I found what Haidt was discussing throughout these three chapters to be incredibly interesting and thought provoking. It was helpful when he mentioned famous psychologists such as Piaget and Kohlberg and their different developmental stages. It was interesting to see how a child’s morality is constructed through time and the effect that delays in the different stages can have on their ability to make moral decisions. It resonated with me when Haidt was discussing how a child’s morality is self-constructed due to their experiences with other children. This idea brought me back to my Justice class where we read the novel Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson. In the novel, Stevenson brings up the idea of becoming proximate to a situation in order to be able to better understand it. I think that this is exactly what Haidt is talking about when he talks about morality being self-constructed with experiences- our decision and ability to make moral judgements starts from a young age due to the proximity that we have to certain situations. When we are younger, it is much harder to make moral decisions because we have not been exposed to as many difficult scenarios that require reasoning, however with time and more experiences we are (hopefully) better able to make better decisions. How proximate we are to certain situations will impact our decisions and our ability to empathize with others.
It was also interesting how Haidt spoke about the tendency of individuals to make snap judgements based off of their emotions and then work to defend them. When dealing with moral choices, it is not really about a black and white “truth” because there are so many different versions of the truth and what is seen as “right” by different societies. We as humans often make snap decisions that are rooted in our own interests and beliefs without even thinking about other possibilities, or how others would feel in a given situation. We must work to be more acutely aware of the social reasoning due to choices that individuals make, rather than censuring individuals on their choices. However, at the same time we must also work to be able to make sound judgements and back them up with sound reasoning. That is the ultimate dilemma because as humans we are so inclined to make decisions instantly and then defend them just because we think that we are right. Ultimately, one of our main downfalls as humans is our unfailing ability to succumb to our own stubbornness, rather than working to understand different types of reasoning.
Eryn, as Haidt notes, children “get so much more articulate with each passing year.” When we’re young, like you said, it’s much harder to determine what is morally right. If we grew up in a school only ever wearing a uniform and, one day, your friend broke the school “rule” and dressed in regular clothes, you would find this to be wrong, because the rule (a “social convention”) has been established in your everyday life. An instance like this– determining whether it’s moral or immoral– would depend on our own experience in school as a child. However, I would argue that we are all sensitive or proximate to situations of pain — that is, we all have felt physical pain in some instance before, so it is more black and white as to whether a decision that involves inflicting pain would be moral vs. immoral.
Haidt is super interesting in his ideas of speaking about ethics. The examples he brings up really provokes me in how I feel that I often encounter situations such as these in everyday life, that I sometimes people do have to make the ethically wrong decisions to achieve their goals. Obviously, every decision is not clear cut in our lives so we really do have to evaluate the decisions we make to think about all of the moral implications that we will face.