He became more and more convinced that our morality flows from our emotional reactions rather than reasoned responses. Now a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia, as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania he studied the moral systems of primitive cultures and did research in Brazil, and eventually India. Haidt tells the story of his intellectual awakening. Kohlberg’s theory was a comforting one for the liberalism that was for many decades in the middle of the twentieth century our ruling ideology, but as it turns out he was wrong about our moral nature. In other words, the mature, morally developed person is a liberal. Kohlberg theorized that children go through stages of moral development, culminating in a “post-conventional” attitude that questions social norms and revises them to accord with higher principles of justice. In the days when Haidt began his work in psychology in the 1980s, the work of Lawrence Kohlberg still dominated. One that is, I’d say, therefore certainly less reasonable than conservatism’s, and for the vast majority of people in the world far from obvious. When he was a young graduate student, Jonathan Haidt presumed that “liberal” was pretty much a synonym for “reasonable,” if not for “obvious.” Now, as he writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, he has found that liberals have limited moral vision. It wasn’t a conclusion he thought he’d come to.
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