Morally, we’re largely intuitive, with limited reasoning powers.
The righteous mind is a difficult book to describe since, really, it’s three books in one. The core message, despite that fact, is that our morals arise as a combination of nature and nurture and they are mostly unconscious. Our moral judgements just slip out of us automatically. We know how we feel about the rightness or wrongness of something before we do any so-called reasoning about the matter. So, what we say about our moral judgements is more a case of justification for public consumption rather than evidence of reasoning. The good news is that we are keenly interested in other people’s opinions of us. So, our moral judgements are effectively prosocial. Our righteous minds bind groups of people together under similar moral flags. Ironically, Haidt also shows that political conservatives cleave to a broader and more balanced array of moralities than political liberals. Liberals, it turns out, are quite didactic.
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