When the CIA “torture report” was released in December of last year, I remember reading the comments left on a post about it in the Wolfpack Students Facebook group. Some commenters crafted arguments about the immorality of torture, while others suggested that sometimes, torture is the lesser of two evils.

But the comments section quickly devolved into what every online debate eventually becomes—a virtual shouting match, replete with name-calling and mud-slinging.

We all know this type of “debate” isn’t going to change the other side’s minds. So why do we bother? And why can’t we seem to avoid hot-headed hostility when we debate political issues?

Debates over controversial political issues aren’t really about politics. They’re about morality. Torture is a stark example, but watch two people debate the minimum wage, and it becomes clear the argument is about something deeper than mere policy.

We should strive to avoid the reactionary hostility that keeps us in our moral trenches. But first, we need to understand how we make moral judgments.

Many philosophers have tried to answer this question. Immanuel Kant thought we come to know right from wrong through our ability to reason. David Hume argued that “reason is the slave to the passions,” or that feelings guide moral belief, and that reason is a tool to that end.

Hume’s ideas seem to be supported by research conducted by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as detailed in his 2012 book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.” In one study, Haidt asked participants to read stories involving “harmless taboos,” then indicate whether they believed the taboo act to be wrong. Here’s one of the stories:

“Jennifer works in a hospital pathology lab. She’s a vegetarian for moral reasons—she thinks it’s wrong to kill animals. But one night she has to incinerate a fresh human cadaver, and she thinks it’s a waste to throw away perfectly edible flesh. So she cuts off a piece of flesh and takes it home. Then she cooks it and eats it.” 

If Jennifer’s cannibalism strikes you as immoral, you’re not alone. Eighty-seven percent of participants in Haidt’s study condemned the act.

But can you articulate why, exactly, it’s wrong of Jennifer to eat human flesh?

If you’re like many of the participants in Haidt’s study, this part might be more difficult. When interviewed, participants had a hard time supporting their belief. Haidt writes that they “seemed to be flailing around, throwing out reason after reason, and rarely changing their minds when [the experimenter] proved their latest reason was not relevant.” 

Haidt’s study seems to show, similar to what Hume hypothesized three centuries ago, that moral judgments are based first on intuitions, or gut feelings, and that reason is often used as a post hoc justification of those intuitions.

If Haidt’s conclusion is correct, it helps explain why we so infrequently change our minds on moral issues.

In another version of Haidt’s experiment, participants read another “harmless taboo” story, after which some participants were given a strong reason why the act in question wasn’t wrong, and some were given a weak reason. Both groups still thought the act was wrong at about the same rate.

Haidt repeated this experiment with another group of participants who had to wait two minutes before answering. In the group that had to wait, participants given the weak reason still answered about the same, but those with the strong reason were less likely to condemn the act.

If our initial judgments are born of intuition, we can’t do much to avoid them. One thing we can do, as the experiment seemed to show, is delay making a final judgment based on those initial intuitions.

In the classroom, we’re forced to reason through contentious issues when they arise. We’re also more likely to begin with an open mind and a willingness to give fair consideration to all sides, since our aim is to learn and grow.

Outside the classroom, however, we focus more on forming political “tribes” and strengthening our “brand” than discovering truth or engaging in open-minded dialogue. We should take care to avoid this “tribal, us-versus-them mentality” that tends to discourage rational, free thought.

When we find ourselves embroiled in political debate, we should ask ourselves whether our reasoning truly supports our cause, or if it’s simply a rationalization of our moral intuitions.