This book is an attempt to understand the foundations of morality. What is morality? What are the various ways in which it manifests among different people? How to guide and leverage it in improving our institutions. Before going on into the details of the book, I have to commend the sheer audacity that is required to even begin a scientific analysis of a complex phenomenon of morality. Taking a step back, it seems that the western academia has immense confidence in the process of science and will subject anything and everything to the discipline of scientific inquiry.
This book presents the evolution of the author in a chronological way and the formulation of moral foundation hypothesis. When his world was altered in a fundamental way (John Kerry losing elections), Haidt did not retrieve into the echo chamber. Instead, he sought out to read opposing perspectives and re-calibrate his understanding of the social and moral principles that guide the political discourse. Haidt goes further and formulates a coherent framework for explaining the moral differences as moral foundations of various groups. This book explicitly states that morality is a type of cognition.
Sure, I can nitpick about the flaws in the moral foundation theory and the somewhat implausible evolutionary explanations for these foundations. But, at a broader level, these will teach you something new and it is worth understanding the differences in moral perspectives. There are a lot of similarities in the Big 5 personality traits and the moral foundation theory. However, I think the methodologies for arriving at these two theories are somewhat different. I would have liked if these foundations are discovered by Induction (from the data) rather than Deduction (initial formulation by Haidt followed by refinements).
I am somewhat unsatisfied by the ending of the book. As a scientist and engineer, I am interested to understand the science of a phenomenon. As an engineer, I am interested to use my human ingenuity to build new systems that exploit the scientific principles. This book, while makes some headway into understanding the principles of morality, does not give any novel suggestions on how to conduct ourselves as moral beings. There are some basic common sense suggestions like, create strong teams, improve synchronization, be more civil, but these insights can be arrived at independent of the moral foundation theory. A more explicit recognition and re-framing of morals using the moral foundations would be very useful.
Investigation into morality should be conducted extremely carefully as it can be easily hijacked by ideological bias. It is difficult to do it in an impartial manner. Jonathan Haidt manages to perform a decent job in explaining some core moral conundrums and adds new dimensions to the ongoing conversation about religion, morality, and community. These new dimensions are not necessarily new, but are refinements of Durkheim, Hume, and Transcendental Movement. These ideas themselves are heavily influenced by Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta philosophies. Ironically, while Haidt understood the difference between individualist and collectivist morality during his stay in India, he does not credit any of the Indian philosophies behind the sociologists and philosophers he builds upon. Reminds me of a phrase called Digestion. Also, it is as if he couldn't put the two and two together. Probably because of low opinion of Indian civilization and dismissing it as an intellectual light weight in birthing any serious philosophical and ideological insights.
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