The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion is Jonathan Haidt’s study of how and why people along a spectrum from extreme liberal to extreme conservative viewpoints coalesce around certain value systems. To get us going, on the first page he presents these two hypothetical tales:
I’m going to tell you a brief story. Pause after you read it and decide whether the people in the story did anything morally wrong.
A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.
If you are like most of the well-educated people in my studies, you felt an initial flash of disgust, but you hesitated before saying the family had done anything morally wrong. After all, the dog was dead already, so they didn’t hurt it, right? And it was their dog, so they had a right to do what they wanted with the carcass, no? If I pushed you to make a judgment, odds are you’d give me a nuanced answer, something like “Well, I think it’s disgusting, and I think they should have just buried the dog, but I wouldn’t say it was morally wrong.”
OK, here’s a more challenging story:
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
Once again, no harm, nobody else knows, and, like the dog-eating family, it involves a kind of recycling that is–as some of my research subjects pointed out–an efficient use of natural resources. But now the disgust is so much stronger, and the action just seems so … degrading. Does that make it wrong? If you’re an educated and politically liberal Westerner, you’ll probably give another nuanced answer, one that acknowledges the man’s right to do what he wants, as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone. But if you are not a liberal or libertarian Westerner, you probably think it’s wrong–morally wrong–for someone to have sex with a chicken carcass and then eat it. For you, as for most people on the planet, morality is broad. Some actions are wrong even though they don’t hurt anyone. Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind. The next step is to understand where these many moralities came from in the first place.
From The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt, Vintage Books, 2012, pp. 3-4.