The Righteous Mind (book)

Connect

🔼Topic:: Ethics (MOC)

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Intuitions come first - Our moral views don't stem from rational thinking or biological causes. It is the result of our deep intuition, which we rationalize with our rational side. Although, it is a two-way street, our intuitions can be influenced by our rational side in the long run.
2. Disagreement is on the same scales, not different values - It's not that people have different values, but more often they disagree on the relative importance of values. Since each decision in a scarce world is about prioritizing values, those values are always at war, and people from different cultures have different "taste buds" for morality which affects the prioritization
3. Morality makes us group-oriented - Since morality is based on our intuitions, it can quickly turn us into group-oriented people, especially in highly emotional settings. Powers of us-vs-them is the easiest to use, but even as simple as shared experiences are enough to trigger our group mode

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen? The book is good, the theory of moral foundations is really interesting and eye-opening. It even got me opened up to conservatives, and I will now better understand their viewpoint, even if not accept it.

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong... The ending of the book really supports conservatives as those who care about all the six moral foundations. This allegedly shows that numerically conservatives are better since six is better than two. However it ignores qualitative differences, such as what they usually prioritize, which is also around only two pillars. Or which pillar is more relevant in our days.

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... The book is very American-centric, and some of the conclusions or analysis are hard to transfer to different political situations.

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style...

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

Introduction

Our world is controlled by Narratives, once people embrace a narrative that matches their intuitions, they become locked, blinded to any other viewpoint.

Introduction

• morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible.
• obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition.
• Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value.
• People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

Part 1 - Intuitions come First, Strategic Reasoning Comes Second.

Where Does Morality come from

Sources of morality:

1. Naturalistic - we are "born" with it, whether by a god or genes, we come pre-built with moral thinking. Naturalism
2. Empiricist - we are born as a clean slate, and we are educated to have certain moral reasoning. Empiricism
3. Rationalist - moral reasoning is the result of our own rationalistic capacity, meaning we figure stuff out on our own. Rationalism

the famous test of Kholberg showed that there are levels of morality, from pre-convention to conventional, to post-convention. The differences are based on how much you follow the rules because they are the rules, to how much you are willing to consider alternatives and each situation's circumstances. However, this test was not naïve and objective as people thought. It sided heavily with individualistic, liberal thinking, which is focused on the freedom of the individual, and the desire to avoid harm. It also supported the rationalistic point of view, saying that only by experimenting and exploring the world could we advance in our moral thinking, instead of being stuck at lower levels when we are being taught what's right.

A more sophisticated test separated between social conventions, and moral laws, showing that some of our intuitions are learned (conventions), and some are known (moral truths). The difference was that conventions are not bad if someone from outside our culture does them, but moral truths are applied to everyone. Social Construct The difference between what counts as a convention and a moral truth also depends on the level of socio-centric of each society. Individualistic societies would name as convention everything that can be justified as supporting personal freedom and limiting harm. while socio-centric societies would see more actions as moral truths and less of a convention. Things like tradition, authority, respect, become more important. Social Environment

In the end, the rationalist view was proven in studies, but in a different direction than we thought. we don't use rationalization to find our beliefs, but rather we use it post-hoc to justify our emotional reaction. Rationalization only this can explain our tendency to object to victimless taboos, like eating a dead dog, or using a flag as a mop in secret.

In the author's opinion, our moral theories are both born and taught. We are born to feel righteous, but need learning and direction to know what we should feel righteous about.

Where Does Morality Come From?

• Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.
• by using a framework that predefined morality as justice while denigrating authority, hierarchy, and tradition, it was inevitable that the research would support worldviews that were secular, questioning, and egalitarian.
• There must be more to moral development than kids constructing rules as they take the perspectives of other people and feel their pain. There must be something beyond rationalism.
• When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just a social convention.
• it was not reasoning in search of truth; it was reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.
• We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

The Intuitive Dog and It's Rational Tail

Emotions are the basis of our moral reasoning, without emotions we would have misguided judgements that we even won't be able to go through Morality is both rational and emotional. Emotions come first, rational thinking is done after the fact.

