More on The Happiness Hypothesis

Where our different philosophical backgrounds came from regarding morality:

Haidt says that ancient cultures extolled virtues. Now we extoll moral reasoning.

The ancient Greeks gave us both the "quest for parsimony [finding just one central rule] and the worship of reason." The Enlightenment revived these two outlooks and "sought a foundation for ethics that did not depend on divine revelation or on God's enforcement." (p. 161)

The two opposing points of view on what this universal moral law should be were put forth by Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham.

Kant: (Deontologists-from Gk deon=obligation)
Moral Laws have to be universally applicable (the categorical imperative).
Would it be okay for everyone to do this thing I want to do? If not then it's not okay for me to do it.
Ethics is "a branch of applied logic."

Bentham: Utilitarianism  (Consequentialists)
"In all decision-making ... goal should be the maximum total benefit (utility), but who gets the benefit is of little concern." (p. 162)
Ethics through moral reasoning. (Haidt points out this is how we are educating our children today.)

Haidt takes a detour through Ben Franklin's attempt to live a virtuous life while fully aware of his temptations and shortcomings. He felt that Virtue was its own reward.  This encourages delayed gratification.

Durkheim talked about "anomie" (normlessness). "Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of any value." Haidt warns that because we are so careful now not to impose our norms on others, children in our society don't have a bedrock of values, but instead are encouraged to sort of create their own. This leads to the condition of anomie. 

Disgust and Divinity

"Disgust has its evolutionary origins in helping people decide what to eat." When we started eating a lot of meat, we came into contact with a lot more contagious pathogens, and disgust developed so that we wouldn't want to eat rotten food.

Haidt has done a lot of research on disgust and the value of purity in different cultures. He thinks the desire for some things to be pure and sacred is part of our natures. I've read about this before--for example, in The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade, to whom Haidt refers. I never have quite gotten the idea of the third dimension of human social space, the dimension of divinity. (Anyone have any thoughts to share on this?)

Mircea Eliade (historian of religion) says "that the modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world. This is the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force to fight against." (p. 193) Now this I do understand--that is, time and space stripped of all sacredness furthers the anomie that Durkheim talked about, so that people in our culture feel rootless. 

The Culture War and The Myth of Pure Evil

Haidt has much more to say about the moral differences between liberals and conservatives in this TED video. It is also interesting to read his "What Makes People Vote Republican?" It's particularly helpful to me--as someone who often votes Republican in national elections, but hangs out with liberals and has some very liberal viewpoints, and ends up feeling out of touch with everyone. 

But the larger reason I think it's important to read/watch these is because, as Haidt says, most of us seem to believe in a "the myth of pure evil" (pp. 72-76). He refers to a book by social psychologist Roy Baumeister:

In Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Aggression, Baumeister examined evil from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator. When taking the perpetrator's perspective, he found that people who do things we see as evil, from spousal abuse all the way to genocide, rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always see themselves as responding to attacks and provocations in ways that are justified. They often think that they themselves are victims. But, of course, you can see right through this tactic; you are good at understanding the biases that others use to protect their self-esteem. The disturbing part is that Baumeister shows us our own distortions as victims, and as righteous advocates of victims. Almost everywhere Baumeister looked in the literature, he found that victims often shared some of the blame...

... Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from the outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil...

...Neither the 9/11 hijackers nor Osama bin Laden were particularly upset because American women can drive, vote, and wear bikinis. Rather, many Islamic extremists want to kill Americans because they are using the Myth of Pure Evil to interpret Arab history and current events. (pp. 74-76)

Baumeister also found, unfortunately, "The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism ... Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means." (p. 76)

I keep telling my husband, who often thinks of writing about how to promote a more civil society, that he and some of his colleagues should collaborate with Haidt or other social psychologists looking at this stuff.