Introduction

I didn’t read The Righteous Mind for a long time after I knew about it. This was partly because I don’t get through much in the way of new reading material. A friend of mine told me yesterday that he’d read something like 130 new books this year. That was on February 20th. I’ve read one, and it was The Righteous Mind. Another friend releases Spotify playlists every Friday of the greatest hits from the many new albums he’s listened to that week. I’ve listened to one new album this year. It was Selling England by the Pound, which he recommended. It was my first foray into Genesis and I loved it. I now have to keep telling him that, no, I haven’t listened to any more Genesis or Peter Gabriel since then, but I’m sure I’ll get round to it within the year.

This is to make the point that I’m starting from a low base rate of reading things. I still think I put off reading The Righteous Mind for unusually long, though, given how interesting I find the subject matter. The reason, I think, is that I sort of felt like it wouldn’t be very interesting, because I’d kind of know and agree with all of it already. Given how slowly I absorb new books, I like them to either be challenging, or a new and informative look at things I just don’t know very much about yet. I don’t mean to come across as some sort of sage of intellectual piety and good habits of mind who scorns the comforting embrace of being validated. I read plenty of political bloggers that I mostly agree with! I just don’t tend to use books for that.

I had a general feeling that The Righteous Mind sits in the background of a lot of the political or meta-political content that I know and love. It had the aura of a sort of foundational text for the loose family of political views and affiliations I have. I don’t consider myself a centrist, which I think is how Haidt identifies himself, but I do share his disdain for tribal partisan politics and general sense that so much of what passes for political debate is just people yelling foundational definitional disagreements past each other mostly for the benefit of their own fans. I felt like I’d probably picked up most of its insights further downstream, and wouldn’t get much out of reading it.

I was completely wrong. I found The Righteous Mind to be a frustrating book, caught up in a disastrous confusion about what its central points were. I regularly found myself thinking I could make its arguments better than it was, leaving me with that awful feeling of listening to someone else make weak arguments for a position you hold and feeling the people around you being unconvinced. I think if I were among the people against whom it mainly seems to be arguing, I would find it unconvincing. 

Most of all, though, it just feels horribly outdated only a decade after it was published, and that’s a real death blow for an attempt to get beyond the ephemera of partisanship and talk about political differences in a more fundamental way. At its core the book is an attempt to go beyond the surface partisanship of R vs D, and dive into the underlying moral psychology that Haidt thinks drives those differences. Unfortunately, just ten years from writing, his underlying structure looks almost as disposable and skin-deep as the latest scandal or wedge policy issue.

This means I enjoyed reading it a lot more than I expected! Reading it made me think harder about a whole bunch of topics. Working out exactly what I think is wrong with it was a really interesting and worthwhile experience. I spent a lot of the time I was “reading” it just staring out the window, working through things in my head. I ended up with a lot to say about it, which is what led to my writing this review.

Run through the three sections

For all I thought its argumentation was muddled and unclear, the way the book is structured is very clear and helpful. It’s divided into three sections, each of which has clearly stated main points it sets out to prove. Within those sections, each chapter ends with a brief summary that makes it clear what Haidt wants you to focus on and take away.

I’m a big fan of this. I read a lot of political or philosophical writing that seems almost designed to make it unclear what the author is trying to say, and I find it extremely wearing. I appreciate an author who will just state the claims and then try to back them up, rather than meandering about between anecdote, argument, autobiography, and rant and hoping you stitch together something out of the vague vibes. Haidt isn’t as unbelievably rigorous about this as Plantinga or Parfit, whose numbered key statements make piecing together their arguments and examining them in detail a pleasure, but the chapter summaries and clear three-part structure are great.

I’m going to run through the three sections fairly briefly, making what I think are the key points in outline format.

Intuitionism

The first part of the book lays out some history of moral psychology and then makes the case for Haidt’s intuitionism. At its core, this is the idea that human beings don’t naturally reason their way to moral decisions, but make them pretty much based on instinct, then cobble together whatever reasoning they need in order to explain their decisions to others and justify them internally.

This is the “rider and elephant” analogy that’s seeped well into rationalist thought, so a lot of it was familiar to me. It’s nicely written in order to gradually guide someone who might be fairly new to the idea that people might not be fully rational agents through the arguments, using Haidt’s own career working in moral psychology as a framework for doing so.

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 clos