My latest book summary is for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. This book argues that there's more to morality than harm and fairness—we actually have at least 6 different moral foundations, which is why we’re so divided.

As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

We have at least 6 moral foundations, like how our tongues have multiple taste-receptors. Those foundations are:

• Care/Harm
• Fairness/Cheating
• Loyalty/Betrayal
• Authority/Subversion
• Sanctity/Degradation
• Liberty/Oppression

Morality varies:

• People from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) societies tend to place a lot of weight on the harm principle—the idea that actions are only morally wrong if they cause harm to others.
• But people in other societies will condemn acts as being “wrong” even if they don’t harm anyone.

The different moral foundations explain we’re divided politically:

• US Democrats generally care about 2 or 3 of these (Care, Fairness and Liberty to some degree).
• Socially conservative Republicans value all 6.
• Libertarians and classically liberal Republicans are more like Democrats, but place more weight on Liberty and less on Care.

Intuition is stronger than reasoning when it comes to morality:

• Haidt uses the metaphor of an Elephant and its Rider. The Elephant (intuition) is bigger, and governs most of our behaviour.
• The Rider (reasoning) is like a press secretary. It doesn’t usually make our decisions; it just makes up ad hoc explanations for them.
• When our intuition tells us something is wrong, but we can’t find a good reason why, we experience moral dumbfoundment.
• Because the Elephant is in charge, it’s hard to change people’s minds through reasoning alone, especially if debates are hostile. We're more likely to change their minds when surrounded by “friendly Elephants”.

Morality binds and blinds:

• We are 90% chimp (selfish), 10% bee (groupish). We have evolved to be mostly selfish, but occasionally things can trigger our “hive switch” and make us transcend our sense of self to become part of a bigger whole.
• Our groupishness has helped us to cooperate in large groups and made humans incredibly successful as a species.
• Religion can only be understood in terms of how it serves groups. Religions make groups more cohesive and help solve free rider problems.
• We are divided by religion and politics because our minds were designed for groupish righteousness. Our moral matrices often blind us to the idea that there could be more than one form of moral truth.

As usual, you can find the full detailed summary on my website. If you found this summary useful, consider forwarding to a friend you think might enjoy it.

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​To Summarise​