Best Books on Morality from 2025
And Happy Birthday to Outraged!
We have lots to celebrate: Happy New Year and a full year of Outraged!
On Tuesday, January 14th, 2025 Outraged was released (little-known publishing insight: new books are always released on Tuesdays).
The book was four years in the making and included a lot of rewriting and ego bruises along the way, and even today, I wonder if there’s more I could have included. But it’s basically already three books in one—a book about human nature and the evolution of morality, a book about moral judgment and victimhood, and a book about how to have better conversations across politics.
Even though it’s easy for any author to second-guess themselves, I’ve been pretty happy with its reception. People seem to appreciate its insights, and nothing makes my heart fuller than seeing someone’s copy of Outraged with little notes in the margin or dog-eared pages. It’s nice to be useful.
It’s also gotten some shoutouts. Behavioral Scientist included it in their Notable Books of 2025. There’s SO MANY amazing books in that list. Behavioral Scientist is a fantastic place to learn about our minds and society—and moral understanding.
Here are 5 books that we think pair well with our themes of moral understanding, politics, and moral psychology in the real world! If you connected with Outraged, these would be good books to try next.
by Max Bazerman
Salacious! This book hits close to home. In 2021, a team of data sleuths (who write the blog Data Colada) discovered that two studies from a landmark paper on honesty were fraudulent. The original authors argued that signing your name before completing a form made people more honest than signing after filling it out. But their results were fudged.
It’s a perfect story—a lying scandal implicating researchers who study honesty. The perfect recipe for outrage. The really crazy thing about the fraud? Two different honesty researchers did separate sneaky things. It’s like getting hit by lightning twice!
Or...is it? If “re-search is me-search“ then maybe people who study moral decision-making are more morally bankrupt than the average Joe?
The discovery of fraud set off a chain-reaction that resurrected concerns about the “replicability crisis” (the need, and often failure, to publish valid and reproducible research findings) in social science today. Part of why this fraud felt so outrageous to academics is that we commit ourselves to finding the truth. What’s more, the harm from the scandal rippled outward—they destabilized networks of trust, poisoned collaborations, and forced a reckoning on the entire field.
The other amazing thing about this book is that it’s written by one of the authors of the fraudulent paper (but not one accused of fraud). Perfect for those of you who want a front-row seat to scandal; it’s like a reality TV show, but academic!
by Cordelia Fine
If you think gender inequality in the workplace is just because of sexism, you might be part of the problem.
Fine argues that efforts to fix gender inequality at work are backfiring, not because people are genuinely malicious, but because we don’t really understand the problem. On one side are “Different but Equal” skeptics—who think that women are naturally in lower status and pay jobs because that’s what they want. On the other are DEI advocates—who worry more about productivity than true fairness. Both sides see themselves as protecting the vulnerable—and both struggle to take the other’s fears seriously.
Fine’s central insight shows how when groups fixate on different harms, moral progress stalls—not because people are evil, but because they’re talking past each other. She covers how we’re all likely part of the problem: because solving something like gender inequality takes more than adding a “#YayWomen” sticker to your LinkedIn profile picture.
by Ruth Braunstein
Are people who avoid paying taxes lazy, evil...or the real American heroes?
For some Americans, paying taxes is more than a mundane chore: it’s a moral act. Taxpaying has become a profound stance on resistance or support of American citizenship. Braunstein argues that taxpaying takes on a moral stance that is influenced by our political beliefs. If you think withholding tax dollars causes harm to an institution you’re not a fan of, you might see resisting taxes as a vital stance. There’s also the opposite: if tax dollars are fueling a community that you think needs it, you might put your money where your political beliefs are, so to say.
In Outraged terms: taxes have become a moral battlefield where competing harms drive our fiscal beliefs. Is taxation an act of theft against harmed citizens, or is resistance holding back support from communities that need investment?
If this book catches your eye, the author also has a killer podcast When the Wolves Came about evangelicals resisting extremism that was named one of the top 20 podcasts of 2025 by The Atlantic.
by Michael Hallsworth
Think you know a hypocrite? Ironically, it’s probably you.
Hallsworth details one of outrage culture’s favorite weapons: accusing someone of hypocrisy. Our obsession with calling out the other side’s inconsistencies can corrode democratic trust and—ironically—makes us feel morally superior without changing our own behavior.
Sure, hypocrites are frustrating and can be harmful. The famous YouTuber preaching about “family values” while quietly cheating on his wife with an employee is vastly hypocritical, and worth calling out. That brand of hypocrisy destroys trust because breaking their own claimed “values” hurts a lot of other people.
But a lot of hypocrisy that we call out is just ordinary human inconsistency. We criticize corporate greed but are first in line on Black Friday. We believe in free speech but get incensed over a tweet from a complete stranger. We change our minds when we learn something new, and our old beliefs don’t match up. That’s not moral harm—it’s living in a complicated, everchanging world.
The real catch is that we’re black belt masters at spotting hypocrisy in other people, but we’re suddenly blind when it’s our own. This book is great to help you realize how pointing the finger really sucks at making us get along.
by Jens Ludwig
Most people involved in gun violence didn’t wake up planning to ruin their lives.
Drawing on decades of field research in the South Side of Chicago reveals something key to understanding moral wrongs: most gun violence is not driven by cold-blooded, calculated acts of malice, but instead fueled by snap judgments made in emotionally charged moments that we all experience.
We think of violence that we commit as an understandable mistake—it was bad luck, bad timing, a mistake. But when judging a larger issue (i.e., gun violence in America), violence is just proof of who “the other side” really is. It’s a double standard, and another example of regular hypocrisy.
Like Outraged, this book challenges the comforting myth that monsters are fundamentally different than us. Instead, ordinary human psychology—threat perception, fear, and split-second decisions—drives devastating outcomes. The line between “normal, everyday person” and “violent, crazed offender” is thinner than most of us would like to believe.
If you nodded along reading Outraged (or even have it pinned on your never-ending TBR list...), these books are excellent companions.
These books have a common theme. We all love to sit on our moral high horses and think we’re morally right, and everyone else must have it wrong. But it’s important to remember that “morality” isn’t just a concept we read about from our desk chairs. Morality is something we live, like when we deciding whether to throw a drink on someone who’s pissing us off at the bar, or whether to forgive a friend for saying something cruel, or when we find ourselves uncurling our middle finger when someone cuts us off in traffic.
Morality is messy, but these books can make it feel a little tidier.
And before we sign off, we’d like to say THANK YOU for all the folks who read us on the regular. Cheers to another year of trying to understand each other, even if it sometimes drives us crazy!
