Klasios - Morality Binds and Blinds

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Evolutionary Psychology

www.epjournal.net2012. 10(4): 714-719

Book Review

Morality Binds and Blinds

A review of Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided byPolitics and Religion. Pantheon Books: New York, 2012, 448 pp., US$28.95, ISBN # 978-0307377906 (hardcover).

John Klasios, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Email:[email protected].

Every so often a book is published which helps to connect the dots and provide asynoptic overview of some topic of inquiry, whereby what was once understood in adisjointed fashion suddenly becomes a coherent and intuitively understood wholeas if byexperiencing a sudden Gestalt switch. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidts The Righteous

Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion is one such book.Stylistically and pedagogically, the approach taken in the book by Haidt parallels some ofits main messages. Haidt points to the evidence within social psychology and reasoningpsychology which demonstrates that humans possess a rueful knack for being more than a

bit impervious to reason and evidence that aims to convince them that they hold false orinaccurate beliefs. Among the evidence adduced along the way is the confirmation bias andmotivated reasoning. Perhaps the lesser-known of the two, motivated reasoning occurswhenever individuals deploy their reasoning either to concoct a justification in favor ofsome belief they possess, or to counter an assertion or argument presented against one ofthose very beliefs.

In connection with these findings from the literature, Haidt draws attention to theprovocative thesis recently advanced by Mercier and Sperber (2011), wherein they arguethat the best explanation of the collective findings within the social and reasoningpsychology literatures is that human reasoning, as deployed in social contexts, evolved notso much as a means of ascertaining truthful propositions, but rather as a way of winningargumentsas a way of persuading others. Perhaps relatedly, the character of Glauconfrom Platos Republic is used to convey a fundamental motive of humans in the moralsphere: to appear moral and virtuous in the eyes of others, without necessarily actuallybeingmoral and virtuous. Both the Glauconian thesis and the one advanced by Mercier andSperber will perhaps not be too surprising to those of an especially evolutionary-bentreading Haidts book.

Given this rather bleak picture of human reasoning, the author declares his intentionto first attempt at persuading the reader by speaking directly to his or her elephant, the
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Morality binds and blinds

Evolutionary PsychologyISSN 1474-7049Volume 10(4). 2012. -715-

metaphorical stand-in which he uses to refer to the intuitive and affective aspects of ourcognitive makeup. It is also these aspects which he thinks are ultimately what exert thepredominant influence on us so far as our moral psychology is concerned. Haidt concedes,rather pessimistically, that if his tactics of persuasion cannot succeed at this level then thefollow-up arguments are quite likely to fall on proverbial deaf ears. Indeed, Haidt seems to

believe it when he says that humans are primarily guided by their intuitions in the fixationof their beliefs. Lest Haidts view sounds like it paints too bleak a picture of humanreasoning, it should be noted that he does believe that processes of rational deliberation canplay a role in belief fixation, as well as reasoned input from others in ones social milieu.One of his more optimistic messages, therefore, is that the pursuit of truth is within ourcapacity, but only insofar as a community of reasoners is able to recursively vet eachothers reasoning a condition which is seemingly best exemplified by scientificcommunities.

The central views bestriding the field of moral psychology throughout the latterpart of last century are briefly sketched by Haidt near the outset of the book, namely thePiagetian and Kohlbergian views. But rather than giving a dry, extended technical overview

of these paradigms, Haidt weaves the explication of their central tenets around his ownexplorations of moral psychology, beginning with his days as a graduate student. Hisexposure to the ethnographic work of Richard Shweder had lead him to eventually researchthe moral psychology of individuals living in India, an experience which would ultimatelyleave an indelible mark both on how Haidt came to see our moral psychology and onhimself personally. The rest of Haidts personal story leads to the central argument that the

rationalist view of humans moral psychologywith roots in Plato and as developed in thefield of moral psychology by Kohlberg and his proponentsis radically incomplete. In itsplace, Haidt makes the case for his moral foundations theory. According to this view,which is a keystone piece around which many of the other themes running throughout thebook revolve, morality is more than what rationalists like Plato and Kohlberg have made itout to be. Rather, Haidt argues that the rationalist picture of moral psychology generallyonly picks out two broad foundations of a larger complex which features at least threeand probably fourothers. These six moral foundations are given the names care/harm,fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, andliberty/oppression. For instance, the liberty/oppression foundation, as its nomenclaturesuggests, is sensitive to moral transgressions which curtail or oppress the liberty of someindividual or group, whereas placing more weight on the welfare of individuals in a foreignnation is likely to activate the loyalty/betrayal foundationthe latter foundation being onethat conservatives score much higher on than liberals.

