Understanding the morality of ourselves, and others

Why we get it wrong and how we can correct it

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Morality.

You can catch up on last week’s articles below:

You have to be one person, either good or bad

So much of life is made better by curiosity. Yet when it comes to morality, we quickly fall into group dynamics and turn our curiosity off. However, if we want to be truly independent thinkers, we must learn to keep being curious, even in uncomfortable situations.

We’re living in a time of great divide not just in the West but across the world. Everyone has an opinion of how someone should act and it usually falls in line with their moral beliefs.

But how often do we take a step back and ask ourselves about the other person and their own beliefs? How often do we look to have rational conversations and work to understand each other?

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza once said, “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.”

Shouldn’t we all take his reflection to heart?

Jonathan Haidt did just that when he sought to understand what separates people and why they are so entrenched in moral beliefs.

In his book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt lays out three pillars he found that define our moral beliefs:

• Intuitions first, reasoning later

• Morality is more than fairness and harm

• Morality binds and blinds us all

Intuitions first, reasoning later

The philosopher David Hume once observed that, “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Haidt used the wisdom Hume had presented as his basis for exploration. Through his research, Haidt was able to find enough evidence to suggest that Hume was in fact right:

We are emotion first, rationalization later.

This goes against a large part of our beliefs. Many of us like to believe we’re driven by our reasoning abilities, by being able to properly deduce and make observations, not a slave to our emotional side. After all, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus had warned about allowing our emotions to control our behavior.

But according to Haidt, we are emotional first, reasoning second.

“Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.”

And according to Haidt, this is why many of us are frustrated with our neighbors, coworkers, and everyone else who has different moral beliefs than us.

We see ourselves as logical beings and search for truth as the all seeing power of our actions, but it is in fact this blindspot, or lack of understanding, that leads us to such frustration.

“If you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas— to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to then things will make a lot more sense.”

The first step then to understanding the moral actions and beliefs of both others and ourselves is not to view them as coming from rationality, but rather, each of our own emotional intuitions which we later build “post hoc” reasoning for.

Morality is more than fairness and harm

In its most simplistic terms, we like to think of morality as right and wrong, is something fair, does someone get hurt, and so on.

But we’re much more complex of creatures than this. While each of these play into our moral decision making, they don’t tell the full story.

Haidt takes a two pronged approach to how our morality evolved.

First, we evolved through natural selection as individuals competing with individuals and all of us are descendants “of primates who excelled at that competition.”

Second (and simultaneously), we humans evolved into extremely social creatures and as such, learned to not just compete as individuals but also as groups.

So each of us is not just a descendent of the most successful individuals, we’re all also descendent of the most successful groups.

“As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists.”

According to Haidt, in the West, there are six groupings of morality we tend to think about:

1. Care and Harm

2. Fairness and Cheating

3. Loyalty and Betrayal

4. Authority and Subversion

5. Sanctity and Degradation

6. Liberty and Oppression

These pairings is where the majority of our disagreements come from according to Haidt (this is his Moral Foundations Theory).

Through his research, Haidt discovered that liberals tended to care most about Care and Fairness. Conservatives, on the other hand, were more evenly spread across all six groupings.

What this means is that liberals tended to moralize more around suffering/cruelty and injustice/inequality and conservatives around each of the six.

“Morality is not just about how we treat each other. It is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.”

When attempting to understand another’s moral choices, rather than just wave them off as being incompetent, we can think through what aspects of morality may be driving their emotions and therefore behaviors. We can also use this same lens to better understand our own moral foundations we lean into.

By becoming curious rather than aggressive, we can disagree but work to understand the other side.

Morality binds and blinds us all

Morality not only provides us a taste for how to act, it also builds our associations.

The morality we hold helps us form groups. This is natural to us and evolved over time with our tribal mentality, but it also provides a downside:

Once we’ve formed our group around our moral ideas, we lose the ability to see outside of the group’s moral structures.

“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.”

Increasingly, as we get deeper and deeper into group dynamics, we stop seeing others as humans, and begin seeing everything in an “us versus them” mindset.

This bleeds into everything we see today in culture wars, where each side works to hijack our emotional intuitions and pull us to their side.

By remembering that it is within our nature to fall into alignment with our “group”, when we do feel that pull—that desire to pile on, to attack, to ostracize—feel it, but don’t act.

When that feeling arises, you can use it as a remembrance of how easy it is to be sucked into the “us versus them” nature of reality, and instead of react, pause.

Maybe we agree with the group, maybe we feel the same way as the rest of them, but there are also times we don’t.

We won’t always agree with our group and we won’t always disagree with the other side. This is key to being an independent thinker: it’s not about our group but about what is morally correct.

There are things the left gets correct and the right gets wrong. But equally true, there are things the left gets wrong that the right gets correct.

Left or right, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, these are all just big bucket labels. Being a truly independent thinker who is looking for the correct moral stance in a world of constant contradictions is to take each situation as its own, and call out what is right and what’s wrong.

And sometimes that means going against your group.

It’s uncomfortable. But it’s also independent and the clearest you can be in determining what is truly morally correct to you.

This is how we start to be independent thinkers. But it’s also how you start to see others as human beings with differing opinions on morality, not some monster that needs destroying.

By keeping our curiosity top of mind, we not only want to better understand our own beliefs, we want to understand those opposite us as well.

Before you go…

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Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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