Summer Reading: The Righteous Mind IX: Moral Capital, Blind Spots, and Asking

Moral Capital
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), Jonathan Haidt discusses what he calls "moral capital," that is, "the resources that sustain a moral community." He also refers to moral capital (as I discuss in the first of my posts on this book) as a "moral system." In doing so, he recognizes the importance of an ethics environment, which is too often ignored:

[W]e must look not just at people, and not just at the relationships among people, but at the complete environment within which those relationships are embedded...

Moral capital, that is, the community's values, norms, and institutions, "enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible." A government ethics program is, therefore, a kind of moral capital, both as an institution and in the norms it defines and spreads throughout the government through training, advice, and enforcement.

It is important to recognize that moral capital which leads to a very cohesive community can be used negatively (for example, if the norms include secrecy and cronyism), especially when the norms are largely self-regulated). A government ethics program is important because its values and norms are solely positive. They are not designed to be used against the public or against other communities. In fact, government ethics programs can be shared by many communities. They are the best kind of moral capital, in that the unselfishness they create has no goal or effect other than increasing the public trust.

Asking about Relationships
In one psychological study that Haidt discusses, when a cashier handed people too much money, only 20% corrected the mistake. However, when the cashier asked people if his payment was correct, 60% said no and returned the extra money. Being asked requires a direct lie in order to do something dishonest.

When a matter comes before a board or commission, members are far more likely to declare a conflict if the chair asks whether anyone has a relationship with anyone involved in the matter, especially when the chair lists the names of all known individuals involved. And yet this is rarely done, and more rarely required by ordinance, regulation, or bylaw. It's a bother, but I'd like to hear an argument against doing this.

Blind Spots
I've written a great deal about blind spots (see the section of my book about them), but it took Haidt's book to remind me of the most famous quotation on how much easier it is for us to see others' conflicts (and tell them how they should deal with them) than it is to see our own:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? —Matthew 7:3

Blind spots are nothing new, but they still prevent most of us from recognizing that we have them.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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