making local government more ethical

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Book Reviews

Robert Wechsler

Moral Capital
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt discusses what he calls "moral capital," that is, "the resources that sustain a moral community." He also refers to moral capital (as I discuss in...
Robert Wechsler
Government ethics is naturally focused on the selfish aspects of people's conduct, the aspects that make them provide special benefits to themselves, those who help them, and those to whom they feel special obligations. But as Jonathan Haidt argues in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), people are not just...
Robert Wechsler

Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), set out a Moral Foundations Theory that posits the existence of moral modules or foundations. In my last post I dealt with...
Robert Wechsler
Moral Disgust
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt discusses Richard Shweder's theory regarding three major clusters of moral themes:  autonomy, community, and divinity. Our culture, unlike most cultures, gives precedence to autonomy over community, even though the concepts...
Robert Wechsler
You may not have realized it, but if you are reading this, you are most likely WEIRD, that is, a member of a culture that is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. The features of WEIRDness can be summed up in the following sentence from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012):  "The...
Robert Wechsler
One section of Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012) is entitled "We Are All Intuitive Politicians." The section begins with a recognition of the centrality of accountability not just in government, but in all our relations with people. "Human beings," he says, "are the world champions of cooperation beyond...

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