The Righteous Mind

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The Book in 3 Sentences

1. People feel first, then we rationalize. And our moral judgments are intuitive and emotional - and our rational reasoning follows to justify arguments, not the other way around.
2. Human morality is built on six innate foundations:
3. If you want to persuade someone, you have to speak to their moral foundation, not just give better arguments.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

• It gave me how to understand why the two parties have a vastly different understanding of each other, and why liberals had such a hard time winning the hearts of conservatives in dinner table talks
• Neat expansion on the “elephant and rider” analogy into political realm, explaining why it’s sometimes difficult to explain why we disagree on some topics
• But it stops at explaining the fracture of coalitions and do not further explore how we can design the system for equity or approach the society should take to bridge the gap in disagreement

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

• Morality binds and blinds
• Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second
• Human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.
• If you can’t state your opponent’s position in a way they accept, you don’t understand it yet.

📒 Summary + Notes

Where does morality comes from? Two common answers have been that 1) it’s innate (nativist) or from childhood learning (empiricist)

• The moral domain varies by culture. It’s usually narrow in Western, educated and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures have broader domain to regular more aspects of life
• Most moral reason is a post hoc fabrication; we observe incongruency in moral reasoning - rationalist theory fail to explain this

Plato believed that reason could and should be the master; Jefferson believed that two processes were equal partners (head and heart); Hume believed that reaason was the servant of the passion

• People usually have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong; they struggle to construct post hoc justification for those feelings
• Social intuitionist model explains why moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second

• Brain evaluates instantly and constantly
• Social and political judgement depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes
• We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us
• Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president
• Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach because we ask “can I believe it?” when want to believe something, and “must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe it

There is more to morality than harm and fairness

• The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects rather than relationships
• Moral domain is narrow in WEIRD cultures - limited to the ethic of autonomy; it’s broader in other societies - within religious and conservative moral matrices

There is more to morality than harm and fairness

• Deontology and utilitarianism are “one-recepter” moralities that are likely to appeal to people who are high on systematizing and low on empathizing
• Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach explains five different moral receptors: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sancitity
• Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adpative challenge of caring for vulnerable children
• Fairness/cheating evolved in response to the challenge of reaping the reward of cooperation without getting exploited
• Loyalty/betryal evolved in response to the challenge of forming and maintaining coalition
• Authority/subversion - forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies
• Santity/degradation goes back to “omnivore’s dilemma” - seeking out and exploring new potential food while remaining way of them until they are proven safe, which led to two competing motives: neophilia and neophobia

Democratic party had difficulty connecting with voters since 1980 because they speak Millian society which is more open and individualistic, difficult to bind pluribus into unum

Why are we so groupish?

• Darwin’s “multilevel selection” vs focus on competition between groups was downplayed and everyone focused on competition among individuals within groups (selfish genes)
• Defense for group selection:

Hive switch - human beings are conditional hive creatures

• We have the ability to under special circumstances lose ourselves and trascend self-interest in something larger than our lives
• Another way to describe Durkheim’s idea of homo duplex - we live most of our lives in the profane world but we achieve our greatest joys in those brief moments of transit to the sacred world

Early religion rose out of our ability to believe supernatural agents as a by-product of a hypersensitive agency detection device, but the group that used them to construc moral communities were the ones that lasted and prosper

People don’t adopt their political ideologies at random; genes that seek pleasure from novelty, variety and diversity and being less sensitive to signs of threat are predisposed to become liberals

• One people join a political team, they get ensnared in the moral matrix