Moral choices are survival choices

A review of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Plato believed that reason should rule over emotion.

Jefferson believed that they were equal partners.

David Hume believed that reason was only fit to be the servant of the passions.

My mother hated that I was ‘so emotional.’ Being a teenage girl when she said that, it was hard to be otherwise. Mom had been my best pal before puberty. After I hit 7th grade and started menstruating, she was suddenly much less engaged. My emotions were overwhelming. For newly maturing human females, that’s normal.

Which would have been helpful to know.

My coping mechanisms were sugar and television, both addictive. I knew that lashing out, letting my emotions loose, was a bad idea. On of the girls in my class had public meltdowns. It only made the harassment she received worse. Mine was bad enough already. However, the reasoned admonition from my mother that the girls picking on me were very unhappy and taking it out on me didn’t help my emotional state AT ALL. Further therapy seemed to focus both on my feelings, and more of mom’s advice. Real answers were not forthcoming.

I wanted to know what to do. Religious instruction was also a fail in that it didn’t seem to be at all connected to my life. I didn’t see anything in either the Ten Commandments or The Beatitudes that gave me any guideposts and there was no talking about it because that was a social rule.

For a short period of time, I tried out distancing myself from my emotions, observing the people around me closely, and trying to get them them to do what I wanted. I found out I was capable of being manipulative if I just shoved my emotions in a box and let my intellect have fun. Using observation, I reasoned out what people wanted and gave them that, which made them more friendly and likely to do what I wanted. Creepy as this sounds [and I know it does] what I wanted was benign: to be liked.

However, lack of emotion is what characterizes psychopaths. They have plenty of reason, but no empathy. Plato was wrong. We don’t want reason to rule.

While I quickly realized that I didn’t like myself when I was in this state and went back to being emotional, I also knew that reason had its place. I was good at figuring things out and my curiosity often ruled me. I wanted to understand both myself and other people. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion went a long way toward that understanding.

Haidt began his study of the relatively new field of moral psychology in the early 90s at the University of Chicago. His work has been a deep dive into the biological and evolutionary underpinnings of how we decide the right thing to do.

My personal struggles with doing the right thing involved probing my deep feelings to find the direction that seemed the best. What I struggled with was satisfying the roiling curiosity that demanded WHY was that the right thing? Christianity had provided no answers, and neither did my adopted religion, Paganism. Nor did philosophy. My boyfriend in college talked me into a philosophy class on the basis that it would help me sort myself out. It didn’t. Philosophy ignored emotion completely and talked about ways of viewing the world which either seemed blindingly obvious or lacking in meaning.*

Haidt’s book was a relief. Paganism grounds us in our bodies and acknowledges what we feel as real and valid [If it’s not always balanced, well, neither is Christianity.] I had already concluded that emotions were real and shouldn’t be denied, but that their energy might be best used by directing it, such as putting anger into a hard workout, or frustration into gaining new skills. The Righteous Mind was about the evolution of our morals.

Haidt uses the analogy of an elephant and a rider. The rider is just a passenger. Our emotions are the elephant and the rider is our reason. Haidt describes multiple repeatable experiments that demonstrate that we never apply reason first. We can’t. The cerebral cortex is too new. Emotion guided life and animal behavior for eons before humans became conscious. Moral reasoning cannot be separated from emotion and our intuitive moral understanding always comes first, with the rational ‘why’ coming after.

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He describes an experiment that he did with one of his grad students. She hypnotized each subject and told them they would feel a flash of disgust when they saw or heard a word that she chose. The test was run on two different words, “take” and “often.” Each group was then given several stories about moral situations to judge. For the words that they were given, they always felt more disgust when the story contained it

For example, The stories were about politicians, who would “take” bribes or alternatively would “often” accept money in exchange for votes. The stories were functionally the same, but when the correct words were used, the members of the study experienced discussed. Which they did not when their hypnotized word was not used.

