(Posting in a personal capacity unless stated otherwise.) I help allocate Open Phil’s resources to improve the governance of AI with a focus on avoiding catastrophic outcomes. Formerly co-founder of the Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative, which supports AI alignment/safety research and outreach programs at Harvard, MIT, and beyond, co-president of Harvard EA, Director of Governance Programs at the Harvard AI Safety Team and MIT AI Alignment, and occasional AI governance researcher.
Not to be confused with the user formerly known as trevor1.
Great write-up. Righteous Mind was the first in a series of books that really usefully transformed how I think about moral cognition (including Hidden Games, Moral Tribes, Secret of Our Success, Elephant in the Brain). I think its moral philosophy, however, is pretty bad. In a mostly positive (and less thorough) review I wrote a few years ago (that I don’t 100% endorse today), I write:
I became even more convinced that this instinct towards relativism is a big problem for The Righteous Mind since reading Joshua Greene’s excellent Moral Tribes, which covers much of the same ground. But Greene shows that this is not just an aversion to moral truth; it stems from Haidt’s undue pessimism about the role of reason.
Moral Tribes argues that our moral intuitions evolved to solve the Tragedy of the Commons, but the contemporary world faces the “Tragedy of Commonsense Morality,” where lots of tribes with different systems for solving collective-action problems have to get along. Greene dedicates much of the section “Why I’m a Liberal” to his disagreements with Haidt. After noting his agreements — morality evolved to promote cooperation, is mostly implemented through emotions, different groups have different moral intuitions, a source of lots of conflict, and we should be less hypocritical and self-righteous in our denunciations of other tribes’ views — Greene says:
Greene goes on to explain that Haidt thinks liberals and conservatives disagree because liberals have the “impoverished taste receptors” of only caring about harm and fairness, while conservatives have the “whole palette.” But, Greene argues, the other tastes require parochial tribalism: you have to be loyal to something, sanctify something, respect an authority, that you probably don’t share with the rest of the world. This makes social conservatives great at solving Tragedies of the Commons, but very bad at the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality, where lots of people worshipping different things and respecting different authorities and loyal to different tribes have to get along with each other.
Greene notes that even Haidt finds “no compelling alternative to utilitarianism” in matters of public policy after deriding it earlier. “It seems that the autistic philosopher [Bentham] was right all along,” Greene observes. Greene explains Haidt’s “paradoxical” endorsement of utilitarianism as an admission that conscious moral reasoning — like a camera’s “manual mode” instead of the intuitive “point-and-shoot” morality — isn’t so underrated after all. If we want to know the right thing to do, we can’t just assume that all of the moral foundations have a grain of truth, figure we’re equally tribalistic, and compromise with the conservatives; we need to turn to reason.
While Haidt is of course right that sound moral arguments often fail to sway listeners, “like the wind and the rain, washing over the land year after year, a good argument can change the shape of things. It begins with a willingness to question one’s tribal beliefs. And here, being a little autistic might help.” He then cites Bentham criticizing sodomy laws in 1785 and Mill advocating gender equality in 1869. And then he concludes: “Today we, some of us, defend the rights of gays and women with great conviction. But before we could do it with feeling, before our feelings felt like ‘rights,’ someone had to do it with thinking. I’m a deep pragmatist [Greene’s preferred term for utilitarians], and a liberal, because I believe in this kind of progress and that our work is not yet done.”