Jonathan Haidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…Are all kinds of morality compromised in psychopathy? Are all kinds? We actually have some data on this. The answer is generally yes, because they have no moral emotions. I think there are certain kinds that they can understand a little better, but it hasn’t really been studied well enough because everybody’s been focused on care and fairness as morality. Psychopaths have no sense of care, or compassion, or sympathy. They’re happy to cheat, they don’t care about fairness, but I think people haven’t really studied group loyalty, tribalism, hierarchy. My prediction is that all forms are compromised. I know there’s a paper, I think I know I’m on a paper that basically has that as the title. But I’m trying to remember how clear the data was on all those, whether it goes beyond just the moral foundations questionnaire. Yes, as far as I can tell psychopaths have no real morality. They do get angry if they feel disrespected sometimes, but that’s about it. You have some very interesting papers on moral elevation, the idea that you can elevate people and this is an important sympathetic relation, actually Adam Smith wrote about this. You can induce them to be more caring, caring in the good way. You can induce nursing behavior. You can induce all kinds of positive responses. If a student at, say, Yale, comes up to you and says, “Jonathan, I would like to engage in some moral elevation on campus.” What would you tell them to do?…

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