Jonathan Haidt Research Articles

Teaching applied ethics to the righteous mind

What does current empirically informed moral psychology imply about the goals that can be realistically achieved in college-level applied ethics courses? This paper takes up this question from the vantage point of Jonathan Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model of human moral judgment. I summarize Haidt’s model, and then consider a variety of pedagogical goals. I begin with two of the loftiest goals of ethics education, and argue that neither is within realistic reach if Haidt’s model is correct. I then look at three goals that can be achieved if his model is correct; but each of these goals, I argue, lacks significant value. I end by identifying three goals that are of significant value and also realistically attainable on Haidt’s model. These should be the focus of applied ethics pedagogy if Haidt’s model is correct.

A Deeper Durkheimian Society for Haidt’s Righteous Minds

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is an advance in the empirical study of morality. He argues that liberals lose elections because they only appeal to the moral foundations of Care and Fairness, whereas conservatives can appeal to additional things that most people value - Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Haidt’s argument gets a bit muddled when he tries to incorporate the libertarians’ concern with Liberty into his scheme of moral foundations. This muddle can be resolved by seeing that all groups need Loyalty, Authority, and Fairness (re-described). Politics today is a debate about what is truly Sacred for society - the conservatives’ traditional sacred realm of family, religion, and nation-state, the libertarians’ sacred individual liberty, or the liberals’ sacred care for those who are harmed by society.

Morality for skeptics? Morality for Humans Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science Mark Johnson University of Chicago Press, 2014. 273 pp.

Morality for skeptics? <b>Morality for Humans</b> Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science <i>Mark Johnson</i> University of Chicago Press, 2014. 273 pp.

Feature Book Review &amp; Citations

Feature Book Review &amp; Citations

In Defense of Practical Ethics in Moral Education: A Reply to Jonathan Haidt

In Defense of Practical Ethics in Moral Education: A Reply to Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012), pp. xvii + 419.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012), pp. xvii + 419.

Political identity and moral education: A response to Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt claims that liberals have a narrower moral outlook than conservatives—they are concerned with fairness and relief of suffering, which Haidt sees as individualistic values, while conservatives care about authority and loyalty too, values concerned with holding society together. I question Haidt’s methodology, which does not permit liberals to express concerns with social bonds that do not fit within an ‘authority’ or ‘loyalty’ framework and discounts people who support liberal positions but do not self-ascribe as liberals. I also argue that of the six ‘moral foundations’, fairness and relief of suffering are more fundamental values than authority and loyalty, which are virtues only if their objects are worthy. Moral education programs must also encourage students to recognize some values as more urgent than others, and permit inquiry into the actual reasons for political behavior other than professed value commitments.

Moralizing biology

In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources of moral phenomena, a process here named the ‘moralization of biology’. I conclude by addressing the ambivalent status of this constellation of authors, for whom today ‘morality comes naturally’: I explore both the attractiveness of their message, and the problematic epistemological assumptions of their research programmes in the light of new discoveries in developmental and molecular biology.

The Predictable Irrationality of Righteous Minds, and the Work of Ethicists

AbstractAs Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, it is often our moral intuitions that come first, rapidly or even automatically, with ethical reasoning coming later. Haidt's book is one of many that have come out in recent years highlighting the relevance of psychology (and its close cousin, neuroscience) for understanding human morality. As a behavioral scientist, I have devoured many of these books. I am fascinated by human nature and love trying to understand why all of us behave and think the way we do. But as a physician ethicist, I often find myself reading these books with a parallel agenda: not just to understand human nature, but also to see whether this line of research has relevance for my work as an ethicist. My bottom line: Understanding moral psychology ought to be a required component of ethics training, not because the science will help us to differentiate between right and wrong, but because it will better equip us to teach ethics in a way that promotes moral behavior in our students.

