The Righteous Mind [Book Review]

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt

Pantheon, 2012

I like Jonathan Haidt. He’s a smart guy, he’s measured and well-spoken, and he’s on a mission to reconcile groups with differing ideologies. He wants to help people get along better, to improve the state of discourse and make the world a better place. But because he approaches these issues through evolutionary psychology, I have problems.

First, evolutionary psychology is reductive: it offers a metanarrative which flattens all other narratives and concepts into itself. For example, it reduces religion to merely a beneficial social structure, which offers a pretty shallow, if not outright inaccurate, representation of religion. But it also renders problematic any claim to knowledge or truth. Haidt himself admits that evolution does not direct organisms toward truth-knowledge, but rather toward survival. Thus, what we think we “know” has no guarantee of being true. However, throughout the whole book, Haidt makes claims that are, purportedly, true, and not merely products of his evolution designed to help him thrive in the environment in which he finds himself (as a popular and successful evolutionary psychologist and author of books).

Second, although it has the illusion of being explanatory, evolutionary psychology is, and can only ever be, descriptive. Because it sets out to “explain” salient features of the human psyche with evolutionary science, it must start with these salient features already identified and characterized. Sociology and phenomenology are typically the disciplines in which this identification takes place. In this way, evolutionary psychology depends on and is informed by sociological and phenomenological observations, not the other way around. Thus, all evolutionary psychology has to offer is “just so” stories, ad hoc origin stories that align with observation — nothing that contributes to the background understanding that helped us make those observations in the first place. In other words, evolutionary psychology doesn’t help us understand our experiences or ourselves; at best, our experience and self-understanding show us why we evolved the way we did. This is not to say that evolutionary psychology is “wrong” or totally useless, just that it’s not as useful or existentially meaningful as it makes itself out to be. (This is true of science in general, which proceeds by stripping the world as it is informed by “subjective” human meanings, purposes, moral evaluations, etc., and examining what’s left. It’s absurd to look for what we have just purposefully stripped away. This is why science can never have any say on ethics or the meaning of human existence, and why people who mistakenly believe that science reveals the true nature of things fear meaninglessness.)

The best chapters in the book are Chapter 8, “The Conservative Advantage” and 12, “Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?”, which are brilliant pieces of sociology (dressed up with the trappings of psychology). In these chapters, Haidt identifies six concepts that people in our culture appeal to for ethics, which he calls moral foundations. These are: care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. He then points out that while liberal politics generally appeal to only the first two or three, conservative politics appeal to all six. This is why, he says, conservatives have an advantage when making moral appeals. It also explains why the parties have such strong, seemingly irreconcilable differences, and why each sees the other side as immoral. For example— by balancing caring values against foundations such as loyalty and authority, conservatives come across as uncaring to liberals who question the values of loyalty or authority. Conversely, conservatives see liberals as naive or overly emotional since they value two or three foundations to the exclusion of the others. It’s the first time I’ve heard or read a liberal honestly try to understand conservatism and succeed. These chapters alone are worth the price of admission. The insights here could really help people from differing parties understand each other and improve debate.

The problem though is that Haidt doesn’t offer a clear takeaway. He says that after having conducted the research and reached these conclusions, he’s more sympathetic to the conservative point of view — he has a better appreciation for the standards of loyalty and sanctity, for example. But this new appreciation does not translate into an actual change of opinion, at least none that he can urge onto the reader. So Haidt stops short of actually pointing us in a helpful moral direction.

To be fair, Haidt himself says that his project is descriptive, not prescriptive (although he does occasionally lapse, unjustifiably, into prescription). But at a deeper level, this moral ambivalence arises from central assumptions that he makes about human nature. Haidt is a moral intuitionist: he believes that human beings base their moral decisions on emotions, passions, gut feelings, or intuitions (he uses all these terms loosely). Any moral rational action (or simulacrum) occurs after the fact, usually ad hoc. (However, he admits elsewhere that rational argument can sway someone’s moral opinion/belief/intuition…which obviously indicates that authentic moral reasoning can and does happen. This outright contradicts to his intuitionist stance.)

In order to justify his moral intuitionism, he cites several studies in which interviewees are asked to justify their stance on moral questions, and are unable to. But, having just read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, I happen to know that there is an equally plausible historical-philosophical explanation: as MacIntyre argues, we are the inheritors of a fragmented and poorly-understood tradition going back to Aristotle via Christianity, desecrated and desiccated from the Enlightenment attempts to overthrow it. Meanwhile, we also inherit fragments of the Enlightenment’s various failed attempts to provide a secular justification for morality in the wake of that overthrow. As a result, we now live in a state of moral confusion and disarray, essentially an ethical dark ages. The results of Haidt’s experiments could just as easily be read off as particular to our contemporary Western culture, and as evidence supporting MacIntyre’s thesis. As far as I could tell, nothing about Haidt’s research supports his universal conclusions.

The way Haidt jumps to these conclusions reveals his central assumptions: (1) that moral intuitions/emotions/impulses/whatever are themselves nonmoral and pre-cultural features of human nature; and (2) they are therefore not subject to moral evaluation. Desires are not subject to correction; you can never truly want the “wrong” thing. It’s easy to miss these assumptions because they’re both negative claims, and ones which our culture generally accepts.

Historically, matters have not always or even primarily been seen in this way. To begin with, it goes against the whole tradition starting with Plato, who was highly critical of this view which was held by the sophists in his day. Even in our own culture, emotions/desires/etc. are norm-governed; otherwise we would have no concept of an emotion ever being inappropriate or uncalled given a particular situation and/or social role (which we do). Moreover, in the realm of ethics, certain justifying passions are seen as more legitimate than others: my passion to become a star athlete or a great pianist is proper to order my life around; my passion for strawberry ice cream is not (my debt here to Charles Taylor).

To quote MacIntyre, from Whose Justice? Which Rationality?:

What members of neither group [the followers of Plato nor the sophists] have understood…is that in conceptualizing and understanding the passions in one way rather than another, indeed in treating the passions as part of nature defined independently of culture rather than as an expression of culture, they were already adopting one particular evaluative standpoint, derived from their culture’s understanding of nature. … [F]rom the Platonic standpoint the nature of each kind of thing is to be specified in terms of the good toward which it moves, so that the adequate characterization of human nature and of the passions as part of that nature requires reference to that good; while, from the sophistic standpoint, the nature to which appeal is made is how things are independently of and prior to all evaluation. (77)

Haidt’s misguided intuitionist assumption explains his misreading and disparagement of Plato (specifically, the “Ring of Gyges” segment of the Republic) — and how he gushes over Hume, the original secular intuitionist who set the bogus terms for the unsuccessful Enlightenment project.

So while there’s certainly some worthwhile, insightful content, and Haidt is a bright guy, this book is also frustrating and inconclusive. Evolutionary psychology has its uses, but if Haidt’s book is any evidence, it won’t help us out of the moral/political mess we’re in.

This review was originally published in a slightly different form on Goodreads in 2023.