Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Righteous Mind, argues forcefully that morality is not primarily a matter of rationality. We use rationality to defend our moral choices. Occasionally we change our minds based on rational argument, but for the most part our moral decisions are made through intuition.
In Plato’s Republic Glaucon argues that human beings are only moral because they fear for their reputations, and that given an invisibility ring most people would behave immorally. Haidt backs up this view with modern psychological research. “I’ll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right – the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.”
Unlike Plato, who assigned Reason the role of ruling over the passions in the well-ordered…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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