading the Bible.
Here's another one: "I could rarely get firm answer as to whether it was intrinsically wrong and God was helpfully letting us know this through providing guidance we could absolutely trust, or that God himself made it wrong by decree."
God made the world by speaking it into existence. Therefore, intrinsic qualities exist by God's decree -- so something being "intrinsically wrong" is not very different from being "wrong by decree". Look at Genesis 1, John 1, Proverbs 3, Proverbs 8, Jeremiah 10. God's law/understanding/wisdom are what create the world. If He decrees that something is bad, then it's bad; "It is" and "He decreed it" are the same thing. So, this question that the reviewer was asking doesn't really make sense from a Christian theological standpoint.
But also, every pastor I know would be immensely pleased to discuss that question with the reviewer. It would send a tingle up their spine to get a theological question like that. They'd recommend podcasts, or lend you a book. This sense of Evangelical authorities as anti-thinking-for-yourself or anti-asking-questions is completely foreign to my experience of them.
I guess there are all sorts of churches in the Evangelical movement, and maybe the reviewer really did land in one where people were like this. But it feels to me much more like the reviewer was already liberal, and had been influenced by liberal theology, when he or she spent time with conservative Evangelicals, and because of that, came away with a pretty biased impression. I'm reading between the lines a bit, so I hope that's not unfair.
Either way, now people reading this have one more data point to consider!
As someone who is not religious and was brought up with only mild (non-Christian) religious instruction, your comment is very valuable to me, Matthew. It is indeed a new data point. (And I have to add that I find various study Bibles of the type you mention very valuable in making sense of Biblical texts.)
No, the reviewer's question does make sense from a Christian theological standpoint. It is just a restatement of the Euthyphro dilemma. But since it isn't “A or not-A”, a third option can solve the dilemma.
God wills the good, because he is good.
The fuller answer lies in defining God's nature properly, the necessary maximally great being. That God could not fail to exist or have a different nature in any logically possible world.
Thanks for this! I think this comment is an apt demonstration of my main point. (Right down to the podcast recommendation!) Evangelical churches are full of people who love to talk about this stuff. Walk into any Southern Baptist, Charismatic or non-denominational Evangelical church and start asking questions like this, and you'll be sure to find at least a few people like Anon S, who are just delighted to get down to the nitty gritty philosophy and theology of it. It's not like the dogmatic, unquestioning kind of thing the reviewer depicts.
> For instance, "it did seem that you weren’t really meant to actually read the whole Bible yourself" -- This is insane to me. Spending time reading the Bible on my own is one of the things I've been consistently exhorted to do, from Sunday School right on up to the present! Every pastor always says that one of the most important parts of the Christian life is reading the Bible on your own, for yourself. Like, "read the whole Bible in a year" Bibles are super popular! If there's any activity that Fundamentalist Evangelicals could rightly be said to be obsessed with, it's reading the Bible.
I think what he's referring to here, is more like... you're not supposed to "read the Bible [critically] yourself." That is, to read the text of the Bible and, if the text in your reading disagreed with some standard idea in your church, to side with the text over the church. There's some times when it's okay, and other times when it isn't, to be sure, but I don't know how successful I'd have been as a young believer talking to fellow churchgoers and pointing out the quite thin-on-the-ground text in the Bible to support homophobia or the pro-life position.
> But also, every pastor I know would be immensely pleased to discuss that question with the reviewer. It would send a tingle up their spine to get a theological question like that. They'd recommend podcasts, or lend you a book. This sense of Evangelical authorities as anti-thinking-for-yourself or anti-asking-questions is completely foreign to my experience of them.
I don't know if I ever spoke to a pastor in my whole time growing up in the church, even when I deconverted. I liked some, didn't care for others, remember gossip about one in particular, but it just felt like something that other people did. I suspect the reviewer was in a similar position, for whatever psychological or cultural reason.
I wrote the other review of The Righteous Mind, which *didn't* make it to the final. So if you want to read a review that is objectively worse (but tracks the book more closely and is more positive about what I got from it, which is a lot), you can find it at this link. :)
People are really being harsh to this review. I thought it made many interesting substantive points, the most important of which is that psychological modalities (disgust, sanctity, etc) can be triggered by successful political messaging (so that contemporary liberals are now in the authority/sanctity modality unlike 30 years ago), rather than politics being downstream of eternally existing psychological types.
I didn't care for this one, though it wasn't the "worst" review either; could have been condensed quite a bit without losing much (yes, I did make myself read the whole thing before commenting. A mostly unpleasant and boring experience.) The entire "Aside on Categories and Axes" was deeply confusing and didn't seem load-bearing for the rest of the review at all; it felt like an answer in search of a question, or maybe an anticipation of a criticism that I did not, in fact, have. It also didn't have to be written by this reviewer in particular - as with many other sections, just linking to a thorough explanation of the concept[1] would have sufficed. No need to reinvent the wheel, my dude - focus on reviewing the book, realize gains from trade and specialization of labour!
(As An Aside, instead of "Where are the socialists?", the unanswered question *I* was most left with was "Where are all the links?" There are literally 0 links or footnotes/references in this review, and it adds so much unnecessary cruft. I get the whole stare-out-the-window-thinking-aloud bit, but...I dunno. I'm just a working-class rube, and for a book about mushy moral philosophy and psychology, there sure was a lot of academia technical jargon/high-minded concepts just casually name-dropped throughout. Needless to say, I often couldn't quite follow along, and I feel like the book reviewer isn't the best person for re-explaining these concepts anyway...
...as for socialism being Kind Of A Big Deal now, I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment? The Democratic party has indeed moved left a lot since 2012[2], but I see a lot of conflation between "social democracy" and "socialism" going on. Still a fringe ideology with dim electoral hopes at all levels, although it punches above its weight class for sure. People love buying Free Lunches with Someone Else's Money, in theory.)
As to the book itself: sure sounds like a kludge. Why bother reskinning the Big 5 personality factors, which haven't had the same collapse in predictive power (to my knowledge)? The whole exercise comes across as clout-chasing by an academic gunning to stay relevant and lay the groundwork for future remunerations. If it fails to accurately characterize conservatives *and* socialists, cutting off both distributional tails, then I suppose it's only a useful lens for looking at...what, centrist liberals?
The useful trickle-down Haidtisms are duly noted, and I'm glad to know where some of the Big Ideas behind one of my most frequent external links about political culture[3] came from; there's definitely a few diamonds in that rough, and Haidt has some hits to show for his misses. At the same time, I feel like I've gotten way more mileage and future-proof predictive value from one of Haidt's later (and narrower) works, "The Coddling of the American Mind"[4]; in fact I'd gotten the two books confused, and thus was initially very confused by this review. "I don't remember Haidt writing this much Complete Nonsense, what gives?" was the mood. As another commentor noted, he seems to do best on the psychology stuff, and fall down when attempting the politics lane; but even there, he can at least criticize liberals fairly effectively. Sad to see that skill not generalize, those steelmen of conservatism and religion are...just...highschool level.
>Even the demands for justice for oppressed groups have over time taken on less and less of a “reduce material harm” flavour and begun to be expressed more and more in a “give prestige and deference” manner.
Yes.[5]
>Conservatives luxuriated in violations of the sacred experienced as liberation, like it was a Sex Pistols concert in the 70s.
Not sure I agree with this take. There's certainly been a bit of a motte-and-bailey from the Moral Majority days, but I feel like it's more an appreciation for pugilism and willingness to fight.[6] (Not to be confused with actual results - he *is* a reality-TV showman, after all.) Contrast Trump and Jeb Bush to see the contrast most starkly. I notice that Trump never had to beg his audience to clap bigly. There's a very valid criticism of modern politics as being blithe blandities bantered between biteless barkers while the actual on-the-ground world burns. The left has been kind of slow to catch on (remember when Michelle Obama claimed "when they go low, we go high"? so quaint!), but they've started to adopt similar tactics too.
To conclude, it sure seems like these days, Sacredness and the rest are only instrumental rather than terminal values. Winning is all that matters. If the theory has any weight at all, then I think it follows that it's winners who set the new moral foundations, rather than moral foundations being timeless guardrails that winners must abide by. (I think we agree on this? That at best, moral foundations put the cart in front of the horse. They're derivative, not integral.)
Personally, I found the writing here a bit challenging. There are some extremely dense sentences which also tended to be chock full of terms that I doubt most readers immediately recognize. I get that the author was trying to communicate some complex and nuanced critiques, but if a longtime reader of ACX has to look up multiple terms in one sentence, and do that multiple times, some editing may be in order. Toward the end, the author seemed to find their stride and the writing was actually quite engaging.
“The Righteous Mind” is one of my favorite books, and I’d love to discuss at length why I think its thesis still has merit, but it’s been a while and I should probably reread it first.
Yes, thank you. Simpler words would have made it easier for me to understand what was being said. I think the failing is half on my side though... maybe those are the best words to use? I was listening to a Daniel Schmachtenberger interview (with Lex Fridman) and I'd often have to stop and re-listen and lookup some words... I was also enthralled by some of his ideas... At some level language doesn't work for me as well as I might hope.
I wasn’t familiar with Schmachtenberger, and my immediate impression on looking him up was that this person is not using language in a way that more than a tiny number of people would readily understand. I would be less bothered if his mission wasn’t supposedly “public sensemaking and dialogue.”
Like the reviewer, I really respect what Haidt is trying to do, even though I have some quibbles.
One stubborn issue for me is that political positions are often so contingent. When you look back at past partisan political debates, they can be such a product of their time, weird battles of emphasis, or even reversed later through migrations of groups between parties who form new coalitions. Take any politician and move them 30 years forward or back, they're not going to run the same platform.
So even though some current debates can seem like trench warfare to me, deeply fixed battle lines, when I zoom out, I lose confidence in that. I'm not sure how to know which fronts are stable and which will move radically in the next few years. The reviewer just talked about upheavals and realignments within a decade, for example.
Another issue sneaks up if you keep reading the moral foundations lit. Willer and Feinberg later argue that if you use your opponent's likely priors when advocating object level political positions, it increases persuasiveness (or at least shrinks polling gaps).
Make arguments that build off your audience's priors. That tracks. I'm not sure I needed a study.
But where have we found ourselves now?
If we can reframe political debates along other underlying values, how do foundational values shape our object level views? If values tie to opposite sides in a debate based on whatever framing you happen to bring, how deterministic can foundational values really be?
Ok, maybe we could retreat to foundations-lite: Yes, all political positions can be framed other ways, but one framing is the most natural, so that's the sticky one.
If we make that move though, well, Occam would like a word. Now we need a theory to explain how different framings become dominant to complete the picture.
We're adding a lot of cruft and I worry we've tossed out a lot of predictive power along the way.
What's the naive theory here to fall back on? Just that arguments work some of the time for some people, while most times people just follow tribes? I think something like that should be set as the opportunity cost theory. It's probably horribly deficient, but any new theory needs to get us significantly further than that without too much additional work.
Let’s be real. A modern day socialist in the U.S. is working off on Marx, who was in fact, proposing a history of how the economy had come to be dominated by capital. So the intelligent design analogy holds.
"Equality of opportunity" seems to me to make sense; it's incoherent if you take it to be an attempt to describe a fundamental property of reality, sure — no individual will have exactly the same opportunities as another — but as an attempt to describe a desirable property of a set of rules for a club or government or whatever, it seems clear to me.
I read this review not having heard of Haidt before, and read the comments as well. My dominant response throughout has remained utter astonishment at the attempt to square evolutionary psychology with the idea of people being driven by anything that could be described as "moral foundations" (unless we define these as "five different colors of papering-over the great wormy mass of bias, blindness, motivated ignorance, and root-level unconscious selfishness that drives human behaviors".
For the reviewer, I heartily recommend Hanson & Simler's "Elephant in the Brain" as at least as interesting as you describe Haidt's book, and certainly less wrong.
I feel as though there is a big leap between moral intuitionism: "The way most people make most moral decisions most of the time is on instinct" and the claim that the five/six moral foundations are innate and can be explained using evolutionary biology and group selection.
You could instead have some of the moral foundations embedded in the culture, instead of in genetics. How did these appear in the culture? Someone made an argument that convinced a large number of people, who were able to indoctrinate the next generation (maybe with multiple iterations over multiple generations), so it became part of their intuition. It is possible for 'most moral decisions are made by instinct' and 'rational moral arguments are extremely important for morality' to both be true.
I am a physicist. It is always dangerous to use anything quantum as an example unless you really understand it. And Feynman tells us that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Protons are well behaved particles. They don't decay - and we've checked a lot. [1] The number operator (which measures how many protons there are) commutes with most of the other things that we care about. So this is a pretty good example of a natural kind.
This is less true for other particles. Lasers have extremely well specified frequencies, but the number of photons they contain is undefined. [2]
Neutrinos are even worse. There are three "flavors" of neutrinos, corresponding to the three flavors of charged leptons: electron, muon, and tau. For electrons, muons, and taus, each flavor has a definite mass. Their flavor eigenstates and mass eigenstates are the same. For neutrinos, each flavor does does not have a definite mass. Their flavor eigenstates are superpositions of multiple mass eigenstates. When they interact with matter, they have a specific flavor, but when they're not interacting, they oscillate between (superpositions of) flavors. [3] We first noticed this because a lot of the neutrinos coming to us from the sun were missing - but actually, some of them had turned into muon neutrinos or tau neutrinos. So fundamental particles do not have to fit into nice categories.
[1] Some Grand Unified Theories predict that protons do decay, so we've been looking for it since the early 1980s. None of the experiments have observed anything. We can say that, if protons do decay, their halflife must be over 10^34 years. The age of the universe is 10^10 years.
If Haidt is claiming that people derive their moral judgements from intuition rather than logic, then why do his foundations of intuition sound an awful lot like the foundations for those logic? I was expecting the elephant metaphor to be more what the reviewer concludes in the end: we make up justifications in terms of things like fairness and caring after initial judgements that actually arise from much more ignoble motivations like partisanship. Instead, Haidt is claiming that we intuit fairness and then justify it via an argument from fairness? That sounds remarkably just like saying "humans are rational fairness arbitrators" and is basically what we ought to be doing. Should I really care about the difference between "intuits fairness" and "logically derives fairness"? And for authority/sanctity/loyalty, that sounds a lot like liberal strawmanning of conservatives ("oh you don't actually believe that letting homosexual couples marry harms society on net, you're just following your priest's word"). So how is this model supposed to help me (a liberal) empathize with conservatives?
I do feel like his system describes my liberal morals pretty well and the increasing liberal deviation from the fairness/caring justifications that the reviewer describes have unsettled me. I'd much rather we return to those justifications exclusively as they're the ones that resonate with me and just seem objectively stronger. I also think that some of this deviation was an attempt to persuade conservatives on their own terms rather than adopting those arguments genuinely. For example, adopting patriotic cues against Trump was a pretty transparent attempt to try to take perceived anti-Trump sentiment in Republicans and snowball it into a Democratic landslide. Appeals to sanctity against Trump were even more transparently such. Did Democrats read Haidt and then say, "guess we better start signalling the other three foundations as hard as we can?"
I just jotted some notes as I read this long review...
> There’s absolutely no analogy here and no contradiction or hypocrisy in someone favouring natural selection as the correct explanation for the origin of species, but favouring “intelligent design” via a planned economy as the correct prescription for a flourishing economic future.
There is actually. Today's economies are just as complex as biological entities. It's arrogant to think we understand enough to plan how an economy of today should work, let alone the economy of tomorrow. That's the power of adaptation by natural selection: evolution changes course based on environmental shifts, like what people *actually need* now rather than what they needed before, and not what *you* think they need; what some finite set of people think is factual and is necessarily limited, ignorant, and already outdated, and always will be. Central planning simply cannot work.
Which isn't to say that an economy shouldn't be regulated, any adaptive system can generate divergent or otherwise undesirable feedback loops, but that's the only place regulation belongs.
> he absolutely talks as if he believes that these other five moral foundations are normatively important as ends in themselves, not just instrumental heuristics for care.
They are to *some people*. Also, Care is insufficient for all ethics, so something else is definitely needed. But more practically, what are you going to do, force your obsession with only Care down everyone else's throats? Re-education camps maybe? Our best organizing principle so far has been democratic rule, which means if other people care about those other moral foundations, then you had better understand them, and not just as a proxy for Care or you might just be building a strawman of another's argument and poisoning open dialog.
> Homosexuality was wrong; God said so in the Bible; end of discussion. I could rarely get firm answer as to whether it was intrinsically wrong and God was helpfully letting us know this through providing guidance we could absolutely trust, or that God himself made it wrong by decree. I couldn’t actually get people to understand that these were different concepts.
Because they're not different concepts to a religious conservative. To claim, "X is intrinsically wrong" is synonymous with saying that God decreed something to be wrong. This distinction is one that *you* created because you think morality can plausibly be separated from God's decrees, that something can be right or wrong regardless of what God thinks, but that's not how religious conservatives think. You have probably created this distinction because you don't actually believe in a deity, so of course it naturally follows that morality then *must* be a separate question. This deduction simply does not follow for a conservative.
> The difference between them is pretty technical, and crucially Haidt’s position leads just as surely to the possibility of “and therefore we can discard them as they’re no longer adaptive to the current environment” as does that of his New Atheist foils.
No it doesn't, per the point above that we have democratic rule, and if selection has really shaped these people to think in certain conservative ways, then *conservativism isn't going anywhere*, and you'd best understand and deal with it democratically. In particular, it's well known that conservatives have more children than liberals, where the former are above replacement level and the latter often below, so the very notion "and therefore we can discard them" is literally false, because conservative principles *are* adaptive.
> Liberty is the most obvious example of a related problem in that he sometimes talks about how each foundation gets expressed in conservatives vs in liberals in a way that makes it clear they’re very different things – in this case in conservatives as “get off my lawn” and in liberals as “the government must intervene on behalf of oppressed groups”.
This seems like a weird non-sequitur because it doesn't obviously follow that those conclusions are necessarily entailed by different assumptions. I mean, they imply different circumstances and actions for sure, but not necessarily a different underlying principle.
> Where in his six foundations would fit the now very commonly expressed, and historically somewhat influential idea that it’s a good idea for everyone to roughly have the same level of wealth, or income, or welfare, or something, and that therefore it’s probably good for the government to redistribute wealth pretty aggressively along those lines, or stop anyone from getting too rich or powerful?
It seems clear to me that socialists would score highly on Care, Fairness, Authority, and Loyalty, but lower on Liberty, and very low on Sanctity. There would be some variability in Authority for the various socialist strains (Communism likely high, for instance). It seems clear that Hadit's goal was to bridge the divide between the dominant political sides at the time, and socialism was not a side with any degree of power (and still isn't).
> Trump is the embodiment of the profane. He offends basic notions of the sacred, of dignity in political debate and in human conduct in general, and of respect and decorum, at such a rate that the outrage just can’t keep up.
Trump also motivated a lot of voters that weren't active voters, indicating that there is a segment that wasn't represented before. They obviously don't care about sanctity, but that doesn't mean ordinary conservatives don't care about sanctity.
> And as for how liberals treat sacredness now? I don’t need to go on at this point with a bunch of examples of how the exemplar crime in the eyes of the average liberal is now offence against some sacred taboo, like conservatives of the past when someone swore in a sitcom.
But this is always cast in terms of harm, like certain kinds of speech harming oppressed minorities.
> Liberal discourse is saturated with appeals to hierarchy and demands for deference, with detractors urged to stay in their lane, not question the experts, and respect those with the prestige to demand such respect.
Again, always justified by alleged *harm*. In Haidt's moral foundations and for conservatives, respect for authority is a moral good *in and of itself*, not because it served some other moral principle.
> Even the demands for justice for oppressed groups have over time taken on less and less of a “reduce material harm” flavour and begun to be expressed more and more in a “give prestige and deference” manner.
I don't know what this is referring to.
> but certainly the dynamics he describes, where liberals focus almost all their messaging on utilitarian appeals to the greater welfare, while conservatives deal with a more complex and nuanced approach to morality involving respect for authority, a focus on defending the sacred, and loyalty to the nation and flag, are shot to hell by now.
I disagree. The window dressing has changed but I don't see that the fundamental dynamics have changed much. I agree that each side will deploy certain tactics that resemble the moral foundations in order to garner more support from various bases, but that's different than what Haidt is describing, which is how these people think about the issues themselves.
I think while some of the critiques by the reviewer are justified, it's worth focusing on the good, useful stuff in the book, and not let a few asides color your entire judgment of the thesis.
True, Haidt goes off on a tangent about how Bentham and Kant were maybe a bit autistic, and that is not at all a critical part of the argument.
True, Haidt claims activations of the Moral Foundations distinguish between conservatives and liberals, where really a much more intelligent view (which he expresses at times) is that the Foundations exist in all people, and it's just about finding the right triggers (pristine forests, but not churches, could activate Sanctity in liberals; we've all seen loyalty and betrayal - of the movement, not the nation - become a big pillar of cancel culture on the left).
True, Haidt goes to great lengths to say his account of morality is descriptive rather than normative, and then at some point details his favorite morality, which is utilitarian but takes into account people's moral sentiments and the society-binding aspects of morality and religion.
But I would just discard the small errors, which are sometimes tangents or corollaries, which in my view do not discredit the general thesis, which holds on very well in my opinion.
Moral Intuitionism is very true, enlightening, and applies to more than morality (almost any topic people care about). The elephant making decisions and the rider justifying them post-hoc is an extremely powerful explanatory tool in my experience.
Some Moral Foundations which are not only care/harm exist (descriptively), even if they're not exactly the ones on his list, and even if it might have been better to find them with PCA rather than theory-driven. Though I think his list is also pretty good. I think you miss the point by saying Fairness is about punishing free-riders. Fairness is about punishing cheaters who violate the rules, and the reason this Foundation evolved might be to punish free-riders, or benefit society in other ways.
Humans really have various socially advantageous instincts (like punishing cheaters), which seem to be somewhat innate and pretty universal, and I think he makes a very good case that these evolved through group-selection, and a good case for group-selection in general.
Criticising religion and morality on an epistemiological basis ("The Bible's God exist" is false, therefore religion is useless/harmful and we need to get rid of it) misses the true benefit of religion, and thus does not engage with it fully.
I think there's a LOT of very good stuff in the book, which is worth covering in more detail. Sorry for again self-promoting my review. :)
It's true that Socialists were left out of the book. But I don't think it means they're a challenge to the thesis. People could base Socialism on many Moral Foundations and arguments - one could argue the economic efficiency of the central planner (Care/Harm), another could argue that it's fundamentally unjust for one person to receive substantially more because of accident of birth (Fairness), etc.
Thinking about the summary of tribalism-vs-moral-psychology, and I think Haidt's work didn't accurately describe politics when he first wrote it.
To get to this conclusion, I need to remember a few things about the politics of that time. especially environmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to run strongly on three of Haidt's five categories of moral argument. One of those is care/harm, another is authority/subversion, and the third is purity/disgust.
