Summary, Analysis & Review of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind by Instaread

By Instaread Summaries

Summary, Analysis & Review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind by Instaread

 

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Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion is an application of Haidt’s research on moral psychology to the c

• Language: English
• Publisher: Instaread, Inc
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683786566

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Overview

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion is an application of Haidt’s research on moral psychology to the context of American politics. Haidt argues that morality is based on both intuition and reasoning, and that liberals and conservatives base their beliefs on different and often competing moral constructs. He suggests that conservatism in the United States relies more on appeal to moral intuitions than liberalism does, and that liberals should take conservative morality seriously by acknowledging the validity of the moral institutions that appeal to conservatives.

There are three principles of moral psychology. The first is that moral intuitions precede moral reasoning. The second is that morality not only describes opinions about harm and fairness, but also includes communal and group taboos and commitments. Third, morality binds communities together, and the moral impetus to community can cause moral blind spots.

Many moralists, such as Plato and Immanuel Kant, argued that morality is achieved by reason regulating passion. However, research by evolutionary psychologists suggests that David Hume provided a better account of morality. Hume believed that moral intuition drives moral feeling, and that reason factors in only after moral judgments are made to explain or provide rationale for moral intuitions.

Evolutionary biology added important depth to prior understandings of morality. It gave rise to the field of evolutionary psychology, which holds that different moral intuitions evolved in response to different environmental imperatives. In the Western world, liberal