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Joel Klemick had been married eleven years when, one October night, his wife, Krista, received an anonymous phone call. Joel, then thirty-five, and Krista, then thirty-two, were living in a midsize city in central Canada where both had been raised and where they were raising their three children. After high school, Joel worked as a floor installer, but his professional trajectory changed early in his marriage after the couple discovered their local Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. Joel had entered seminary and was studying for a divinity degree. He was also working on the church staff as an associate pastor.
The caller that evening told Krista—accurately—that Joel had been seeing another woman. Krista confronted Joel with the accusation. He denied it. She pressed. He denied it again. She pressed again. He confessed. Krista asked him to leave their home. The church soon learned of Joel’s transgression, and the board of directors fired him. Here’s how Joel described his greatest regret:
I began an extramarital affair that cost me my integrity, job, and friendships and almost cost me my family, a master’s degree, and my faith.
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Moral regrets make up the smallest of the four categories in the deep structure of regret, representing only about 10 percent of the total regrets. But for many of us, these regrets ache the most and last the longest. They are also more complex than the other core regrets. Nearly everyone agrees that constructing a strong life foundation—working hard in school, for example, or saving money—is wise. Many of us agree on what constitutes “boldness”—launching a business instead of settling into a lackluster job, traveling the world instead of lazing on the couch. But you and I and our nearly eight billion fellow humans don’t share a single definition of what it means to be “moral.”
The result is that moral regrets share a basic structure with their counterparts: they begin at the juncture of two paths. But they involve a wider set of values. For instance, we may find ourselves with a choice to treat someone with care or to harm them. Or maybe the choice is to follow the rules or to ignore them. Sometimes, we’re faced with the option of remaining loyal to a group or betraying it; of respecting certain people or institutions or disobeying them; of preserving the sacred or desecrating it.
But whatever the specifics, at the pivotal moment, we choose what our conscience says is the wrong path. We hurt others. We hoodwink, connive, or violate the basic tenets of fairness. We break our vows. We disrespect authority. We degrade what ought to be revered. And while the decision can feel fine—even exhilarating—at first, over time it gnaws at us.
Moral regrets sound like this: If only I’d done the right thing.
THE MEANING OF MORALITY
Every so often you read a book that profoundly changes how you understand the world. For me, one of those books is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, written by Jonathan Haidt and published in 2012.[1] Haidt is a social psychologist, now at New York University, who devoted his early academic career to the study of moral psychology. In the book, he explains his and others’ research about how people determine which actions are right and which are wrong.
The Righteous Mind led me to the underlying studies that Haidt wrote about, and they overturned my thinking on two key dimensions.
First, I’d long believed that when we face morally weighty questions （Is the death penalty justified? Should assisted suicide be legal?）， we reason through the issues to arrive at a conclusion. We approach these questions like a judge who evaluates competing arguments, ponders both sides, and delivers a reasoned decision. But according to Haidt’s research, that simply isn’t accurate. Instead, when we consider what’s moral, we have an instantaneous, visceral, emotional response about right or wrong—and then we use reason to justify that intuition.[2] The rational mind isn’t a black-robed jurist rendering unbiased pronouncements, as I’d thought. It’s the press secretary for our intuitions. Its job is to defend the boss.
The second dimension on which the book reshaped my perspective is especially relevant to this book. Morality, Haidt shows, is much broader and more varied than many secular, left-of-center Westerners typically understand. Suppose I asked—as Haidt, University of Southern California’s Jesse Graham, and University of Virginia’s Brian Nosek did in one paper[3]—whether it’s wrong to “stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know.” All of us—liberal, conservative, middle-of-the-road—would say that it is. How could anyone endorse harming an innocent child? Likewise, if I asked about the morality of stealing money from a cash register when the clerk isn’t looking, nearly everyone would agree that this, too, is wrong. When it comes to harming others for no reason or lying, cheating, and stealing, people of all backgrounds and beliefs generally concur on what’s moral.