The usual liberal argument in favor of environment-protecting laws would often depend on the authority of scientific consensus. The emotional punch that led people to protest against pollution was the purity of the unspoiled world. The arguments presented would include care for various endangered species.
Typically, the politically-conservative tribe would discount authority, put up a different calculation of care-vs-harm, and pay more attention to human flourishing than to purity of the environment.
Somehow, Haidt's analysis never noticed these factors.
There are probably other criticisms of Haidt's work, rooted in the way in which Haidt tried to evaluate his categories.
The categories appear to be very useful in understanding political opinion. But it is helpful to remember that categories like purity and authority show up in many different ways on the liberal (or progressive) side of politics.
I was a fan of Haidt's book when I first read it, but have not revisited it and do not particularly care to. I think this is because I see Haidt as essentially doing Jugaad ethics (https://www.thetruthcounts.com/blogtraducciones/2018/11/14/jugaad-ethics/) where he is trying to merge post-Rawlsian political/moral reasoning with classical virtue ethics and just coming up with a worse version of virtue ethics. This is because Haidt's moral foundations map somewhat cleanly onto the seven classical virtues, and the places where Haidt's foundations fail to map onto the virtues are pretty much isomorphic to the places where Haidt's foundations are least substantial and most questionable. So as an attempt to provide empirical moral psychological research supporting virtue ethics, I appreciated Haidt's work, but whether by a misguided attempt to be original or just unfamiliarity with the underlying principles of virtue ethics, Haidt's book came out a lot worse than it would have if it had cited a lot more Aristotle and Aquinas (or even just C. S. Lewis).
Of course, if he'd done so, that raises the question of whether Haidt would have produced anything of value at all which couldn't be gotten from reading Aristotle, Aquinas, or Lewis. I don't think he would have actually produced literally nothing of value, but it would have been the academic paper this book really should be, not a book-length treatment of anything.
Doesn't change your overall point, but, in 2D space, you aren't limited to fermions and bosons. You can also have anyons. (and, quasiparticles with anyonic statistics have been observed.)
There's a clear shared moral foundation between socialism and conservative complaints about welfare queens. In traditional socialist ideology, capitalists are basically parasites: they use their position to capture surpluses created by workers. Thus they're free riders on the system in exactly the same way that welfare abusers are, with the added insult that they live much better than everyone else. I'm surprised that the author didn't see this connection.
Of course, you can also get to socialism purely through a harm framework by arguing that a socialist system would do a better job of maximizing social welfare than a capitalist system, which would make socialism just another type of liberal/leftist moral framework. This also seems to fit well.
I think Haidt actually describes libertarians fairly well. Not in the book (where he, as most people do, ignores libertarians entirely), but in his further research.
I discussed this with him over the interwebs (Haidt responds to e-mails quite reliably by the way) and pointed out that what the people they call liberals in the US also care a lot about sanctity (even prior to social justice and identity politics, e.g. with the way they usually talk about nature and global warming - a lot of almost religious overtones). He admitted that this was the case and that he was looking a bit more into it (this was several years back).
I also mentioned that I believe there is a foundational discinction between different "types" of libertarians. Deontologists of the Austrian school definitely seem to reach the libertarian position from a very different starting point than the more utilitarian-ish libertarians like David Friedman. Haidt found that interesting but I don't think he explored that much further though.
Still, his personality traits correlated with libertarianism seemed quite on point to me. And I don't think much has changed since then. Libertarianism seems remarkably stable compared to the US mainstream. So does socialism. I guess it might be that "conservative" and "liberal" are just labels which are too broad to keep stable and in reality cover a bunch of separate groups...they shift, expand and shrink in several dimensions over time to be able to capture hopefully just above 50 percent of the (voting) population and the only constraint is that the groups that form each of these large coalitions can't hate each other enough to join the other coalition and they need to hate the other coalition enough not to stop voting altogether.
So maybe the 2010 typical liberals are still the 2010 typical liberals and so are the past conservatives but there are other groups which were not captured well by either the US democrats or the US republican sback then but have since raised to prominence. The populist Trumpists on one hand and the identity-politics Jacobins on the other. Perhaps in 2010 both of these groups existed but neither coalition courted them enough to make them a major aspect of their political party. Or in other words, perhaps in 2010 both major US parties depended mostly on the centrists with the extremes mostly disenfranchised whereas nowadays it's the centrists are the (almost) disenfranchised ones.
By the way, the review feels like reading Nassim Taleb (in how it is self-centred) but sadly without his ability to write.
One issue with the author's complaints about the model breaking after 10 years is that American political parties are going through a realignment so one might expect the arguments/policies of each party to swap (but there is a lag due to politicians being slower to change parties). I think both the author and Haidt assume that the parties are more homogeneous as opposed to be coalitional.
"their movement somehow ended up headed by a brash, shock-and-disgust-to-dominate real estate brawler with a disreputable sex life"
Trump enabled conservatives to politically cross-dress, to challenge the liberals (your choice of term, which I use here with that qualification) using their own tools.
"liberals . . . never got the police" Not so fast. If one includes certain district attorneys, who have the power to decline to charge certain individuals or offenses, and the 'mostly peaceful' riots of 2020, one can find that the police have been taken over by the liberal (again, your term) constellation of priorities.
I too was irritated by Haidt's use of scholarship back then, thinking that the categorizations along those axes were suspect, before the replication crisis was reported (acknowledged?).
"Outrage against Trump was often outrage against the violation of the sacred."
The liberal (again, your term) visualizes the sacred, respects authority, and demands loyalty, and always did. Liberals merely locate them elsewhere from where conservatives put them.
I have been a fan of Haidt's from the start, but I also had some criticisms in his perception of the liberal and conservative groups. I had treated them as things he had overlooked but could eventually incorporate into his foundations theory. This review captures what is wrong better than my original thinking. In my meager defense I will note that much of what has happened since had, er, not yet happened to illustrate the points.
Even in 2012 liberals were deeply concerned with purity and authority, and somewhat with loyalty. Those just didn't show up in Haidt's original data because his questionnaire suffered from bias. "Would you use an American flag to clean the toilet if it is all you had?" is designed to measure conservative purity more than liberal. Yet a parallel question of "Would you use a newspaper with a photo of MLK, Obama, or Gandhi as toilet paper if it were all you had?" does the same thing in a liberal direction. Much of environmentalism (and vegetariansim, organic farming) is about purity, even aesthetics rather than measurable harm, in "protecting wilderness" (for what?) or regarding it as sacred. NG liked to use the word cathedral a lot. It has not only been around covid that liberals have appealed to authority, it was quite apparent to me a decade ago and more that university professors were regarded as knowing more about many subjects and got to define such things as whether race was a real category, even when they were nonsensical, and executives overruling legislatures and both overruled by courts was considered the natural order of things.
That was a very informative and enjoyable read. 2 misgivings: a sentence to make the elephant and rider model explicit would be useful, and looking up Dan Ariely's crimes did bring up issues, but not nearly enough to justify making him the exemplar of all that should be dismissed
I think the basic reviewer claim, that tribalism determines morality rather than vice versa, is essentially correct (though god knows we didn't need all that verbiage to get there)!
And the moralism of a particular tribal is historical and contingent; attempts to derive it from some more fundamental bedrock are in the same class as trying to derive the radius of planet orbits from nested platonic solids and similar enterprises.
Nietzsche's master/slave morality inversion is one example of this historical contingency, but it's far from the only one; much more recently, "western" morality was basically reset with WW2, which established a whole set of things that society is and is not allowed to do, no questions asked. We can see how historically contingent this is as soon as we try to justify on any sort of logical or philosophical grounds the details of the new morality.
A particularly useful example is abortion. if you'd asked people in the US in the 1930s, a lot more would have told you that abortion was bad ("killing an innocent life") than forced sterilization ("well, it's not ideal, but as they say, three generations of imbeciles are enough; and it's just preventing a future outcome, it's not killing anyone"). But of course now that polarity has absolutely flipped, and the only reason I see for this is that the Nazis supported one and not the other, so we should do the opposite.
My point is not which of abortion or sterilization are bad (though I fully expect a stream of furious excuses/justifications/reasons why I understand nothing, which I will absolutely ignore); my point is that this is how contingency works: events happen, people are raised in the shadow of those events told to be like X and not like Y, and that determines the shibboleths of their tribe.
You can try to go beyond that to argue that certain behaviors (tolerance) will result in less violence, which almost everyone wants; or that certain types of government will do a better job of aggregating diffuse information and finding talent; or that certain economic structures will generate innovation and wealth faster. But none of these justify particular moral stances ("abortion is wrong", "sterilization is right") and honestly I think attempts to do so are as pointless and no different from proofs for the existence of god -- apparently irrefutable to those who already believe, and just so much nonsense to thsoe who don't.
I'm not even convinced there are especially strong clusters of moral stances going together; I suspect that one mostly sees that when examining a very narrow slice of history (Europe/US since about 1800) and as soon as you go beyond that the cluster fall apart (as they fall apart, even with Europe/US when you start looking at particular items). It's all just historical contigency -> tribal identity!
Thank you very much for the "Aside on Categories and Axes" section. This puts into words a failure mode I feel I see a lot in social science and the humanities, but which I've been largely unsuccessful at communicating to people who don't already have some experience with healthier fields of scholarship and instinctively know that forming useful terminology and categories doesn't work like that.
R.E: The fermion boson distinction, you can have a quantum field configuration in a superposition of being a fermion and being a boson, and that will make some difference to how the field behaves when you measure it, so long as what you're measuring isn't its spin. As you say, that kind of measurement just kicks you into one of two Everett branches with either a fermion or a boson.
As an analogy, think of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation.A particle with a wave function spread out over an area always seems to have one definite position when you measure its position, because you're entangling yourself with the position basis. But when you measure momentum instead, a spread out wave function will have a different average momentum than one peaked at a particular point.
In the same way, there is a difference in behaviour between a field that's in a superposition of having one fermion and one boson, and a field that's either a fermion or a boson, but you're not sure which. You don't see that difference when you're measuring spin or things related to spin, but you do see it in other measurements.
So I'd say conceiving of fermion vs boson as a perfectly pure distinction makes sense in some contexts, but not all.
This is my second- or third-favorite review so far and a dark horse to get my vote in the end. In part I like it because it checks the boxes for what I find interesting: relevant and important topic, stays broadly on the subject of the book but injects its own interpretation and critique. But I especially like how it achieves those goals without resorting to brilliance. Scott and many of the finalists write and reason in ways that make it clear they're super-sharp. This review consciously doesn't, but still manages to make the same kind of approach to the material work. It's the rare "rationalist" analysis that succeeds on the strength of rationalism as a mindset, rather than relying on the unusual levels of talent that rationalist blogging tends to select for.
I don't mean that as a dig at the reviewer, who's clearly capable and intelligent. The review works well and shows a lot of care. It's not perfect; much of the analysis is over-explained or rambling, and the political observations often miss the mark. But these are small quibbles compared to the value of setting up, presenting, and defending a critical position. As always, many thanks for contributing!
This strand of conservative intellectualism ("these are useful things for society to believe and people should just sort of get on as if they’re true and not question them too much lest our shared reality collapse and our social norms with it", and "the intellectual conservative tradition of “what is good for the masses to believe is not identical to what’s fundamentally true, please consult my 60,000 word essay on decision theory, game theory, computational load, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for details, therefore Catholicism”) sounds really interesting, and I'm not sure I've encountered it before.
To either the original writer or anyone informed in the area: could someone point me towards any articles or books or videos that talk about this? I'd like to understand how relevant it is to the politicised side of American conservatism. Would something like this position be in the backs of the minds of most of the political conservative intellectuals?
Theoretical physicist here: your description of quantum mechanics was brief but fine :)
Other comments...
I liked this review a lot, and I think the criticisms it contains are justified and helpful in thinking through the issues surrounding Moral Foundations. But there are a few places on which I think the author misses the point, or at least I think about things differently:
1. I think critiques of the form "these aren't the right categories" or "these categories are a bit ad-hoc" that think they are takedowns of Haidt's program are missing the central message. Haidt repeatedly (at least in public talks, don't remember about the book) states that he does not put a lot of stock in the specific foundations he outlines, and is very open to new foundations / splitting up existing ones (a la Fairness / Liberty). iirc he explicitly calls for criticisms of this kind in order to strengthen MF, and better identify foundations he missed.
In my reading, his main point is not "these 5 (6) foundations are fundamental; stuff everything into these boxes" but rather "moral intuitions are like tastebuds, things aren't all classified along one axis, and here are some possible (though incomplete) axes on which we tend to have intuitions about things."
Also I was surprised that, in the thousands of words about distributions and categories, the author did mention "factor analysis", which is how most (good) psychometric categories are derived, including (probably) Haidt's (again, I don't remember if it's mentioned in the book but he talks about it in lectures).
Finally on this, I heard Tyler Cowen mention that in his view, social science (including economics) is, at best, descriptive but not predictive. I think about this a lot, because as a natural scientist myself, I tend to think of science as being predictive if it is to be science at all. But maybe a better reading of Haidt, which he may or may not agree with himself, is that the MFs he identifies describe politics / the culture war as of 2010ish, but using it to predict some future political battle is a bridge too far because that's not what social science is for. I don't know, maybe.
2. Maybe a nit-picky point and certainly not unique to me, but calling the modern-day Left "liberals" and the modern-day Right "conservatives" is a mistaken use of these terms; I think partly explains why Haidt appears to get modern politics wrong.
Trump violates conservative ethics in all the ways the author discusses, because the party of Trump is apparently the Right = Conservatives ≠ conservatives. Haidt could easily tell a story where the conservative values he identifies are still present and preserved over time, but the political coalitions have shifted to focusing on different issues and so different Foundations are in the spotlight. (This is consistent with the critique above where Haidt and his Foundations fail to predict those shifting coalitions.)
[Now repeat the same paragraph but for Woke-rs instead of Trump-ers, where "Right" → "Left", "conservative" → "liberal", "Conservative" → "Liberal", "Trump" → AOC (??).]
My understanding of this section was that the reviewer wasn't talking about "philosophers, religious figures, and theologians", they were talking only about *the religious people they grew up around and talked about religion with*. (See the paragraph above, that starts "I grew up a religious conservative, surrounded by religious conservatives...")
In practice, I think most socialists may be motivated by the care foundation, but in theory, many forms of socialism are *supposed* to be motivated by opposition to exploitation, which seems like a liberty or fairness concern.
Interesting, I would suggest the opposite. Given that most socialists tend to attack the very rich, and are only rarely directly interested in compromises which would actually help the poor (but without destroying the rich), it seems to me that the primary motivation of most socialists is in fact a belief about fundamental equality.
I agree with the presenter, however, that Haidt’s moral foundations don’t cover this very well. I think it is closest to opposition to exploitation, but “equality above all” seems an entirely different political value.
Thank you for the link, that's an amazing piece of intellectual history. Another reason to love the internet: you really can see the debate happening right in front of your eyes. Between them, Pinker and Dawkins seem to cover every angle.
I have to say, though, that Everett's response was an interesting complication. Not much more than a complication, but language certainly does raise a number of evolution-related questions.
You are right, but you are also in a sense wrong.
You are right that acting “for the benefit of the group” must have some inclusive fitness value for the individual/s acting in that way. But given that you can find a mechanism making this happen, group selection exists.
…Meaning that a group where the individuals have managed to find a way to reap individual inclusive fitness points by acting for the benefit of the group, will out-compete groups where individuals have not been able to develop such a mechanism. (For example, they may more easily kill off the individuals who are less able to commit to their own group.)
As regards the (major) mechanism at play here, my money is in “generalized reputational rewards” (which is something more than reciprocal altruism). An individual that comes across as self-bound to other-oriented behavior, is likely to be seen as more trustworthy by “interested others”, and hence able to enter into more mutually beneficial exchanges, which enhances the individual’s inclusive fitness.
Already Darwin hints at this mechanism, in his attempt to explain the existence of “involuntary blushing” among humans (in The expression of the emotions in Man and the Animals). 2500 years earlier, Socrates’ did something similar, according to Xenophon. Socrates first notices that it is of private benefit for a man to have a good reputation, and then states: “The easiest way to acquire a good reputation in the eyes of others, is to become the man you want others to believe that you are”.
…My point: Many who believe in the existence of “group selection” simultaneously agree with you (and people like Dawkins) that group selection only works if it is possible to identify mechanisms that “makes it worth it to be other-oriented” for the individual/s who act for the benefit of the group. Don’t mix up this brand of group-selection with the type of group-selection you hate.😊
I admire your passion, but perhaps not your ability to read what other people write.
We are on the same side, but you apparently do not understand that.
I.e. human group-oriented behavior, even if (or rather: particularly when) it is - psychologically speaking -genuinely other-oriented, must – one way or the other – enhance the inclusive genetic fitness of the individual displaying the observed behavior.
Anyway, thanks for a spirited exchange of views!
Thank you. I came here looking for someone to shot down the group selection stuff. I've been reading "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins. And he definitely has his willow switch out and is beating group selection... to death. I love EO Wilson, but we all make mistakes.
It's true. I was very close to becoming a Republican when this book came out (2012), but 2016 changed all that.
Obama also seemed to see himself as above compromise at various points in his presidency, and in many ways the era of progressivism that he exemplified held as an article of faith that the arc of history would inevitably bend toward their vision of justice, transcending the backward and irrelevant conservatives at a gradual but sure clip.
Against that backdrop, Haidt’s willingness to open himself to more conservative moralities in other cultures (and in himself at times in his life, such as the immediate aftermath of 9/11) and acknowledge that their might be some amount of virtue to them in certain contexts such that one could expect them to persist in a way that ought to be understood rather than dismissed makes him seem rather enlightened relative to his contemporaries.
Rating for the review = 1 / (Wordcount of Review * number of times reviewer pats his own back) = 0
Agreed. I think there's a certain lack of self-awareness in complaining about books that go on tangents and anecdotes about the author's personal life... in a review that starts by doing exacty that.
A lot of reviews in this contest have the problem "Author didn't want to write a review, author wanted to talk about their personal politics", and this is definitely the case here.
Many extremely popular authors launch on tangents and personal anecdotes. Scott does it a lot. It was David Foster Wallace's main shtick in his essays. The magic trick is writing it so that is entertaining and engaging ... which is difficult.
I don't understand your system. Is the maximum review a rating of 1? If the review was only 10 words and one Pat, the score would be 1/10? But if it was 100 words and one Pat, it would be 1/100?
I think a better system to complain about pats on backs would be 10 - ((abs(word limit-5000))/1000) - number of pats on back.
Since Torin is dividing by zero, the review received an infinite score. Or undefined, if you want to quibble.
I agree with bbqturtle. Turin’s system is flawed.
And his formula cannot return a value of zero, so long as 1 is being divided by a real number.
We might assume the use of Floating-point arithmetic and that he is assigning a value of infinity to the denominator (Wordcount * Pats on back), which again does not make any sense unless we assume either “wordcount” or “pats on back” is infinite (which they are not).
If we are being generous to Turin, we might say he was just trying to casually indicate that the “Wordcount” and “Pats on back” are sufficiently large so as to warrant an answer to his formula that approaches zero. I don’t knock the imprecision so much as just seeing this as being a bit too harsh on the author :)
P.S. I found this book review, with some reservations, a rather enjoyable read.
A wordless, egoless review would receive an infinite score. This seems to be some kind of koan.
I liked the review, but agree it was quite a bit too long for what it was trying to get across.
Does 145 'I's make a good review?
It's true that Haidt may have exaggerated how much the moral intuitions actually drive the political leanings, but that doesn't mean these moral intuitions are completely fake either. He pointed to how widespread they are in different cultures and claimed they can serve some purposes sometimes.
It seems like it hasn't really replicated. And if you look at the raw data, especially with further studies, you basically get collapses onto two dimensions: Care-Fairness and Loyalty-Authority-Purity. So Haidt was onto something, but his initial categories were sorta made up!
Some of that is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory#Critiques_and_competing_theories
I haven't found Haidt's responses and would be interested to see them as well.
The whole discussion in the response section of one of Scott's Morality-as-Cooperation papers is really fascinating though: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/701478#_d23216891e1
There's a page on Haidt's website about criticism of Moral Foundations (https://moralfoundations.org/critiques/) but it doesn't appear to be up to date. It doesn't reference "Replacing the Moral Foundations" by Sinn and Hayes, for example (https://www.jstor.org/stable/45094407). Thanks for giving me more summer reading :)
+1
Do you have a link or citation on that? It’s pretty important if true.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1073191118817916
Thank you!
Yes, give a hint! I am skeptical.
+1
Even beyond that, life is complex enough that how you translate "fairness is important" into the details of tax law can veer off in a thousand different directions...
To me these sorts of fundamentals are like saying "life is constrained by the conservation of energy". Well, sure, that's true – but evolution as based on historical contingency has a lot more predictive/explanatory power than the generality of conservation laws.
Tangential question:
Is it against the spirit (and/or the actual rules) of the contest to start researching and working on a review for next year's contest, in advance (like up to a year in advance)?
I don't see any reason why that would be a problem. Personally I'd be happy knowing I'm reading something that someone worked very hard on! FYI, here are the rules that were posted for this contest and the previous:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-final-rules
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2022
I generally liked this review, but I think it would have been better if the author had started working on it substantially in advance, and had a chance to thoroughly rewrite it to condense some points that are repeated, and generally shorten it to give it clearer focus.
+1
+1 for your name
Agree totally. Needed editing.
Kenny! Imagine bumping into you in a thread like this (chatted with you a few times at usc about bayesianism and philosophy so I guess the odds aren't that low)
Yes, reasonable place to run into each other again!
If anyone was wondering about Lambesis, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Lambesis it sounds like the steroids probably had more to do with him trying to recruit a hitman at his gym than any atheism, and he may've converted back after rejoining his band post-release (apparently they didn't mind)? In any case, good luck to his second wife.
There's something to Haidt's thesis, but the better psychological explanation of conservatism vs. liberalism comes from looking at how people score on openness to experience and conscientiousness. https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6867614/#:~:text=In%20line%20with%20research%20in,a%20sibling%20fixed-effects%20specification.
It honestly explains a lot. People who like new experiences are likelier to go to college, likelier to move to a big city, etc. so it's not surprising that's correlated with liberalism. It's also not surprising that people who feel a strong sense of duty and have a high level of self-discipline would skew conservative.
There is absolutely something to what you're saying, but when you take into consideration that conservatives are less likely to want to try new foods (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8794126/) and liberals own more books and travel-related items (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-political-wars/), there's obviously something there. And that's without taking into account that sort of by definition liberals are more accepting of novel ideas/identities.
It's also a strongly age-related distinction. Older people tend to be more conservative and are also less interested in trying new foods.
Is that really true? At 71, I find myself getting bored with foods I'm used to eating, and wanting different ones. Of course, that could be taste buds becoming less sensitive as I age.
