Jonathan Haidt

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Jonathan Haidt in 2012.

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

His metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider for the subconscious and conscious mind is somewhat unoriginal, and the same thing was said only slightly differently by Schopenhauer[wp], who wrote that the conscious intellect "is like a lame man who can see, riding on the shoulders of a blind giant." His more original contribution concerns six categories of morality as a number of mental modules that establish scales of good versus evil, which he calls 'moral foundations theory'. They are:

  1. Care vs. harm:: cherishing and protecting others.
  2. Fairness vs. cheating: rendering justice according to shared rules. (Aternate name: Proportionality)
  3. Liberty vs. oppression: the loathing of tyranny.
  4. Loyalty vs. betrayal: standing with your group, family, nation. (Aternate name: Ingroup)
  5. Authority vs. subversion: obeying tradition and legitimate authority. (Aternate name: Respect.)
  6. Sanctity vs. degradation: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions. (Aternate name: Purity.)[1]

He has since devolved into a Very Serious Person, after winning a Templeton prize, now spending his efforts on foggy discourse and dissing New Atheism.[2]

[edit] Footnotes

  1. See generally Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion; (Pantheon, 2012; ISBN 978-0-307-37790-6.)
  2. http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/05/17/the-unbearable-squishiness-of-jonathan-haidt/
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