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Jonathan Haidt , The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York : Pantheon , 2012), pp. xvii + 419.
In The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues for empirically grounded accounts of the psychological nature of moral judgement, which he calls the 'social intuition model' and the 'moral foundations theory', and considers some of their implications, including especially their implications for political psychology. While he is not always careful or generous in his claims about philosophers (more about that later), any philosopher working in normative ethical theory, metaethics or (especially) moral psychology should be familiar with his research. Political theorists will also find several points of interest in Haidt's discussion.
The book is divided into three parts, each of which opens with a guiding metaphor. The metaphor of part I, which is titled 'Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second', will be familiar to readers of Haidt's earlier The Happiness Hypothesis: 'The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.' Haidt's elephant is our automatic mental processes, while the rider represents reason. More specifically, in this context, the elephant represents our moral intuitions. Moral intuitions, according to Haidt, combine affective and cognitive elements. They include our moral emotions, although not all intuitions rise to the level of emotions. When we make a moral judgement, Haidt contends, it is nearly always the case that we first have the intuition that, say, a certain action would be wrong, and then look for reasons why this is so. Haidt believes that intuitions play an even larger role in judgement than does philosopher Joshua Greene, who has also done empirical research on the relation between reason and moral intuitions, and Haidt is less inclined to think that we would be better off without them.
While the rider has minimal influence over whether the elephant will go right or left, once the elephant has decided, the rider can facilitate its progress in various ways, none more important than by doing public relations work and offering up post hoc rationales for the elephant's choice. This, according to Haidt, is reason's main function in the realm of moral...