I dunno. I grew up in a very rural area in the south, but within an hour drive of a city that had "ethnic" restaurants. And if you split my (very working class, very white, very rural) high school class into "kids who would drive an hour to eat Thai food" and "kids who would not eat Thai food," it would probably line up pretty closely with their Biden/Trump vote, with who went to college and who didn't, and with who now lives in cities vs who still lives in our hometown. I don't think that eating Thai food is more moral than not eating Thai food, but willingness to try new things in general does seem to be highly correlated with a bunch of other stuff, including liberal political views. Obviously, that's just anecdotal evidence, but it lines up with the actual data.
Right. When I started writing about immigration policy in 2000, I was struck by how many other public intellectuals' views on immigration policy were largely driven by how much they liked Thai restaurants. I'd liked Thai restaurants a lot since 1983, but that struck me as a mostly trivial factor. But I noticed that many pundits hadn't really thought much about the effects of an immigration policy other than if it made Thai restaurants cheaper they were in favor of it.
To what degree is this openness, and to what degree is it simply IQ? I think you're capturing some of both there. As I understand it, if you're low-IQ, high openness, there's a good chance you're not interested in driving an hour to try Thai food either -- you're more likely to just experiment with sex and drugs.
Most of my high-IQ friends from growing up are either libertarian or leftist, and usually not a very exotic flavor of leftist but someone who would fit comfortably towards the middle of the Democratic Party. Those who are rightists, however, usually believe a large number of things that are outside the Overton Window (and I'm such a rightist myself). I don't know anyone particularly intelligent and under the age of 50 who would qualify as anything close to a mainstream Republican, or who has a high opinion of Fox News.
Ports have traditionally been the place for exposure to the new. Ideas, people, ways. Maybe there's a little de facto exposure therapy going on.
At that point we might want to start trying to distinguish between "rural/conservative people seem less open to experience because of the way it's being measured" and "rural/conservative people are *actually* less open to experience because of their environment/upbringing."
I think the kind of liberalism you’re discussing is correlated with, but not the same as, the kind of liberalism Haidt is discussing. But then one of the review’s criticisms is that Haidt himself does not make this distinction as well as he should.
That said, I am a conservative with an unadventurous palette who nonetheless scores high in openness and low in conscientiousness. My experience of the liberals I know is that many have become less accepting of eccentric ideas at the same time as they have become more liberal in Haidt’s sense, so I am skeptical that temperament is driving their political shifts.
Re: conservative foodies- there are an awful lot of rednecks who know twenty kinds of ghost peppers, ass-blasters, horseradish and so forth. And they really accept pain at both ends learning more.
None of that counts as openness to new foods, because those aren't foods the researchers themselves are interested in.
Meanwhile the typical Portlandia person who won't eat anything but dirt and kale is probably "super open to new foods". :)
I have two Portland friends. One a conservative Christian the other an outspoken liberal. Neither would relish kale and dirt.
> there's obviously something there
I don't think so. Foods, travel-related items and books are only a small part of openness to experience. Also, the number of book and travel-related items is only one data. What about the diversity in the genre of books? Or how often they buy books from new authors? The date of publication of books?
My impression is that people who were interested in artistic trends (e.g., Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot) tended to be on the right politically up through the stock market crash of 1929. They tended to be elitists from wealthy families, so it was only natural that they could afford to follow aesthetic movements while the poor proletariat could not. During the Depression, businessmen could no longer afford to patronize the arts, so artists turned to the left as potential patrons, and that presumption has endured ever since.
This is a good observation, but the completeness of the change leads me to think it was more a civilizational turn than happenstance. If it hadn't been the '29 Crash that did it, it would have been something else not far removed in time.
In the early, expansionist, self-confident stages of a civilization, art serves largely to exemplify and glorify traditional values. As a civilization loses its self-confidence and begins to cast aside those traditional values, its art serves to amplify the self-doubt and decadence.
I recall Scott making a point before, that conservatives can try to force art to be conservative, but in practice it almost always ends up gross and kitsch. This seems largely true, and it's very difficult to use art to renew civilization. But if a civilization is renewed, its art will naturally be renewed as well.
Over the course of the 19th Century, young artists and writers became more self-conscious about stylistic innovation as what is expected of each new generation. Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 are an early example.
These are also class signals, although that then raises the question of why class signals would track with openness to experience.
Because 1) it's easier to have new experiences when you have the social and financial capital to pay for them. 2) openness to experience is costly and thus is a good if you want to signal you are high class. 3) random contingency (never underestimate random contingency)
As someone who likes trying new foods, I'm suspicious that's just another measure of urban culture and not a measure of innate openness to new experiences. As a counter example, if a rural academic invented a survey trying to measure openness and had questions such as:
Would you like to try fly fishing?
Would you like to try ice fishing?
Would you like to try spearfishing?
Would you like to try tidal water fishing?
Would you like to try trolling?
etc.
We'd clearly see it as a bad measure as "interested in fishing" is part of rural culture and different survey results between rural/urban people would clearly just be telling us that rural people liked fishing more, not that they were more open to new experiences.
And thinking about this more, 'sampling other cultures' is clearly part of the urban culture but with a clear rule that you're always sampling from other cultures that are far enough away so as not to be a political threat. For example, liberal elites seem much more likely to try sampling cricket than Nascar, or lutefisk than kool-aid pickles, foreign music than country music, etc.
As a cosmopolitan liberal elitist I hadn't previously considered any of those kinds of fishing, but now you ask, yes please to all! I occasionally catch mackerel off beaches and like to think I'm a dab hand at trolling 👹
IDK. I was just listening to a podcast in which truck drivers talked about thinking through solutions to world hunger or composing music during drives. Tons of ingenuity has been applied to problems on farms. I don't think any of these attributes are biased toward urbanites except for "sophisticated in art, music, and literature", but nowadays with Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and so on even people in many rural communities can access sophisticated music, literature, etc.
Sort of an unrelated anecdote, but I have been really shocked by the number of urban professionals I know who had long commutes and didn't use books on tape or podcasts at all, but then I have a few trucker friends too (yay men's league sports for creating heterodox friend groups), and they all LOVE books on tape.
Did not match my expectations at all as I discovered that over the last ~5 years.
I find this dubious as an explanation for the simple reason that your only real "anchor" for what it means to be "a deep thinker" is going to be the people around you. Plus perhaps strawmen of others you hear on the radio or see on the internet.
If we imagine an alien species who spend 80% of their conscious time contemplating The Good, and another alien species for whom the typical member spends 0.01% of their time contemplating The Good, then presumably somebody who contemplates The Good merely 50% of the time would view themselves as not a deep thinker in the first case, and a deep thinker in the second case. Similarly, if some material condition leads people to have more/fewer objective books/art available to them, then the guy who owns ten books to everybody else's one or two is going to see himself as a voracious reader.
"Your social upbringing and cultural millieu shouldn't impact your personality" is a hell of a claim.
<i>> We've got people measuring a purported fundamental personality trait of Openness to Experience by asking participants "I see myself as someone who..."
> ... is ingenious, a deep thinker.
> ... values artistic, esthetic experiences.
> ... is inventive.
> ... is sophisticated in art, music, and literature.
> ... likes to reflect, play with ideas</i>
My first thought on that is that it's actually measuring how conceited somebody is. "Why yes, strange person, I do indeed see myself as an inventive, sophisticated genius, thank you for asking!"
I think both "really pretentious people skew liberal" and "people who are interested in art and literature skew liberal" are almost definitely true.
I'm guessing from reading satirical novels that really pretentious people skewed conservative up through about 1929.
For example, I'm currently reading William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel "Vanity Fair" (the impetus for Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities"). Thackeray appears to have been much amused by the racial liberalism of his time -- e.g., the main villain wants his son to marry a rich half-black, half-Jewish heiress from St. Kitts and then tries to marry her himself, and Thackeray is recurrently making fun of rich people donating to African charities, much as Dickens made fun of "telescopic philanthropy" a few years later.
On the other hand, that's merely an undercurrent in the novel, likely because in 1848 it was still a pretty esoteric taste. Most of the more derisible characters in "Vanity Fair" like Jos. Sedley are old-fashioned snobs.
That's more or less true, but, on the other hand, the Big 5 Openness factor is likely a good predictor of where people will want to move to. I'm conservative politically, but I've always chosen to live places where a wide variety of cutting edge culture was close at hand. (E.g., one of the more pleasant memories of my life is going to see Kubrick's "2001" with my staunch Republican father at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood when I was age 9.) But that makes me unusual.
It's fun to compare the Big 5 personality scores of people on Facebook who liked "2001: A Space Odyssey," a genuinely weird movie that, annoying as it is, is also clearly a masterpiece, vs. people who liked "Pretty Woman:"
2001 fans rank very high in Openness, 11th out of the 846 movies. The only famous film that scores higher is David Lynch’s dream-surrealist Mulholland Drive. In contrast, Pretty Woman enthusiasts fall at only the 12th percentile out of the 846 films on Openness. They tend to be rather basic.
Openness correlates with aesthetic interests, so the films at the top tend to be spectacular-looking: I can recall seeing "2001" at the Cinerama Dome in 1968 when I was 9 and being sure I had never been to a movie that looked like it before (and maybe nobody else had either). "Pretty Woman," on the other hand, was directed by sitcom writer Garry Marshall, an efficient helmsman but not one to pioneer lens flare as an art form.
But on Conscientiousness, "Pretty Woman’s" fan base scores at the 97th percentile versus 26th for "2001’s."
The Julia Roberts film’s admirers come in at the 81st percentile in Extraversion, while 2001’s are as introverted as the stereotype about science-fiction buffs implies: They fall at the 2nd percentile.
Not surprisingly, Pretty Woman’s audience is fairly Agreeable (75th percentile), while devotees of the intentionally inhuman 2001 are not (15th percentile).
Finally, both groups are above average in Neuroticism.
In other words, the stats vindicate the stereotypes: People who like "Pretty Woman" on Facebook are more or less "Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion" come to life, and the typical "2001" nut is Comic Book Guy from "The Simpsons."
Granted, Kubrick was probably a right wing nut while I'm sure the people who made "Pretty Woman" were mostly nice liberals. But, here's the thing: almost nobody notices that the great film directors tend to lean right, probably because they rank so high in Openness that their fans tend to lean left.
How do libertarians fit onto that map?
Openness to experience tracking liberalism was bang on the money 20 years ago, to the point I'd have bought it as a standard explanation of liberalism vs conservatism. It probably still predicts a form of liberalism now.
Conscientiousness seems to have done a complete 180 though - I'd be comfortably willing to bet around $100 that white liberals under 40 are more conscientious than white conservatives under 40. I think that's probably the big change in liberalism over the past 20 years - liberalism became hegemonic in prestigious institutions (particularly education), so now conscientious people become conscientious about their carbon footprints, not being racist instead of religious piety and good housekeeping. That's why purity-signalling and enforcing orthodoxy is now a liberal thing. It may also explain why the new atheists got defenestrated, as they tended to be confrontationally anti-orthodox.
Liberalism didn't become a "social justice religion." Liberalism won, and its prize was conscientious quasi-religious people murdering it and walking around in its skin.
Expressing orthodox political opinions carefully is not the same thing as conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness means a desire to complete one's tasks reliably and to a high standard.
If I was a betting man (which I am not) I would gladly accept your wager.
I think you're using "conscientiousness" here to refer to "following and enforcing social norms" which would more appropriately be some sub-factor of agreeableness, not conscientiousness.
Aside from the semantics, I think you're pointing out a real phenomenon: the left has increased its enforcement of ideological purity over the last 20 years. This probably has to do with their social power increasing. The left used to be willing to ally with themselves with people who didn't quite share their views, because they needed allies to fight the right. Nowadays, the need for allies is less dire, and so they can be more discerning as to who gets to be a part of the "good people" club.
I'm not sure that is true. Left wing movements are famously fractious (the People's Front of Judea is based on a popular stereotype).
Sure, internally in left wing circles there's lots of discord, but not to the extent that people are pushed out of the left for having some different opinion on the finer points of theory.
I was referring to specifically the phenomenon where grey tribe types used to be in good standing on the left back in the day, whereas nowadays the left is very much more just for the blue tribe. The grey tribe is variously painted as right-wing, actually joining the right-wing, or trying to make an identity for themselves as liberals.
I think that we must have very different experiences of left-wing organisations. People must certainly do get pushed out of 'the left', but that is mostly because the group defines 'the left' as what ever they believe and anyone else is a 'class traitor', 'fascist' or 'nazi'.
I can see people being pushed out of a given book club or whatever due to their specific views on whether there should be an armed revolution or not, but that doesn't mean said person is kicked out of the larger political grouping we call "the left". More likely, the person will join some other book club which is for/against armed revolution, but still vote for candidates on the left come the next election, and support the left's talking points in the broader discourse.
"I'd be comfortably willing to bet around $100 that white liberals under 40 are more conscientious than white conservatives under 40."
I could see that. In general, during the Trump Era, outspoken Trump supporters tended to be people who needed some forgiveness.
For example, actor Scott Baio spoke for Trump at his 2016 convention.
The one time I've seen Scott Baio in real life was in about 1982 when a friend came to visit from Houston. We were driving down Sunset Boulevard when we got to the tricky part near UCLA that might well have been Jan & Dean's "Deadman's Curve" when there was a traffic jam. Eventually, we got to the cause of the jam: a brand new Italian supercar was wrapped around a streetlight pole, and the driver, Scott Baio, star of "Joanie Loves Chachi" was stomping around on the curb, dressed head to toe in Fiorucci sportsware, agitatedly talking to somebody (probably his agent) on his car phone (this was before cell phones when they were very rare).
My friend went home to Texas quite satisfied that he'd seen the true essence of Los Angeles.
Haidt actually discusses this very factor (Openness to new experience) in the book, and how it could lead to both geographic and political sorting.
Right, I'd agree that personality traits traditionally explain a lot of political differences among white Americans. A really interesting application of this was a recent study of movie ratings by Big 5 personality types called "We Are What We Watch: Movie Plots Predict the Personalities of Those who ‘Like’ Them.”
https://www.takimag.com/article/are-we-what-we-watch/
"Surprisingly, the genre most strongly associated with all AFPP dimensions is sports, whose fans are lower on Openness and Neuroticism, and higher on Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness.
For example, the two movies with the most extreme personality profiles are the polar-opposite high school cult classics "Heathers," in which Wynona Rider is conflicted over whether or not to finish murdering all the popular girls, and "Friday Night Lights," about a blue-collar Texas football team trying to win the state title. Fans of the football movie scored at the 5th percentile in Openness and the 95th percentile in Conscientiousness, while fans of the kill-the-popular-girls movie scored at the 98th percentile in Openness and the 3rd percentile in Conscientiousness.
Beyond the other things people have stated (age, types of food in your environment, ...) don't forget that people will say what they think is the appropriate answer, not how they actually behave. And in current America, the cool response, the one you're supposed to have, is "openness to new experiences".
How many of these people insisting that they're all about new experiences actually engage in *genuinely* new experiences? I don't see many of them taking a mind-expanding semester at even Brigham Young U, let alone Bob Jones U...
They claim to want new experiences, but everything they do follows a standard script that's replicating all their previous experiences, just in slightly different ways.
But "taking a semester at another college in the same country" is not a thing. There isn't study abroad for students from New York to go to Kansas.
Of course you can! It's called dual enrollment (in one of its forms). Or a gap year.
Ask yourself why the version I gave is NOT a thing, whereas the stereotypical version of going abroad IS a thing...
That's my point.
The real issue is precisely what I stated. The exact same people (probably parents, definitely college authorities) who are all for you "expanding your horizons" by partying in London do not want you fraternizing (and god forbid, perhaps even sympathizing) with the enemy by studying in Salt Lake City.
I also read this book, and came to a somewhat similar conclusion to the reviewer, although I think I was somewhat more sympathetic to Haidt's idea that these 5/6/7+ pillars are what the rest of morality is built upon, in part because they are flexible - you can play to any or all of them, and your argument can still work if you phrase it right. Kind of hard to prove though when it's that weak a connection, but I'm reminded of the old quote about everyone being a libertarian, and a liberal, and a conservative, and a communist, ect.
I do think it's worth noting that people seem to have a revulsion to "might makes right" reasoning, and prefer to have things framed in flattering moral terms rather than just openly declaring that they'll do whatever makes their tribe win. Sure, Trump was crass and boorish, but he also talked a lot about "draining the swamp" and "making America great again", depends on how cynical you are but at the very least that was the stated reason for why you should vote for him, and not because he was gratuitously offensive. I'm sure we could construct a group selection just-so story to explain this quirk of in-group identification, but I think that's one of the weaker elements of Haidt's work, it's much more compelling when it's just observing and describing how different people have different approaches to morality.
I also think that the observation that "people have values other than pleasure/pain" is both obvious and very important not to forget, if only because it makes a lot of utilitarian arguments fall flat when you try to persuade normies. That's a shame, isn't strengthening our tribe at the expense of the Kantians the whole reason why we developed moral reasoning in the first place?
I think Haidt really convinced me that moral foundations, just like personality, is a thing that ought to be thought about. But as with personality sitting in your armchair cogitating on your evidence probably won't get you to the truth. I want 5 other people to propose their own schemas for moral foundations. Then have lots of surveys and factor analyses on them and maybe we'll have something as solid as OCEAN. I suspect that Haidt got some things right, like harm working as a moral foundation. But even the four humors theory of personality was able to get extroversion/introversion right. Some factors are easy to tease apart correctly, some hard.
Take a look at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656618303568#t0005
It probably also doesn't have it right ... but as you suggest ... a few people looking at this and getting more questions and we might triangulate on a the right dimensions. Haidt took a good first pass and laid the groundwork, but we'll land somewhere different.
I like Curry's model, but reducing morality to "cooperation" is a very western idea.
Western idea, sure. But does that doesn't mean it doesn't work as a model to describe non-Western societies.
I was fascinated to discover that the medieval four humours theory was the basis for Anglo-American comedy. The English originally saw humor as originating in sketches of different personality types, and then became chauvinistically convinced that English liberty, in contrast to Continental despotism, allowed different personalities and thus humor to flourish.
Moral foundations aren't new to Haidt though; it's just a repackaging of G.E. Moore that Haidt apparently (based on this review) instead tries to ground in a mixture of utilitarianism and evo psych.
The reviewer doth protest too much, methinks.
Strange that only a portion of the review is about the book and most of it is about the reviewer, but oh, well. His rider must be struggling with his elephant.
Haidt actually lays out that his findings came from his data, not from any theory. His first book was finding ancient wisdom around the world and finding commonality.
Haidt also notes that he began as an atheist leftist. He was surprised by his research. He kept exploring and let his research find the answers rather than impose a framework.
Haidt puts socialists with left/liberals, so it is odd the reviewer couldn't understand that. That is Haidt's own area.. And again, he let his data guide where each side went rather than impose it.
The 5 MFT model isn't as good as his 6. He breaks out Libertarians from left/liberals. And it works pretty well.
You can take a Moral Foundations Test online for free. From my experience, everyone lines up pretty well according to their political nature.
The key takeaway really is that left/liberals/socialists really struggle to understand what drives conservatives and usually project false motives on others. "Look, this statement was a secret dog-whistle for hatred". Or maybe the person believes it is the moral choice....
Is the book a little dated? Sure. This was written before the Woke took over the world, when the phrase "trans rights" could more likely relate to transportation issues that anything else. And like so much else, it was pre Trump and pre BLM. That doesn't mean the theories are incorrect.
"when the phrase 'trans rights' could more likely relate to transportation issues that anything else"
...and when BLM was the Bureau of Land Management.
... and when Social Justice was Catholics equivocating about welfare.
...and when Equity was assets minus liabilities.
Haidt's data came from his data. His findings came from the lenses he brought to his data.
Not really. He didn't come with preconceived notions. He just wanted to see where people were morally. He had to come up with groupings and categories from the data.
You could say the data was flawed because Haidt was a leftist Jewish atheist social psychologist, but nothing indicates he tried to shape data to reach an outcome, unlike so many others.
Everybody comes with preconceived notions. If you want to say Haidt was unaware of his, that’s fine.
It's been several years since I've read the book, but my reaction then is the same as it is now: it's a really interesting idea that has impacted the way I look at the world, and, hey, it might even be true!
What I mean by that is that I'm fairly agnostic as to whether Haidt's arguments about natural selection and the heritability of morality are correct. The value for me was in thinking of morality (others and my own) in terms of different axes and how those might express themselves in different individuals and cultures.
I don't really understand your objection to the way Haidt discusses conservatives. Isn't he just applying intuitionism, an idea you seem to agree with? And doesn't he do that across the board, not just with religious conservatives?
My review from a half decade ago largely agrees with you, though in a lot less detail. Actually it's almost scary how many of the same beats we hit, down to referencing Hume's is/ought distinction as a problem for Haidt.
I'd just add that in social Darwinist terms the parts of the west that are cosmopolitan and produce new technology have done pretty darn well at conquering stuff when they put their minds to it. And while Haidt showed that while the Harm foundation is what liberals use to justify moral decisions that's adaptive because in a cosmopolitan society you can't count on other people agreeing with you about what's Clean or Sacred or whatever. Heinrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" is useful here.
Also, for all his calls in the book for a thicker, less rational version of liberal thought Haidt sure failed to appreciate "wokeism" as exactly what he was hoping for when it came to prominence.
Excellent review.
https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2017/05/book-review-righteous-mind.html
To be fair to Haidt the is/ought distinction is a problem for pretty much everybody all the time. Almost no one ever gets past it, and those that do typically have a pretty underwhelming "ought".
That was really excellent. I read Haidt's book twice, a few years apart and loved the first section showing that our moral intuition isn’t some reasoned idea. I could never quite explain what felt wrong about the moral foundations aspect, which is kind of his main premise. The reviewer lays it bare. Especially the sacred values of the left after Trump arrived. That has intrigued me since he jumped out of the clown car in 2016. But it didn’t register that this was a death blow to Haidt's theories, perhaps because I’d already put the book away by then.
Kudos for the explanations.
I liked this review a lot. It's the only review so far that is sharply critical of the book it's reviewing. I think it's really helpful that it even says how the book tends to go wrong.
I do think the review could have benefitted from being rewritten a month or two after this draft was put together, so that it could be in a more distilled form.
I agree with this. Both that the criticism is good and that it could have done with some re-writing. But I'd add that this is really a review - so much more than many of the other recent entries.
Yes, thirded. Excellent review, shame about the writing.
His descriptions of the moral foundations of political sides in America in the 90s/00s are obviously subject to change as the politics do. If anything, the re-discovery of sanctity, group loyalty, and authority within wholly liberal enclaves in the last decade* (ie wokeness) reifies Haidt’s argument. And shows how wobbly certain moral orders can be if they don’t hit the taste buds in the right way.
*haven’t seen any data on this but it seems apparent
I found the writing style here fairly painful, and repetitive.
Same here.
"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."
– Blaise Pascal
"Dan Ariley"
That should be Ariely.
