Jonathan Haidt
social-psychology · 1963- · United States
Jonathan Haidt argues that moral judgment is more like taste than like proof: we feel the rightness or wrongness first and reason afterward, and the feelings run along several distinct foundations — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty — that people and cultures weight very differently. Much moral disagreement, on his account, is not error but different foundations bearing different loads.
What Vela reads them for
Haidt gives Vela a dispositional map of moral intuition to set beside Tajfel's situational mechanism — useful for reading the moral texture of religious communities without flattening them into a single morality. His concept page is moral foundations theory, cited especially where loyalty and sanctity run hot.
Concepts they originated
Concepts they developed
Books in Vela's library
Honest framing
The foundations' number and innateness are contested, and the theory's political applications have sometimes outrun its evidence. Vela presents it as an influential map, not a settled inventory of the moral mind.