Major Fault Line in Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory" of Human Evolution
Psychologist
Jonathan Haidt on politics, morality, and the coddling of the American mind.
Brian
Gallagher
Nautilus
March 7, 2019
Above
is an interview of Jonathan Haidt. It’s pretty good on some things like his
latest book The Coddling of the
American Mind. I think he may be better on this topic than “human nature”
and things such as the evolutionary emergence of human morality, values he
contends we are hard-wired for and are therefore compelled to express.
The
following excerpted statement of his from the interview caught my attention in
that it is revealing in terms of my critique of his book, The Righteous Mind. He’s asked to
account for the now Trumpian Republican Party. Haidt’s response raises this
question: If his moral foundation theory is as powerful and useful as he leads
us to believe in his book, how could one election and one president, Trump, in
effect debunk it?
JH: “Trump has shifted a lot of things
around. The Republican Party is no longer the social conservative party. I
believe, in other research I’ve published with Karen Stenner, a political
scientist in Australia, Trump is appealing to more authoritarian tendencies.
It’s very hard to see how Donald Trump is a conservative. So the psychology that I just
described a moment ago [moral foundation theory] no longer quite
applies. [Italics mine.] The Republican Party, I don’t know what’s
happening to it [shouldn’t his moral foundation theory provide some answers?],
but it is bringing in elements that are overtly racist. It is bringing in
desires for rapid change, which is not a conservative virtue, generally.”
Haidt
hitching his moral foundation theory to evolutionary human nature remains a problem
for me.
Equally
unsatisfactory is his claim in his The
Righteous Mind that Democrats are less loyal and less patriotic than
Republicans just doesn’t hold water. Since Trump’s election who, really, is
proving to be the greater patriot, Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell? I’ve gone
over these two main points and others here:
and here:
I
think a good theory of cultural evolution, one I’m working on, would tell us a
lot more about how humans became what we are and why we behave as we do than
Haidt’s moral foundation theory.
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