The Righteous Mind and Measuring Your Life

I've requested How Will You Measure Your Life from my local library, but I don't think it'll be available for another few weeks. Maybe Jesse would be willing to drop by Brother Christensen's house and get the inside story on the book, for those who aren't able/planning to read it.

I did just finish an interesting book called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The author, Jonathan Haidt is a Professor of Psychology at UVA. His research has focused on how we make moral decisions, and he summarizes what he's learned in his career. It's fairly standard social science written for a broad audience.

The three core principles he attempts to establish are:
- Moral 'reasoning' is really moral intuition followed by logical justification, which is why debate and dialogue so seldom sway people's opinions.
- Our moral senses have many dimensions, but (industrialized, Western, educated) society only recognizes a few as valid bases for moral judgements.
- While we usually consider moral judgements individually, occasionally we can be turned to a 'hive' view, with a more group-level perspective.

In all, I found a lot of the book to match very well with my own feelings about how and what we choose to value, as individuals and as a society. I particularly liked Haidt's attempt to broaden the moral matrix (2nd point above); this is something I think rationalists in both parties largely neglect. Liberal (or libertarian) legal justification admits only 'harm' as a valid mechanism for determining whether something is 'right'. Haidt began his research by relating stories to college students, narratives which most people would agree were 'wrong', but which couldn't be categorized as such by an appeal to them having caused harm. Repeatedly, students would attempt to introduce new elements into the narrative, in order to inject some harm, in order to provide what they felt was a justifiable reason for finding the behavior in the narrative immoral. Haidt's prescription, and I think I agree with him, is that we should recognize that our moral vision is much broader than can be encompassed by the concept of harm, and that we should be moral 'pluralists' in the sense of recognizing the varied mechanisms by which we deem things 'immoral'.

To that end, Haidt established a website called yourmorals.org. You can go and register to participate in a variety of questionnaire-based studies. The primary study, called the 'Moral Foundations Questionnaire', asks you to rate how much or little you take various things into account when making a moral decision, and then provides a personalized 'rating' based on five moral dimensions identified by Haidt's research, as well as providing comparison to the average ratings for self-identifying liberals and conservatives. You should all go do it; it doesn't take long and I think it can provide interesting insight. Here are my scores:

Harm - 2.7
Fairness - 2.8
Loyalty - 3.3
Authority - 3.5
Purity - 3.3

Justice

I've been reading my runner up selection for book o' the month last month (The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen) and thoroughly enjoying it, although I'm still convinced it would have made a lousy book club selection.

I've also been watching a series of lectures by Harvard professor Michael Sandel called, simply, Justice. The production quality is pretty good; Harvard teamed with WGBH to put it together. The lectures are fairly engaging, even if I feel too much time is given to Harvard underclassmen and not enough to in-depth topical development.

I'm wondering if there would be critical mass here at PVS for a discussion of some of the material. Is anyone interested in watching, say, one lecture a week (25 min.) and then having a collective discussion? Anyway, just a thought.

As for Red State, Blue State, I finished it some time back. I'll try and collect my thoughts and post something about it tonight or tomorrow.