Society & Culture
Welcome to double digits of The Liberal Soul! For today's episode I will be talking about Jonathon Haidt's book from 2012: The Righteous Mind (Why good people are divided by politics and religion). I wanted to do this episode to draw in some moral psychology into political and religious philosophy. Haidt's careful consideration of why people believe different things and his analogies for how the mind has different default settings is really fascinating and useful for navigating a world with other people who don't agree with you. I highly recommend the book if you have time. Some of the highlights in this episode are: The phenomenon of moral dumbfounding, how babies appear to have a moral sense, Moral Foundations Theory, how people are pulled to being more objective if they have an audience with unknown opinions, exploratory vs confirmatory thought, and how (in my view) the pillars in MFT can often be in conflict with each other. I hope you enjoy the episode!