Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion is roughly divided into two parts. In the first, Haidt makes the case for social intuitionism, the theory that moral judgements are primarily the product of automatic intuitions rather than conscious reasoning. The main form of evidence for this is so-called “moral dumbfounding”: when people are shown to instantly reach moral conclusions they cannot then explain using reasoning. Example, “A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he thoroughly cooks it and eats it.” We immediately react that it is wrong to have sex with a dead chicken before we are able to explain why. When experimenters ask test subjects to explain why it is wrong to have sex with a dead chicken, they are often “morally dumbfounded,” ie unable to come up with a good rational explanation. Moral reasoning, Haidt concludes, is therefore always post hoc.
Hard to argue with that…although Haidt doesn’t necessarily show that all moral judgements operate according to his theory. Nonetheless, it is the second part of the book, in which Haidt puts forth the argument for Moral Foundations theory, that is more problematic. According to this theory, there are six main moral intuitions, or “modular foundations,” that we are innately predisposed to develop. The above example with the chicken, for example, would violate the Sanctity/degradation moral foundation. The central metaphor of this theory is that the moral mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors, those being “Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression.”
I feel uneasy reducing ethics to a set of “tastes,” implying that because some moral judgements seem to be a matter of instant and irrational intuitions, all moral judgements are so. Furthermore, Moral Foundations theory essentially tells us that morality is a set of evolutionarily beneficial prejudices. According to Haidt, we have evolved these six moral foundations as a species because they are the moral intuitions which guarantee us the greatest chance of survival. Therefore, they are all equally important and valid, and a morality which includes all of them will be more “fit” than one with only some. No moral foundation has the right to consider itself more important on the basis of reasoning, argument or conscious thought, because in fact all conscious thought about morality is post hoc self-justification (according to Haidt).
One of the biggest problems with this is that it implies that all prejudices are evolutionarily functional (or else why would we have them?), and hence useful, even moral. White supremacy, for example, can been seen as have the useful function of holding a group of people together, uniting them to work towards a common good. Under Haidt’s theory there is no way to argue that an ethics of fairness, equality and diversity is inherently better than an ethics of white supremacy. Morality is nothing more than a set of evolutionarily programed moral intuitions (or at least that seems to me to be the logical conclusion of Haidt’s argument).
Haidt, however, puts a more positive spin on his findings by arguing that if we can just learn to recognize everyone’s moral intuitions as equally valid, then we will live in a better, more cooperative world. According to Haidt, progressives tend to focus on just two of the six moral foundations, whereas conservatives take into consideration all six. Therefore, conservatives are numerically better than progressives, see figure below:
One problem with this is that his choice of six moral foundations is fairly arbitrary. Other studies have found that two moral foundations (an individualizing foundation and a binding foundation) would be enough to explain the data (see this study). Furthermore, why should a greater number of moral intuitions be inherently better? How have we gone from the descriptive to the prescriptive?
To suggest that because respect for authority has been considered a virtue means that it always should be considered one, for example, seems to me a stretch. Or another example, homosexuality has long been considered a violation of Sanctity. According to Haidt, the predisposition to view homosexuality as immoral is innate and carries just as much moral weight as a person’s right to sexual autonomy. Even if he is right that we have innate moral predispositions, is there any reason we can’t decide on the basis of experience and reasoning that some of them are more valuable than others? Or that just because we have a certain predisposition (for example to violence and exploitation) we have to make use of it?
Aside from this, there is the problem that much of Moral Foundations theory is unfalsifiable. As with so many evolutionary explanations (see Steven Pinker), there is a danger of creating “Just-so stories,” ie an “untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals1.” How is one to determine experimentally why a certain adaption evolved. Is something true just because it is plausible?
So while Haidt’s work presents an important reminder to remember that our moral judgements are culturally influenced, and that therefore we risk misunderstanding other people when we apply our own moral standards to them, I reject his conclusions, especially as they are prescriptive, as opposed to descriptive.
recycled paper clips 