"People genuinely thought that at a base, normative level, there could be no morality without explicit instruction from God"
I used to be religious and now as an atheist still think there's no objective morality without a God to impose it. Hume's is-ought gap just seems unbridgeable.
+1 Always bothers me when atheists dismiss that concern as completely ridiculous.
Though I'd note, even with a God, the idea of "objective" morality still seems non-sensical.
I don’t understand the argument. How exactly is « do what God said in His scripture » more objective that for example « maximize some form of utility in the group »?
Or may be my question should be what you mean by objective in this context?
I worry about the sustainability of the belief that minimizing harm is a preferable goal within an explicitly materialistic framework
Without some kind of possibility that there is an external standard mandating that there is the existence of moral and immoral decisions the reliability of belief in them existing and certainly the extent that people reliably hew to those distinctions in their personal life is something that I worry about
Materialistically there is no reason to prefer for a rock to roll down one side of a mountain instead of another. By the same token I don't understand how there can be a materialistic standard that can distinguish between an action that increases utility and one that decreases it. In absolute terms there is no fundamental difference between the direction a rock rolls and the direction an action takes in terms of utility on materialistic grounds
My answer is that we should encourage the literal Biblical God vs materialistic reality dualism we overly default to to fade away and allow the concession that we cannot know that there is no supernatural underpinning to reality. It still doesn't matter which way a rock rolls down the mountain but no one can claim to prove that it doesn't matter what that rock rolls over because a distinction between rocks and things which can experience utility may exist in absolute and consequential terms
Because an omnipotent deity gets to define whatever it chooses.
I agree that works for a lot of people (though perhaps decreasing), I am not sure it makes any actual sense.
If God predates the universe and sets everything in it, why not that? If I'm writing a work of fiction, can't I determine the "moral of the story"?
No, I don't see that you can. If you were to write and publish a story today, and state implicitly or explicitly in that story that murder is good, that would not make murder good, *even within your story.*
Or if you set up a Squid Game island, and over three generations raise a bunch of human beings to believe that murderous conflict is the only good (sounds a bit like ancient Greece!), that still won't make it good.
To the extent that morality means anything (I'm not sure it does mean anything, but *if* it does), then it means something other than, "the rules set for X by the entity that created X." There's a million theories of what that 'something other' is, and I won't try to distinguish between them here. But it seems clear that predating or ownership or being bigger than are not criteria that allow you to arbitrarily determine what morality is.
But because God is perfectly good, He wouldn't decide something bad like that.
Are things good because God decides they are good, or does God decide they are good because they are good? This is probably a deep question in Christian theology, but I think the obvious answer is to say "yes, both".
> To the extent that morality means anything (I'm not sure it does mean anything, but *if* it does), then it means something other than, "the rules set for X by the entity that created X."
You cannot refute a theistic axiom equating morality with a deity's will with any arguments from ethics or metaethics, because such fields already implicitly accept that "morality" is an orthogonal question. They cannot prove it though, the best they can do is argue that people seem to behave morally even without belief in god, but what would such behaviour imply anything about moral truth?
Think about the difference between the two 'should's in "Which way should I go to get to the grocery store?" versus "How should I live my life?" The first is mere practical geography, while the second is ethics. Same thing with 'best' in "Who's the best soccer player?" versus "What's the best way to live?"
What does it mean for something to be "better" in the absence of a specific, concrete goal? Just "better" universally, for all of life and time? And, if "better", "best" and "should" have any meaning at all in this universal sense, who would have the right to say what that is? And how would you know?
Maybe there's no "objective" morality, but it's also pretty easy for most non-religious people to agree on more than an 80/20, golden-rule-style version of it. In the same way, you can say that we don't really perceive reality for a variety of reasons (brain reconstructs vision, blind spot in the eye, don't see the whole spectrum of light, it's all really quantum particles, etc.), but people generally function fine in terms of seeing an object and picking it up. So then if we're not saying that every atheist is going to run around killing people because why not, then what are we actually saying when we say there's no objective morality?
Humans evolved the ability to perceive reality because if what you saw wasn't what was in front of you, you wouldn't last as long. The same is not true of morality. Hypocrisy is adaptive. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/homo-hipocritus.html
The essay you link doesn’t seem to suggest lack of a commonly understood morality, more that bending the rules of that morality can be beneficial. Which is true for religious society as well. I’m not sure what your point is.
It's a matter of how the mind works. We think differently in "near" vs "far" mode because it's beneficial for us to project norms in far mode applied to others, and then act differently in near mode determining our own actions. And our mind is split sufficiently we can do this with conscious sincerity, not thinking of ourselves as being hypocritical but instead easily coming up with excuses. Indeed the reason our consciousness exists is to come up with rationalizations for things we already decided to do for other reasons (as seen in split-brain patients).
I feel like Hume's is-ought gap does not really exists in virtue ethic - which basically defines what you should do what is good for you*. But it's a feeling I would be hard pressed to put into arguments especially in a foreign language.
*The obvious [and difficult] question being of course "what is good for me".
That "obvious question" typically entails a lot of "ought" logic.
I don't think so. In utilitarianism the is/ought gap is between "what should I do ?" and "maximize global utility (for some definition of utility)". When some sort of utility function has been defined, the only questions left are "is" question. Same thing with virtue ethic : the is/ought gap lies necessarily between "what should I do" and "what is good for you" - deciding what are your goods is a purely a "is" question.
I weakly claim that there is in fact no gap between "what should I do" and "what is good for you".
I'm saying that the way virtue ethicists decide "what is good for you" involves ought questions rather than is questions.
This is true, but I think virtue ethicists get closer to the "is" than other ethical systems. Like, pick a controversial behavior in some piece of media where there's strong disagreement about whether a character "did the right thing". Then ask yourself "did the character behave in a [loving/faithful/hopeful/prudent/temperate/courageous/just] way?" You should be able to rank the answer to each of those out of 10, and (this is the important part) someone on the opposite side of the controversy probably gives approximately the same answers. They just disagree about the relative importance of prudence versus justice or whatever. Because you can reasonably disagree about the relative merits of the virtues, we're not totally reaching pure "is", but we are getting importantly closer to it than we would be if we were just stuck at the level of "moral or immoral, yes or no?" See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving-the-question
Is-ought gap is always already bridged in any ethical system. "Within moral system X, one ought to Y" is completely consistent with the idea that there is no objective X or Y.
I think it all depends on what you think the strength of the "ought" is. If you view it the way religious people, or Mill, or Kant, or most regular people do. It is totally 100% hopeless.
I tend to not be a moral nihilist, but instead think something along the lines of "morality is a hack together group of mental/individual/psychological/social/environmental ways of handling a related group of issues mostly concerning group action and dealing with others".
There is no one correct "ought".
BUT by looking at what your group of agents (typically persons) believe regarding "ethics/morals", and why they believe it (the IS), we can become a little more knowledgeable about what of those patterns make sense in our current context, what do not, and perhaps with some research explore the bounds of what kind of tolerances you have for where you can have some softer "ought" or more likely heterodox series of "oughts".
"We ought not do that because it will have disastrous consequences in this particular situation", "We ought to do this because it is super important to many people despite its silliness".
While human beings are not clay, they aren't iron either so there is some ability to put square pegs into round holes, but only to a degree.
I do think anyone searching for some unified "Ethical Theory" is just hopelessly going to end up on the rocks. It is a mistake to think it is tractable into some single unified rule like physics (maybe) is.
> I used to be religious and now as an atheist still think there's no objective morality without a God to impose it. Hume's is-ought gap just seems unbridgeable.
Read some Kant.
What is an objective morality? If arbitrary rules imposed by God count, why don't arbitrary rules imposed by society? If "objective" here requires that the rules not be arbitrary, how does it help if there's a God to impose it?
There are multiple societies, but only one creator of this universe.
Even if that claim was true, and I see no good reason to believe it is, I don't see why that's relevant. You can still apply the same question if you just replace "society" with "the society I was born into".
"The society I was born into" has an indexical property, so it's not the same for everyone. Additionally, you can leave the society you're born into. You can't leave the universe.
""The society I was born into" has an indexical property, so it's not the same for everyone."
Why do you assume that an objective source of morals, if it exists, must be the same for everyone? Why can't I have one objective set of moral obligations stemming from one source, and you have a different objective set of moral obligations stemming from a different source?
Furthermore, this claim is only true because I happened to refer to myself using a first-person pronoun. If I had used my name instead, this wouldn't apply.
"Additionally, you can leave the society you're born into. You can't leave the universe."
I fail to see what this has to do with the is-ought gap.
Subjective things vary by observers, objective things do not.
Imagine the case of the last member of a tribe. There are no other members left to have any obligations toward. What is morality to that last member then? Or imagine that somebody discovers they were adopted and were actually born into a different society than the one they were raised in. Do their obligations change?
This review was too long. That said, as a Catholic who has read some of Haidt's work (but not this whole book) I sort of agree with the author in the sense that I think a lot of what Haidt was doing was stumbling backwards into Catholicism.
Evangelical Christians and Protestants generally derive morality from scripture: if it's in the Bible, it must be so. Catholic ethics operate differently - of course there's the whole idea of scripture and tradition. But if you read Summa Theologica, you'll notice that St. Thomas Aquinas repeatedly draws not only on scripture, but also on work by pagan Romans and Muslims. This is because Catholic morality derives from natural law, which is presumed to be "written on the hearts of men." Of course the natural law does not dictate exact outcomes in every case, but like a vector, it points in generally acceptable moral directions. And because natural law is intuitively known to everyone, it is accessible to all: Pagans, Muslims, and even Protestants.
So sure, the Evangelicals don't denounce murder for the same reason as Catholics or Muslims or Jews or atheists. But we all know murder is wrong because "everything naturally loves itself, the result being that everything naturally keeps itself in being, and resists corruptions so far as it can." (ST II Q.64 A.5). One doesn't need to be an evolutionary psychologist to know that our natural inclination is to remain alive, and this insight provides a foundation for moral reasoning that is accessible to everyone. Of course, there are exceptions and outliers (sin exists) but the same moral intuition is available to all.
Similarly, Catholic teaching avoids the tired capitalism/socialism debate with the idea of just price. We are all social beings - no man is an island - and justice is about rendering to each man his due. When we speak of what each man is due, we of course consider the value that transacting parties places on obtaining or providing an item or service (which is why socialism is against CST) but that is not the only consideration. The common good dictates that you are in fact your brother's keeper, even if he is across the bargaining table. Unconscionable contracts, unjust wages, and the like offend the idea of natural justice, but the mere existence of private property does not.
What is CST?
Catholic social teaching.
We evangelicals have become a lot more open to natural law in the last couple of decades, though you’re right that it has a status well below the Bible.
To ask a moral foundations followup to your last paragraph, what do you take to be the foundations of Roman Catholic social teaching? From the outside it looks like a jumble of extremely principled positions with weirdly sentimental ones.
What do you mean by foundations? The theological foundations are scripture and tradition as understood via the application of natural reason. If you're talking about the academic/legal work which most completely articulates the natural law from a Catholic perspective, I think it is Summa Theologica, which is repeatedly cited by the Catechism to this day.
I usually see Catholic social teaching used by Catholics to refer to a body of thought laid down over the last century or so, rather than all Roman Catholic teachings on social issues across time, and I hoped that you could clarify the foundations of that body in particular. I certainly can’t define it; the boundaries seem pretty fuzzy.
If you’re referring to all Catholic social thought, or to Catholic thought in general, then of course Aquinas is the first person I’d think of.
Ah, I see. I think of it as being all the Church's teachings that are relevant to social life, so, a subset of the larger doctrine. Obviously there's tons of stuff that goes into that, but the USCCB has an official summary of CST's key themes here:
https://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/catholic-social-teaching/seven-themes-of-catholic-social-teaching
Not a Catholic here but I think the Vatican II conference, the changes there and the effects among Catholics have been a big deal. Might be overshadowing the prior centuries of teaching & discussion.
Apparently Romano Amerio’s “Iota Unum” is a good source of information on those changes.
I’m sympathetic to a charismatic-style experience of Holy Spirit but I just can’t do biblical literalism; took Latin in middle school, I can recognize the rhythm of clumsy translation. I think a busy monk would be just as likely to write “maketh me to lie down in green pastures” as “maketh me lie down in green pastures” due to the way Latin infinitives work. Considering layers of Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew before that, and literalism just seems impossible. This conflict may end up funneling me into Catholicism.
Thank you for the book recommendation.
I’d like to write an effortpost on the discipline of textual criticism, but I am totally unqualified. Instead I’ll summarize its existence:
Both Protestants and Catholics are aware of the reality of scribal error. Textual critics take original language manuscripts and group them into families based on variant readings that reflect a common ancestor. They compare the differences based on the kinds of errors scribes make, taking into account the family and age of the manuscript – older manuscripts had less time to accumulate errors, of course. They also compare with ancient translations, which are sometimes based on original language text families that have not come down to us.
The textual disputes that remain aren’t at the center of doctrinal disputes, and positions on them don’t really break down along denominational lines. Protestants and Catholics do have differences in the canon of the Old Testament, but that’s a dispute about what qualifies a text to be included and not about scribal error.
It’s reassuring to know people are doing that work. I should look for it.
Yeah but the problem with the Protestant take - at least what I see from Evangelicals - is that they run around being like “tradition is heresy because it isn’t in scripture!”
This seems ridiculous to me. The church fathers compiled scripture, and it developed right alongside tradition. If some aspect of tradition seems inconsistent with scripture, the simple fact that it is definitely not, because the same men - Christ’s first followers - developed both.
I've generally seen Leon XIII's encyclical de rerum novarum as the first text specifically about Catholic social teaching, but obviously it draws from an older tradition.
(It's significance may be overstated in France due to the debates around monarchy and democracy that happened at the same time)
He is Jewish. Seems weird to discuss which version of another religion he is.
Yes, but is he a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?
"Yes, Mr. O'Flanagan, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?"
He’s an atheist though? Or at least that’s what I read somewhere.
I believe he attends central synagogue in nyc. Judaism, especially the reform branch, isn’t particularly bothered about whether you believe in god’s existence and, yes, my understanding is that he is not a believer. But he certainly has a religious tradition that he is part of and if you want to think about religious influence on his worldview (and there is a lot to mine there), I would look to Judaism.
I also found Haidt to be doing genteel scientific astrology. With that said, I think socialists fit into his model of liberals easily, without much hacking needed at all.
Socialists highly value free-rider punishment, but the free riders are the greedy "millionaires and billionaires" who take more than their share - more than they could possibly deserve. They also highly value care, in wanting to redistribute their ill-gotten gains to the needy. Aren't these the foundations he attributes to liberals? Couldn't he just say that socialists are people with liberal foundations, who take them up to 11?
There are too many socialisms to generalize about them. Even Marx distinguished utopian socialism from scientific socialism. Egalitarian socialists are all about equal income or equal wealth, or equal something. There are market socialists. About the only thing they necessarily agree on is that the bad thing is all capitalism's fault. They don’t even agree on what the bad thing is.
+0.5
+1. The critiques based on how differently liberals and conservatives are behaving a decade later are much more telling than the points about socialism.
>Where are the socialists?
>There are just no socialists in Haidt’s world.
Haidt was born in 1963. Very few socialists existed in the USA until about a decade ago, and this book is a decade old. Bernie Sanders is a freakish aberration who resides in a miniature, desolate state. He appears to have, however, inspired many young people in recent years.
But Haidt claims to be identifying _universal_ moral pillars, not just those in the USA.
There were plenty of socialists back then. The collapse of the USSR made it slightly more embarrassing to admit it. Much of '60s radical politics was about socialism vs. capitalism. The New Left were all reading Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School. Establishment media tended to smear them and the FBI infiltrated them.
Vermont's not that bad - I've been there a couple of times and it's really quite nice.
Haidt claimed to have been significantly influenced by political thought from other countries, including India, where socialism is not a freakish aberration.
Well, I haven't read the book and barely read the review because it is too verbose, but I was under the impression the political framing is USA centric. No?
It is USA centric. But the review mentioned that Haidt learned to understand sanctity while living in India. If he uses India as a major contributor for his understanding of universal moral foundations, it is surprising that he has a blind spot for socialism.
There are other countries than the US.
Socialism was out of fashion from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the crash of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
Now it's back in fashion.
It’s been a while since I read The Righteous Mind, but I found the review helpful to think through some things. Certainly the changes to the world since c. 2014 make the book look quite dated. I wonder what Haidt has to say about it now.
I don’t think that reasoning from tribe to foundations exactly works. The social-justice–adjacent folks that I know do seem to feel the violation of sanctity deeply, which Haidt did not predict, but their treatment of authority is less heartfelt and more tactical.
The reflections on Haidt’s utilitarianism are interesting, because I mostly ignored it when I read the book. Unlike Haidt, I am not a utilitarian myself. I understood the possible range of discussion to be limited by the norms of social science. I think that a pretty interesting attempt at a moral–moral-psychological synthesis could be made by a natural law theorist; but if a natural law theorist were discovered at a social psychology conference, would anyone respect him enough to hear him out? He’d be tarred and feathered, then run out of town on a rail.
Similarly, it’s true that Haidt treats religious conservatives as non-agents, but he treats pretty much everyone as a non-agent, so as a conservative evangelical I didn’t feel particularly singled out. It’s also true that we don’t ordinarily reason morally from game theory, but most of the people I consider to be conservative intellectuals don’t either. That’s more common among neoreactionaries and among rationalists trying to steelman conservativism.
There is a failure to distinguish between tactics and foundations in this review. I'm less interested in where the parties are now than whether they will snap back to where they were in the next few decades.
Having said that, I view MFT as a model, not a real theory. Authority scales have always been biased because they focus on non-leftist organizations. And the tail really does wag the dog quite a bit, as tribalism causes path dependencies in ethics.
I’m only halfway through this review but so far it’s making my day (for boring, complex reasons). So this might be credit the review doesn’t deserve but right now I think it’s great.
Liberals concerned with care, fairness & liberty, libertarians with liberty, and conservatives with all of the foundations - that resonates with me. I think liberalism was concerned with all of them at one point, but care taken to extremes conflicts with every policy position, so they had to keep jettisoning foundations (if that’s even possible). Hence any rebalancing looks like reducing care (anathema).
The group evolution bit is also interesting. Thank you to this writer.
Except now I disagree with “tribalism drives morality.” That can’t be the whole story, or there would never be internecine moral conflict, someone married to someone of another political bent but still functioning as a unified whole for other tasks, etc.
It's not the whole story, but it's clearly part of it. I think calling it tribalism is also much more descriptive than Haidt's loyalty. The desire to be the most whatever in your group and do it in a performative way is much more toxic than old-fashioned loyalty.
I’m running into my unfamiliarity with it & feeling stupid but curious. Your description totally makes sense but when I think about group dynamics in the 70s/80s/90s (my formative decades) I think it operated differently. A group was more like an accretion disk than like something sealed in a can. One could be a “group member” simply by showing up often enough (ie to team practice, religious service, extracurricular etc) with leadership or performative belonging not required. Some activities require investment (model rockets, trains, amateur astronomy, mountain biking) but even then one can participate without performativity. Some things are very performative (cheer team for example) but there are lots of things that are not. Some of the best leaders or most invested are the least performative.
Digital-age group styles might encourage performativity simply because if one doesn’t put something online, no one else knows they’re there. Even standing in the back of the room, so to speak, requires performance - an avatar, some type of post, etc. It seems like it might influence the group to take the “can” form rather than “accretion disk” form because the territory available for partial participation is different. In an IRL group the loyalty can be to an individual or to some values, online it seems even the loyalty to the individual is actually loyalty to an abstraction of the individual (more like fandom), and the loyalty to values might glom onto the fandom to create an abstract construct which one can then perform to varying degrees. But IRL groups were/are not entirely that way, so this tribalism shouldn’t be an internal driver of moral/political psychology for pre-digital society.
Wanting to be the best goalie isn’t primarily performative for example.
The group dynamics layer i remember best is the region where the dedicated people mock the performative ones and measure their own devotion specifically inverse to performativity.
I’m not talking about groups like soccer goalies, I’m talking about religious or political groups. In those, you do see people competing to show who’s the purest or strictest. The most devout / most gun loving / most woke. This definitely predates digital life. Just look at the dynamics of religious denominations.
Yes, I agree that (some) people in (most) groups compete to establish hierarchy and that can be along purity/strictness lines.
Sometimes that is congruent with people competing to be better (or to improve) at whatever the point of the group is (ie best goalie). In a political group you might get best orator, most effective canvasser, best campaign manager (whoever is helping Fetterman with the “New Jersey’s Own Dr. Oz” campaign is a genius), etc. This might be a separate axis from the purity. For example in Xtianity you can get the “prodigal” axis on which the extent of one’s prior sin and subsequent redemption is the grounds for competition.
People definitely do compete to be, or be seen as, most hardcore in their group. But when the skaters are just posing and nobody skates anymore, the scene dies. When it’s all posing, no worship, no policy, etc, no forward motion, when the “tribalism” or “seeming” takes over, function declines.
Tribalism might be another name for nationalism, or regionalism, or identitarianism. Unconscious loyalty versus conscious loyalty? I just don’t buy “tribalism creates everything.” It gets kind of chicken-versus-egg. What created the tribes, then? At least one other book review concluded that tribalism was a primary driver of human experience. I’d say yes it’s a factor but it is not alone creating individual moral intuitions from a blank slate. Dynamics of rejection and belonging do factor in - but if it were the only factor, then if there were workers who weren’t socialists, they’d be failing to compete correctly and subject to false consciousness. But there are other axes operating at the same time.
There are also other roles in addition to “best” which matter in a group. President, VP, secretary, treasurer, MP for climate policy, etc, a single tribe may have multiple necessary leadership roles, with nuanced functions, and that function is not identical to “best partisan.”
In other words yes, I agree, people do this but it isn’t the only group dynamic or even the most important for most groups with any longevity.
I agree, it’s a factor but clearly not the only one. If I were in charge of Haidt’s taxonomy, such as it is, I’d consider renaming loyalty to tribalism.
I actually just started reading this book recently myself, though I've known about Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory for years now and I've largely internalized some basic version of it into my overall political worldview. I've finished reading the first two sections of the book, but I haven't made it to the third one yet, and so far I don't see much indication of the motte-and-bailey you're describing. Maybe that's something that mostly comes through in the last third of the book?
In any case, I feel like you're being rather hard on Haidt for not taking the beliefs of devoutly religious conservatives at face value. Unless you're an actual religious fundamentalist yourself and believe that all of the commands in the Bible are the literal Word of God, it's basically impossible to take those beliefs at face value. At most, you can point out that religious conservatives earnestly believe those ideas, but that still just begs the question of *why* those particular ideas are the ones that became central to conservative religious dogma. Maybe Haidt's answer isn't the correct one, but your argument here would apply just as much to any other attempt to answer this question. If these cultural norms aren't a result of individual selection, but they aren't a result of group selection either (and presumably aren't the result of actual divine intervention like the fundies believe), then where did they come from? Random chance? That seems even more dismissive toward conservative beliefs. If you think "these norms were once adaptive, but aren't adaptive any longer" is insulting to the people who hold those ideas, then "these norms were never adaptive, they're arbitrary cultural artifacts that stuck around through pure inertia" is even more insulting.
