Morality vs. rationality

I've mentioned Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, before.  He's probably best known for arguing that conservatives and liberals come from different moral universes in which they weigh values like fairness, harm, loyalty, authority, and purity differently and that difference explains their different opinions on moral and political issues.  He has a new book, "The Righteous Mind" in which he (according to this NY Times review) aims to expose some of the faulty reasoning employed on behalf of people's different moral beliefs.  Here are some selections of what I thought was most interesting/pertinent:

Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.”
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We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.

To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people’s minds, Haidt concludes, don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends.

That last part about not appealing to reason reminds me of this 30 Rock video in which one character opines: "Your father is being irrational and irrational behavior doesn't respond to rational arguments. It responds to fear."  It also reminds me of how I often approach topics on the blog, like appealing to people's sympathy to suggest that any anti-sociopathic beliefs are fascist and one step away from being Hitler-esque.  I'm just trying to say things in a way that people are more likely to understand.  But seriously, I use reason for my readers that prefer that, but sometimes I like to do a little gut check for the rest of you.  I think most of you like it, at least the ones that stick around.  You don't mind having your beliefs tweaked with a little bit.  If you end up not changing your mind, you feel like you come out of the haze stronger for it.  If you change your mind a bit, you feel like the experience has broadened your horizons.  It pays to have a sociopath around for this very purpose.  You're welcome.  Now return the favor and don't commit genocide against my people.

I also like this part of the article about how maladaptive traits can hurt society, which I consider a bit of a nod to taking care of dirty work:

Traits we evolved in a dispersed world, like tribalism and righteousness, have become dangerously maladaptive in an era of rapid globalization. A pure scientist would let us purge these traits from the gene pool by fighting and killing one another. But Haidt wants to spare us this fate. He seeks a world in which “fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.” To achieve this goal, he asks us to understand and overcome our instincts. He appeals to a power capable of circumspection, reflection and reform.