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Moral regrets make up the smallest of the four categories in the deep structure of regret, representing only about 10 percent of the total regrets. But for many of us, these regrets ache the most and last the longest. They are also more complex than the other core regrets. Nearly everyone agrees that constructing a strong life foundation—working hard in school, for example, or saving money—is wise. Many of us agree on what constitutes “boldness”—launching a business instead of settling into a lackluster job, traveling the world instead of lazing on the couch. But you and I and our nearly eight billion fellow humans don’t share a single definition of what it means to be “moral.”
The result is that moral regrets share a basic structure with their counterparts: they begin at the juncture of two paths. But they involve a wider set of values. For instance, we may find ourselves with a choice to treat someone with care or to harm them. Or maybe the choice is to follow the rules or to ignore them. Sometimes, we’re faced with the option of remaining loyal to a group or betraying it; of respecting certain people or institutions or disobeying them; of preserving the sacred or desecrating it.
But whatever the specifics, at the pivotal moment, we choose what our conscience says is the wrong path. We hurt others. We hoodwink, connive, or violate the basic tenets of fairness. We break our vows. We disrespect authority. We degrade what ought to be revered. And while the decision can feel fine—even exhilarating—at first, over time it gnaws at us.
Moral regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the right thing.
THE MEANING OF MORALITY
Every so often you read a book that profoundly changes how you understand the world. For me, one of those books is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, written by Jonathan Haidt and published in 2012.[1] Haidt is a social psychologist, now at New York University, who devoted his early academic career to the study of moral psychology. In the book, he explains his and others’ research about how people determine which actions are right and which are wrong.
The Righteous Mind led me to the underlying studies that Haidt wrote about, and they overturned my thinking on two key dimensions.
First, I’d long believed that when we face morally weighty questions (Is the death penalty justified? Should assisted suicide be legal?), we reason through the issues to arrive at a conclusion. We approach these questions like a judge who evaluates competing arguments, ponders both sides, and delivers a reasoned decision. But according to Haidt’s research, that simply isn’t accurate. Instead, when we consider what’s moral, we have an instantaneous, visceral, emotional response about right or wrong—and then we use reason to justify that intuition.[2] The rational mind isn’t a black-robed jurist rendering unbiased pronouncements, as I’d thought. It’s the press secretary for our intuitions. Its job is to defend the boss.
The second dimension on which the book reshaped my perspective is especially relevant to this book. Morality, Haidt shows, is much broader and more varied than many secular, left-of-center Westerners typically understand. Suppose I asked—as Haidt, University of Southern California’s Jesse Graham, and University of Virginia’s Brian Nosek did in one paper[3]—whether it’s wrong to “stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know.” All of us—liberal, conservative, middle-of-the-road—would say that it is. How could anyone endorse harming an innocent child? Likewise, if I asked about the morality of stealing money from a cash register when the clerk isn’t looking, nearly everyone would agree that this, too, is wrong. When it comes to harming others for no reason or lying, cheating, and stealing, people of all backgrounds and beliefs generally concur on what’s moral.
But for many political conservatives, not to mention many people outside North America and Europe, morality goes beyond the virtues of care and fairness. For example, is it wrong for children to talk back to their parents? To call adults by their first name? Is it wrong for an American to renounce his citizenship and defect to Cuba? Is it wrong to toss the Bible or the Koran into the garbage? Is it wrong for a woman to get an abortion, for a man to marry another man, or for people of any gender to wed multiple spouses? You will get different answers to these questions at a Baptist church and at a Unitarian church—in Blount County, Alabama, and in Berkeley, California. That’s not because one group is virtuous and the other evil. It’s because one group has a narrower view of morality (don’t harm or cheat other people) and the other has a wider view (don’t harm or cheat other people—but also stay loyal to your group, heed authority, and uphold the sacred).
Haidt and his colleagues call this idea “moral foundations theory.”?[4] Drawing on evolutionary biology, cultural psychology, and several other fields, they show that beliefs about morality stand on five pillars:
Care/harm: Children are more vulnerable than the offspring of other animals, so humans devote considerable time and effort to protecting them. As a result, evolution has instilled in us the ethic of care. Those who nurture and defend the vulnerable are kind; those who hurt them are cruel.
Fairness/cheating: Our success as a species has always hinged on cooperation, including exchanges that evolutionary scientists call “reciprocal altruism.” That means we value those whom we can trust and disdain those who breach our trust.
Loyalty/disloyalty: Our survival depends not only on our individual actions, but also on the cohesiveness of our group. That’s why being true to your team, sect, or nation is respected—and forsaking your tribe is usually reviled.
Authority/subversion: Among primates, hierarchies nourish members and protect them from aggressors. Those who undermine the hierarchy can place everyone in the group at risk. When this evolutionary impulse extends to human morality, traits like deference and obedience toward those at the top become virtues.[5]
Purity/desecration: Our ancestors had to contend with all manner of pathogens—from Mycobacterium tuberculosis to Mycobacterium leprae—so their descendants developed the capacity to avoid them along with what’s known as a “behavioral immune system” to guard against a broader set of impurities such as violations of chastity. In the moral realm, write one set of scholars, “purity concerns uniquely predict (beyond other foundations and demographics such as political ideology) culture-war attitudes about gay marriage, euthanasia, abortion, and pornography.”?[6]