"Aspects of a social group that make it [...] more reproductively fit at the social level are often aspects that make that social group incredibly unpleasant for almost all or even all of its constituent individuals."
Considering that much of human history was "incredibly unpleasant" for people who weren't part of the ruling class, and in many cases even for the people who were part of the ruling class, I don't feel like this is a good argument against group selection effects on culture. If anything it's all the more proof that cultural evolution all too often wins out against what would be best for individuals.
> In any case, I feel like you're being rather hard on Haidt for not taking the beliefs of devoutly religious conservatives at face value. Unless you're an actual religious fundamentalist yourself and believe that all of the commands in the Bible are the literal Word of God, it's basically impossible to take those beliefs at face value. At most, you can point out that religious conservatives earnestly believe those ideas, but that still just begs the question of why those particular ideas are the ones that became central to conservative religious dogma. Maybe Haidt's answer isn't the correct one, but your argument here would apply just as much to any other attempt to answer this question. If these cultural norms aren't a result of individual selection, but they aren't a result of group selection either (and presumably aren't the result of actual divine intervention like the fundies believe), then where did they come from? Random chance?
An explanation of where an ideas-set comes from is not necessarily useful for understanding why an ideas-set appeals to people, or how people with an ideas-set conceptualize the world.
Evangelicals act, and perceive the world, as if the Christian God described in the Bible actually exists. This is a facts-claim with numerous downstream moral claims (admittedly, sometimes poorly thought out ones, but that's hardly unique to Evangelicals). It's very easy to take these beliefs at face value, much the same as I can take the beliefs of someone who believes torture is a useful interrogation tool at face value. They're just wrong, because they believe a wrong set of facts, which leads them to a wrong conclusion. (Or perhaps I do.) To claim that actually, you believe X because of Y weird esoteric thing, feels more offensive than just to say you believe X.
"An explanation of where an ideas-set comes from is not necessarily useful for understanding why an ideas-set appeals to people, or how people with an ideas-set conceptualize the world."
It probably helps though, particularly if your goal is to find any sort of reasonable compromise with the people who hold those ideas, or to persuade them to change their minds.
"It's very easy to take these beliefs at face value, much the same as I can take the beliefs of someone who believes torture is a useful interrogation tool at face value."
Interesting example, because I think a lot of people (including many "normies" who've never read a social psychology book in their lives) *wouldn't* take that claim at face value. They'd assume that the torturer was either an authoritarian who supported the use of torture as a particularly nasty deterrent to scare people into compliance, or simply a pathological sadist who got a thrill out of causing pain. In either case, there'd be an assumption that "torture is the best way of getting information out of suspects" is simply an excuse, whether the torturer is consciously aware of that fact or not.
Why do people think torture isn't a useful interrogation tool?
It certainly is useful in some circumstances (the person you are torturing knows what you want to know, and checking false info is easy). Lets say you are trying to get into a safe.
Generalized torture, particularly of people who don't know the "safe combo" on the other hand isn't going to be very successful and is going to lead to a lot of false reports.
I feel like people really confuse the two cases.
It's not a useful tool because 99.99% of all cases torture is applied in, it is not "get the safe combo now," which is the only time it might actually be useful.
>Considering that much of human history was "incredibly unpleasant" for people who weren't part of the ruling class, and in many cases even for the people who were part of the ruling class, I don't feel like this is a good argument against group selection effects on culture. If anything it's all the more proof that cultural evolution all too often wins out against what would be best for individuals.
I believe the author is using this to argue against the *normative* part of Haidt's ethics, not the descriptive part. The argument isn't "there are no group selection effects on culture," it's "group selection effects often lead to things that may help in group survival but are terrible for individuals within that group, therefore group selection cannot justify morality."
> "group selection effects often lead to things that may help in group survival but are terrible for individuals within that group, therefore group selection cannot justify morality."
That doesn't follow though. Morality sometimes could require individual sacrifice for the group, like the trolley problem.
One iteration on moral foundations theory that seems a bit more compelling is the game-theory based Morality-as-Cooperation proposal: https://behavioralscientist.org/whats-wrong-with-moral-foundations-theory-and-how-to-get-moral-psychology-right/
They break down moral intuitions into 7 dimensions based on certain biological strategies:
Family - Kin selection / Kin Altruism
Group - Coordination / Mutualism
Reciprocity - Social Dilemma / Reciprocal Altruism
Heroism - Conflict Resolution (Contest) / Hawkish Displays
Deference - Conflict Resolution (Contest) / Dove-ish Displays
Fairness - Conflict Resolution (Bargaining) / Division
Property - Conflict Resolution (Possession) / Ownership
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656618303568#t0005
Personally, I'm a Gemini.
I said this higher up in the thread, but the idea that all morality is just cooperation is a very western idea, and one I'm not very sympathetic to. But having said that, I like Curry's model. Much better than Haidts
Half-baked, five-minute thinking thoughts incoming:
"I think that political differences are what drive our differences in moral intuition."
Could it perhaps be some kind of generational question, where people have their moral intuition and stick with it, but e.g. are liberal in their teens and gradually change until they code conservative in their 40s (not because of the changing landscape, but because of actual changed beliefs), and possibly a corresponding conversative-in-their-teens becoming liberal in their 40s?
So (for example) people who had strong 'purity' desires in their teens back then are now liberally-minded. The people disagreeing with them are 'pushed' into the conversative camp, because they don't find commonality with the liberal camp.
To be clear, this is extremely shooting from the hip (for added context: I am not even from the US, so I have far less data to work with than most commenters here). I certainly don't think this is plausible enough to save Haidt's categorisation, certainly not in any meaningful way - it breaks the association between the moral foundations and the political camps, even if it would rescue the permanence of the moral foundations - but it was a third option that came to mind as I read the review.
I don't believe this (currently), but I could imagine a world where someone further iterates on this idea and then steelmans it, in which I might be led to believe it.
A few people have already discussed that possibility and elaborated on it further. See: https://status451.com/2017/11/05/i-see-trad-people/
I disagree with the central criticism of Haidt here based on a normative read of Adam Smith. You can't pigeonhole Smith as making exlcusively normative claims and accuse Haidt of mistaking those for descriptive claims. Smith was in part describing a social phenomenon: people contributing to the common good by following self-interest in cooperation with others.
This is *not* the same as exalting laissez-faire as the "right" economic principle, although Smith may have done some of that as well. A wide range of economic systems are compatible with the insight that the profit motive keeps societies running. The only systems it really excludes are economies that attempt to remove that motive entirely, and these economies have flopped every time they've been tried (to my knowledge).
Haidt is right to criticize some liberals and leftists for demonizing and dismissing the profit motive as a fundamental economic force. It is not merely normatively wrong but descriptively ignorant, and quite comparable to rejection of evolution. Even the Chinese Communists figured this out after their disastrous experience with Maoist economics.
I have yet to read through the whole review but I am extremely concerned that there are only two hits when I ctrl+f for the word "death". As Scott has written about a little in the past, moral intuitions regarding existence vs. non-existence are different from intuitions regarding suffering vs. happiness — in fact they are orthogonal axes and it is possible for people to value one radically more than the other. A lot of moral disagreements rest there.
Great review! Liked your straightforward, slow, methodical style.
Though I didn't read all of it. The atom/boson/RH/LH metaphor got a bit too complex and tedious to follow and didn't get to the point fast enough, so I skimmed to the juicier bits and conclusion.
Especially liked the idea that EA altruists only cared about one foundation. That's exactly my problem with them, that I did not have the right words for:
They care too much and value too little :)
It's a shame that you didn't have time for steelmanning this view. Why do people only care about care? You sorta hinted at "group traits that punish subversion and stabilize hierarchy and grow the group make individuals miserable". Helpful to a degree.
But it gives me a good frame to read up on Singer and such.
Dear Anonymous Reviewer,
I believe you will enjoy watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAdl6hS0bjw and then of course this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-jS4e3zacI
I haven't read the book, but I have seen a lot of Haidt interviews. I always got the impression that what he was saying was neither "conservatives come to their beliefs through careful thought about the way heuristics can mold utilitarian outcomes" nor "conservative beliefs include powerful heuristics that might be better for utilitarian outcomes." It always seemed that what he was saying was actually "here is how conservatives think of their morals, and liberal failure to engage with this way of thinking makes it impossible for liberals and conservatives to communicate."
Haidt talking about wiping his butt with the wrong hand and discovering sacredness, silly though it may be, isn't supposed to be justification of the sacredness principle, and it's not supposed to be an explanation of why conservatives believe in the sacredness principle. It's supposed to be a bridge into sacredness for people who justify their morals exclusively through care. So that liberals can win some arguments.
I don't find this as compelling as I did when I first heard it, to be honest: why not take it a step further and just start disingenuously claiming that God wants Medicare for All. But it is absolutely true that even as liberals become more obsessed with "sacredness" in the form of cultural taboos, if you have a conversation with most liberals about why they think Mexican food is cultural appropriation or whatever they're on about this week, they'll give you a care/harm answer. And if you have a conversation with a conservative on how Donald Trump can possibly represent them, they'll tell you that ol' Donny Boy was sent by God Almighty and His Son, Jesus, to own the Godless libs. Don't believe me? Check out this absolutely unhinged article on Prophecy Reform, meant to reign in this impulse (Scott linked something about this like a year ago): https://religionunplugged.com/news/2021/4/28/charismatics-issue-prophetic-standards-to-address-false-trump-prophecies
I tend to be skeptical that this talk is coming from an honest place: I think it's likely that it's more of a cultural passphrase than it is a genuine expression of values. But also, that's me assuming a vast coverup instead of taking the literal messages at face value. I might think it's insane to think that a vaguely China-inspired prom dress is doing harm, and that any outcry is obviously some sort of base revulsion masquerading as utilitarian concern, but that's not what the people doing the outcry are saying. And I might think it's insane that anyone could view Trump as a messenger of God, and not a tool sharpened to a fine point to serve conservative interests, but that's not what the people supporting Trump are saying. I may not be completely qualified to comment on their motives for saying it.
I've often remarked that Kant's Categorical Imperative bears a striking resemblance to Rule Utilitarianism.
I think anything that tries to argue “conservatives are like THIS while liberals are like THIS” is going to fail to understand political differences, because politics is a messy system of alliances, not an expression of underlying moral values.
You might as well try to understand the moral similarities between Japanese and Finnish worldviews in WW2 to decipher why they fought on the same side.
Another issue I have with this review is the "Where is the Socialists?" section. You wrote: "Where in his six foundations would fit the now very commonly expressed, and historically somewhat influential idea that it’s a good idea for everyone to roughly have the same level of wealth, [etc.]? It either has to show up the same as welfare-queen-punishment, which is its polar opposite, in the fairness foundation..."
First off, I'd question your claim that socialist ideas are "now very commonly expressed." At least here in the Western world, socialism is a fringe ideology. (And no, the Nordic states are not socialist, that's a misconception. The Nordic states are welfare capitalist nations, and while they may have very high taxes and very generous social programs, they also have freer markets than the U.S. does overall.) Sure, socialism is a few orders of magnitude less fringe than Yarvin's bizarre neo-reactionary nonsense, but that's not saying much: it just means that socialists comprise 1% of the population, in contrast to the 0.001% of the population that subscribes to Yarvinism. Certainly, there are far fewer socialists than there are conservatives, liberals, or libertarians, so I can't blame Haidt for excluding them, even taking the last 10 years into account.
But I do agree that socialist ideas were "historically somewhat influential," which brings me to my second and far more important point: The fact that Haidt's framework puts socialism and opposition to welfare queens in the same category is a *feature*, not a bug. Historically, socialism was an ideology for workers, particularly blue-collar manual laborers, and it largely appealed to them for the same reasons that anti-welfare conservatism appeals to the blue-collar crowd today. In both cases, the workers are upset that they're stuck doing hard labor while another group is seemingly getting stuff for free at their expense; the only difference between the old-school labor leftists and modern anti-welfare conservatives is that the former directed their anger upwards at the bourgeoisie for "stealing" the surplus value of their labor, while the latter direct their anger downwards at the lumpenproletariat for "stealing" their wages via government taxation and redistribution.
In other words, while socialism and opposition to welfare queens might appear to be polar opposites on the object level, they both have a similar psychological impetus driving them, which is the fundamental idea that the people who did the work of picking the apples are the ones who deserve to eat the apples. It's important to remember that the core idea of socialism is not "everyone deserves free stuff," but rather "workers are entitled to the full value of the results of their labor." It's an ideology for proletarians who take pride in their work, not for lumpenproles looking for a handout. Socialists opposed the bourgeoisie precisely because wealthy property owners were perceived as the ultimate free riders, making money off the labor of the working class without doing any real labor themselves. This fits in very well with Haidt's emphasis on fairness and proportionality.
Re Socialism: you're making a "no true Scotsman" argument.
I'm defining socialism as it was defined by the ideology's foundational thinkers, by the overwhelming majority of socialists in the West up until the 1960s, and by the overwhelming majority of socialists in the world today. Just because it's not how modern college activists in the U.S. and Western Europe think of socialism doesn't mean it's wrong, especially since first-world college activists are an infinitesimally small minority on the global and historical scale.
The reviewer himself even says that his experience with socialism in college was mostly just about various social/cultural issues, and that the economic aspects were largely ignored. But socialism is an economic ideology first and foremost, and entirely orthogonal to social and cultural issues. (In fact, most socialists throughout history have been quite culturally conservative, and this is still very much the case in non-Western countries today: China is hardly a bastion of social progressivism, and the Soviet Union's policies on Culture War issues were reactionary to an extreme that makes the average American conservative look downright tolerant by comparison. Even in the West, socialist activists and labor organizers intentionally distanced themselves from feminism and the LGBT rights movement for most of the 20th century.) So the idea that you can be "socialist, but not on economic issues" is nonsensical - the ideology is entirely about economic issues!
It's true that there are many different variants of socialism. It would be a "No True Scotsman" argument if I said that only Marxist-Leninists were real socialists and the DemSoc types didn't count, or vice-versa. But for all of the disagreements between the MLs, DemSocs, syndicalists, and anarchists, they all agreed that the core foundation of socialism was economic in nature. So if you're a college activist who doesn't care about worker ownership of the means of production at all, and simply identifies as a "socialist" because you have left-wing stances on Culture War issues that neither Marx nor Bakunin would've given a damn about, then I think it's fair to say that the label doesn't fit.
It's fallacious for the Glaswegian to say that the Edinburgher isn't a true Scotsman. It's not fallacious for either of them to point out that Idi Amin isn't a true Scotsman, despite his claims to the contrary.
While you’re absolutely right about socialism in terms of the historical roots of the philosophy, “socialism” in the modern context bears little relation to that working class foundation. It got co-opted and bastardised long ago by “champagne socialists”. It’s now an ideology of academics and students, not manual labourers. “Socialists” these days advocate for student debt forgiveness, rather than the 40 hour week.
> It got co-opted and bastardised long ago by “champagne socialists”
Maybe I'm just not moving in the right circles, but it seems to have been bastardized, at least in America, when Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016. Before that year I had never heard anyone in the US self-identify as a socialist who didn't earnestly mean that investor-capitalism should be completely replaced by 100% worker-owned coops and nationalized corporations. There should be no stock-market and no private investors.
Now if you are telling me that, well, Social Democracy is basically Democratic Socialism, I'm really, really confused AND I don't trust you, because actual socialists do exist in your political coalition. Part of the confusion is that I'm all for Social Democracy and all against Democratic Socialism. I view them as radically different: one good, the other bad. If you conflate these two things, it makes my head spin.
I recommend that all the young people who are really for Social Democracy start saying that is what they are for and not Socialism, because not many people who grew up during the Cold War want anything to do with self-identified Socialists. You may as well call yourselves Fascists and then say, you know, like Norway...
"Now if you are telling me that, well, Social Democracy is basically Democratic Socialism, I'm really, really confused AND I don't trust you, because actual socialists do exist in your political coalition. Part of the confusion is that I'm all for Social Democracy and all against Democratic Socialism. I view them as radically different: one good, the other bad. If you conflate these two things, it makes my head spin."
This is exactly how I feel too. The conflation of center-left welfare capitalism with full-on socialism is one of the worst failings of modern political discourse. It only serves to benefit two groups: Conservatives (who can then point at anyone left of Reagan and say "see, liberals are socialists, just like Stalin!"), and actual revolutionary socialists (who can then rally social democrats to their cause by claiming "we just want the country to be more like Norway," despite actually wanting it to be more like China). And maybe also some pandering left-wing politicians (who can claim they're "socialist" to rally support from hip young anti-establishment activists, despite their actual policies being more in line with social democracy).
Ideological socialism was never a proletarian ideology, but was always led by the equivalent of the modern college students, eg. Marx, Lassalle, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Berger, Debs, the Webbs. Its major motivations were "capitalism is inefficient" and "we must do something to help the poor workers."
They then became the intellectual wing of various union-based parties in Europe, which in practice became social democratic as none of their proletarian supporters actually wanted socialism all that much, but were quite keen on collective bargaining and welfare.
These groups had "punishing free riders" as their principle motivation to the extent they thought of capitalists as free riders. The socialist intellectuals were clearly motivated by something like the care foundation, and the labour voters are motivated by fairness in the sense of "it's not fair that I don't get paid holidays," which doesn't seem to be what Haidt is talking about.
This is correct. The vast majority of socialist leaders were intellectuals who were often quite hostile to reforms to improve the worker's lives because it made their overall project of remaking society less likely.
We need the bourgeoise to exploit the workers really badly, or otherwise won't want a revolution!
Haidt claims to be heavily influence in his political thinking by living in India. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) regularly wins power in major states, including Kerala and West Bengal. I don't think that you can characterize socialism as fringe ideology in India.
So, one thing that the review didn't really touch on is Haidt's distinction between individualistic and sociocentric cultures. The modern Western world is individualistic, whereas nearly all non-Western and pre-modern cultures are/were sociocentric. Sociocentric cultures tend to value loyalty, tradition, and purity, similar to conservatives within individualistic cultures, but to an even further extreme. This discovery is a big part of what made Haidt develop his theory of moral foundations to begin with!
Haidt considers both fascism and the sort of authoritarian, nationalistic, patriarchal socialism found in non-Western nations (e.g. Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam, and very likely the Marxists in India too) to be "ultra-sociocentric," implying they would value loyalty, tradition, and purity to an even greater extent than Western conservatives. It's definitely an idea rooted in horseshoe theory, since it portrays literal communists as being even more *right-wing* in their values than the average right-winger and akin to literal fascists. But I think the use of horseshoe theory is justified here, since (as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread) most communist regimes were actually quite regressive on social and cultural issues.
It depends on which social and cultural issues you mean, though.
Yes, starting in the 1930s communist regimes became generally 'sex-negative' in contemporary terms--although Soviet ideology was generally pro-free-love during the '20s. Communist regimes were hostile to homosexuality as part of this general turn toward sex-negativity.
But they never abandoned their theoretical commitment to gender equality, despite glorification of "family values" and women's traditional roles as mothers alongside their new roles as workers. A lot of communist sex-negativity was at least rhetorically justified on what we would now call sex-negative feminist grounds: protecting women from exploitation and degradation.
Similarly, communist regimes remained consistently anti-religious. (I mention this because the author of the review mentioned opposition to Sharia courts and religious instruction in schools among activities his socialist comrades engaged in--such activism would be completely in line with the traditional attitude of communist states toward religion.)
I have my own political framework theory based on 3 axes: conservatism, socialism, and liberalism. After reading this review though I realise it could be adapted to a moral framework theory too: trust, fairness, and freedom. I will briefly try to see if I can rescue Haidt's idea that morals drive politics rather than the other way around by changing what the moral groups are.
A high trust society is useful because it massively reduces transaction costs and has a greater chance of ensuring long term group survival (group evolution theory). High trust is obtained through expressing the group's religious statements, low immigration, conformity, etc.
A high fairness society is useful because everyone gets their basic needs tended to, everyone gets a chance to "make it" (individual evolution theory). High fairness is obtained through major redistribution by government and building infrastructure.
A high freedom society is useful because people can do what they want to, either in their personal life or in business (individual evolution theory). High fairness is obtained by having a strong and independent judicial system and clear property rights.
Each moral is useful, sometimes more useful in one situation versus another (think rural versus urban or ex-slave states versus not), but when one is emphasised far beyond the others in politics it makes for an inefficient system of governance.
I have no idea if these categories fit the data, this is just observational.
As for does it fit the US? The world is complex, there is more than one thing going on. In the case of the US the main issue I see is that, despite the name, it is a state of nations and everyone would be a lot happier if it was broken up. The political structure there is very dualist but I see political (and maybe moral?) theory as trialist is nature, at least in the industrial epoch. This would predict an unstable party system in the US.
Thank you! I've been reading Haidt for nearly 20 years, and "The Righteous Mind" is amazingly bad (with some good points, as you've noted). It's incredibly gratifying to have someone identify many of the same points that have bugged the sh!t out of me.....
Seconded. It's been very frustrating to me that it acquired the "aura" the reviewer identifies.
I really enjoyed this review, I loved and recommended the book when I'd read it long ago and this helped me reappraise many of my naive reactions to its (to me) very persuasive prose. Looking forward to finding out who the author of this review is as I'd like to read more.
About the objection to omitting socialism, I found that after reading the book I actually started understanding socialism more easily within a moral emotion framework. When socialists say things like "obscene wealth" or "billionaires should not exist," I understand those most easily as irrationally strong emotional responses to an evolved fairness sensitivity. That's the only thing for me that justifies the intensity of those positions as expressed, they're associated not with a cool assessment of the correct distribution of resources but a visceral disgust at the outliers. Having not read it in some time I'm sure you're right that Haidt doesn't make this interpretation explicit, and it may be a case where his framework can be bent to 'explain' anything you like, but it sounds basically right to me. Am I missing something that disqualifies socialists completely from his framework, even if he groups them with other seemingly opposing factions?
Maybe it's worth pointing to some later academic takes on MFT:
A 2021 review (https://t.co/JWRKwVMCKR):
> With 89 samples, 605 effect sizes, and 33,804 independent participants, in addition to 192,870 participants from the widely used YourMorals.org website, the basic differences about conservatives and liberals are supported. Yet, heterogeneity is moderate, and the results may be less generalizable across samples and political cultures than previously thought. The effect sizes obtained from the YourMorals.org data appear inflated compared with independent samples, which is partly related to political interest and may be because of self-selection. The association of moral foundations to political orientation varies culturally (between regions and countries) and subculturally (between White and Black respondents and in response to political interest). The associations also differ depending on the choice of the social or economic dimension and its labeling, supporting both the bidimensional model of political orientation and the findings that the dimensions are often strongly correlated.