At the end of the test, they added a story designed to show that there were limits to visceral reasoning. They predicted that, even if the codeword was in the story, the structure of the story i.e. reason would overrule the visceral response that would arise from seeing one of the code words. While most of the subjects did indeed overrule, their visceral judgment, 1/3 of the subjects did not, although they often couldn’t explain why, or they would make up a random story about why.

Haidt further goes on to address what keeps us in line with each other. Since reason is not fit to rule and doesn’t by definition make us better people, the best way to run a society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time. Therefore, when it comes to moral judgments, we should take a functionalist approach and see what the purpose of certain behaviors is.

Moral judgments didn’t involve helping us figure out the right thing to do but moral reasoning helped us build coalitions, which made us more likely to survive. Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship in the animal kingdom. When you see a group in the animal kingdom, they will be related. No so with humans. We create systems of formal and informal accountability, making people responsible for their actions. This is what lets us work in unrelated groups toward a common goal.

When people are not accountable, only about 20% will be honest to their personal detriment. This can’t be predicted by how people rate their own honesty.

In the early 2000s, Haidt became frustrated with the fact that Democrats weren’t winning elections and set out to understand why. He had already theorized and tested five ‘moral matrices.’ These were patterns of moral judgments, and he examined them across multiple cultures and economic classes. When he got frustrated, with the help of his team, he applied his studies to liberals on conservatives. The results were enlightening and in the course of these studies, he determined a sixth moral matrix.

The outcome of his studies was that liberals use two of the moral matrices to make political choices, while conservatives use all six, balanced against each other.

The six foundations are:

• Care/harm

• Fairness/cheating

• Loyalty/betrayal

• Authority/subversion

• Purity/dégradation

• Liberty/oppression

Haidt explains each of these matrices in terms of how these things mattered to early hominids would have given our genes an evolutionary advantage. I’ve since read several books on evolutionary psychology, and haven’t yet come across anything that contradicts Haidt’s work.

The moral foundations questionnaire (MMQ) verified Haidt’s insights. Liberals have what could be described as a two-foundation morality, whereas conservatives engage with all the foundations. To make sure that this finding was not an artifact of how the study was done, they continued to collect data and refine the questions on the test. The findings continue to replicate, and not just in the United States.

You can take the MMQ at www.yourmorals.org

The larger study had more than 130,000 responses.

Even our brains are partisan.

The book is somewhat dated in that Haidt was a liberal when he started researching Republicans versus Democrats and wanted Democrats to win elections again. Of course, that’s happened. However, because of his research, Haidt no longer describes himself as a liberal.

In chapter 8, he describes ‘the conservative advantage.’

Republicans inherited Christian morality which is much more broad than what has been espoused by the left. In the 60s and 70s, a wide foundation appeal was attractive to many Democrats who were more likely to balance all six moral matrices. In contrast, the moral foundation offered by modern Democrats was very narrow, focusing only on care and fairness.

So what makes people vote Republican?

There are two approaches to creating a society where people with diverse opinions can live together. One is exemplified by John Stuart Mill and his utilitarian approach. The other is described by Emile Durkheim

Mill’s morality is based solely on care in fairness, whereas Durkheim embraces all six foundations

The difference is a society that is contractual versus one that emerges organically.

Organic societies develop from the original hierarchical unit which is the family. A hierarchical, traditional society, places value on order, loyalty, and sacredness, and many of the ways that this manifests is morally offensive to people on the Left.

In Chapter 9, Haidt revisits the idea of group selection, which was discarded in the 70s. He lays out four arguments for why Darwin’s theory [of group selection, not individual selection] should be acknowledged as valid. He does so because humans are unique among life on Earth in our ability to work together outside kin groups. As fascinating and incredibly useful as I’ve found Haidt’s moral matrices, knowing that humans are so good at working together gives me hope for the future.

The book is full of analogies and stories that make the more esoteric ideas accessible. Even though it’s politically dated, it’s worth reading.

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Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; three boyz. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition, and The Storytellers: a Journey of Discovery.