Hanging out with my wife, teaching her about Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundation Theory and arguing about it. It's fun.
Discussion
Theory with Hanging my Haidt's about and it. It's arguing about Foundation Jonathan her teaching out fun. Moral wife,
Excellent book!
I really enjoyed it. Didn't read it, but listened to the audio version twice.
...The Righteous Mind, that is
I gifted it to my father in law. He really enjoyed it as well.
I read the Coddling of The American Mind as well, that Jonathan Haidt wrote. It was another good one.
That’s how you grow together.
What’s the TLDR on that theory amigo
If liberty/oppression isn’t the most obvious and foundational moral gauge then GFY
Liberty or Death
Jonathan Haidt goes in depth about it in the book: The Righteous Mind.
First, he makes an argument that our moral judgments are driven by fast, automatic gut feelings. He calls it the "elephant".
Then reasoning and logic, the "rider", comes afterward to justify the gut feeling.
He kinda explains moral dumbfounding, when you feel something is wrong, but struggle to articulate why. Your feeling come first, then the logic second.
Second, he brings forward the 6 main moral foundations:
1. Care/Harm
2. Fairness/Cheating
3. Loyalty/Betrayal
4. Authority/Subversion
5. Sanctity/Degradation
6. Liberty/Oppression
He compares them to taste buds. How genetically, you may be predisposed to having a higher or lower distribution in each of them, but you can expand your pallet.
Some people take a liking to sour foods right away, while others will never enjoy it, but some might develop the taste over time.
Liberals are incredibly high in the care/harm & fairness/cheating moral foundations, medium in liberty, but low in all the others.
Conservatives are high in loyalty, authority and sanctity, then medium for the rest.
Libertarians are high in liberty, medium in fairness, and low in the rest.
When discussing politics, Haidt argues that the trick is finding which moral foundation the person you are addressing is high in, then adjust your argument to fit within that moral framework.
His studies show that liberals are unable to understand conservatives and libertarians' point of views. When testing them on how a conservative or libertarian would answer a question, they aren't able to put themselves into their mindset. However, conservatives are able to. Libertarians are the best at it, able to adjust their answers almost exactly as to how both other groups would.
There’s a lot of strong evidence supporting the idea that we have fast unconscious processes that impact our emotions which impacts our actions. Makes a lot of sense. Why was your wife arguing with you?
I got to the bottom of her argument. Basically, it was soft science vs hard science. She doesn't fully buy it because social science isn't hard science. It wasn't anything more interesting than that haha.
Idk why calling it a soft science is seen so negatively. Economics is a soft science but that doesn’t mean it isn’t infinitely valuable.
That's why I thought it was a weak argument, once I got to the bottom of it. Wah-men, I tell you....
GM brothers 🧐
But isn’t she right to insist on a higher standard for morals?
The theory sounds pretty democratic to me, just because leftist “liberals” believe it’s “fair” to take taxes and use force to steal and redistribute money- doesn’t mean it is a moral good to do so.
The elephant and rider can go and crush our houses if allowed to!
It wasn't that she was insisting on a higher moral standard. Her points was that social sciences are a 'soft" science and aren't fully concrete.
I don't think the theory is about what should be, but more about what is.
Whether liberals believe taxation is fair or not, while it may not be moral from a libertarian perspective, Moral Foundation theory simply observes that framework. It doesn't prescribe it as good or bad.
I think it would be more a political (objective) theory then? Maybe that’s what she meant by “soft science”
Morality is objective (Plato’s moral realism, Natural Law) imo 🤓