So in each of us there's the rider and the elephant. The elephant is our automatic processes, which solicits the reaction of "seeing that", which means that this system prompts our intuitions, our "gut reactions" to moral questions in a way that is above emotions. After that, our rider activates the "reason why" reaction, which tries to make sense of our moral preferences, but not for ourselves, but rather to convince others to come up with the same moral judgment as we did. Elephant and the Rider

The process works both ways in the long run, the intuitions drive our reasoning process, but others can also affect our intuitions through their reasoning, which will change our moral judgments.

The best and fastest way to change someone's mind is through talking to their "elephant", since the intuitions precede our judgment, this will result in a deeper and stable change of mind. So emotional arguments are stronger than factual rational ones. Empathy is the answer to righteousness Negotiation is an act of connection

The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail

• To be human is to feel pulled in different directions,
• reasoning requires the passions.
• People made moral judgments quickly and emotionally. Moral reasoning was mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.
• We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.
• Moral emotions are one type of moral intuition, but most moral intuitions are more subtle; they don’t rise to the level of emotions.
• Intuitions come first and reasoning is usually produced after a judgment is made, in order to influence other people. But as a discussion progresses, the reasons given by other people sometimes change our intuitions and judgments.
• If you want to change people’s minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants. You’ve got to use links 3 and 4 of the social intuitionist model to elicit new intuitions, not new rationales.
• 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.
• Empathy is an antidote to righteousness,

Elephants Rule

since our moral judgment and most of the motivation for our actions come from our intuitions (the elephant), that means that we are highly influenced by biases. For example - Availability Bias - the more we are familiar with something, the more we like it Halo effect - people who are attractive or successful are perceived as trustworthy in unrelated subjects as well senses and moral judgment: we have a two-way street between senses and moral Judgment. for example - washing our hands can make us behave more morally, and doing immoral acts makes us feel "dirty". Mind-body connection. implicit bias 2bc can also affect our judgment. All these biases affect our intuitions, which in turn affect our reasoning ("the rider"), to follow along and justify these choices post-hock. However, its important to note that its still a two-way street. The intuitions can be affected by reason, usually through conversations with others that tend to highlight the drawbacks or holes in our moral theory.

Elephants Rule

• In other words, thinking is the rider; affect is the elephant. The thinking system is not equipped to lead—it simply doesn’t have the power to make things happen—but it can be a useful advisor.
• human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their responses on those reactions.
• Immorality makes us feel physically dirty, and cleansing ourselves can sometimes make us more concerned about guarding our moral purity.
• the elephant begins making something like moral judgments during infancy, long before language and reasoning arrive.
• The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs.
• if you force the two to sit around and chat for a few minutes, the elephant actually opens up to advice from the rider and arguments from outside sources.
• Elephants rule, but they are neither dumb nor despotic. Intuitions can be shaped by reasoning,

Vote for Me (Here's Why)

Our quest for truth is more like a politician trying to get more votes, than a scientist who is looking for the objective truth. scientific method The only way to force us to solve the intrapersonal conflict between our moral intuitions and our desire to be accepted by others is to have Accountability. Once we are accountable for our opinions, we tend to hold them in a much more rigid set of testing. To promote such accountability, we must:

1. Knowledge - have a chance to learn about the topic before presenting it
2. Anonymous - We are not aware of the public's opinions (or which way they prefer)
3. Can't be conned - we believe that the public is also well-informed about the subject

otherwise, we might fail in cases like Conformation Bias, and choose the option that is more convenient to us, rather than what's right. it's because we have different belief thresholds for different ideologies. for something I want to believe, I ask myself "can I believe it" (is there any reason to believe it), and for things I don't want to believe, I ask "must I believe it" (is there any reason not to believe it). usually, we all have a moral threshold were pass that point we won't be able to lie to ourselves about how justified it is, so even when we are not monitored - we all cheat, but by a little.

another proof that rationalism is false is that researches show that philosophy professors are not any more ethical than other people. Intuitionalism is the true basis for moral philosophy.

in summary: intuitions comes first, strategic reasoning comes second

Vote for Me (Here’s Why)

• Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability. We’re really good at holding others accountable for their actions, and we’re really skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own.
• Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience’s views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy.
• Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
• “In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’
• We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.