Religion and the Public University

It seems almost commonplace now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, to bemoan the crisis facing public higher education in America. (1) Funding at the federal and state levels - sometimes in decline, sometimes on the rise - feels more tenuous than ever. (2) To entice new students, colleges and universities have been creating and revamping majors, expanding study-abroad programs and internship options, and opening new recreational and research facilities, all while increasing tuition at rates well above inflation. (3) And we have recently been witness to a disturbing set of public shamings as schools disclose a of statistical inflation in pursuit of higher rankings in U.S. News and World Report (Perez-Pena and Slotnik 2012). The 2008 fiscal crisis and the fraught relationship between Congress and the White House have only added urgency to this already agitated discussion. Many reasons can explain the anxiety about the future of public higher education. This paper addresses one cause that is often unmentioned. It is my worry that millions of Americans who regard religion as central to their lives may have become disenchanted with and disenfranchised by public higher education. For one example among many, Liberty University in Virginia, founded by the Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell in 1971, has doubled its student body twice since 2007 alone. It now educates more than 60,000 students each semester - far more than even some of the largest public universities (Anderson 2013). Religious Americans who attend or send their children to parochial schools of higher education do not see their moral or political views reflected in or valued by public academia, which is often seen as dominated by left-of-center voices. (4) I believe that this sense of disenfranchisement leads religious Americans to send more and more of their children to private denominationally-affiliated colleges and seminaries instead of public universities. (5) This essay is organized into two major parts. To provide an overview of the crisis facing American higher education, I begin by discussing two representative texts, The University in Ruins by Bill Readings and The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. These books describe different sets of problems and propose divergent (though complementary) kinds of solutions. The essay then takes up a vision of the university presented in the 1790s by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and compares his view with recent writings by the contemporary social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I conclude by using these texts to suggest how public higher education could better accommodate religious Americans. Bill Readings and the University of Economics Two books on public education, one by the late literary scholar Bill Readings and the other by the cultural historian Louis Menand, present broad critiques of the contemporary public university. In a way, these two authors create a tension with each other. For Readings, the university functions primarily as a filter for creating and credentialing capitalist workers; for Menand, the university is structurally anachronistic and detached from the demands of contemporary life. A look at these two books provides an outline of the dominant discourses of alarm. It also suggests the reasons that words like morality, God, nation, and truth (common tropes for religious Americans) tend to be excluded from the debate about the condition and future of public higher education. Readings' primary contention is that, by the final decade of the twentieth century, the university had been transformed from an institution conveying what he calls culture to an institution promoting something he calls excellence. By culture, Readings means a sort of nation-state ethos, a narrative played on the accomplishments - including the history and the literature and art - of the political and geographical entity in which a university was founded and had matured. …

Reflections and Confessions of a Pedagogue

In light of increasing levels of polarization between liberals and conservatives both in the classroom and in the wider culture, this article uses an introductory seminary course as a springboard for reflection upon pedagogical practices and assumptions to help address this divide. Special attention is given to the work of moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, as presented in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012). Haidt’s work seeks to enhance mutual understanding between persons on both sides of political and religious debates by showing that there are multiple legitimate foundations for making moral judgments. Although he does not frame his argument explicitly in terms of the mind-body problem, he consistently challenges the way western philosophy and psychology have privileged individual reason over the passions, social intuition, and other automatic processes associated with the body. He further challenges this age-old dualism by drawing upon body-related metaphors to make his case against moral monism and a narrow understanding of cognition restricted to conscious reasoning, exclusive of intuition and emotion as additional forms of information processing. Thus, the research of Haidt and other psychologists can contribute some “new directions” to the way we conceive of and teach in relationship to the “old connections” of body/mind and self/other (the theme of the 2012 Conference of the Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology).

The Single Individual in Ordinary Time: Theological Engagements with Sociobiology

Søren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer provide provocatively individualistic, liturgical, Jesus-centered perspectives on anthropology that accentuate the neo-Hegelian, amoral, collectivist perspectives of geneticist Francis Collins, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and entomologist/political philosopher E. O. Wilson. In the mix of the vagaries of scientific developments, the offense of Jesus Christ does not change, and it seems vital for Christians to testify explicitly against any worldview (economic and/or scientific) that presents human lives (whether self-given sacrificially or taken involuntarily) as the dross of a refined future. It is through the repetitive practice of Holy Communion that Christians consume the gift to see the world as gift, not for our own winning or saving.

