Yin/Yang

This Explains – and Changes – Everything

Each year Edge.org asks a “big” question, gathers responses to it from some of today’s most important thinkers, and publishes the results in a book.  In this post I propose one idea in response to three recent annual questions. The annual question for 2014 was What scientific idea is ready for retirement? The responses were published in … Continue reading →

Jonathan Haidt’s Metaphors Sacrifice Completeness and Accuracy in Favor of Parsimony and Ideology, Part II: Taste Buds

This is Part II of a two-part essay in which I attempt to make the case that several of the metaphors Jonathan Haidt uses to help convey the lessons of his study of morality do more harm than good to his Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), to our understanding of the partisan divide, and potentially to … Continue reading →

“The Righteous Mind” Critiqued in Three Pictures

What Moral Foundations Really Are, and How They Help Us To Diagnose and Treat The Political Divide

1) Moral foundations are evolved psychological mechanisms of moral and social perception. They are senses. Each moral foundation provides its possessor with a predisposition to perceive the particular aspect of human behavior that is associated with that foundation. The metaphor I like to use is this: Moral foundations are to moral and social perception as … Continue reading →

Some of Haidt’s Metaphors Contradict His Findings

[Note:This post was edited on 3/30/13 to include the sentence in bold font.] This post is critical of select portions of Jonathan Haidt’s work so I want to make it clear at the outset that I think his approach, research, findings, and interpretations of those findings in the academic sense are right on the money.  … Continue reading →

Response to “Conservatives Good, Republican Party Bad”

NOTE:  Haidt has published a follow-up to his “Conservatives Good, Republican Party Bad” post, here:  I Retract My Republican-Party-Bad Post.          ========================================================= On the blog section of the website for his new book “The Righteous Mind,” Jonathan Haidt posted a short essay entitled “Conservatives Good, Republican Party Bad.” I posted a comment to Dr. Haidt’s … Continue reading →

Overview: Moral Foundations Theory Explains Much More Than Just The Political Divide

Social scientist Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory does not go far enough.  Haidt suggests that moral foundations are a set of intuitions about human behavior and social interaction embedded in each of us by natural selection, and that the political divide can be traced to the different ways liberals and conservatives apply the foundations to … Continue reading →

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: Conservatism is the Seedbed of Liberalism

When there’s food on the table there are many problems. When there’s no food on the table there is only one problem. – Proverb I believe that the six-foundation morality – “all the tools in the toolbox” – puts food on the table by allowing humans to create cooperative societies. Those societies then provide the … Continue reading →

Other Brief Thoughts: Haidt’s Yin/Yang, Moral Thinking, and Advice to Democrats

I disagree somewhat with Haidt’s characterization of the relationship between liberalism and conservatism as that of Yin/Yang.  I think yin/yang, rightly understood, is the check and balance between the three individualizing foundations and the three binding foundations that is inherent to the six-foundation morality, and is exemplified by the concept of the Milwaukee Theme Park (described … Continue reading →

Conclusion

If moral foundations are products of natural selection, then they exist for a reason.  The reason is that they help us to perceive, think about, and respond to threats to our individual and collective well being. They are threat detection modules. The more foundations each of us employs in our moral vision, the wider our … Continue reading →