Indeed, one of Haidts central contentions in the book, backed up by the empiricalevidence he and colleagues have gathered, is that liberals primarily make use of only threeof these moral foundationscare/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppressionwhereasconservatives utilize all six. Moreover, the cross-national data gathered by Haidt and hiscolleagues show that this patterned divide between liberals and conservatives remainsconsistent no matter which country one looks at. Along these lines, earlier work by Haidtfound that upper-class individuals in Brazilian cities distinguished moral violations fromconventional violations/taboos more like upper-class individuals in Philadelphia, whereas


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their working-class compatriots tended to make no such distinctionthat is, saw outrightmoral violations as on a par with violations of a conventional sort. Thus, distinguishingmoral violations from taboos appears to cross-cut cultures, at least in the case of the upper-class subjects examined in Haidts work.

Comprising one of the central themes of the book, Haidt makes the case that moral

psychology has come to reveal human moralizing as primarily driven by intuitiveprocessesa picture which mirrors the verdict with respect to our reasoning moregenerally. According to thesocial intuitionist modeldeveloped by Haidt, intuitive cognitiveprocesses precede the more overt, conscious deliberations that are traditionally held to bethe hallmark of moral reasoning. Before formally introducing this model, however, Haidtbegins by tracing out how his own thinking gradually evolved into the model as it ispresented in the book. Three contrasting views of the relation between moral reasoning, onthe one hand, and intuitions and emotions, on the other, are presented: thePlatonic/rationalist view, the Humean sentimentalist view, and the Jeffersonian dual-process view. Although Haidt at one stage acceded to the Jeffersonian dual-process view,he ultimately came to abandon it in favor of Humes view. Evidence is marshalled to

support the view that, rather than human moral psychology being directed by cool,calculated, off-line deliberation via the higher rational facultiesthe Platonic viewandcontra it being shaped conjunctively by both reason and the passionsthe Jeffersonianviewit rather appears, according to Haidt, that we start with moral judgments infused byintuitive flashes, with which our controlled reasoning then proceeds to concoct ex postfacto rationalizations for.

Undergirding Haidts moral foundations theory is an explicit endorsement ofevolutionary psychologys modularityspecifically the construal proffered by Sperber andHirschfeld (2004). In conjunction with this construal of modularity, Haidt also cites thetreatment of developmental neurogenetics presented by Marcus (2004), utilizing Marcusterse definition of nativism as organized in advance of experience. Broadly speaking, Haidttakes the view that the six moral foundations are modules inhering within our cognitivearchitecture. These broadly construed modules are simultaneously taken to be malleable inresponse to a wide array of cultural, social, and other factors, yet malleable in relativelyspecific, constrained, systematic, and organized waysways which presumably have beenadaptively crafted by natural selection. Of course, this review is not the place to partake inan extended and in-depth analysis of Haidts modular framework, or cognitive modularitymore generally, but his corpus of work on moral foundations theory and other topics isdefinitely evolutionary-psychological in character, and unashamedly so.

The final part of the book looks at the groupish psychology of humans moregenerally, and religion more specifically. The principle underlying this part of the book isthat morality binds and blinds. Roughly speaking, Haidt takes human groupishness andmoral psychology to have evolved chiefly to bind humans into in-groups. And it is withinthese in-groups that rituals, norms, and customsinter aliafacilitate group cohesion andsolidarity for the purposes of competing with rival out-groups. As has been pointed out byothers (e.g., de Waal, 2006) one of our most noble psychological dimensions, namelymorality, has its provenance in an evolutionary history of inter-group conflict. That said,however, one should be cautious before necessarily conflating the underlying evolved


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psychological aspects of our moral impulses with morality as it perhaps ought to be definedas (Kitcher, 2006).

It is also at this point of the book where arguably the most controversial of Haidtstheses makes its entrance, namely that humans have been shaped to some non-negligibleextent by group selection, and that religion may possibly be an adaptation (perhaps, for

instance, an adaptation characterized by cultural complexes interfacing with an underlyingcognitive basis, forged jointly by gene-culture co-evolutionary processes). It is important totake note, however, that Haidt is simply raising the possibility and not reaching anydefinitive conclusions. Relatedly, his contention that humans are, metaphorically speaking,90 percent chimp and 10 percent beethat is, have been shaped partly by groupselectionwill obviously be viewed skeptically by many. That said, whether humans haveor have not been shaped by group selectionand if so, the extent to which they havebeenremains an empirical question. At a minimum, much of the controversy at thetheoretical level has seemingly overlooked the fact that gene selection/inclusive fitness andgroup selection/multi-level selection are equivalent formulations (e.g., Sterelny andGriffiths, 1999, pp. 151-179; Wilson, 2012a, 2012b; Okasha, 2008). The question of

religion, too, still remains an open question. For instance, and in line with Haidtssuggestion that it may be an adaptation, recent arguments have been advanced in favor of aframework that is both adaptationist and pluralisticincorporating explanatory elementssuch as spandrels and cultural group selection, inter alia (e.g., Atran and Henrich, 2010;Powell and Clarke, 2012).

