Hating on Haidt

Purity for thee, but not for me

If you’ve been following my writing about the “worldview space”, its potential structure, and how we could identify the most relevant axes for describing it, you might be wondering why I haven’t discussed Jonathan Haidt and Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). After all, MFT is an attempt to map out key dimensions of moral judgment, which is closely aligned with the project of defining a low-dimensional model for understanding worldviews (which I described in my earlier posts).

actual image of Kurt Gray blowing up MFT

And yet, while MFT can be descriptively useful and may well capture something valuable about human moral reasoning, there are compelling critiques which suggest that some findings related to MFT may be tautological (as we’ll discuss). Also, MFT doesn’t just claim to provide a useful framework for understanding differences in the sorts of moral judgements which are most salient within our particular cultural context, it claims to uncover fundamental, bottom-up truths about human morality, a high bar! Instead, I think it offers a sometimes helpful model (which could actually be getting at something fundamental), but which is also unavoidably shaped by the researchers’ assumptions, at least in part.