Lessons on Morality: Perspectives on Right and Wrong

 Hey team,

I recently read Johnathan Haidts, “The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion” and it was incredible and absolutely changed and advanced how I see divide in modern society.

I was originally attracted to the title, specifically the word “righteous” as I recently wrote about how I am often disgusted when it is amplified in someone's behavior. I now see the word “righteous” as meaning what you, or your group, believe you are rightfully owed in addition to a belief or perspective you hold as being superior to others. This has clear implications in political and religious debates because ultimately we are arguing over what we believe ourselves, or more often our collective, is owed in terms of its laws, regulations, and support. When we assert and believe that things should be a certain way with specific attributes, we are implying that our interpretation of the world is superior to that of those who disagree with us. While we often utilize rationality in justifying this perspective/ belief, it is not rationality that got us there and is not what will convince others that we are correct either. In part one of the books author Jonathan Haidt explains how our moral minds function as the combination of a designated “rider” and its “elephant” where the rider represents our rational, justifying mind and the elephant represents our instinctual/ “gut” mind which is first to make a conclusion regarding an issue as opposed to our slower, rational rider. Following our emotional conclusion from our elephant, our rider will take control and use reasoning to justify our conclusion even though it was not our rider who made the conclusion in the first place. This is referred to as “post hoc reasoning”. Even with all this at play, it is our rider that we attach to and claim to be the one in charge.

So what shapes how our elephant reacts? This depends on how we are seeing the problem at play and how it may be going against our individual moral code. Moral code, as in the specific and personal rules we judge the world through on a scale of  “rightness” and “wrongness”, has general, arguably innate, scopes whereby specific situations get our perspective projected upon. Haidt outlines these scopes as promoting and respecting: fairness, loyalty, authority, care, and sanctity (moral cleanliness) along with mitigating their opposites (cheating, betrayal, subversion, harm, and disgust). As individuals, our moral code is often prominent in a few of these and not others, though we all have some degree of each. Additionally each of these scopes of molarity has its specific manifestations, for example, while two individuals may care about fairness, one may view fairness as having equal rights and opportunities while the other may see fairness as having equal outcomes. While both are rooted in fairness/ equality the specific manifestation differs across individuals. Same goes for the other scopes. Through this framework, you can see how as humans we may treasure the same value, but how we see that value will vary tremendously and ultimately this difference in how these values manifest that will divide us. 

Going deeper into what divides us, we need to return to the idea of righteousness. While not explicitly emphasized in the book, righteousness is a key factor in our divisions. Naturally, we will differ in what we believe to be fair, loyal, and so on, even while cherishing the same values. The problem arises when we cling to the specifics of our beliefs and hold onto them as absolute “truths”, superior to the “truths” of others. This attachment to specificity, which underlies righteousness, blinds us to other manifestations of the same values. We refuse to listen to alternative perspectives or negate them outright, and we often only seek out information that supports our view (confirmation bias). This is sheer ignorance and delusion.

What’s particularly interesting is that by attaching to our beliefs and rigidly distinguishing between “right” and “wrong,” we are clearly operating from a place of ego. The ego is the part of our mind that acts from delusion and ignorance, and serves to categorize and discriminate. When our ego dominates, we are already losing the battle. Regardless of whether our belief is supported by science and data, it is not our rationality or intellect that is in control, but our emotionally driven "elephants" that constantly clash with others and as such will not make a difference when trying to convince others or yourself.  Whether we can see it or not, when we attach to our beliefs of how things ought to be, and take this as truth, we are acting in a grandiose way, where our understanding of a problem and its solution is somehow more true than others. To combat this we must embrace our humility. Of course, I'm not suggesting that all our beliefs are completely false. However, I do believe that our beliefs are not universal truths. We should acknowledge that we could be wrong, that there is likely much more to any problem, that others could be right, and that there are probably multiple valid perspectives and solutions. It is likely impossible to determine which perspective is the most true or helpful. 

I hope you can see that when we indulge in our righteousness, regaurldless of whether it is on behalf of us as individuals or collectives, we aren’t helping anyone (besides our egos or collective ego). Clinging to what makes me more right and you wrong divides us and deprives us of our humility and humanity. I truly do believe that in our core, our essence, we have far more in common than we don’t. And even while we have so many similarities, all our similarities will too be different so it’s quite useless to try to go on lumping and splitting our differences. In being so dogmatic about our beliefs we will continue to be stripped of our true essence and pave the path for more ignorance to seep in. We ought to approach such problems with humility and detachment

https://yourmorals.org/