thinktoomuch.net » Jonathan Haidt http://www.thinktoomuch.net Pondering the South African Memesphere - Looking for the Good in Everything Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:11:12 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Humans Need the Threat of Punishment http://www.thinktoomuch.net/2009/04/19/humans-need-the-threat-of-punishment/ http://www.thinktoomuch.net/2009/04/19/humans-need-the-threat-of-punishment/#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:56:44 +0000 thinker http://www.thinktoomuch.net/?p=743 This brilliant TED talk by Jonathan Haidt talks about five human moral foundations. Pointing out how these foundations are emphasized differently by conservatives, he invites liberals to take the blue pill, to step outside of their “moral matrix”, and learn to understand the bigger picture of human morality from an anthropological perspective. And it also contains one little snippet about a study “proving” the meme that I turned into my post title.


[TED Talk - Jonathan Haidt]

Ben-Jammin also shared two links that are related to this video. For those that prefer text (hello bandwidth starved South Africa, amongst others):

Edge: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION: A Talk with Jonathan Haidt

and then a more scholarly paper, in pdf format (which was written in MS Word, how immoral! ;-) ):

When morality opposes justice:
Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize

I have not read the first link, other than scanning over it to let my eye catch a snippet where Haidt even dares to take on The Philosopher Himself :-P , and I haven’t read the scholarly paper either — the TED talk was sufficient for encouraging the writing this post, and could be sufficient for sparking some discussion on whether the threat of hell is of use to humanity. Other discussions related to the material are also more than welcome.

]]> http://www.thinktoomuch.net/2009/04/19/humans-need-the-threat-of-punishment/feed/ 6