There is no way of showing emotion in text but I am smiling. Haidt would too seeing how we both look at the same data and see different things or, at the very least, think the other sees something different, which totally makes his point. Nowhere am I arguing for blank slate at birth.

In his “The Righteous Mind” Haidt argues that reason is subject to passion (and emotions). “Reflexes” are not necessarily reasonable, no more so than ‘triggered’ responses. They are however the result of memories and experiences as they do not arise on their own. And this is a gross oversimplification of any type of response. This is what I am actually pointing at in the piece.

Your initial comment focussed on my usage of hardwiring. And, I suspect, the implication that some things are set in stone in the brain. I completely agree with you that this is wrong though pretty much any other kind of metaphor I might use would also be equally suspect. A more accurate scientific description would be “neural signal-reinforced dendritic synapse network responses” but that is inelegant and, also, this is not a scientific paper.