Political Brains © Oleg Atbashian The People’s Cube. Indeed, their moral perspectives end up being so far removed from each other that they frequently fail to see their counterparts as having any kind of moral viewpoint at all. Moreover, liberals and conservatives are doomed to misunderstand each other in ways which border on the absurd. Liberals, because they operate within a set of rational moral parameters based ‘only’ on compassion, freedom, and a particular and quite narrow notion of justice, are, he claims, politically disadvantaged compared to conservatives, who can appeal to people’s full range of moral intuitions (or instincts). Haidt takes the political and cultural implications of this to be highly significant. In fact, because they concentrate more on the rider – the reason – and less on what their instincts are telling them, rationalist or constructivist philosophers, who all turn out to be ‘liberals’, are apparently blind to the crucial importance of notions such as group loyalty, authority (liberals only acknowledge this as legitimate under certain conditions) and sanctity in our moral lives. For Haidt, the central mistake of psychologists and philosophers has been to address themselves not to the elephant, but to the rider – whose job turns out to be little more than the post hoc rationalisation of the actions of his or her steed. This is a book strong on metaphors, and one of the best is that of the mind as an irrational elephant ridden, but hardly controlled, by a rational rider (this is a re-imagining of Hume’s notion of reason being the slave of the passions). In Haidt’s hands, evolutionary psychology loses the tunnel-vision it acquires from some of its proponents, and opens itself to insights from both sociology and philosophy. However, he is admirably non-reductive in his efforts. 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). His approach, therefore, is necessarily ‘naturalistic’ or ‘external’ – meaning that he is concerned with explaining rather than justifying moral belief. 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. Jonathan Haidt, although technically a psychologist, has sufficient expertise to write well on topics with relevance to philosophy. SUBSCRIBE NOW Books The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt Philip Badger finds The Righteous Mind difficult to believe unqualifiedly.

The righteous mind