A 2015 theoretical critique focused on purity (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.833.8295&rep=rep1&type=pdf):
> The main evidence for these claims [of the MFT model of (potentially evolved) discrete cognitive modules] comes from researcher-constructed scenarios of ‘‘harm’’ (e.g., murder) and ‘‘purity’’ (e.g., chicken masturbation) that reveal different patterns of judgment (Graham et al., 2013). However, our research finds that these scenarios fundamentally confound moral content (harm vs. purity) with domain-general dimensions, including severity and weirdness (among potential others; Gray & Wegner, 2011). In our controlled studies, purity per se demonstrates no special effect on moral cognition, nor does it appear to be distinct from harm—or even pass manipulation checks—all arguing against MFT modularity (Gray & Keeney, 2015).
2014 finding that authoritarianism and social dominance orientation mediate liberal-conservative differences in moral intuitions (https://t.co/y7g1xuZDKj):
> We demonstrate that liberal-conservative differences in moral intuitions are statistically mediated by authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, so that conservatives’ greater valuation of ingroup, authority, and purity concerns is attributable to higher levels of authoritarianism, whereas liberals’ greater valuation of fairness and harm avoidance is attributable to lower levels of social dominance. We also find that ingroup, authority, and purity concerns are positively associated with intergroup hostility and support for discrimination, whereas concerns about fairness and harm avoidance are negatively associated with these variables.
My impression as an outsider is that MFT isn't really holding up scientifically, partly for reasons the reviewer identifies—it's anchored in contingent politics, very much a product of its time, and the model is theoretically and philosophically incoherent. I like this review (it's my favorite among all the submissions I read, alongside Albion: In Twelve Books), but I think it goes too easy on Haidt.
"sanctity"? wtf? my own ethics center on aesthetics. I write beautiful programs. I try to lead a balanced life. &tc. you can go from aesthetics to sanctity, but not the other way around. talk about loading the dice before rolling.
Love the authorial voice.
Too long; needs an editor.
Learned things about the book I didn’t expect and were relevant to my interests.
Thumbs up
Many of these reviews have erred on the side of being a synopsis rather than a review. This one errs a bit too much on the other side, seeming to be mostly designed for people who have already read the book, or are at least familiar with its arguments.
On a more general note, I feel like 80% of the book reviews (both from Scott and the competition) I read on this site come down to "This book has the right sort of general idea about a lot of things, but the details are all wack".
As others have said, Haidt is onto something important here, but his ability to understand the right is limited by not actually being on the right. As such, let me offer my (probably equally blinkered) view of what things look like from the right of what he's missing: I've always thought of the main difference between the moral frameworks of the right and the left is that the left has what I'd call an unreasonable and pathological sympathy for losers, at the expense of treating people by consistent rules.
"Both perspectives are wrong, but it's useful to see how it looks from the other side."
They're both wrong, but they also both contain a bit of truth. Conservatives would prefer to err on the side of being too harsh, liberals would prefer to err on the side of being too lenient. It's probably the single most consistent psychological difference between them, even more so than Haidt's moral foundations. Of course, most people aren't extremist caricatures, so "unreasonable and pathological" behavior on either side is thankfully rare (not that it ever stops the other side's media from signal-boosting those rare examples until they start looking commonplace).
I wonder if the real driver isn't the conservatism = survive mindset, liberalism = thrive mindset dichotomy. If you view civilisation as fragile and liable to collapse at any time, you need to be harsh to force everyone to pull their weight and obey the rules, because if they don't it could literally bring about the downfall of society. If you take civilisation as more or less a given and assume it will always be here, then the main question isn't how to maintain civilisation but how to distribute its benefits, and you don't need to worry so much about free-riders and inefficiencies, because they don't pose an existential threat to society.
Well, on this point as well, as the reviewer points out, left-wingers have started to resemble right-wingers. "Cancel culture" can be extremely harsh: if you've uttered the n-word (and not even as an insult, only to refer to it), for example, you would deserve to lose your job, lose your friends, and never be able to find another job or other friends? But the same people would then urge leniency towards people they feel sympathetic to. So can right-wingers, by the way. So I'm not convinced this is really a difference between the left and the right.
“ human beings don’t naturally reason their way to moral decisions, but make them pretty much based on instinct”
I think “instinct” is a mistake here. I interpreted Haidt to be talking about something like system I and system II, which does not map onto instinct and reason. Instinct is genetic and static, system I can learn.
And the elephant can learn too.
I just wanted to comment that I found this review extremely pleasurable to read. I was literally laughing with happiness in a few places. I also think it made a lot of solid arguments, but I was very struck by how much I enjoyed it... The author reveals (I think?) that they are British, and maybe that has something to do with it: perhaps it's just that style of Britishness that feels like home to me.
Anyway, I loved it. Also, have always thought Haidt sounded like he was talking complete nonsense, but could never be bothered to read the book, so it's nice to have some hooks to hang my distaste on now.
I really liked it too - I did have a moment of, "Oh god, here we go" in the first couple of paragraphs, then it turned into a really good review straight after.
So far as attempting to doxx the author, it seems he went to a British university, but was raised Southern Baptist (so almost certainly of American extraction).
I very much enjoyed it also. I had some problems with the language. I have heard, 'normative', 'descriptive', teleological' etc. and I can look up their meaning, but I couldn't use them in a sentence and so it was hard for me to parse the meaning of some of the ideas expressed. So simpler words would have helped me. (I realize this is perhaps my failing and not that of the author.)
That correctly identified much of what I found frustrating about the book too.
To be charitable to Haidt, I'd say that his goal is to *actually* inspire more liberals to be sympathetic to conservatives not necessarily make the ideal rational argument that one should be so sympathetic. Explaining the descriptive reasons why having certain kinds of moral foundations might lead to better behavior in a number of situations probably is a way to make people who don't think about it too carefully to feel more sympathetic to those who take those moral foundations as normative. They shouldn't and it didn't work for me but I do think lots of people tend to be more sympathetic to behavior when they can understand why it might have arisen and see it as at least useful in *some* situation.
I'd add that I thought Haidt's crits of the new Atheists were a bit unfair as well. Many of the new atheists were very open to the beneficial aspects of ritual and other religious behavior. Indeed, some of them seem quite keen on the idea of replicating some of that ritual etc.. in a non-religious context.
The problem is (just as the review describes) that Haidt is often very sloppy about defining the questions/arguments. The new atheists would say: yay yah, all those rituals and stuff are great but the addition of the actual belief in the theological claims is completely harmful. However, Haidt is too eager to label them as small-minded to appreciate that they are answering a different question that he never addresses head on. Maybe you can argue that the rituals are completely impossible without actual belief (I don't think the new atheists would deny that it's harder...religious belief is pretty universal) but, absent such a demonstration, he doesn't actually reject the new atheist's argument. He merely points to something else that's good which goes along with what the new atheists are criticizing.
<<nor the intellectual conservative tradition of “what is good for the masses to believe is not identical to what’s fundamentally true, please consult my 60,000 word essay on decision theory, game theory, computational load, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for details, therefore Catholicism”.>>
Lol! I’d like to read that essay. Can anyone point me in the direction of something like that? Thanks
Read stuff from the Claremont Review of Books. Their politics are generally despicable, but the books they review and the articles they write are always fascinating.
Thank you for the pointer!
The fun fact is that those kind of ideas (Catholicism as a mean to some "good" society) were condemned by the Catholic church in the 30's (with the condemnation of Maurras and the Action Française).
While I found much of this convincing I think you are recasting Haidt's moral foundation's theory as a theory of partisan politics. Yes, he argues that differences in moral foundations explain differences in partisan affiliation but it's not directly a theory about political ideology.
Haidt's theory is directly predicting moral reactions, not theories. They aren't the same. The data that Haidt's moral foundations are designed to explain are direct emotional responses to situations. He has done empirical work showing that you can predict answers to questions about things like "is it wrong for an adult brother and sister to have consensual sex once using protection." Whether or not he has shown that those 5 categories are somehow special or if there are other basises that you could re-express those categories in terms of doesn't change the fact that discovering these five/six elements are very helpful in predicting what people say are their immediate moral reactions is an important insight.
Now the claims about politics are no different than an analysis of how race affects politics or other features. The political effects of differences in these traits aren't themselves what's supposed to justify them as useful concepts.
A boring, but I think accurate, way of summarizing things is that Haidt is good at psychology, which is his field, but he's bad at political science and ethical philosophy, which are not his fields. In this regard, he's like most scientists who sometimes write outside their fields.
I'm left confused about what we're trying to measure.
Given that we know people have strong tribal affiliation, we should expect that who/what people nominally support in the political sphere will be strongly colored by their tribal affiliations. But the overwhelming majority of human moral decision making/reasoning doesn't happen in the political sphere, it happens in day-to-day interactions at jobs, around neighbors, and with family.
My great aunt's facebook page suggests she's a rabid partisan, but knowing her in real life, the actual moral intuitions that drive her behavior and the behavior she expects from others look totally different. She is, to use the cliché, a kind sweet old lady. She would vehemently disapprove of anyone behaving at her dinner table or the grocery store the way politicians she supports routinely behave. And any knowledge of tribalism would suggest *we should expect this contradiction*. Saying "the tribal intuition overwhelms the moral intuition" in no way invalidates the existence of the moral intuition.
I have no particular views about Haidt's findings, but I'm not sure how the political landscape could be expected to confirm or disprove them.
It's interesting to note how polarized the reviews of the review are.
Anyway, I'm going to be the voice of reason and moderation in this rancorous debate between two sides that I cordially despise and take no great pains to understand, and give it a score that should satisfy both parties:
5/10, perfectly unremarkable.
Many of the studies Haidt talks about have since failed replication. The Macbeth effect failed replication. The Helzer & Pizzaro one failed replication. And so on. The failure of those to replicate makes it hard to know what to take away from several chapters. Are the chapters extraneous to his main point, so the failures mean little? Then why where they included in the first place? Or is his theory fatally wounded?
Also on the question of "why these particular foundations", Haidt has subsequently acknowledged they don't rest on anything. Haidt and his various co-authors "accept that the original list of foundations was 'arbitrary,' based on a limited review of only 'five books and articles,' and never intended to be 'exhaustive.'."
"The way most people make most moral decisions most of the time is on instinct, and then retrospectively justified by argument if necessary. "
I think there's a fundamental mistake here - it's not instinct but emotion (or feeling - what Hume called 'The passions') that underpins most moral positions. Instinct is really something completely different.
I am not sure what you think the difference between instinct and emotion is.
I would say that emotion is (to zeroth approximation) the mechanism through which instinct acts.
Like your final judgement.
Typo -- "The scientific would could do with a lot more of": "would" => "world"?
On the Christians you talked to not being able to get the difference between being gay is wrong because it just is and gayness is wrong because God said so: I think you are forgetting the part where God made us (according to them) to function in a certain way. It’s a divine design decision and so it can ‘reasonably’ be thought of as both.
> I would never recommend The Righteous Mind to someone who wanted to know what I think is the state of the art in thought on moral psychology, ethics, or politics.
What *are* the state of the art recommendations here?
Curious as well.
"Some people under 6 foot are closer in height to some people over 6 foot than they are to some other people under 6 foot. That doesn’t mean height is a myth or even that the particular threshold of 6 foot isn’t sometimes really important (for instance in determining whether you’ll fit through a certain doorway without having to duck)" < thank you for this example!
This review is one of my top 3 favorite contest finalists. “by far the best largely wrong book I’ve read” is an interesting take!
I agree that the last decade poses a challenge for Haidt's model, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
Some of my family and family friends are Trump supporters. In my experience they value loyalty a lot. They are extremely loyal to Trump and want to punish anyone who goes against him. And they like Trump, in part, because he seems loyal them. They also seem to be deferential to authority. What's changed is that they no longer trust the processes and procedures that have traditionally conferred authority in the US. In place of that they have turned to Trump specifically, who derives his authority from strength and loyalty to his supporters. As for sanctity...OK, I'll admit that's harder to square with Trumps open vulgarity. But I'll say this -- a lot of the Trump supporters I know are middle class Catholics, and when pressed, they'll admit that they don't like Trump's infidelities and meanness. They justify it as necessary for "defending America" from "socialists" who want to destroy the values and traditions that made America great, which they view as sacred. They view Trump as a true patriot (like them), and what's patriotism if not a belief in the sanctity of one's country? They also justify looking past Trump's personal behavior by pointing to his SCOTUS picks. They feel like they made a trade-off to protect the sanctity of life, and you know what? They came out on top of that trade-off.
As for liberals, it's true that they've become more deferential to authority in the era of Trump and the pandemic, but I think it's really a subset of upper class, professional liberals that are in positions of authority themselves. I don't think Haidt would claim that moral foundations always trump (no pun intended) self-interest. But also, over the last decade we've seen perceived harms weaponized to take down people in positions of authority so often that it has a name -- cancel culture. We've also seen victimhood (i.e., being on the wrong side of care/harm) become a type of social capital within the left, so much so that whole hierarchies of intersecting victimhood have emerged.
Moral foundations may not be quite as foundational as Haidt thinks, but it seems like they still explain the last decade of American politics reasonably well. If anything is missing, it's an analysis of what happens when trust breaks down between groups with different foundations, and how inter-group conflict influences the applications of moral foundations theory. (Maybe there is some of that in the book...it's been a while since I read it).
The Trump supporters you describe are what Bob Altemeyer would classify as Right Wing Authoritarians. Despite the name, you can have right wing authoritarianism on the political left as well as the political right. What has changed since Altemeyer wrote <em>The Authoritarians</em> in 2006 is that this is now a reality rather than a theoretical possibility. I would suggest that, from the perspective of a 20 year old, the culture wars are over in the sense that there is a clear ideological winner. So cancel culture is about defending established norms.
If I am right about that, then we should expect to see a lot of similarities between the Trump supporters and the Wokesters. You mention loyalty, which we would expect to see from authoritarian followers. Cancel culture group loyalty and punishing those who threaten the group. I don't know whether Wokesters or Trump supporters value loyalty more, but they both value it highly.
You also mention deference to authority, another characteristic of authoritarian followers. Wokesters have attacked people in positions of authority, but so has Trump. These both appear to be cases of defining an "in group" and then failing to recognize the authority of people who fall outside the group.
The problem I see is that Haidt's loyalty and authority scales might be reflecting nothing more than that authoritarians have been drawn to conservatism in the past. In that case, and authoritarians are now being drawn to the left more than the right, the differences should shrink and eventually reverse. That does leave Haidt's sanctity scale, which doesn't measure a characteristic of authoritarians.
I'm extremely confident in the opposite of your belief about the handedness thing. There is absolutely no way, in my view, that the left and right hand thing didn't start as a practical consideration that then got codified into a religious practice.
Would like to read more about the philosophical concept of “category” and how that relates to things like conservative, liberal, progressive, socialist, right, left, libertarian, etc and how that varies by place and time. All these words seem somewhat meaningful but oh so misleading so often. Book recommendations?
>>Liberals were anti-authority freedom fighters until they controlled a whole bunch of prestigious institutions and sources of authority...(and Conservatives) somehow ended up headed by a brash, shock-and-disgust-to-dominate real estate brawler with a disreputable sex life...<<
The above implies a third layer of causation. (1) Liberals and Conservatives changed their moral intuitions because of (2) the sorts of institutions and politicians they found representing them. Okay. But how did Liberals end up running the universities? How did Conservatives end up voting for Trump? Didn't their moral intuitions influence the political positions in which they found themselves? If not, then what did?
"Perhaps the real lesson is that, viewed tribally rather than nationally, the loyalty foundation actually rules all?"
My just-so evo-psych story is that there are two foundations of morality, one for intra-tribal affairs (kinship and the game-theoretical stuff), and one for dealing with enemy tribes (all's fair in war). But once tribes started to get replaced with entities far larger than the Dunbar number, this framework began to require all sorts of epicycles about who counts as in-tribe or enemy and to what extent. Which isn't polite to admit out loud (or, apparently, even quietly to themselves for many), and so the endless vacillations between the proclaimed ideal of total human brotherhood (which underpins Christianity and Utilitarianism, among others) and the reality of hatred for the outgroup of the day.
Was the cover image for this created by DALL-E? The mahout's face and feet both look a bit off.
At least this is an attempt at a review rather than a summary of the book. Proud of his "socialism," this lad. If he'd lived with Wilson and Callaghan he'd be a little less sure of his political virtue. The reason Haidt declines to analyse socialism is that it is a failed ideology that has always made a mess wherever and whenever it has been tried.
With four pillars I can fit an elephant. With five I can make it wiggle its trunk.
With six you can wiggle the tail as well.
I have recently posted negatively on my substack about Haidt's current stance, but I think this review of his book is unfair. The short way of putting this is that I think that the reviewer goes out of his way to remember ideas in the book that have not held up and to forget the ideas that were most durable. The latter include the phrases "90 percent chimp, 10 percent bee" and "elephant and rider." If what these phrases evoke now seem redundant for today's reader, it is only because they influenced so many pundits that the ideas are now "in the air."
Maybe what is coming next from this reviewer is a dismissal of Isaac Newton. After all, Newton tried to practice alchemy, failed to anticipate quantum mechanics, and nobody has to read Newton to learn calculus.
This statement in the review is very perceptive:
“Aspects of a social group that make it compete well with other groups for resources, win wars with other groups, resist internal takeover or subversion by individuals within the group, and therefore be more reproductively fit at the social level are often aspects that make that social group incredibly unpleasant for almost all or even all of its constituent individuals.”
This is certainly true, in particular of close-knit groups. "Hell is other people", as Jean-Paul Sartre noticed. But these groups are here (and there are many of them), so there must none the less have been “something in it” for the individual group members, from their individual inclusive-fitness points of view.
Not least the risk of social ostracism – the fate of Spinoza comes to mind.
Framed differently: “Human happiness” is not the ultimate human desire, as airy-fairy utilitarians think. Survival is. For that reason, humans are “moral” – but only according to the norms of their group. If their perception of these group norms change, their moral change.
To pick one of thousands of examples: If you had survey’d Germans in 1935 if it was right to kill all European Jews, you are unlikely to have got many “agree party/agree fully” responses. Ten years later…
The social order, including our morals, is frail.
I think the statement is not all that true; the world's leading societies over the past few centuries have tended to be among the most pleasant to live in.
Naively you might expect the world to be run by a bunch of hyper-efficient super-Spartas by now, but the Spartan social model has only been tried once and it wasn't all that successful. Unpleasant societies have some efficiency advantages fall behind technologically, suffer from internal divisions, and willingly surrender to any conqueror that looks less unpleasant than their own rulers.
Yes and no. You do not have to go «full Sparta» to feel the weight of the community on your happiness. Just grow up in any small village community, anywhere.
Novels upon novels have been written on this theme. My personal favorite is the Dano-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose’s “A fugitive crosses his tracks”, essentially a collection of essays about growing up in a small Danish village. This is the book where he launched the famous “Law of Jante”, arguably ruling all small communities. Here are the ten commandments of Jante:
1. You shall not believe that you amount to anything.
2. You shall not believe you are as much as us.
3. You shall not think you are smarter than us.
4. You shall not believe you are better than us.
5. You shall not believe you know more than us.
6. You shall not believe you are grander than us.
7. You shall not believe you can do anything.
8. You shall not laugh of us.
9. You shall not think anyone cares about you.
10. You shall not believe you can teach us anything.
…true, cities can be different. “Stadtluft Macht Frei” (city air makes you free), as the Germans say. But cities have their own cliques, small-groups, and sects. Try not to toe the line with respect to the “issues of the day” in your own group. Most people are cultural/political/religious/moral opportunists, and for perfectly understandable reasons. Including the fact that you usually find your love interest/s in your own community.
I think our reviewer both makes and misses the point when talking about group dynamic driving moral intuitions. He uses Trump as a primary counterexample to argue that conservatives and liberals essentially flipped on the sanctity dimension. He correctly picks up that the arguments changed, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that deeply held beliefs did as well. The left hated Trump for many reasons, but I don’t think they suddenly changed their minds on sanctity. They used those arguments against him because they thought it would be effective because that’s what conservatives actually DO care about. Same thing with regards to loyalty/patriotism. Using Russia Russia Russia as a line of attack was effective with some conservatives until it was debunked.
Did some people change their minds? Of course. I just don’t see evidence it was the wholesale shift posited by the reviewer. I just see lots of situational arguments for or against particular politicians.
As someone who has not read the book, this was such a helpful review for me. I too tend to fall into the same trap Haidt does when he confuses the explanation of why a belief may exist and the actual reality of the belief. Attributing logic when other explanations make more sense moves me further from reality than I want to be, so thanks for challenging that.
I like Haidt a lot now, but he was still very confused when he wrote Righteous Mind and especially when he did the research imo. I think his writing and talks from that time are most useful for seeing someone work through their own political and tribal biases to realize that other people have different values. This experience is what makes Haidt so great today. I first became aware of him when he would annoyingly anti-New Atheist, but he proved himself as someone who wants to know the truth by making very socially difficult updates, and I respect him immensely for how he handled that. I like what he has to say about Durkheim *now* because he’s an expert and he’s able to give the best nuggets that he still believes, but he used to be a total lackey for Durkheim and basically everything he ever said as far as I could tell, including human group selection. I’m curious what he thinks about that now, or if he even thinks he needs to explain why humans form tribes to note that they do…
I read some of Haidt's earlier stuff in philosophy grad school (way back in 2008!), and yeah, the normative/descriptive confusion was just infuriating. I blogged about it at the time, here: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/09/psychologists-mangle-philosophy.html
First, I think this is a terrific review. About half of it could be cut--and you can tell where, because the reviewer tells us how excessively he's going on--but I think it's extremely interesting analysis of a very influential book. I'm posting this after just having read the review, and I may post again, because I kept thinking, "I'm into this; I should be taking notes," but I didn't.
I read Haidt's book a few years ago. I thought it was very interesting but over-formulaic (and, like the review, too wordy). But I came to Haidt's book prepared to recognize a basic validity. I had spent a couple of years as a member of a group called "Better Angels" (now "Braver Angels" . . . copyright issues, I think), which uses Haidt's ideas (knowingly, but not explicitly) to "train" liberal and conservative people to talk and listen to one another, and discover ways to communicate by acknowledging basic differences in worldview. That background convinced me to be open to the idea that cognitive and affective styles across political lines were, as Haidt suggests, more "foundational" than political.
For reasons that aren't germane I didn't read Haidt's book till after I withdrew from that cross-polar group, but when I read it I felt it threw light on my experiences there in 2018-19, well after our political situation further deteriorated (as it has been doing most of my life). So although I also found problems in the research and theories, I was more impressed by the way they seemed functionally helpful. But I did conclude that this was more a rough first draft of a model along "foundations" lines. And, after all, I'm not sure you can get much further anchored in survey research. I see this review as bringing me back to these issues by acknowledging just that: it's a fine first shot, but here's a start at how we challenge it and look for Foundations 2.0 (of course, other reviews may have done this too, but I haven't read them). I found plenty of good ideas, wading through the prose.
