This is nice: UVA professor Jonathan Haidt responded on our long thread discussing his work on Moral Foundations theory, with reference to the Penn State case. In case you quit following the thread, this is what he wrote:

Dear Rod, and everyone else:

What an extraordinarily civil and constructive discussion! What planet are you guys from? (and can i move there?)

Rod, you really really get it — the multifaceted nature of morality, the presence of subtypes within each political team, and the role of loyalty and deference to revered authority in creating this disaster. Thanks for making the connections between my work and this awful story.

For those of you discussing the nature of purity: you’re right, purity is not the best word. I’ve changed the term to “Sanctity/degradation”. And i have a short post from 2 years about about how liberals DO make use of it, especially regarding nature, as you suspected:

https://www.yourmorals.org/blog/2010/02/in-search-of-liberal-purity/

I’ll have a book coming out on all this in March, you can see the first chapter here:
https://www.righteousmind.com/

Best wishes to you all,
jon haidt

Thanks, Professor. We are on the Planet Blog Where Host Moderates Discussion. In time, this tends to drive away the screamers and ranters, and attracts people who actually want to have a conversation. Anyway, readers, I think you should be proud of the group sensibility we’ve got going here. Prof. Haidt’s compliment to you is deserved.

I went to the Righteous Mind website linked above. Funny to see the cover for the US and the cover for the UK versions of the book — the UK one is far wittier, but also risque. From the introductory chapter:

The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is captured in some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” The link also appears in the term self-righteous, which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

More:

Part III is about the third principle: morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is thathuman beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves.

But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin’s ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play, and the implications are profound. We’re not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion. I’ll show that our “higher nature” allows us to be profoundly altruistic, but that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our groups. I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or parasite, as some scientists (the “new atheists”) have argued in recent years. And I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or progressive), and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.

The book is out in March. Can’t wait to read it, and blog extensively here about it. Maybe we can do a book club discussion here — you know, read it together, and discuss the chapters in an orderly way. I think that’d be great.