Book review: The Righteous Mind
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt is a book about morality. It's about the ways in which people form moral opinions and the underlying basis for human morality. The book begins with a description of how the author's views have changed over time and how the conventional view of how children develop morality has changed over time. To oversimplify, at one point people viewed children as inherently immoral and needing to be taught about morality. Then children were viewed as being inherently moral and only needing to be protected from forces that would stunt there inherent goodness. Then Lawrence Kohlberg re-invented morality as a rational way of rationally reconciling one's own desires with the desires of others. And finally he came to the conclusion that people have inborn moral intuitions that we use to construct our theories of morality. That won't be any surprise to readers of...