There’s Some Fetish in Your Ethics

Call the ethos understanding rightness in terms of spiritual purity and piety, and wrongness in terms of corruption and sacrilege, the fetish ethic. Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues sug- gest that this ethos is particularly salient to political conservatives and non-liberal cultures around the globe. In this essay, I point to numerous examples of moral fetishism in mainstream academic ethics. Once we see how deeply infected our ethical reasoning is by fetishistic intuitions, we can respond by (1) repudiating the fetishistic impulse, by (2) our fetishism into liberal rationales, or by (3) accepting the fetishism on its own terms. Of these options, I argue that sublimating our fetishism is not advis- able, and that embracing our ethical fetishism isn't as obviously misguided as some suggest.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. By Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. By Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Moving Back to Science and Self-Reflection in the Debate over Sexual Orientation Change Efforts

The April 2011 issue of Social Work featured a commentary by Adrienne Dessel regarding sexual reorientation therapies. At first we wondered why Dr. Dessel had chosen to comment on an article that appeared in a different journal from a different discipline (that is, marriage and family therapy; Serovich et al., 2008). However, it seems the most important feature of the article was that it could be used as a springboard for Dr. Dessel to question the very existence of such psychological care before an audience of social workers. In the interest of trying to provide a balanced perspective on the subject, we would like to briefly highlight some more recent contributions to the literature that can assist social workers in basing their advocacy claims in science and a self-reflective humility. In 2009 the American Psychological Association (APA) released the 130-page report of their task force on appropriate therapeutic responses to sexual orientation (APA, 2009). This report surveyed the literature on what the task force referred to as sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE) in far greater breadth and depth than did the Serovich et al. (2008) analysis. The report was widely lauded for its attempt to take the religious faith of clients seriously as a diversity dimension in addressing SOCE. Although the task force clearly discouraged the practice of SOCE in favor of an affirmative therapeutic model, the evidence (or lack thereof) did not support the banning of SOCE. The report concluded that there is little in the way of credible evidence that could clarify whether SOCE does or does not work in changing same-sex attractions [emphasis added] (APA, 2009, p. 28). The report been questioned on the grounds that it had to set unrealistically high standards for methodological purity to summarily disregard this literature (Jones, Rosik, Williams, & Byrd, 2010), but the trade-off in doing so is having to acknowledge that the scientific jury is still very much out as pertains to SOCE. Here it is worth remembering that the absence of conclusive evidence of effectiveness is not logically equivalent to positive evidence of ineffectiveness. Moreover, banning SOCE on the basis of these methodological standards would likely bring into question the validity of other contemporary therapy approaches. Any failure to similarly ban them would give the impression of double standards and partisan rather than scientific motives. To its credit, the task force acknowledged that the affirmative therapeutic approach has not been evaluated for safety and efficacy (APA, 2009, p. 91) and that research meeting its methodological standards is still needed to establish this. We admire the compassion and concern for the betterment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) clients that Dr. Dessel exudes in her commentary. We do, however, wish that her arguments could have shown a greater familiarity with and respect for the traditionally religious worldview that motivates many SOCE consumers. This omission may reflect a certain limitation in worldview brought about by what moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt refers to as the tribal-moral community of many mental health professionals who are united by sacred values that can hinder research and blind them to the unwelcoming climate that they may create for non-liberals (Tierney, 2011). In this regard, social workers and other mental health professionals from across the sociopolitical spectrum will benefit immensely from a knowledge of Haidt's moral foundations theory (MFT) (see http://www.MoralFoundations.org). MFT integrates anthropological and evolutionary accounts of morality to identify and explain the standards by which liberals and conservatives formulate their moral frameworks (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Haidt, 2012); to discover your own moral foundations profile visit http://www. YourMorals.org. Through the lens of MFT, these authors conclude that although conservative and liberal individuals share some similar moral concerns (relative to the rights and welfare of individuals), conservatives also are motivated by moral concerns that liberals may not recognize and that emphasize the virtues and institutions that bind people into roles, duties, and mutual obligations. …

The politics are personal: The Australian vs the Australian curriculum in history

