Paul Frantizek
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

I theorize that most people (though clearly not all) like to think of themselves as moral actors. Of course we all slip up and have our hypocrisies, but, from my experience, people like to think of themselves as good. So how can one person’s good be another person’s bad?

Jonathan Haidt has done excellent, if somewhat controversial, work in this regard. There’s a Wiki page on his ideas, but a good summary of his thought can be found here:

In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt identifies six basic pairs of moral intuitions that ground the world’s moral systems. He describes them as care vs. harm, fairness vs. cheating, loyalty vs. betrayal, authority vs. subversion, sanctity vs. degradation, and liberty vs. oppression. He claims that whereas American conservatives employ each of these different moral foundations, liberals are disproportionately motivated by “care.” He tells us that “across many scales, surveys, and political controversies, liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering, compared to conservatives and especially to libertarians.” When they are motivated by concerns of liberty and oppression it is on behalf of “underdogs, victims, and powerless groups everywhere.” This one-dimensional concern makes them unable to comprehend the more complex moral concerns of conservatives. Haidt therefore recommends that liberals try to appreciate the richer set of moral resources employed by conservatives in order to build cooperation across the ideological divide. In offering this moral counsel he presupposes that the norm of cooperation should take precedence over the values that divide us.

In addition to the five moral foundations, Haidt singled out three of the foundations for their role in supporting a moral society. Interestingly, there was a definite difference in regard for these supports along the political spectrum:

When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations — Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity — I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.

The one addition I would make to Haidt’s theory, intimated above in the references to racism, homophobia and exclusion, is that the political left has expanded (or perhaps better said, subsumed) the concept of ‘Care’ into the concept of ‘Inclusion’. In effect, they have created a moral universe where Inclusion or Diversity isn’t simply one social virtue among many; it is the sole good upon which a society is judged, and all other presumed social virtues (things like respect for private property, pluralism, self-sufficiency) are either subordinated to Inclusion/Diversity or even regarded with hostility when they’re identified as being impediments to inclusion (The current ‘debate’ over immigration, especially in Europe, is a perfect example of this thinking).

I think this is really the core of most of the current rancor between the left and right: to the left, traditional social virtues (especially respect for private property and self-sufficiency) are seen as shorthand for racism, while to the right, the overarching concern for inclusion and diversity veers dangerously close to moral relativism (as well as threatening the overall security of the community).

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