Part 2 - The Different Moral "tastes"

Beyond WEIRD Morality

westerners (especially Americans) are outliers considering their moral views. to understand how they are different, we can be based on Shweders three ethics:

1. Autonomy - the belief that people are first individuals with wants and needs, and morality should be based on protecting their needs and rights.
2. Community - people are first members of a group, which is larger than the sum of its parts. The group is what's most important, its real and must be protected, at the expense of the individual
3. Divinity - people are first bearers of a divine soul/essence, which should be respected and remain pure, despite other considerations (whether societal or personal)

Beyond WEIRD Morality

• The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences.
• The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected.
• The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.
• liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.
• Our minds have the potential to become righteous about many different concerns, and only a few of these concerns are activated during childhood. Other potential concerns are left undeveloped and unconnected to the web of shared meanings and values that become our adult moral matrix.

Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind

As we saw previously, there is no "one moral truth" in a sense that there are conflicting moral considerations with different values that they try to maximize, and therefore vary difficult to compare and compromise.

Morality, is therefore similar to taste buds, it's a mixture of perceptions and cannot be reduced so a single one. Utilitarianism and Deontology are examples of such reduction to a single aspect.

we can judge moral theories on the Empty-system driven scale. These two theories are examples of theories that are high on the systemizing scale, basing their foundation on universal rules, logic, and detachment from emotions. On the other end of the scale we can find theories like Ethics of care, which are highly based on context and empathy. To get to know what are the different morality types (or tastes) of humans we must experiment and explore, since they cannot be rationalized (each taste requires a different logic). Also, morality should be verified not based on what it ought to be (in a perfect rational world), but rather what is it (what are people's actual motivations, reasons, and actions). Is vs Ought Idealism

There are many moral modules, that vary between cultures and are connected to different behaviors. Many disagreements are not in the moral models, but rather if a specific action is linked to that model or not. For example, both think that the body is a holy thing that should be preserved, but is a sexual act something that desecrates it or not.

The common 6 moral models: Moral Taste Buds

1. Care vs Harm - originated from our need to care for the next generation
2. Fairness vs cheating - originated from the benefit of cooperation. it's main goal is to achieve proportionality, that everyone gets what they deserve, based on their skills and inputs.
3. Loyalty vs Betrayal - originated from the benefit of coalition building
4. Authority vs subversion - originated from the benefit of social norms and reduce conflict
5. Sanctity vs degradation - originated as social signals on what to avoid
6. Liberty vs Oppression - the desire to limit harm to your freedom, can be seen as equality of law, or having negative freedom. sometimes free riders can be seen as oppressors, and the main emotion is our desire to punish them, rather then creating a free society.

Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind

• we believe that moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles.
• Bentham told us to use arithmetic to figure out the right course of action, but Kant told us to use logic. Both men accomplished miracles of systemization, boiling all of morality down to a single sentence, a single formula.
• We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can’t be done by reasoning, math, or logic. It can be done only by observation, and observation is usually keener when informed by empathy.
• even if we all share the same small set of cognitive modules, we can hook actions up to modules in so many ways that we can build conflicting moral matrices on the same small set of foundations.

The Moral Foundations of Politics

• Mothers who were innately sensitive to signs of suffering, distress, or neediness improved their odds, relative to their less sensitive sisters.
• The current triggers can change rapidly. We care about violence toward many more classes of victims today than our grandparents did in their time.
• Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality
• The love of loyal teammates is matched by a corresponding hatred of traitors, who are usually considered to be far worse than enemies.
• Human authority, then, is not just raw power backed by the threat of force. Human authorities take on responsibility for maintaining order and justice.
• The original adaptive challenge that drove the evolution of the Sanctity foundation, therefore, was the need to avoid pathogens, parasites, and other threats that spread by physical touch or proximity.
• the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.
• our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can’t justify those feelings by pointing to victims.

The Conservative Advantage

since conservatives care more equally about the different moral "tastes", its easier for them to evoke strong emotional reactions within the public, which makes it easier to gather support and get more votes. If the liberals play on only two values (care and fairness), they are more likely to lose when new arguments from other values are introduced, values that people care about.

The Conservative Advantage

• Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory.
• The Liberty/oppression foundation, I propose, evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others.
• It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.
• reciprocal altruism was the source of moral intuitions about equality. But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.
• The Fairness/cheating foundation is about proportionality and the law of karma. It is about making sure that people get what they deserve,

Part 3 - Morality Binds and Blinds

Why Are We So Groupish?

evolution happens on several levels simultaneously. We compete as individuals for our self-interest, but we also have advantages from working as a group, which wishes to remove free riders and cheaters. group selection 2bc happens when evolution favors group traits that even come at a price for the individual.

