The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

The Dinner Party Problem

A family's dog gets hit by a car. They take the body home, butcher it, cook it, and eat it for dinner. No one sees them. No one gets sick. Did they do something wrong?

If you flinched but couldn't quite explain why, Jonathan Haidt has spent twenty-five years studying that flinch. The flinch, he argues, is the real moral judgment. Whatever came next, about dignity, slippery slopes, what dogs symbolize, was your inner press secretary, hired after the fact to defend a verdict you had already reached.

That is the central provocation of The Righteous Mind. You are not the careful judge you think you are. You are a lawyer for a client you didn't know you had, and the client is your gut. Worse, your gut runs on at least six different moral senses, most of which evolved for reasons that have nothing to do with modern political arguments. When two people disagree about abortion or immigration or whether kneeling during the anthem is okay, they are not usually disagreeing about facts. They are tasting the same situation with different palates and getting genuinely different flavors.

Haidt builds his case around three claims, each illustrated by a metaphor he keeps coming back to. First, intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. The mind is a small rider sitting on a huge elephant, and the rider is mostly there to make excuses for wherever the elephant decides to walk. Second, there is more to morality than harm and fairness. The righteous mind is a tongue with six taste receptors, and most of the world tastes flavors that secular, college-educated Westerners barely register. Third, morality binds and blinds. Humans are roughly ninety percent chimpanzee and ten percent bee, capable of slipping out of selfishness and into a group-mind that makes armies, religions, and corporations possible, and that lets us hate the people on the other team with a clean conscience.