PBH310: Moral Psychology & Abortion

what is Haidt's definition of morality?

I need some good stories and experiments that speak to conservatives, not liberals, e.g. flag burning or religious desecration (maybe in reverse order, starting with secular religion first…)

I need some key images and graphs: the moral matrices from Part III, maybe the graphs from Part II as a warm up to that…

more concise intro

• “In psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work” (p. 141)

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

• Moral reasoning is often the servant of moral emotions. Gut feelings can sometimes drive moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.
  • Haidt has a great intuitist way of building Part I… but he does so addressing a secular, liberal audience… this would need to be approached differently to address a conservative, religious audience in an intuitionist way
    • Can I use moral dumbfounding examples for religious conservatives?

Stop at 2:02

the social intuitionist model (image/diagram) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_intuitionism#/media/File:SocialIntuitionistCC.jpg

There's more to morality than harm and fairness.¹⁾

From YourMorals.org:

1. Care: Concerns regarding care and protecting individuals from harm
2. Equality: Equality is a psychological motive for balanced reciprocity, equal treatment, equal say, and equal outcome
3. Loyalty: Concerns regarding loyalty to others, self-sacrifice, and patriotism
4. Authority: Concerns regarding respect to authority and rejection of insubordination
5. Purity: Concerns regarding maintaining purity and preventing degradation
6. Proportionality: Proportionality is a psychological motive for rewards and punishments to be proportionate to merit and deservingness and benefits to be calibrated to the amount of contribution

need better definitions and understanding, and… can this just be combined with the second section? The lessons are in Part III, the discovery is in Part II

Morality binds and blinds. We are 90 Percent Chimp and 10 Percent Bee.

points to bring out:

• How political teams form, how people gravitate to the left or right
• For pro-life activism
  • First, there's a lot of wisdom here in internal community-building - active the hive switch
  • Second, there's a lot of wisdom here in being effective communicators
    • We need to understand how abortion advocates may be thinking, working off different moral foundations, and we need to have empathy and be able to speak their language
    • We also need to understand how abortion advocates may see us if they misunderstand our moral foundations, and be prepared to speak to the elephant in order to build connection and help lower their defences, etc