Questions of right and wrong have haunted humanity throughout our history.
How do we know what it is we should do?
How do we know how we should live?
What is the basis for our statements about good and evil?
How can we separate a moral act from an immoral one?
As someone who frequently asks these questions, I was thrilled when I recently came across the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a professor and writer at UVA. Haid is a researcher in the field of moral psychology and has pioneered what he calls the Moral Foundations Theory.
In it, Haidt breaks down morality into five major categories:
1. Care / Harm
2. Fairness / Justice
3. Loyalty / Ingroup
4. Respect / Authority
5. Purity / Sanctity
One of the more interesting observations Haidt makes in his research is how these categories relate to one’s political ideology. As Haidt demonstrates in this video from the 2008 TED conference, there is a pronounced segmentation between liberals and conservatives among these 5 categories.
As it turns out, almost everyone values the first two categories (Care and Fairness), though liberals tend to rate these somewhat higher than conservatives. However, on the last three categories (Loyalty, Respect, and Purity), he has found that generally only conservatives value these (to a high degree)- as demonstrated by the below chart.
If you watch the video, you see that Haidt, a liberal, is making an interesting plea to a largely liberal audience (though I think the appeal is just as important to a conservative audience). What he is saying is that liberals and conservatives don’t just disagree on what is right and wrong. Theydisagree on the means for defining right and wrong altogether. Liberals and conservatives have a difficult time agreeing on social issues because they have fundamentally different criteria for arriving at their conclusions.
As journalist Rod Dreher has pointed out, this distinction applies to the recent case of the Ground Zero Mosque.
Appeals against the building of the mosque by conservatives are appeals to the Loyalty, Respect, and Purity categories.
Liberals, on the other hand, are less inclined to see a problem with the mosque, since they use only the guidelines of the Care / Harm and Fairness / Justice categories.
I think this is a really powerful framework for discussing morality and, more specifically, political ideology.
http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/
