The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

Book 1:

He starts out with stories that are intuitively wrong, but don’t have a good reason for being that. E.g. having intercourse with a dead chicken before eating it (contraception is used etc.).

Then he describes the main schools of thoughts where morality comes from: nature, nurture and rationalist (Piaget thought the kids reason their way to morals).

There is a link between the feeling of cleanness and conservatism. It’s not fear of new things, it’s disgust. By asking someone next to a hand-sanatizer about their political views, conservative perspectives rise significantly.

Moral judgement is in large parts subconscious. The conscious mind tries to rationalise the decision after the fact.

He draws on Palto’s story about the ring of Gyges and take the view apposing Socrates. One is not better of virtuous but perceived as evil, than vice versa. The accountability of people is what makes them moral. He therefore references Ariely’s experiments where he shows that the majority of people cheat when given the chance to.

→ The central metaphor for this book is the monkey riding the elephant. The monkey steers it a little but is mostly responsible for rationalising what the elephant did.

Book 2:

There are 6 dimensions of moral taste:

1. Care-Harm → Comes from evolutionary advantage to protect in-group, especially babies, from harm
2. Fairness-Cheating → Reciprocity is evolutionary advantageous (adapted for communities < Dunbars number) Tit for Tat is the dominant strategy in many situations.
3. Loyalty-Betrayal → Also advantageous to protect the social fabric of the in-group. Strong social groups are advantageous, which makes maintaining them a priority.
4. Authority-Subversion → The social hierarchy is very important and protected by genetical predisposition to honour it.
5. Sanctity-Degradation → We have to balance the fear and interest in new things. Fear from new things is related to disgust.
6. Liberty-Oppression → This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty. Its intuitions are often in tension with those of the authority foundation. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. We report some preliminary work on this potential foundation in this paper, on the psychology of libertarianism and liberty. → Connected to the law of karma.

→ The central metaphor for this book is are the 6 taste receptors in the mouth. Just stimulating one is not satisfying and there are different tastes in food even though we all have the same receptors.

Studies show that liberals (US) care about the first two dimensions, while conservatives care about all 6 dimensions.

Book 3:

He makes the argument, that we are remarkable group players and that selection may take place on various levels (including group level) and not just the gene level (Dawkins).

In general he points out that group behaviour is very important for humans and that we all have instincts to be charitable to our in-group. One important aspect of that is in his eyes religion. Religion has in his view primarily the (Durkheimian) community aspect. It raises trust in the fellow group members and lowers transaction costs through ensured accountability.

→ The central metaphor for this book is: We are 90% chimp and 10% bee.

Conclusion:

The book is excellently structured and I am very positively surprised by Haidt. He has some resemblance to Harari in the way he values fictions. Emil Durkheim is one of my main takeaways as future to-reads.