Starting out with just a little richness

Moral Foundations

After making the case for intuitionism, the middle section of the book focuses on the core of Haidt’s research, his moral foundations model. By analogy to taste receptors, the idea is that we don’t have just one intuitive impulse producing our snap moral judgements that we then rationalise, but five (later this is expanded to six, but I’ll follow the book’s process of introducing that one later, as it was added later in Haidt’s own research). The five foundations are:

• Care: Basic utilitarian idea that suffering is bad;

• Fairness: Desire for equality and freedom, and the urge to punish free-riders and defectors (if this seems like a messy category at best, and a contradictory mess at worst, don’t worry, Haidt refines this one in time);

• Loyalty: Basic in-group/out-group alignment;

• Authority: Respect for those in positions of power/prestige, and the idea that they can determine what is right and wrong and instruct accordingly;

• Sanctity: Religious-seeming (though not always explicitly so) ideas of purity vs profanity, not violating the sacred, and so on.

The idea is that these are five fundamental intuitions humans have that come together to create our instinctive moral judgements, but that they are weighted differently in different people. Haidt then goes on to claim, based on his research, a strong correlation between the extent to which people feel these intuitions and the US partisan groupings of conservatives and liberals (Haidt is aware that the term “liberal” means all sorts of things around the world, but is working in a US context so uses it that way throughout, as I will), with liberals mostly responding to care and fairness, and conservatives to all five.

Haidt then proposes that conservatives have an inbuilt advantage in moral persuasion, because their wider collection of moral intuitions allows them to tell a greater variety of stories and justify themselves in a way that generates broader appeal, whereas liberals are mostly stuck justifying everything through care and fairness.

Haidt clearly struggles with the fairness foundation and its somewhat grab-bag nature. He eventually splits it in two, leaving the free-rider punishment part (which he calls proportionality) in the foundation called fairness, and spinning off a new foundation called liberty which is based around freedom from oppression. The revised political division is then that liberals mostly respond to care, fairness, and liberty, libertarians to liberty above all, and conservatives to all six.

Group Selection

The third part of the book then tries to work out why we’d have these intuitions at all, rather than just being self-interested, as evolution would seem to suggest we should be. This turns into an impassioned defence of group selection. According to Haidt, group selection was a part of evolutionary theory from the start, but gradually got more and more abused by people reverse-engineering group selection just-so-stories for pretty much anything, until a backlash in the 60s and 70s consigned group selection to the academic graveyard and insisted that evolution worked entirely by individual selection.

Haidt believes this to be a mistake, and sees himself as part of a movement to cautiously return some degree of group selection to the academic mainstream. He draws heavily on E.O. Wilson, approving of his proposed synthesis between the biological and social sciences, and makes a strong case, based on studies of the emergence of hive behaviour in insects, among other case studies, that group selection is possible and has been observed in other contexts. He’s clearly aware of the dangers of loose applications of group selection and the interpretive freedom this would give to explain almost anything as in some way a product of evolution, but works hard to establish when we might expect group selection and when we might not, and to make sure that individual selection always stays in frame as the main driving force of evolution.

This is necessary for his central idea because the moral foundations he claims are innate (he does a good job of explaining how innateness does not require that something be present from birth) can be explained as group adaptations but not individual adaptations. Haidt is positioning himself against the idea that evolution would drive humans to be selfish (with exceptions for close genetic relatives), so any other behaviour must be the result of explicit reasoning on our part. He claims instead that that some degree of non-selfish behaviour arises naturally through group selection, and that this is expressed through our moral intuitions, with moral reasoning mostly serving as a post-hoc justification for this.

Jul 16, 9:17am: plus some more

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Jul 16, 11:33am:
Jul 16, 11:34am