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 Ar…

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 the fairness/proportionality foundation. Here I will deal …

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 precede…

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 Go…

According to an article in yesterday's Washington Post, new allegations have been made of a "shadow campaign" by which the District of Columbia's largest contractor (in contract dollars) supported the current mayor's 2010 campaign to the tune of about 650,000 unreported dollars. The money was alleg…

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012) is a book that does not, from its title, appear to have much value for government ethics. But Haidt's approach to morality, and his look at how people approach morality, provides a lot of food…