Last Updated on March 12, 2021
90% of everything I know about morality I’ve read in a Jonathan Haidt book. In summary, “we are all self-righteous hypocrites.”
Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.
The Righteous Mind
People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
The Righteous Mind
If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way — deeply and intuitively — you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.
The Righteous Mind
The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. […] As an intuitionist, I’d say that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion.
The Righteous Mind