In the book club, we read a great book by Jonathan Haidt about morality: The Righteous Mind. The book contains a lot of new things.
First, Jonathan described morality as a simple non-harm principle: It is immoral to harm others without reason.
Morality is not just about not harming others. In the following story (not the most disturbing story of the book), people think Andrej's behavior is not right.
Andrej is a decent guy, never harms anyone. Once a week, he buys a frozen chicken and has sex with it. Then he cooks and eats it.
Jonathan studies people around the world, asks them weird questions, and records their answers.
Jonathan found five (and later six) pillars of morality.
The harm and fairness are self-explanatory. The authority means respect for elders, ingroup stands for loyalty and cohesiveness of the group, and purity deals with hygienic (and sexual) prescriptions.
In the individualistic western culture, we emphasize the first two. Other societies pay more attention to others as well.
It seems that children absorb the morality from their environment. First, they follow all rules. When they grow up, they can distinguish between agreements and principles. For instance, if they are allowed, they go to school without a uniform but do not harm others.
The research shows that people make fast moral decisions and think about reasons later. Jonathan proved this with an experiment where people needed to give justification for the judgment. First, they condemned an action and then modified stories to fit the crime.
Interestingly, rich and poor differ in the view on moral rules. The rich consider a lot of them as conventions. The effect appears across cultures.
One part of the book describes the group evolution. Humans cooperate and read each other intentions. Leaders are not alpha males as in primates (mainly gorillas), but they rule less violently.
Jonathan argues that humans were under many evolutionary pressures that molded them to be more cooperative and work in groups.
In the last 50000 years, humans changed a lot. Jonathan argues that it made us more groupish: to be able to behave in a group.
In a wild world, you cannot trust everyone. Whereas in a community, you can trust people much more. The trust substitute police, and the result is better for everyone.
Because of reduced frictions, some religious communities control parts of industry. The orthodox jews control the diamond trade. The cost (to inspect) is lower if you trust other people.
Social capital determines how society helps everyone to succeed.
In the book, Jonathan describes liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. The summary of their worldview is the best I read. It is unifying.
Liberals care a lot about the first two moral pillars: fairness and harm. Conservatives use all of these pillars. Libertarians do not care about anything (other than drugs, just kidding).
He points out that liberals identify victims or problems very well. Because of that, they push for the change. Conservatives mostly support the status quo and acknowledge that introducing laws might bring undesirable change that results in the loss of social capital.
The liberal argument is: "Help single mothers." Conservatives reply: "By supporting single mothers, we repel men from marrying and raising children."
Jonathan did a lot of experiments about morality and politics. In one, he let people fill a morality questionnaire as someone with the opposite conviction would fill it. He found that radical liberals misjudged their political opponents the most. It poses a serious problem, how can you cooperate with a person about whom you think his opinions are: "Harming innocent animals is perfectly fine."
Read the book. But in the case you are lazy, there are some facts that I haven't found in any other book.
Immigration decreases the human capital. People tend to meet less around immigrants.
Groups perform better if they perceive themselves as homogenous.
In the trust game, an experimental game that measures how you are trustworthy, the best pair are two religious people. They trust more and deserve the trust.
By the surveys, religious people are better. They give to charity and volunteer.