Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

The Sanctity foundation is crucial for understanding the American culture wars, particularly over biomedical issues. If you dismiss the Sanctity foundation entirely, then it's hard to understand the fuss over most of today's biomedical controversies.

Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.48

The Care/harm foundation

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.

The Fairness/cheating foundation

Schools don't teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.

The Loyalty/betrayal foundation

The Authority/subversion foundation

But the rest of the time—which is almost all of the time—accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than to be right.

We do not live but a quarter part of our life—why do we not let on the flood—raise the gates—& set our wheels in motion—He that hath ears to hear let him hear. Employ your senses." (HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1851)70

The Sanctity/degradation foundation

If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own."50 It's such an obvious point, yet few of us apply it in moral and political arguments because our righteous minds so readily shift into combat mode.

In other words, people don't just blindly empathize; they don't sync up with everyone they see. 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 it.

It is no coincidence that the only Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win election and then reelection combined gregariousness and oratorical skill with an almost musical emotionality. Bill Clinton knew how to charm elephants.

Turiel's account of moral development differed in many ways from Kohlberg's, but the political implications were similar: morality is about treating individuals well. It's about harm and fairness (not loyalty, respect, duty, piety, patriotism, or tradition).

We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it. It imperiously contests for authority with our will.8

While many propositions are untrue, in order to be classified as a Great Untruth, an idea must meet three criteria: It contradicts ancient wisdom (ideas found widely in the wisdom literatures of many cultures). It contradicts modern psychological research on well-being. It harms the individuals and communities who embrace it.

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin's ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play

Anything that binds people together into dense networks of trust makes people less selfish. In

You cannot teach antifragility directly, but you can give your children the gift of experience—the thousands of experiences they need to become resilient, autonomous adults.

The hatred of oppression is found on both sides of the political spectrum. The difference seems to be that for liberals—who are more universalistic and who rely more heavily upon the Care/harm foundation—the Liberty/oppression foundation is employed in the service of underdogs, victims, and powerless groups everywhere.

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.

Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since.