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[Ya-ta Boy]

And Here's Why It Matters

Despite the rather poor title, this is an interesting article about a serious academic doing important work on the topic of moral psychology.

Here's a snippet:
Haidt identified five foundational moral impulses. As succinctly defined by Northwestern University's McAdams, they are:
� Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
� Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
� In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
� Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.
� Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

Haidt's research reveals that liberals feel strongly about the first two dimensions -- preventing harm and ensuring fairness -- but often feel little, or even feel negatively, about the other three. Conservatives, on the other hand, are drawn to loyalty, authority and purity, which liberals tend to think of as backward or outdated. People on the right acknowledge the importance of harm prevention and fairness but not with quite the same energy or passion as those on the left�
"Similarly, societies modulate the dimension of moral emotions differently, creating a distinctive cultural profile of moral feeling, judgment and justification. If you're a sharia devotee ready to stone adulterers and slaughter infidels, you have purity and in-group pushed up to 11. PETA members, who vibrate to the pain of other species, have turned in-group way down and harm way up."
Of Haidt's five moral realms, the one that causes the most friction between cosmopolitan liberals and traditionalist conservatives is purity/sanctity. To a 21st-century secular liberal, the concept barely registers. Haidt notes it was part of the Western vocabulary as recently as the Victorian era but lost its force in the early 20th century when modern rules of proper hygiene were codified. With the physical properties of contamination understood, the moral symbolism of impurity no longer carried much weight�
Not surprisingly, Haidt's data suggests purity/sanctity is the moral foundation that best predicts an individual's attitude toward abortion. It also helps explain opposition to gay marriage. "If you think society is made up of individuals, and each individual has the right to do what he or she wants if they aren't hurting anybody, it's unfathomable why anyone would oppose gay marriage," he says. "Liberals assume opponents must be homophobic.
Spend some time reading Haidt, and chances are you'll begin to view day-to-day political arguments through a less-polarized lens. Should the Guantanamo Bay prison be closed? Of course, say liberals, whose harm/fairness receptors are acute. Not so fast, argue conservatives, whose finely attuned sense of in-group loyalty points to a proactive attitude toward outside threats�
In his quest to "help people overcome morally motivated misunderstandings," Haidt has set up a couple of Web sites, www.civilpolitics.org and www.yourmorals.org. At the latter, you can take a quiz that will locate you on his moral map. For fun, you can also answer the questions you think the way your political opposite would respond. Haidt had both liberals and conservatives do just that in the laboratory, and the results are sobering for those on the left: Conservatives understood them a lot better than they understood conservatives�

"Morality," he insists, "is a team sport."

http://www.alternet.org/story/138303/conservatives_live_in_a_different_moral_universe_--_and_here%27s_why_it_matters/?page=entire

I've said before on here that no one ever really changes their mind about public issues being debated because our arguments are based on our moral systems. This article backs that claim up with references to real work being done by real researchers.

The whole article is worth reading, but the meat is reproduced above.

[Fox]

I think this is interesting, honestly. I do find myself drawn to the first two on that list while I am somewhat uncomfortable with three and four.

I do, however, think I find myself drawn to item five as well, though what individual people consider pure or sacred seems to vary an awful lot, so honestly I wonder if that shouldn't be broken down into two (or more?) smaller categories.

I know he seems to be trying to keep his categories very general, but purity and sanctity are perhaps too broad, particularly when you start putting things like pollution (for example) under said category. I think the desire to keep your behavior pure by certain standards (e.g. religious) and the desire to keep the natural environment around you clean and healthy are two very different impulses; perhaps pollution would even make more sense as an outgrowth of the harm/care principle.

[Manner of Speaking]

Ya-ta Boy,

Your thread is an interesting read...but I can't help but wonder, strictly from a methodological viewpoint, how Haidt "identified" his five "foundational moral impulses". Haidt has postulated a relationship between these five "impulses" and a person's political/moral outlook...but did Haidt develop these impulses first and then discover how they determine viewpoint, or did Haidt work backwards from the Liberalism/Conservativism to identify them? I'm curious.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Kuros]

Yeah, I think Fairness/Reciprocity is most important for me, followed by Authority/Respect, followed closely by Purity/Sanctity, and towards the bottom is Harm/Care just above In-group Loyalty, the last of which is the only one I'm probably ever negative about.

Note that:

[T-J]

I think all five are important to conservatives and liberals. The biggest difference in my opinion are how points two and five are addressed.

In terms of fairness, Conservatives tend to focus on ensuring fairness by focusing on barriers, or more specifically guaranteeing the absence of them. Conversely, liberals tend to be more active in program creation to close gaps where unfair situations are perceived.

Just the opposite is true when you look at how the two groups deal with the purity / sanctity issue. Liberals tend to be much more hands off. If it doesn't effect others then all is good. Conservatives tend to be much more in favor of active preventative measures to ensure the protection of societal norms.

As is true with most issues, I think there is much more in common between the two groups as far as where they want to be, than even they realize. The biggest differences lie in how to get there.