Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent multidisciplinary work on the meaning of life, entitled The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006). I am presently reading Haidt's book for the second time, paragraph by paragraph. This is clearly one of the books I would take to a…
Why are humans so repulsed by the idea that they are animals? Perhaps "Terror Management Theory" can shine some light on this important issue. When I started this blog in 2006, one idea that motivated me was that human beings simply can't deal with the idea that they are animals.…
In this lecture on TED, Jonathan Haidt discusses his approach, which involves "five foundations of morality." Haidt also explains that, in our attempts to better understand morality, too many of us are trapped in a non-ending cycle in which "everybody thinks they are right." We are in need of humility, and the best way to get moral humility is to escape moral righteousness by striving to step out of the struggle. We need to see that liberals and conservatives both have something to offer to the conversation of change versus stability. I've written repeatedly and glowingly about Haidt's approach to morality. You can find earlier DI posts regarding Haidt's approach to morality here and here.
For the past few years, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has successfully injected a huge does of psychology into the study of morality. Along the way, he has gone a long way toward bridging the “is” with the “ought,” a chasm that many philosophers have insisted to be unbridgeable. Haidt explores these moral-psychological issues in highly readable form in his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Here’s a photo of my personal well-worn copy of Haidt’s book:
Based on his experiments, Haidt has been extraordinarily successful in describing the moral differences distinguishing conservatives and liberals. Which group is more moral? That isn’t the right question, according to Haidt. Both of these groups sincerely strive to be “moral.” Conservatives and liberals differ in the way they characterize morality because they base their differing moral senses on different measures. Based on Haidt’s research, there are the five separate measures (I think of them as tectonic plates) that underlie all moral systems. Conservative morality substantially draws on all five of these five measures:
– harm/care
– fairness/reciprocity
– ingroup/loyalty
– authority/respect, and
– purity/sanctity
For liberals, however, the moral domain consists primarily (or only) of the first two of these five measures (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). For liberals, the other three measures (I’ll call them “conservative measures”) tend to fly under the liberal radar. In fact, many liberals scoff at claims that the conservative measures (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity) have anything at all to do with morality. To avoid a …
I've written before about the work of Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”). He is a psychologist who has taken an experimental approach to investigating morality. I was highly impressed by Haidt's analysis of conservative versus liberal versus of morality, for instance. In his previous work, Haidt determined that disgust played a…
