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Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host Julia Galef, and my guest for this episode is Jonathan Haidt. He is a social

psychologist at New York University, and the author of several bestselling books, including The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

That's the book in which John talks about his work on moral foundations theory, which you may have heard of, even if you haven't read the book.

It argues that all of our moral judgments are grounded in a short list of moral foundations, such as fairness and loyalty, and that liberals and conservatives tend to differ in which moral foundations they use.

That's the focus of our conversation in this episode. We talk especially about why and how people should try to understand the moral foundations of people who are across the political aisle from them.

This is something I've wanted to talk to John about for a while, but the immediate reason I got in touch with him was a recent episode I did with Harvard

philosopher Michael Sandell, in which Sandell and I tried and didn't quite succeed at understanding

our moral disagreements with each other.

And a number of listeners commented after that episode, hey, that sounded like a moral

foundation's disagreement.

You should really get John Hyde on the show to talk about that. And I thought that was a great

idea. So here is Professor Jonathan Height. He is talking about how he developed moral foundations

...