Rex Kerr
2 min readMay 12, 2023

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But one could equally well say that you feel threatened by Haidt's successful moral phenomenology and have nothing but words to try to salvage the perception of utility of your chosen profession.

The problem with these nonspecific intention-based arguments is that they cast shade on everyone all the time and provide approximately zero insight, especially if you can throw in things like having a "career in the U.S." an don't even hold yourself to needing evidence that the moral intuitions hypothesis is liable to help rather than hurt (but not fatally) his career prospects.

Your criticisms of the research are all utterly general--one can say, "well, what if something is missing?" about pretty much anything. "Climate change is natural--climate scientists are missing something." "The universe is only a million years old--cosmologists are missing the dynamic nature of time." "I argued with my ex on the balcony, but after I left an intruder climbed up and threw her off." If you don't give us more details, we should rightfully wonder whether you understand what you're criticizing.

(Likewise, you glibly declare that the liberty axis was suggested to "appeal to libertarians", without addressing his reasoning for doing so in the slightest.)

Also, when you say he "rails against wokeness", and you characterize that as "politics", you make it sound like he hasn't documented multiple instances of the attitudes he is criticizing leading to direct and unjustified harm to people, thus violating the two moral intuitions shared by basically everyone. And his response is almost entirely positive and proactive, too: trying to champion viewpoint diversity rather than attacking specific people or ideas.

Haidt is certainly not immune from criticism, but the innuendo-heavy, evidence-free style of objection you're using here wouldn't even work against Peterson, and Haidt is far more thoughtful and evidence-based than Peterson.

If you want to argue against Haidt's perspective, given your background, you're probably best equipped to think about the relationship between what we should call moral and what is indicated by the moral intuitions even if they're true. It's very easy to fall into the naturalistic fallacy here--Haidt tries hard not to, but he may well not have succeeded.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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