I also found ways in which I thought some of the reviewers interesting ideas might, in fact, be rather facile. For instance, he notes that progressive discourse frequently seems to reflect a "Sanctity" foundation--the sort of thing that leads Anna Applebaum to refer to the woke as "new Puritans." But I think that's a misunderstanding of Haidt's idea. Haidt's Sanctity, as I recall it, draws heavily on the affect of physical disgust--a repulsion from anything but functional sex and bodily excretions. The ideological puritanism of progressive discourse is industrial grade intolerance, but not based on the same notion of purity that Haidt was using. When it comes to the Trump "pee tape," I don't think liberals were disgusted by the idea at all: they expected conservatives to be. Some may have been, but most simply didn't believe it existed (which looks like a good bet now), so if they were disgusted by the idea, that disgust attached to liberal use of it. Trump, for a large number of them, is the man in the "Apprentice." (In my time with "Better Angels," this was deeply apparent--the "profane" man that liberals could plainly see didn't exist for most of the conservatives, and our rarely expressed disgust was clearly viewed as a product of our liberal political biases. So I'd say that what may present as "sacredness" in the liberal profusion of shibboleths and taboos is in fact something quite different from the foundational category Haidt posited. (I also think it's something Haidt did not deal with in his book.) Sacredness needs to be grounded in, "Eww--gross!" (Of course, that's precisely how I, and I presume most liberals, view Trump . . . If only we could open their eyes! Or noses.)
Liberals, on the other hand, are seen as championing recreational sex without consequences, "deviant" sexual enjoyment of Eww--gross! body parts, underarm hair and God knows what other smelly human practices. The beautifully (?) coiffed Master of the Apprentice (who apparently doesn't share many of these prejudices, but is happy to advertise that he's a germaphobe) physically hugs the American flag (Hillary never went that far, thank goodness--and it would have repelled her base if she had), promises anti-abortion justices (and delivers, as they hope all who are pregnant will). When it comes to the review comments about 2016 and the Loyalty foundation, I think the reviewer has it all wrong: we all knew the flags were there to protect Hillary from attack as a damn Marx-loving socialist-communist--Trump was the one tootling the Wall, military spending, and that more-than-symbolic symbol of American order: guns.
I also think the reviewer stretches the "Authority" category when he claims that progressives exhibit its expression. In the academy, certain left authorities may be revered by liberals, but it's not because of their rank as professors, it's because their writings have been widely accepted on the left--and are almost sure to be rapidly superseded by the next authority, in a way that God's writings have yet to be for religious conservatives. (And professors on the right aren't authorities at all, unless you're in their class and worry about your grade--prudentially motivated conformist behavior crosses Haidt's foundations; it's on a different axis.) The Authority foundation is expressed in readiness to buy into hierarchy as just, especially in institutions framed by Sacredness, such as, traditionally, the military and the church.
Uh oh. I'm running on. And I started by criticizing that in the review. I'll stop with this: I wouldn't be running on if the review hadn't pumped up my enthusiasm. I think it's terrific.
The "laughable graphic that adds nothing": https://64.media.tumblr.com/7aeecf0f285034d81d8d049d2e9d23c5/tumblr_inline_nyly9wAXNd1r2wwh3_400.png
<i>Probably the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals in Haidt’s view is that the former value sanctity, loyalty, and authority, whereas liberals don’t really care about these at all. So, explain Trump, please!. Trump is the embodiment of the profane. He offends basic notions of the sacred, of dignity in political debate and in human conduct in general, and of respect and decorum, at such a rate that the outrage just can’t keep up.</i>
Isn't the obvious explanation simply that people generally care for *specific* holy things, authorities, etc.? Think of St. Boniface cutting down the pagan sacred tree, or a Jacobite joining in the '45. In a sense, they're offending against senses of the sacred (in St. Boniface's case) or of loyalty and authority (in the Jacobite case), but since they don't recognise the tree as actually sacred, or George II's government as a legitimate authority, it would be fallacious to conclude that they don't care for sanctity or authority per se. In the case of Trump, he was (rightly or wrongly) widely perceived as offending against specifically liberal sacred values, so there was no real contradiction for a conservative to support him whilst also supporting the values that conservatives tend to find sacred.
So generally I would agree with the reviewer that I like Haidt, and where he is coming from in this, but didn't really feel he did a good job exploring/justifying the actual choices for his foundations, and didn't really make a good/comprehensible case for them. Even when I first read it I could tell he was really bright, but also seemed myopically off track.
All that said the reviewer seems overly enamored with utilitarianism, and I say that as someone who thinks complex versions of it are often a decent way to make policy.
What Haidt is right about is our moral intuitions, and in some sense much of our very sense of morality, is just a haphazard cobbled together set of psychological kludges, predispositions, maybe social norms from group selection, historical happenstance, game theoretical considerations to social problems, and 15 other things.
Ethics is a heterodox and in no way consistent sets of beliefs/facts (hell many of them aren't even strictly speaking beliefs. And attempts to treat it as such are doomed to failure.
Which is also why utilitarianism as so many in the EA want to practice it doesn't really work. They want to count up hedons (or anti-hedons), and when you point out that isn't what large portions of morality/ethics are about they just want to say "well that is just stupid holdovers from all the above heterodox crud of our individual/psychological/social/historical evolution". Except that is all any of it is, including utilitarianism, and if you are going to throw out the rest of ethics, there is zero reason to keep utilitarianism either.
This is the point I think Haidt was groping towards.
Telling someone it is more ethical for them to give their surplus wages to starving kids in Africa, than their struggling sister/neighbor isn't just unpersuasive, it is also simply wrong about what ethics is fundamentally. And any attempt to "autistically" excise that from individual moral decision making is doomed to failure. That said complex utilitarianism is still a pretty strong lens to evaluate large scale policy decision making that isn't by individuals, though you always need to be mindful of the context/scope.
TLDR -- well, actually, TL, gave up after a while. I have other things to spend my time on. The author needs to learn the virtue of concision. The review reads like he's just thinking out loud at great length.
(This got long, so here's a TLDR: I am (mostly) a conservative religious person of the type OP is talking about. What OP says about us w/r/t Haidt's book, I agree with. But some other stuff he or she says about us seems very inaccurate to me.)
I come from a very similar upbringing to that of the reviewer; the non-denominational Evangelical churches I favor have a lot of proud Southern Baptists and Pentecostals. There are two paragraphs in this piece that seem to be intended to establish the reviewer's religious conservative upbringing credentials, and I want to offer another perspective on a few things in those paragraphs. But first, let me say that when the reviewer actually draws from their experience of religious conservatives, with reference to Haidt's book, I think they're exactly right. For instance:
"People genuinely thought that at a base, normative level, there could be no morality without explicit instruction from God" -- This ignores what we call "common grace", but nonetheless is definitely something a religious conservative would say to Haidt on this subject.
"I’m pretty sure the average religious conservative feels like these two positions are both pretty offensive ways of just not engaging with their actual beliefs but talking around them like they’re non-agents." -- Yes. The reviewer is exactly right about this.
(And, when I read the Aside on Categories and Axes, I felt like the reviewer was my long-lost brother or sister, and I wanted to sit and have a long conversation with this person who sees things so clearly! Bravo, I say.)
But, on the other hand, the two credential-establishing paragraphs make me feel like the reviewer is some kind of spy or infiltrator, who has learned some of our shibboleths, but not all, and filled in the rest with caricatures taken from enemy propaganda.
For instance, "it did seem that you weren’t really meant to actually read the whole Bible yourself" -- This is insane to me. Spending time reading the Bible on my own is one of the things I've been consistently exhorted to do, from Sunday School right on up to the present! Every pastor always says that one of the most important parts of the Christian life is reading the Bible on your own, for yourself. Like, "read the whole Bible in a year" Bibles are super popular! If there's any activity that Fundamentalist Evangelicals could rightly be said to be obsessed with, it's reading the Bible.
Here's another one: "I could rarely get firm answer as to whether it was intrinsically wrong and God was helpfully letting us know this through providing guidance we could absolutely trust, or that God himself made it wrong by decree."
God made the world by speaking it into existence. Therefore, intrinsic qualities exist by God's decree -- so something being "intrinsically wrong" is not very different from being "wrong by decree". Look at Genesis 1, John 1, Proverbs 3, Proverbs 8, Jeremiah 10. God's law/understanding/wisdom are what create the world. If He decrees that something is bad, then it's bad; "It is" and "He decreed it" are the same thing. So, this question that the reviewer was asking doesn't really make sense from a Christian theological standpoint.
But also, every pastor I know would be immensely pleased to discuss that question with the reviewer. It would send a tingle up their spine to get a theological question like that. They'd recommend podcasts, or lend you a book. This sense of Evangelical authorities as anti-thinking-for-yourself or anti-asking-questions is completely foreign to my experience of them.
I guess there are all sorts of churches in the Evangelical movement, and maybe the reviewer really did land in one where people were like this. But it feels to me much more like the reviewer was already liberal, and had been influenced by liberal theology, when he or she spent time with conservative Evangelicals, and because of that, came away with a pretty biased impression. I'm reading between the lines a bit, so I hope that's not unfair.
Either way, now people reading this have one more data point to consider!
As someone who is not religious and was brought up with only mild (non-Christian) religious instruction, your comment is very valuable to me, Matthew. It is indeed a new data point. (And I have to add that I find various study Bibles of the type you mention very valuable in making sense of Biblical texts.)
No, the reviewer's question does make sense from a Christian theological standpoint. It is just a restatement of the Euthyphro dilemma. But since it isn't “A or not-A”, a third option can solve the dilemma.
God wills the good, because he is good.
The fuller answer lies in defining God's nature properly, the necessary maximally great being. That God could not fail to exist or have a different nature in any logically possible world.
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/the-euthyphro-dilemma-once-again
Thanks for this! I think this comment is an apt demonstration of my main point. (Right down to the podcast recommendation!) Evangelical churches are full of people who love to talk about this stuff. Walk into any Southern Baptist, Charismatic or non-denominational Evangelical church and start asking questions like this, and you'll be sure to find at least a few people like Anon S, who are just delighted to get down to the nitty gritty philosophy and theology of it. It's not like the dogmatic, unquestioning kind of thing the reviewer depicts.
> For instance, "it did seem that you weren’t really meant to actually read the whole Bible yourself" -- This is insane to me. Spending time reading the Bible on my own is one of the things I've been consistently exhorted to do, from Sunday School right on up to the present! Every pastor always says that one of the most important parts of the Christian life is reading the Bible on your own, for yourself. Like, "read the whole Bible in a year" Bibles are super popular! If there's any activity that Fundamentalist Evangelicals could rightly be said to be obsessed with, it's reading the Bible.
I think what he's referring to here, is more like... you're not supposed to "read the Bible [critically] yourself." That is, to read the text of the Bible and, if the text in your reading disagreed with some standard idea in your church, to side with the text over the church. There's some times when it's okay, and other times when it isn't, to be sure, but I don't know how successful I'd have been as a young believer talking to fellow churchgoers and pointing out the quite thin-on-the-ground text in the Bible to support homophobia or the pro-life position.
> But also, every pastor I know would be immensely pleased to discuss that question with the reviewer. It would send a tingle up their spine to get a theological question like that. They'd recommend podcasts, or lend you a book. This sense of Evangelical authorities as anti-thinking-for-yourself or anti-asking-questions is completely foreign to my experience of them.
I don't know if I ever spoke to a pastor in my whole time growing up in the church, even when I deconverted. I liked some, didn't care for others, remember gossip about one in particular, but it just felt like something that other people did. I suspect the reviewer was in a similar position, for whatever psychological or cultural reason.
I wrote the other review of The Righteous Mind, which *didn't* make it to the final. So if you want to read a review that is objectively worse (but tracks the book more closely and is more positive about what I got from it, which is a lot), you can find it at this link. :)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iBDkwir2FsG4DAiDh/book-review-the-righteous-mind-3
For what it's worth, I thought your review was also quite good - in fact I ranked it higher than 9 of the finalists.
It's worth a lot to me, that you liked it and that you say it. Thank you!
People are really being harsh to this review. I thought it made many interesting substantive points, the most important of which is that psychological modalities (disgust, sanctity, etc) can be triggered by successful political messaging (so that contemporary liberals are now in the authority/sanctity modality unlike 30 years ago), rather than politics being downstream of eternally existing psychological types.
I didn't care for this one, though it wasn't the "worst" review either; could have been condensed quite a bit without losing much (yes, I did make myself read the whole thing before commenting. A mostly unpleasant and boring experience.) The entire "Aside on Categories and Axes" was deeply confusing and didn't seem load-bearing for the rest of the review at all; it felt like an answer in search of a question, or maybe an anticipation of a criticism that I did not, in fact, have. It also didn't have to be written by this reviewer in particular - as with many other sections, just linking to a thorough explanation of the concept[1] would have sufficed. No need to reinvent the wheel, my dude - focus on reviewing the book, realize gains from trade and specialization of labour!
(As An Aside, instead of "Where are the socialists?", the unanswered question *I* was most left with was "Where are all the links?" There are literally 0 links or footnotes/references in this review, and it adds so much unnecessary cruft. I get the whole stare-out-the-window-thinking-aloud bit, but...I dunno. I'm just a working-class rube, and for a book about mushy moral philosophy and psychology, there sure was a lot of academia technical jargon/high-minded concepts just casually name-dropped throughout. Needless to say, I often couldn't quite follow along, and I feel like the book reviewer isn't the best person for re-explaining these concepts anyway...
...as for socialism being Kind Of A Big Deal now, I'm not sure I'd agree with that assessment? The Democratic party has indeed moved left a lot since 2012[2], but I see a lot of conflation between "social democracy" and "socialism" going on. Still a fringe ideology with dim electoral hopes at all levels, although it punches above its weight class for sure. People love buying Free Lunches with Someone Else's Money, in theory.)
As to the book itself: sure sounds like a kludge. Why bother reskinning the Big 5 personality factors, which haven't had the same collapse in predictive power (to my knowledge)? The whole exercise comes across as clout-chasing by an academic gunning to stay relevant and lay the groundwork for future remunerations. If it fails to accurately characterize conservatives *and* socialists, cutting off both distributional tails, then I suppose it's only a useful lens for looking at...what, centrist liberals?
The useful trickle-down Haidtisms are duly noted, and I'm glad to know where some of the Big Ideas behind one of my most frequent external links about political culture[3] came from; there's definitely a few diamonds in that rough, and Haidt has some hits to show for his misses. At the same time, I feel like I've gotten way more mileage and future-proof predictive value from one of Haidt's later (and narrower) works, "The Coddling of the American Mind"[4]; in fact I'd gotten the two books confused, and thus was initially very confused by this review. "I don't remember Haidt writing this much Complete Nonsense, what gives?" was the mood. As another commentor noted, he seems to do best on the psychology stuff, and fall down when attempting the politics lane; but even there, he can at least criticize liberals fairly effectively. Sad to see that skill not generalize, those steelmen of conservatism and religion are...just...highschool level.
>Even the demands for justice for oppressed groups have over time taken on less and less of a “reduce material harm” flavour and begun to be expressed more and more in a “give prestige and deference” manner.
Yes.[5]
>Conservatives luxuriated in violations of the sacred experienced as liberation, like it was a Sex Pistols concert in the 70s.
Not sure I agree with this take. There's certainly been a bit of a motte-and-bailey from the Moral Majority days, but I feel like it's more an appreciation for pugilism and willingness to fight.[6] (Not to be confused with actual results - he *is* a reality-TV showman, after all.) Contrast Trump and Jeb Bush to see the contrast most starkly. I notice that Trump never had to beg his audience to clap bigly. There's a very valid criticism of modern politics as being blithe blandities bantered between biteless barkers while the actual on-the-ground world burns. The left has been kind of slow to catch on (remember when Michelle Obama claimed "when they go low, we go high"? so quaint!), but they've started to adopt similar tactics too.
To conclude, it sure seems like these days, Sacredness and the rest are only instrumental rather than terminal values. Winning is all that matters. If the theory has any weight at all, then I think it follows that it's winners who set the new moral foundations, rather than moral foundations being timeless guardrails that winners must abide by. (I think we agree on this? That at best, moral foundations put the cart in front of the horse. They're derivative, not integral.)
[1] https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/
[2] https://www.slowboring.com/p/shifting-left
[3] https://scholars-stage.org/honor-dignity-and-victimhood-a-tour-through-three-centuries-of-american-political-culture/
[4] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
[5] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-respect-redistribution
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/
Personally, I found the writing here a bit challenging. There are some extremely dense sentences which also tended to be chock full of terms that I doubt most readers immediately recognize. I get that the author was trying to communicate some complex and nuanced critiques, but if a longtime reader of ACX has to look up multiple terms in one sentence, and do that multiple times, some editing may be in order. Toward the end, the author seemed to find their stride and the writing was actually quite engaging.
“The Righteous Mind” is one of my favorite books, and I’d love to discuss at length why I think its thesis still has merit, but it’s been a while and I should probably reread it first.
Yes, thank you. Simpler words would have made it easier for me to understand what was being said. I think the failing is half on my side though... maybe those are the best words to use? I was listening to a Daniel Schmachtenberger interview (with Lex Fridman) and I'd often have to stop and re-listen and lookup some words... I was also enthralled by some of his ideas... At some level language doesn't work for me as well as I might hope.
I wasn’t familiar with Schmachtenberger, and my immediate impression on looking him up was that this person is not using language in a way that more than a tiny number of people would readily understand. I would be less bothered if his mission wasn’t supposedly “public sensemaking and dialogue.”
Like the reviewer, I really respect what Haidt is trying to do, even though I have some quibbles.
One stubborn issue for me is that political positions are often so contingent. When you look back at past partisan political debates, they can be such a product of their time, weird battles of emphasis, or even reversed later through migrations of groups between parties who form new coalitions. Take any politician and move them 30 years forward or back, they're not going to run the same platform.
So even though some current debates can seem like trench warfare to me, deeply fixed battle lines, when I zoom out, I lose confidence in that. I'm not sure how to know which fronts are stable and which will move radically in the next few years. The reviewer just talked about upheavals and realignments within a decade, for example.
Another issue sneaks up if you keep reading the moral foundations lit. Willer and Feinberg later argue that if you use your opponent's likely priors when advocating object level political positions, it increases persuasiveness (or at least shrinks polling gaps).
Make arguments that build off your audience's priors. That tracks. I'm not sure I needed a study.
But where have we found ourselves now?
If we can reframe political debates along other underlying values, how do foundational values shape our object level views? If values tie to opposite sides in a debate based on whatever framing you happen to bring, how deterministic can foundational values really be?
Ok, maybe we could retreat to foundations-lite: Yes, all political positions can be framed other ways, but one framing is the most natural, so that's the sticky one.
If we make that move though, well, Occam would like a word. Now we need a theory to explain how different framings become dominant to complete the picture.
We're adding a lot of cruft and I worry we've tossed out a lot of predictive power along the way.
What's the naive theory here to fall back on? Just that arguments work some of the time for some people, while most times people just follow tribes? I think something like that should be set as the opportunity cost theory. It's probably horribly deficient, but any new theory needs to get us significantly further than that without too much additional work.
Let’s be real. A modern day socialist in the U.S. is working off on Marx, who was in fact, proposing a history of how the economy had come to be dominated by capital. So the intelligent design analogy holds.
"Equality of opportunity" seems to me to make sense; it's incoherent if you take it to be an attempt to describe a fundamental property of reality, sure — no individual will have exactly the same opportunities as another — but as an attempt to describe a desirable property of a set of rules for a club or government or whatever, it seems clear to me.
I read this review not having heard of Haidt before, and read the comments as well. My dominant response throughout has remained utter astonishment at the attempt to square evolutionary psychology with the idea of people being driven by anything that could be described as "moral foundations" (unless we define these as "five different colors of papering-over the great wormy mass of bias, blindness, motivated ignorance, and root-level unconscious selfishness that drives human behaviors".
For the reviewer, I heartily recommend Hanson & Simler's "Elephant in the Brain" as at least as interesting as you describe Haidt's book, and certainly less wrong.
Does Haidt mention class? After reading Scott's on Class post, it seems a better explaner for modern politics than these foundational concepts
I feel as though there is a big leap between moral intuitionism: "The way most people make most moral decisions most of the time is on instinct" and the claim that the five/six moral foundations are innate and can be explained using evolutionary biology and group selection.
You could instead have some of the moral foundations embedded in the culture, instead of in genetics. How did these appear in the culture? Someone made an argument that convinced a large number of people, who were able to indoctrinate the next generation (maybe with multiple iterations over multiple generations), so it became part of their intuition. It is possible for 'most moral decisions are made by instinct' and 'rational moral arguments are extremely important for morality' to both be true.
I am a physicist. It is always dangerous to use anything quantum as an example unless you really understand it. And Feynman tells us that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Protons are well behaved particles. They don't decay - and we've checked a lot. [1] The number operator (which measures how many protons there are) commutes with most of the other things that we care about. So this is a pretty good example of a natural kind.
This is less true for other particles. Lasers have extremely well specified frequencies, but the number of photons they contain is undefined. [2]
Neutrinos are even worse. There are three "flavors" of neutrinos, corresponding to the three flavors of charged leptons: electron, muon, and tau. For electrons, muons, and taus, each flavor has a definite mass. Their flavor eigenstates and mass eigenstates are the same. For neutrinos, each flavor does does not have a definite mass. Their flavor eigenstates are superpositions of multiple mass eigenstates. When they interact with matter, they have a specific flavor, but when they're not interacting, they oscillate between (superpositions of) flavors. [3] We first noticed this because a lot of the neutrinos coming to us from the sun were missing - but actually, some of them had turned into muon neutrinos or tau neutrinos. So fundamental particles do not have to fit into nice categories.
[1] Some Grand Unified Theories predict that protons do decay, so we've been looking for it since the early 1980s. None of the experiments have observed anything. We can say that, if protons do decay, their halflife must be over 10^34 years. The age of the universe is 10^10 years.
[2] I don't feel like looking this up in a textbook, so here's something to this effect on StackExchange: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/572317/is-number-of-photons-undefined-for-a-classical-em-wave
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation
If Haidt is claiming that people derive their moral judgements from intuition rather than logic, then why do his foundations of intuition sound an awful lot like the foundations for those logic? I was expecting the elephant metaphor to be more what the reviewer concludes in the end: we make up justifications in terms of things like fairness and caring after initial judgements that actually arise from much more ignoble motivations like partisanship. Instead, Haidt is claiming that we intuit fairness and then justify it via an argument from fairness? That sounds remarkably just like saying "humans are rational fairness arbitrators" and is basically what we ought to be doing. Should I really care about the difference between "intuits fairness" and "logically derives fairness"? And for authority/sanctity/loyalty, that sounds a lot like liberal strawmanning of conservatives ("oh you don't actually believe that letting homosexual couples marry harms society on net, you're just following your priest's word"). So how is this model supposed to help me (a liberal) empathize with conservatives?
