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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...