Among the reasons I hated this book:

• Haidt pretends that he's going to argue for some position X, sets us up for an argument for X by explaining what he hopes to prove, and then jumps immediately to "and now I think I've shown that X" without actually making the argument. (In his section on "group selection", for example, he mentions in passing an important reason why group selection is typically considered a poor explanation for natural selection in animals like us, then promises to refute that reason and defend group selection, then he completely bypasses that reason entirely to tell us why group selection just feels right to him, then insists that he's saved group selection from its detractors.)

• He's utterly cynical about ethics and moral reasoning. "Glaucon [is] the guy who got it right," he says. "We are all self-righteous hypocrites." I mean, you can do that, sure. Say morality doesn't exist, or that it's just convention, posturing, superstition, or what-have-you. But you have to follow-through with this consistently and confront its implications. Haidt doesn't. He's just amorally cynical when he wants to be, and then ducks back behind something like moral realism when he prefers that perspective.

• When some study shows that, say, only 20% of subjects behaved ethically when they had the opportunity to do something unethically self-interested instead, he insists that this proves that nobody is really ethical and we're all in it for #1, instead of the conclusion the data actually indicate, which is that behaving ethically in the face of temptation isn't easy, and some people are better at it than others.

• He uses as evidence a lot of dubious "priming" studies and other such things that I doubt have held up well (that's probably not his fault considering when he wrote the book, but it made his failure to argue competently for his positions worse: I couldn't even trust the ostensibly more-rigorous studies he was citing).

• His rose-colored view of the moral sincerity of the American political right hasn't aged very well, and you can't help but roll your eyes as Haidt naively takes at face value that Republicans believe in respect for established institutions, family values, and the like.

• Haidt tries to disparage utilitarianism and Kantian deontological ethics not by offering arguments against them (except his haphazardly-argued-for assertion that we should "reject rationalism and embrace intutitionism" in ethics) but by trying to tar the developers of these philosophies as people who had Asperger's Syndrome and who were therefore unqualified to speak to the human experience! (Then, to make matters worse, he disingenuously insisted that wasn't what he was doing.)

Disclaimer: I rage quit at the half-way mark.

Haidt I think would argue that I have intuitively rejected his argument for irrational reasons and am now coming up with "rational"-in-scare-quotes reasons to reject it. But I went into this book sympathetically, hoping to find some useful perspectives that would help me understand the world better. All I wanted was for the author to meet me half way with some good evidence and good arguments to tie the evidence together. Instead he handed me a steaming turd.