Astral Codex Ten

Moral Foundations

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Moral Foundations

Article

Moral Foundations is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 15, 2022 and June 30, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “the middle section of the book focuses on the core of Haidt’s research, his moral foundations model”; “Cf. Jonathan Haidt’s theory of Moral Foundations”. It most often appears alongside Jonathan Haidt, US, 2012.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 15, 2022
  • Last seen: June 30, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
This is the “rider and elephant” analogy that’s seeped well into rationalist thought, so a lot of it was familiar to me. It’s nicely written in order to gradually guide someone who might be fairly new to the idea that people might not be fully rational agents through the arguments, using Haidt’s own career working in moral psychology as a framework for doing so. Moral Foundations After making the case for intuitionism, the middle section of the book focuses on the core of Haidt’s research, his moral foundations model. By analogy to taste receptors, the idea is that we don’t have just one intuitive impulse producing our snap moral judgements that we then rationalise, but five (later this is expanded to six, but I’ll follow the book’s process of introducing that one later, as it was added later in Haidt’s own research). The five foundations are:
After making the case for intuitionism, the middle section of the book focuses on the core of Haidt’s research, his moral foundations model. By analogy to taste receptors, the idea is that we don’t have just one intuitive impulse producing our snap moral judgements that we then rationalise, but five (later this is expanded to six, but I’ll follow the book’s process of introducing that one later, as it was added later in Haidt’s own research). The five foundations are:
This is necessary for his central idea because the moral foundations he claims are innate (he does a good job of explaining how innateness does not require that something be present from birth) can be explained as group adaptations but not individual adaptations. Haidt is positioning himself against the idea that evolution would drive humans to be selfish (with exceptions for close genetic relatives), so any other behaviour must be the result of explicit reasoning on our part. He claims instead that that some degree of non-selfish behaviour arises naturally through group selection, and that this is expressed through our moral intuitions, with moral reasoning mostly serving as a post-hoc justification for this.
Is There An Illusion Of Moral Decline?
June 30, 2023 · Original source
Cf. Jonathan Haidt’s theory of Moral Foundations.
Inline links: Jonathan Haidt’s theory of Moral Foundations