This article reviews the relationship between the conservative newspaper The Australian and the development of a national history curriculum in Australia. The lead author surveyed the major Australian press in the five‐year period between 2007 and 2012 and found clear patterns of difference between The Australian and other press outlets in relation to education in general and history curriculum in particular. Using Jonathan Haidt%s five‐point model of moral values, the article analyses the behaviour of the press in Australia in relation to history education as a feature of moral preferences. Extending from this analysis, it then highlights a number of cases of press campaigns in The Australian targeted against individuals including one academic involved in the development of a national curriculum. The article demonstrates that a culture of aggressive conservatism exercised in this Murdoch press outlet reaches beyond the field of conventional political debate to constitute a serious and concerning influence in the dynamics of curriculum policy development.

Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (review)

James A. Knapp. Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xii + 231. $89.00. Breaking with historicist accounts of early modern in terms of political and religious iconophobia and iconoclasm, James Knapp offers fascinating and original study of early modern visuality--encompassing range of experiences including ekphrasis and in mind's eye--and ethical questions it provoked. Indeed, great passion of book is arguably not for Renaissance literature but for way in which ethical response to visual in Spenser and Shakespeare speaks to twentieth-century phenomenology and a new body of work on morality and ethics in philosophy, literary theory and cognitive psychology (16). Knapp begins by acknowledging that attraction to and anxiety about in early modern literature reflects critical moment when English culture was undergoing epistemological, theological and aesthetic transformations that would mark transition from medieval to early modern era (2). Reformation skepticism about vision as catalyst in spiritual matters (fundamental to Neoplatonic and Pauline discourses) clashed with philosophy's increasing trust in empirical observation, hence the question of how people ought to be moved by visual sparked intense debate (2). The Reformation privileging of word over image was thus not simply religious imperative, but an attempt to separate reasoned, stable, and implicitly verbal world of morality from unstable, emotional realm of visual experience (31). Literary artists, however, embraced power of visuality to elicit not only emotional but ethical reactions, and chief among them were Spenser and Shakespeare, for whom a crucial test of one's virtue lies in how one responds to images (27). There are two key tenets to Knapp's argument that Spenser and Shakespeare are seen to share. First is assumption that truth be accessed by rejection of material world, but that (citing phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion) the invisible (truth) is only available in ... 'the crossing of visible (59). Also underpinning argument here is work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who offers uncontested evidence that one must see or feel in order to think, that every thought known to us occurs to flesh' and whose insistence on figure of intertwining or chiasm, to define embodied proves highly suggestive for Knapp's close readings of Spenser and Shakespeare. The second assumption relates to distinction between morality as set of principles from accidents of particular situation and ethics, which cannot be thought apart from singular situations in which human subjects are challenged to make ethical decisions (24). Drawing upon recent developments in psychology, including work of Jonathan Haidt, Knapp argues that moral plays fairly minor role in guiding human action (21), Haidt's automatic intuitive reaction being initially dominant. Similarly, in Spenser and Shakespeare, moral conviction is produced phenomenologically, welling up in their characters despite their awareness of established principles and in tension with calm domain of reasoning (22). Both writers are judged to be acutely aware of tension between morality and ethics, which often begins from ambiguous nature of visual experience. In section on Spenser, which considers his translations in Jan van der Noot's Theater for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569), The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), and The Faerie Queene (1590), Knapp moves on from Ernest Gilman's influential assumption that '[d]epending on passage of his work that falls open, one can find in Spenser militant reformer on question of or lover of decoration and display willing to employ more traditional discriminations between their use and abuse' (48) to suggest coherent trajectory. …

Can We All Get Along?

"This book," writes Jonathan Haidt in his introduction to The Righteous Mind , "is about why it's so hard for us to get along." His core premise is that moral psychology can sort out problems that moral philosophy and political theory cannot. In the end, however, the problem of getting along is not sorted out. Maybe it's Haidt's cheerful view of humanity that explains this failure. Some of us, especially on the left, believe that class inequality, poverty, greed, corruption, prejudice, orthodoxy, and ignorance divide us no matter how hard we try to see the other person's point of view.