This third section of the book also integrates the other two main principlescomprising the organizing themes of the first two sections. According to Haidt, our well-documented foibles of reasoning are especially evident with respect to those beliefs whichindividuals take to be sacred i.e., religious, political. If one follows the sacrednessthatis, ascertains what an individual or group holds to be a sacred value, cause, precept, etc.itis likely that they will discover where an individual or group becomes blind to any reasonsor counter-evidence that speak against that which is sacralized. As Haidt puts it:

Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on theother side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle aroundsacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and theyare so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and commonsense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects. Ifyou want to understand another group,follow the sacredness. (pp. 311-312)

Apart from the obvious relevance that the book has to human political cognition andbehaviorwhich is especially apropos given the polarized nature of the current politicalclimate in the United Statesmany of its central messages will also be applicable toacademic and scientific discourse. As Haidt (2012) has made salient elsewhere, socialpsychologists, for instance, and social scientists more generally, may collectively as agroup be inadvertently or advertently discriminating against conservative colleagues inways which conform to the tribalistic moral psychology he has outlined. Indeed, a recentsurvey of social psychologists found them to be overwhelmingly socially liberal, but more


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to the point many openly conceded that they would likely discriminate in various waysagainst conservative colleagues (Inbar and Lammers, 2012). Such a finding certainlysupports Haidts contention that social psychologyif not academia more broadlycan bea hostile climate for conservatives (the out-group). Alarmingly, Inbar and Lammers foundthat more than one out of three of their respondents would discriminate against

conservative colleagues when making hiring decisions, which indicates that majorpersonnel decisions occurring within the field of social psychology are being executed in adiscriminatory fashion.

The pervasive manner in which individuals form tribal moral communities thatsacralize certain values (e.g., egalitarianism) may also seemingly explain why certain topicsand lines of investigation in the human sciences are met with such strong resistancee.g.,adaptationism applied to human psychology, sex differences, race differences. Theseresistances may very well be the manifestations of an underlying moral psychologysculpted by natural selection, a psychology that enabled our ancestors to form moral teamsthat perceived the world in terms of an idiosyncratic moral matrix, and who circled aroundthe sacred values and objects of the tribeat once delineating the in-group and juxtaposing

it against all others. Haidts book is an important , eye-opening work of synthesis that is asbroad as it is topical, and for which it should deservingly gain a wide and interdisciplinaryreadership.

References

Atran, S., and Henrich, J. (2010). The Evolution of Religion: How cognitive by-products,adaptive learning heuristics, ritual displays, and group competition generate deepcommitments to prosocial religions. Biological Theory: Integrating Development,Evolution, and Cognition,5(1), 18-30.

De Waal, F. (2006). Morally evolved: Primate social instincts, human morality, and the riseand fall of "Veneer Theory". In S. Macedo, and J. Ober (Eds.), Primates andphilosophers: How morality evolved (pp. 1-82). Princeton, N.J: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Haidt, J. (2012, February 5). Post-partisan social psychology. Retrieved fromhttp://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html

Inbar, Y., and Lammers, J. (2012). Political diversity in social and personality psychology.Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 496-503.

Kitcher, P. (2006). Ethics and evolution: How to get here from there. In S. Macedo, and J.Ober (Eds.), Primates and philosophers: How morality evolved (pp. 120-139).Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Marcus, G. F. (2004). The birth of the mind: How a tiny number of genes creates thecomplexities of human thought. New York: Basic books.

Mercier, H., and Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for anargumentative theory.Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34, 57-111.

Okasha, S. (2008). Units and levels of selection. In S. Sarkar, and A. Plutynski (Eds.), ACompanion to the philosophy of biology (pp. 138-156). Oxford: Blackwell.

Powell, R., and Clarke, S. (2012). Religion as an evolutionary byproduct: A critique of the
http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.htmlhttp://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.htmlhttp://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html


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standard model.British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 63(3), 457-486.Sperber, D., and Hirschfeld, L. (2004). The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and

diversity. Trends in Cognitive Science,8, 40-46.Sterelny, K., and Griffiths, P. E. (1999). Sex and death: An introduction to philosophy of

biology. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, D. S. (2012a, May 29). Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, and the consensus ofthe many. Retrieved fromhttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/richard-dawkins-edward-o.-wilson-and-the-consensus-of-the-many

Wilson, D. S. (2012b, July 12). Clash of paradigms. Retrieved fromhttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/clash-of-paradigms
http://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/richard-dawkins-edward-o.-wilson-and-the-consensus-of-the-manyhttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/richard-dawkins-edward-o.-wilson-and-the-consensus-of-the-manyhttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/richard-dawkins-edward-o.-wilson-and-the-consensus-of-the-manyhttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/clash-of-paradigmshttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/clash-of-paradigmshttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/clash-of-paradigmshttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/richard-dawkins-edward-o.-wilson-and-the-consensus-of-the-manyhttp://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/richard-dawkins-edward-o.-wilson-and-the-consensus-of-the-many

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