I do feel like his system describes my liberal morals pretty well and the increasing liberal deviation from the fairness/caring justifications that the reviewer describes have unsettled me. I'd much rather we return to those justifications exclusively as they're the ones that resonate with me and just seem objectively stronger. I also think that some of this deviation was an attempt to persuade conservatives on their own terms rather than adopting those arguments genuinely. For example, adopting patriotic cues against Trump was a pretty transparent attempt to try to take perceived anti-Trump sentiment in Republicans and snowball it into a Democratic landslide. Appeals to sanctity against Trump were even more transparently such. Did Democrats read Haidt and then say, "guess we better start signalling the other three foundations as hard as we can?"
I just jotted some notes as I read this long review...
> There’s absolutely no analogy here and no contradiction or hypocrisy in someone favouring natural selection as the correct explanation for the origin of species, but favouring “intelligent design” via a planned economy as the correct prescription for a flourishing economic future.
There is actually. Today's economies are just as complex as biological entities. It's arrogant to think we understand enough to plan how an economy of today should work, let alone the economy of tomorrow. That's the power of adaptation by natural selection: evolution changes course based on environmental shifts, like what people *actually need* now rather than what they needed before, and not what *you* think they need; what some finite set of people think is factual and is necessarily limited, ignorant, and already outdated, and always will be. Central planning simply cannot work.
Which isn't to say that an economy shouldn't be regulated, any adaptive system can generate divergent or otherwise undesirable feedback loops, but that's the only place regulation belongs.
> he absolutely talks as if he believes that these other five moral foundations are normatively important as ends in themselves, not just instrumental heuristics for care.
They are to *some people*. Also, Care is insufficient for all ethics, so something else is definitely needed. But more practically, what are you going to do, force your obsession with only Care down everyone else's throats? Re-education camps maybe? Our best organizing principle so far has been democratic rule, which means if other people care about those other moral foundations, then you had better understand them, and not just as a proxy for Care or you might just be building a strawman of another's argument and poisoning open dialog.
> Homosexuality was wrong; God said so in the Bible; end of discussion. I could rarely get firm answer as to whether it was intrinsically wrong and God was helpfully letting us know this through providing guidance we could absolutely trust, or that God himself made it wrong by decree. I couldn’t actually get people to understand that these were different concepts.
Because they're not different concepts to a religious conservative. To claim, "X is intrinsically wrong" is synonymous with saying that God decreed something to be wrong. This distinction is one that *you* created because you think morality can plausibly be separated from God's decrees, that something can be right or wrong regardless of what God thinks, but that's not how religious conservatives think. You have probably created this distinction because you don't actually believe in a deity, so of course it naturally follows that morality then *must* be a separate question. This deduction simply does not follow for a conservative.
> The difference between them is pretty technical, and crucially Haidt’s position leads just as surely to the possibility of “and therefore we can discard them as they’re no longer adaptive to the current environment” as does that of his New Atheist foils.
No it doesn't, per the point above that we have democratic rule, and if selection has really shaped these people to think in certain conservative ways, then *conservativism isn't going anywhere*, and you'd best understand and deal with it democratically. In particular, it's well known that conservatives have more children than liberals, where the former are above replacement level and the latter often below, so the very notion "and therefore we can discard them" is literally false, because conservative principles *are* adaptive.
> Liberty is the most obvious example of a related problem in that he sometimes talks about how each foundation gets expressed in conservatives vs in liberals in a way that makes it clear they’re very different things – in this case in conservatives as “get off my lawn” and in liberals as “the government must intervene on behalf of oppressed groups”.
This seems like a weird non-sequitur because it doesn't obviously follow that those conclusions are necessarily entailed by different assumptions. I mean, they imply different circumstances and actions for sure, but not necessarily a different underlying principle.
> Where in his six foundations would fit the now very commonly expressed, and historically somewhat influential idea that it’s a good idea for everyone to roughly have the same level of wealth, or income, or welfare, or something, and that therefore it’s probably good for the government to redistribute wealth pretty aggressively along those lines, or stop anyone from getting too rich or powerful?
It seems clear to me that socialists would score highly on Care, Fairness, Authority, and Loyalty, but lower on Liberty, and very low on Sanctity. There would be some variability in Authority for the various socialist strains (Communism likely high, for instance). It seems clear that Hadit's goal was to bridge the divide between the dominant political sides at the time, and socialism was not a side with any degree of power (and still isn't).
> Trump is the embodiment of the profane. He offends basic notions of the sacred, of dignity in political debate and in human conduct in general, and of respect and decorum, at such a rate that the outrage just can’t keep up.
Trump also motivated a lot of voters that weren't active voters, indicating that there is a segment that wasn't represented before. They obviously don't care about sanctity, but that doesn't mean ordinary conservatives don't care about sanctity.
> And as for how liberals treat sacredness now? I don’t need to go on at this point with a bunch of examples of how the exemplar crime in the eyes of the average liberal is now offence against some sacred taboo, like conservatives of the past when someone swore in a sitcom.
But this is always cast in terms of harm, like certain kinds of speech harming oppressed minorities.
> Liberal discourse is saturated with appeals to hierarchy and demands for deference, with detractors urged to stay in their lane, not question the experts, and respect those with the prestige to demand such respect.
Again, always justified by alleged *harm*. In Haidt's moral foundations and for conservatives, respect for authority is a moral good *in and of itself*, not because it served some other moral principle.
> Even the demands for justice for oppressed groups have over time taken on less and less of a “reduce material harm” flavour and begun to be expressed more and more in a “give prestige and deference” manner.
I don't know what this is referring to.
> but certainly the dynamics he describes, where liberals focus almost all their messaging on utilitarian appeals to the greater welfare, while conservatives deal with a more complex and nuanced approach to morality involving respect for authority, a focus on defending the sacred, and loyalty to the nation and flag, are shot to hell by now.
I disagree. The window dressing has changed but I don't see that the fundamental dynamics have changed much. I agree that each side will deploy certain tactics that resemble the moral foundations in order to garner more support from various bases, but that's different than what Haidt is describing, which is how these people think about the issues themselves.
think he could've been more charitable towards the paragraph comparing attitudes towards evolution and smithian spontaneous order
yes, u may believe evolution descriptively but believe in communism normatively
but u should also believe in markets giving rise to huge complexity, descriptively speaking. many fail to appreciate this (while embracing evolution)
(although haidt does do a bait and switch in the last sentence)
Rule Thinkers In, Not Out.
I think while some of the critiques by the reviewer are justified, it's worth focusing on the good, useful stuff in the book, and not let a few asides color your entire judgment of the thesis.
True, Haidt goes off on a tangent about how Bentham and Kant were maybe a bit autistic, and that is not at all a critical part of the argument.
True, Haidt claims activations of the Moral Foundations distinguish between conservatives and liberals, where really a much more intelligent view (which he expresses at times) is that the Foundations exist in all people, and it's just about finding the right triggers (pristine forests, but not churches, could activate Sanctity in liberals; we've all seen loyalty and betrayal - of the movement, not the nation - become a big pillar of cancel culture on the left).
True, Haidt goes to great lengths to say his account of morality is descriptive rather than normative, and then at some point details his favorite morality, which is utilitarian but takes into account people's moral sentiments and the society-binding aspects of morality and religion.
But I would just discard the small errors, which are sometimes tangents or corollaries, which in my view do not discredit the general thesis, which holds on very well in my opinion.
Moral Intuitionism is very true, enlightening, and applies to more than morality (almost any topic people care about). The elephant making decisions and the rider justifying them post-hoc is an extremely powerful explanatory tool in my experience.
Some Moral Foundations which are not only care/harm exist (descriptively), even if they're not exactly the ones on his list, and even if it might have been better to find them with PCA rather than theory-driven. Though I think his list is also pretty good. I think you miss the point by saying Fairness is about punishing free-riders. Fairness is about punishing cheaters who violate the rules, and the reason this Foundation evolved might be to punish free-riders, or benefit society in other ways.
Humans really have various socially advantageous instincts (like punishing cheaters), which seem to be somewhat innate and pretty universal, and I think he makes a very good case that these evolved through group-selection, and a good case for group-selection in general.
Criticising religion and morality on an epistemiological basis ("The Bible's God exist" is false, therefore religion is useless/harmful and we need to get rid of it) misses the true benefit of religion, and thus does not engage with it fully.
I think there's a LOT of very good stuff in the book, which is worth covering in more detail. Sorry for again self-promoting my review. :)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iBDkwir2FsG4DAiDh/book-review-the-righteous-mind-3
It's true that Socialists were left out of the book. But I don't think it means they're a challenge to the thesis. People could base Socialism on many Moral Foundations and arguments - one could argue the economic efficiency of the central planner (Care/Harm), another could argue that it's fundamentally unjust for one person to receive substantially more because of accident of birth (Fairness), etc.
Thinking about the summary of tribalism-vs-moral-psychology, and I think Haidt's work didn't accurately describe politics when he first wrote it.
To get to this conclusion, I need to remember a few things about the politics of that time. especially environmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to run strongly on three of Haidt's five categories of moral argument. One of those is care/harm, another is authority/subversion, and the third is purity/disgust.
The usual liberal argument in favor of environment-protecting laws would often depend on the authority of scientific consensus. The emotional punch that led people to protest against pollution was the purity of the unspoiled world. The arguments presented would include care for various endangered species.
Typically, the politically-conservative tribe would discount authority, put up a different calculation of care-vs-harm, and pay more attention to human flourishing than to purity of the environment.
Somehow, Haidt's analysis never noticed these factors.
There are probably other criticisms of Haidt's work, rooted in the way in which Haidt tried to evaluate his categories.
The categories appear to be very useful in understanding political opinion. But it is helpful to remember that categories like purity and authority show up in many different ways on the liberal (or progressive) side of politics.
I was a fan of Haidt's book when I first read it, but have not revisited it and do not particularly care to. I think this is because I see Haidt as essentially doing Jugaad ethics (https://www.thetruthcounts.com/blogtraducciones/2018/11/14/jugaad-ethics/) where he is trying to merge post-Rawlsian political/moral reasoning with classical virtue ethics and just coming up with a worse version of virtue ethics. This is because Haidt's moral foundations map somewhat cleanly onto the seven classical virtues, and the places where Haidt's foundations fail to map onto the virtues are pretty much isomorphic to the places where Haidt's foundations are least substantial and most questionable. So as an attempt to provide empirical moral psychological research supporting virtue ethics, I appreciated Haidt's work, but whether by a misguided attempt to be original or just unfamiliarity with the underlying principles of virtue ethics, Haidt's book came out a lot worse than it would have if it had cited a lot more Aristotle and Aquinas (or even just C. S. Lewis).
Of course, if he'd done so, that raises the question of whether Haidt would have produced anything of value at all which couldn't be gotten from reading Aristotle, Aquinas, or Lewis. I don't think he would have actually produced literally nothing of value, but it would have been the academic paper this book really should be, not a book-length treatment of anything.
Doesn't change your overall point, but, in 2D space, you aren't limited to fermions and bosons. You can also have anyons. (and, quasiparticles with anyonic statistics have been observed.)
There's a clear shared moral foundation between socialism and conservative complaints about welfare queens. In traditional socialist ideology, capitalists are basically parasites: they use their position to capture surpluses created by workers. Thus they're free riders on the system in exactly the same way that welfare abusers are, with the added insult that they live much better than everyone else. I'm surprised that the author didn't see this connection.
Of course, you can also get to socialism purely through a harm framework by arguing that a socialist system would do a better job of maximizing social welfare than a capitalist system, which would make socialism just another type of liberal/leftist moral framework. This also seems to fit well.
I think Haidt actually describes libertarians fairly well. Not in the book (where he, as most people do, ignores libertarians entirely), but in his further research.
I discussed this with him over the interwebs (Haidt responds to e-mails quite reliably by the way) and pointed out that what the people they call liberals in the US also care a lot about sanctity (even prior to social justice and identity politics, e.g. with the way they usually talk about nature and global warming - a lot of almost religious overtones). He admitted that this was the case and that he was looking a bit more into it (this was several years back).
I also mentioned that I believe there is a foundational discinction between different "types" of libertarians. Deontologists of the Austrian school definitely seem to reach the libertarian position from a very different starting point than the more utilitarian-ish libertarians like David Friedman. Haidt found that interesting but I don't think he explored that much further though.
Still, his personality traits correlated with libertarianism seemed quite on point to me. And I don't think much has changed since then. Libertarianism seems remarkably stable compared to the US mainstream. So does socialism. I guess it might be that "conservative" and "liberal" are just labels which are too broad to keep stable and in reality cover a bunch of separate groups...they shift, expand and shrink in several dimensions over time to be able to capture hopefully just above 50 percent of the (voting) population and the only constraint is that the groups that form each of these large coalitions can't hate each other enough to join the other coalition and they need to hate the other coalition enough not to stop voting altogether.
So maybe the 2010 typical liberals are still the 2010 typical liberals and so are the past conservatives but there are other groups which were not captured well by either the US democrats or the US republican sback then but have since raised to prominence. The populist Trumpists on one hand and the identity-politics Jacobins on the other. Perhaps in 2010 both of these groups existed but neither coalition courted them enough to make them a major aspect of their political party. Or in other words, perhaps in 2010 both major US parties depended mostly on the centrists with the extremes mostly disenfranchised whereas nowadays it's the centrists are the (almost) disenfranchised ones.
By the way, the review feels like reading Nassim Taleb (in how it is self-centred) but sadly without his ability to write.
One issue with the author's complaints about the model breaking after 10 years is that American political parties are going through a realignment so one might expect the arguments/policies of each party to swap (but there is a lag due to politicians being slower to change parties). I think both the author and Haidt assume that the parties are more homogeneous as opposed to be coalitional.
"their movement somehow ended up headed by a brash, shock-and-disgust-to-dominate real estate brawler with a disreputable sex life"
Trump enabled conservatives to politically cross-dress, to challenge the liberals (your choice of term, which I use here with that qualification) using their own tools.
"liberals . . . never got the police" Not so fast. If one includes certain district attorneys, who have the power to decline to charge certain individuals or offenses, and the 'mostly peaceful' riots of 2020, one can find that the police have been taken over by the liberal (again, your term) constellation of priorities.
I too was irritated by Haidt's use of scholarship back then, thinking that the categorizations along those axes were suspect, before the replication crisis was reported (acknowledged?).
"Outrage against Trump was often outrage against the violation of the sacred."
The liberal (again, your term) visualizes the sacred, respects authority, and demands loyalty, and always did. Liberals merely locate them elsewhere from where conservatives put them.
I have been a fan of Haidt's from the start, but I also had some criticisms in his perception of the liberal and conservative groups. I had treated them as things he had overlooked but could eventually incorporate into his foundations theory. This review captures what is wrong better than my original thinking. In my meager defense I will note that much of what has happened since had, er, not yet happened to illustrate the points.
Even in 2012 liberals were deeply concerned with purity and authority, and somewhat with loyalty. Those just didn't show up in Haidt's original data because his questionnaire suffered from bias. "Would you use an American flag to clean the toilet if it is all you had?" is designed to measure conservative purity more than liberal. Yet a parallel question of "Would you use a newspaper with a photo of MLK, Obama, or Gandhi as toilet paper if it were all you had?" does the same thing in a liberal direction. Much of environmentalism (and vegetariansim, organic farming) is about purity, even aesthetics rather than measurable harm, in "protecting wilderness" (for what?) or regarding it as sacred. NG liked to use the word cathedral a lot. It has not only been around covid that liberals have appealed to authority, it was quite apparent to me a decade ago and more that university professors were regarded as knowing more about many subjects and got to define such things as whether race was a real category, even when they were nonsensical, and executives overruling legislatures and both overruled by courts was considered the natural order of things.
Good review.
That was a very informative and enjoyable read. 2 misgivings: a sentence to make the elephant and rider model explicit would be useful, and looking up Dan Ariely's crimes did bring up issues, but not nearly enough to justify making him the exemplar of all that should be dismissed
I think the basic reviewer claim, that tribalism determines morality rather than vice versa, is essentially correct (though god knows we didn't need all that verbiage to get there)!
And the moralism of a particular tribal is historical and contingent; attempts to derive it from some more fundamental bedrock are in the same class as trying to derive the radius of planet orbits from nested platonic solids and similar enterprises.
Nietzsche's master/slave morality inversion is one example of this historical contingency, but it's far from the only one; much more recently, "western" morality was basically reset with WW2, which established a whole set of things that society is and is not allowed to do, no questions asked. We can see how historically contingent this is as soon as we try to justify on any sort of logical or philosophical grounds the details of the new morality.
A particularly useful example is abortion. if you'd asked people in the US in the 1930s, a lot more would have told you that abortion was bad ("killing an innocent life") than forced sterilization ("well, it's not ideal, but as they say, three generations of imbeciles are enough; and it's just preventing a future outcome, it's not killing anyone"). But of course now that polarity has absolutely flipped, and the only reason I see for this is that the Nazis supported one and not the other, so we should do the opposite.
My point is not which of abortion or sterilization are bad (though I fully expect a stream of furious excuses/justifications/reasons why I understand nothing, which I will absolutely ignore); my point is that this is how contingency works: events happen, people are raised in the shadow of those events told to be like X and not like Y, and that determines the shibboleths of their tribe.
You can try to go beyond that to argue that certain behaviors (tolerance) will result in less violence, which almost everyone wants; or that certain types of government will do a better job of aggregating diffuse information and finding talent; or that certain economic structures will generate innovation and wealth faster. But none of these justify particular moral stances ("abortion is wrong", "sterilization is right") and honestly I think attempts to do so are as pointless and no different from proofs for the existence of god -- apparently irrefutable to those who already believe, and just so much nonsense to thsoe who don't.
I'm not even convinced there are especially strong clusters of moral stances going together; I suspect that one mostly sees that when examining a very narrow slice of history (Europe/US since about 1800) and as soon as you go beyond that the cluster fall apart (as they fall apart, even with Europe/US when you start looking at particular items). It's all just historical contigency -> tribal identity!
Thank you very much for the "Aside on Categories and Axes" section. This puts into words a failure mode I feel I see a lot in social science and the humanities, but which I've been largely unsuccessful at communicating to people who don't already have some experience with healthier fields of scholarship and instinctively know that forming useful terminology and categories doesn't work like that.
R.E: The fermion boson distinction, you can have a quantum field configuration in a superposition of being a fermion and being a boson, and that will make some difference to how the field behaves when you measure it, so long as what you're measuring isn't its spin. As you say, that kind of measurement just kicks you into one of two Everett branches with either a fermion or a boson.
As an analogy, think of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation.A particle with a wave function spread out over an area always seems to have one definite position when you measure its position, because you're entangling yourself with the position basis. But when you measure momentum instead, a spread out wave function will have a different average momentum than one peaked at a particular point.
In the same way, there is a difference in behaviour between a field that's in a superposition of having one fermion and one boson, and a field that's either a fermion or a boson, but you're not sure which. You don't see that difference when you're measuring spin or things related to spin, but you do see it in other measurements.
So I'd say conceiving of fermion vs boson as a perfectly pure distinction makes sense in some contexts, but not all.
Review-of-the-review: 9/10
This is my second- or third-favorite review so far and a dark horse to get my vote in the end. In part I like it because it checks the boxes for what I find interesting: relevant and important topic, stays broadly on the subject of the book but injects its own interpretation and critique. But I especially like how it achieves those goals without resorting to brilliance. Scott and many of the finalists write and reason in ways that make it clear they're super-sharp. This review consciously doesn't, but still manages to make the same kind of approach to the material work. It's the rare "rationalist" analysis that succeeds on the strength of rationalism as a mindset, rather than relying on the unusual levels of talent that rationalist blogging tends to select for.
I don't mean that as a dig at the reviewer, who's clearly capable and intelligent. The review works well and shows a lot of care. It's not perfect; much of the analysis is over-explained or rambling, and the political observations often miss the mark. But these are small quibbles compared to the value of setting up, presenting, and defending a critical position. As always, many thanks for contributing!
This strand of conservative intellectualism ("these are useful things for society to believe and people should just sort of get on as if they’re true and not question them too much lest our shared reality collapse and our social norms with it", and "the intellectual conservative tradition of “what is good for the masses to believe is not identical to what’s fundamentally true, please consult my 60,000 word essay on decision theory, game theory, computational load, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for details, therefore Catholicism”) sounds really interesting, and I'm not sure I've encountered it before.
To either the original writer or anyone informed in the area: could someone point me towards any articles or books or videos that talk about this? I'd like to understand how relevant it is to the politicised side of American conservatism. Would something like this position be in the backs of the minds of most of the political conservative intellectuals?
Theoretical physicist here: your description of quantum mechanics was brief but fine :)
Other comments...
I liked this review a lot, and I think the criticisms it contains are justified and helpful in thinking through the issues surrounding Moral Foundations. But there are a few places on which I think the author misses the point, or at least I think about things differently:
1. I think critiques of the form "these aren't the right categories" or "these categories are a bit ad-hoc" that think they are takedowns of Haidt's program are missing the central message. Haidt repeatedly (at least in public talks, don't remember about the book) states that he does not put a lot of stock in the specific foundations he outlines, and is very open to new foundations / splitting up existing ones (a la Fairness / Liberty). iirc he explicitly calls for criticisms of this kind in order to strengthen MF, and better identify foundations he missed.
In my reading, his main point is not "these 5 (6) foundations are fundamental; stuff everything into these boxes" but rather "moral intuitions are like tastebuds, things aren't all classified along one axis, and here are some possible (though incomplete) axes on which we tend to have intuitions about things."
Also I was surprised that, in the thousands of words about distributions and categories, the author did mention "factor analysis", which is how most (good) psychometric categories are derived, including (probably) Haidt's (again, I don't remember if it's mentioned in the book but he talks about it in lectures).
Finally on this, I heard Tyler Cowen mention that in his view, social science (including economics) is, at best, descriptive but not predictive. I think about this a lot, because as a natural scientist myself, I tend to think of science as being predictive if it is to be science at all. But maybe a better reading of Haidt, which he may or may not agree with himself, is that the MFs he identifies describe politics / the culture war as of 2010ish, but using it to predict some future political battle is a bridge too far because that's not what social science is for. I don't know, maybe.
Also:
2. Maybe a nit-picky point and certainly not unique to me, but calling the modern-day Left "liberals" and the modern-day Right "conservatives" is a mistaken use of these terms; I think partly explains why Haidt appears to get modern politics wrong.
Trump violates conservative ethics in all the ways the author discusses, because the party of Trump is apparently the Right = Conservatives ≠ conservatives. Haidt could easily tell a story where the conservative values he identifies are still present and preserved over time, but the political coalitions have shifted to focusing on different issues and so different Foundations are in the spotlight. (This is consistent with the critique above where Haidt and his Foundations fail to predict those shifting coalitions.)
[Now repeat the same paragraph but for Woke-rs instead of Trump-ers, where "Right" → "Left", "conservative" → "liberal", "Conservative" → "Liberal", "Trump" → AOC (??).]