TeachingBase

Moral intuitions handout

An overview of six important human moral intuitions

Teaching material type Reading text

Subject Areas Ethics

Learning Goals Evaluation Competency

Suitable Grade Levels 9-12

Concepts Moral cognition, Social cognition

Content Anchors Our Mind

based on: Grinberg, R., Mehl, C., Sarrouf, J., & Isbell, D. (2018). OpenMind TM Workshop Facilitator Guide. https://openmindplatform.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/OpenMind_Facilitator-Guide_12-12-18.pdf

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Related Literature

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York, NY, USA: Pantheon Books.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion is a 2012 social psychology book by Jonathan Haidt, in which the author describes human morality as it relates to politics and religion. In the first section, Haidt demonstrates that people’s beliefs are driven primarily by intuition, with reason operating mostly to justify beliefs that are intuitively obvious. In the second section, he lays out his theory that the human brain is organized to respond to several distinct types of moral violations, much like a tongue is organized to respond to different sorts of foods. In the last section, Haidt proposes that humans have an innate capacity to sometimes be “groupish” rather than “selfish”. (Source: Wikipedia)