Assignment:
1. Haidt
Jonathan Haidt begins the conclusion of "The Righteous Mind" with this passage: "In this book I took you on a tour of human nature and human history. I tried to show that my beloved topic of inquiry moral psychology is the key to understanding politics, religion, and our spectacular rise to planetary dominance."
In doing this, he presented us with three guiding principles of moral psychology:
1. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
2. There is more to morality than harm and fairness.
3. Morality binds and blinds. Haidt writes, "To put all this together, Moral Foundations Theory says that there are (at least) six psychological systems that comprise the universal foundations of the world's many moral matrices." Specifically, these systems are:
1. Care/harm
2. Fairness (proportionality/cheating)
3. Loyalty/betrayal
4. Authority/subversion
5. Sanctity/degradation
6. Liberty/oppression The emphasis placed on each of these six foundations is what Haidt argues divides conservatives (Republicans) and liberals/progressives (Democrats). How so? Use examples.