(Here is Haidt’s response, which I find rather unconvincing.)
In fact, the more I think about Haidt’s questions, the more heavily biased they seem. For example, one of his “authority” questions asks for how much money you’d curse your parents in their face, and have to wait for a year to explain and apologize. Imagine if he instead asked for how much money you’d yell racial insults at a black person. Now, Haidt would presumably say that the latter falls properly under “harm,” since it would be greatly emotionally hurtful to this person. But how does this same argument not apply to someone being cursed by their own child?!
Looking again at the questions listed in this paper, I remembered a blog post by Bryan Caplan in which he proposed some skillfully thought up alternative questions that make Haidt’s biases especially apparent:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/03/do_liberals_use.html
(Here is Haidt’s response, which I find rather unconvincing.)
In fact, the more I think about Haidt’s questions, the more heavily biased they seem. For example, one of his “authority” questions asks for how much money you’d curse your parents in their face, and have to wait for a year to explain and apologize. Imagine if he instead asked for how much money you’d yell racial insults at a black person. Now, Haidt would presumably say that the latter falls properly under “harm,” since it would be greatly emotionally hurtful to this person. But how does this same argument not apply to someone being cursed by their own child?!