Group tendencies gave us the ability to learn from each other, Cooperation, and to Specializationi), giving humans a clear advantage over other species that tend to work alone. We became a social animal, with norms, genes and moral expectations to maintain our "groupness". (Related:: Human is a social being

Why Are We So Groupish?

• Individuals compete with individuals, and that competition rewards selfishness—which includes some forms of strategic cooperation (even criminals can work together to further their own interests).7 But at the same time, groups compete with groups, and that competition favors groups composed of true team players
• Natural selection favored increasing levels of what Tomasello calls “group-mindedness”—the ability to learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and, ultimately, to create and obey social institutions,
• early humans domesticated themselves when they began to select friends and partners based on their ability to live within the tribe’s moral matrix.
• groupishness is focused on improving the welfare of the in-group, not on harming an out-group.
• We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

The Hive Switch

There are cases where we can completely forget ourselves and have a sense of oneness, of Unity and harmony with the group. These cases often occur in highly emotional states, such as combat, parties, or drugs. One of the main causes for this phenomenon are the mirror neurons, which makes us imitate other's emotional state and intention, thus creating a chain effect between everyone (I'm happy because he's happy, when then is passed along to someone else). Mirroring happens more between members of the same group.

In businesses, we can see two different approaches:

1. Transactional leadership - based on personal self interest, with all the negative implications External Motivation
2. Transformational leadership - based on creating hives and using group tendencies to have shared goals and altruism. You can increase that by:
   1. Creating a unified identity - uniforms, common goals and culture
   2. Having group events
   3. Having groups compete with one another, instead of individuals.

In the political sense, a a nation of multiple hives is more stable than that of a single hive or no hives at all, since it can have the benefits of altruism on the one hand, but avoid tyranny on the other hand.

The Hive Switch

• human beings are conditional hive creatures. We have the ability (under special conditions) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves.
• Awe acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns. Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life.
• People feel each other’s pain and joy to a much greater degree than do any other primates. Just seeing someone else smile activates some of the same neurons as when you smile.
• We are conditional hive creatures. We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated
• Self-interested employees are Glauconians, far more interested in looking good and getting promoted than in helping the company.43 In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely.
• Transactional leadership appeals to followers’ self-interest, but transformational leadership changes the way followers see themselves—from isolated individuals to members of a larger group.
• Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

Religion is a Team Sport

Religions are based on our systematic need to humanize nature, but it has become much more than that. It is a system to create strong social ties around a moral framework, which leads to trust, cooperation, and group level selection (even at the cost of huge sacrifices for the individual). cohesion Those strong ties are what makes religious people more generous and altruistic, even for non group members on non conflicted issues, but it can increase confrontation on conflicted issues. Religions are a moral exoskeleton for societies, that directs the elephant away from self interest and into community and cooperation. Without religions each person will have to rely on his rider to create an inner compass, a very hard mission to accomplish.

Religion Is a Team Sport

• Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
• Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust.
• Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely “rational” beliefs might be like asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon.
• It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.
• Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.
• Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior.
• Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.
• Only groups that can elicit commitment and suppress free riding can grow.

Can't We All Disagree More Constructively.

Three things affect your political beliefs:

1. Genes - a biological tendency to be scared of risks Risk Management or to seek novelty can affect left/right wing leaning.
2. life experience - important moments that are colored by one type of political behavior or another, like a school shooting, or an abusive authority figure experience knowledge
3. great narrative - from childhood we are told stories that can implant a political narrative in our brain, which is very difficult to change

We all have things to gain if we learn from both political sides of the political spectrum. The conservatives which higher emphasis on social capital, on stricter laws that give us the moral exoskeleton to act kindly, to cooperate and to remove free riders and cheaters. The liberals which open our eyes to the victims of these laws, and enable us to adapt our viewpoints quicker based on new information, like environment or minority rights.

Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?

• genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.14 Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.
• the genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences.
• Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community.
• The stricter commune would be better able to suppress or regulate selfishness, and would therefore be more likely to endure. Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as nations, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense.
• Intuitions come first, so anything we can do to cultivate more positive social connections will alter intuitions and, thus, downstream reasoning and behavior.
• Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places—particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation.
• We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It’s not just a capacity; it’s the portal to many of life’s most cherished experiences.