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Books

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

Philip Badger finds The Righteous Mind difficult to believe unqualifiedly.

Jonathan Haidt, although technically a psychologist, has sufficient expertise to write well on topics with relevance to philosophy. His topic in this book is morality and its impact on politics, and he addresses it, primarily at least, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology – that is, by considering how our moral instincts might have evolved. His approach, therefore, is necessarily ‘naturalistic’ or ‘external’ – meaning that he is concerned with explaining rather than justifying moral belief. This causes him some difficulties: he has a paradoxical sympathy for moral conservatives, whose understanding of their own position tends to be anything but ‘external’ (they see themselves as having pretty much the only right perspective on morality). However, he is admirably non-reductive in his efforts.

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