BELIEFS AND MORALS(associated with the loyalty, authority, and purity dimensions) which
Haidt believes makes people happy. Without these, he says, you risk
ending up with a “nation of shoppers who feel empty inside”.
Haidt’s theory of morality has the potential to help inter-group rela-
tions, including America’s Culture Wars, by fostering in people greater
understanding of other viewpoints. Indeed, different groups will often
judge the same issues in the context of a different moral dimension.
For example, liberals typically consider immigration issues in terms of
fairness/reciprocity, perceiving the conservative position to be racist and
immoral. Haidt’s theory suggests that it is not necessarily that conserva-
tives are racist but rather that they interpret this issue in terms of the
in-group/loyalty moral dimension, which is prioritized in their cultural
Trolleyology
To investigate people’s moral judgements, psychologists use fictional
scenarios, often involving a runaway trolley, a convention which
they’ve borrowed from the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith
Jarvis Thomson. Take the three principles identified by Marc Hauser
as possible moral universals, described on p.229. These can be fleshed
out using versions of the trolley problem. Imagine a heavy runaway
trolley is running down a track towards a crowd of five people, imperil-
ling their lives. Now imagine pulling a lever to divert the trolley down
a different path such that you save the five people, but a single man on
the new path will be killed. This is an example of a harm happening as
a side-effect in the pursuit of a greater good. Now imagine that instead
of pulling a lever, you push a man into the path of the trolley, saving
the crowd of five but killing the man. This is an example of deliberately
causing a harm in the pursuit of the same greater good.
This last example also involved direct physical contact, which most
people judge to be morally worse than harmful actions instigated
at a distance. If you pulled a lever which opened a trap door which
dropped the man into the path of the trolley, thus saving the crowd,
this would be an example of causing a deliberate harm without direct
physical contact, with the aim of achieving a greater good. Most
people judge this to be less morally bad than pushing the man with
your bare hands. Finally, imagine you see the trolley hurtling towards
the crowd of five and you choose to do nothing. Most people judge
this as morally bad, but not as bad as if the trolley was hurtling down
an empty track and you then switched a lever deliberately so as to
divert the trolley towards a crowd of five people. A rural community of
Mayans, however, consider harm caused through inaction to be just as
morally bad as active harm (see pp.229–30).