This Week on Free Will: Jonathan Haidt

by Will Wilkinson on June 8, 2008

This week on Free Will, I talk with moral psychology big shot Jonathan Haidt about … the psychology of morality! This was fun because I’m a huge Haidt fan. Here’s my unpublished essay written for Reason on why Democrats should pay more attention to Haidt and less to guys like Lakoff.

Interestingly, I think Jon and I have a pretty fundamental disagreement about the implications of his theory. I think it actually helps to vindicate the authority of secular liberal morality, and, together with social indicators data, gives us reason to push for a more thoroughgoingly liberal culture. Jon thinks it helps us see what’s valuable in conservative moralities, and that we need a sort of balanced moral ecosystem of different kinds of moralities. Sadly, this all came up at the end, and we didn’t get to dig in as much as I’d have liked. But this subject interests me so much I think I want to write a book about it.

jfcote87

I’m a little skeptical of some of the ingroup claims about liberals and libertarians. Good college educated liberals can be very accepting of a bonobo like culture but may blanche at a purity father-daughter dance held by religious conservatives. I’m curious how well Haidt’s work takes into account the liberal problem of tolerating everyone except the intolerant. It’s hard not to see the “ingroup” (perhaps “outgroup” is a better word) processing in Will’s gleeful description of liberal democracy destroying the radical islam. (I’m gleeful too).

Great couple of podcasts, and I hope that you can keep mining the last questions regarding liberal culture.

mk

Indeed, awesome podcast.
I'm curious to know more about his methodology. How does he ensure his set of questions, which he uses to determine the fundamental moral emotions, is not biased? E.g. if you ask too many questions about disgust, disgust will look overly important. What is the "right" set of moral questions to perform statistical analysis on?

mk

In other words, what does "a random sample of the set of all moral questions" look like? How does Haidt obtain this sample?

I would guess it should be weighted by probability of occurrence; e.g. very prosaic or common moral situations should occur very frequently, and made-up or obviously contrived situations should occur very infrequently.