The Morality of Politics

If you ever feel like your arguments about politics with family and friends just come down to shouting matches and name-calling contests, with no real progress on one side or the other, you might want to check out Haidt's theories on Moral Psychology. The author of The Rational Tail and the Emotional Dog, which I think is the best psychological paper I ever read, Haidt is building a massive reputation for his recent discoveries on why liberals and conservatives always seem to be talking past each other.

Haidt has actually been at this sort of this for a while. All the way back in 2007, he was building up research on moral foundations theory, which became the foundation of his recent book The Righteous Mind, which is highly recommended. As he explains,

In moral psychology and moral philosophy, morality is almost always about how people treat each other. Here's an influential definition from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel: morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other."

Kohlberg thought that all of morality, including concerns about the welfare of others, could be derived from the psychology of justice. Carol Gilligan convinced the field that an ethic of "care" had a separate developmental trajectory, and was not derived from concerns about justice.

OK, so there are two psychological systems, one about fairness/justice, and one about care and protection of the vulnerable. And if you look at the many books on the evolution of morality, most of them focus exclusively on those two systems, with long discussions of Robert Trivers' reciprocal altruism (to explain fairness) and of kin altruism and/or attachment theory to explain why we don't like to see suffering and often care for people who are not our children.

But if you try to apply this two-foundation morality to the rest of the world, you either fail or you become Procrustes. Most traditional societies care about a lot more than harm/care and fairness/justice. Why do so many societies care deeply and morally about menstruation, food taboos, sexuality, and respect for elders and the Gods? You can't just dismiss this stuff as social convention. If you want to describe human morality, rather than the morality of educated Western academics, you've got to include the Durkheimian view that morality is in large part about binding people together.

From a review of the anthropological and evolutionary literatures, Craig Joseph (at Northwestern University) and I concluded that there were three best candidates for being additional psychological foundations of morality, beyond harm/care and fairness/justice. These three we label asingroup/loyalty (which may have evolved from the long history of cross-group or sub-group competition, related to what Joe Henrich calls "coalitional psychology"); authority/respect (which may have evolved from the long history of primate hierarchy, modified by cultural limitations on power and bullying, as documented by Christopher Boehm), andpurity/sanctity, which may be a much more recent system, growing out of the uniquely human emotion of disgust, which seems to give people feelings that some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others.

Joseph and I think of these foundational systems as expressions of whatDan Sperber calls "learning modules"—they are evolved modular systems that generate, during enculturation, large numbers of more specific modules which help children recognize, quickly and automatically, examples of culturally emphasized virtues and vices. For example, we academics have extremely fine-tuned receptors for sexism (related to fairness) but not sacrilege (related to purity).

Virtues are socially constructed and socially learned, but these processes are highly prepared and constrained by the evolved mind. We call these three additional foundations the binding foundations, because the virtues, practices, and institutions they generate function to bind people together into hierarchically organized interdependent social groups that try to regulate the daily lives and personal habits of their members. We contrast these to the two individualizing foundations (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), which generate virtues and practices that protect individuals from each other and allow them to live in harmony as autonomous agents who can focus on their own goals.

My UVA colleagues Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek, and I have collected data from about 7,000 people so far on a survey designed to measure people's endorsement of these five foundations. In every sample we've looked at, in the United States and in other Western countries, we find that people who self-identify as liberals endorse moral values and statements related to the two individualizing foundations primarily, whereas self-described conservatives endorse values and statements related to all five foundations. It seems that the moral domain encompasses more for conservatives—it's not just about Gilligan's care and Kohlberg's justice. It's also about Durkheim's issues of loyalty to the group, respect for authority, and sacredness.

Haidt further elaborated this conservative liberal moral framework in another Edge article from 2008. While astute political scientists have conclusively pointed out the terrible overstatements Haidt makes on the voting behavior of the working class, there is still plenty of useful observations on the general make-up of the conservative mindset. For example,

A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever "lost" him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.

All of our rationally-oriented liberals out there, take heed: the reason that you will never actually win an argument based on ration is that moral foundations your argument rests upon are limited. As Haidt makes perfectly clear in the previous two quotes, liberals only focus on two of five fundamental moral values. Liberals care a lot about fairness and harm, but conservative values also embrace social stability, in-group loyalty and sanctity.

From a conservative perspective, your liberal argument is morally thin, and they can hear that a mile away. It only concerns the treatment of a few disenfranchised groups, and it does little to address the deep values of the "moral majority," as Jerry Falwell dubbed it. When a conservative says that liberals are disgusting, he's one hundred percent correct. Liberals are almost entirely incapable of connecting to people outside their group on sacred moral foundations (like those that related to religion); these foundations come from our species' efforts to stay clean and pure (don't eat shit or dead people; don't fuck your sister), and their violation inspires disgust. No doubt, a conservative sees Piss Christ when he thinks of a liberal, and unfortunately, most liberals' language doesn't help them there. If you're calling a conservative fucking retarded or fag-basher, you're only reaffirming his previous conclusion about liberals' disrespect for sanctity.

While feeling gross shouldn't be much of an issue on its own, it plays a huge role in an argument. We can essentially rationalize anything we feel, and our thinking tends to flow in that direction. First is an (emotional) intuition, then comes the rational thought. So by making an argument that disgusts someone that places a high value on purity and sanctity, you've already put him on the defensive, and he'll use ration to shore up his own beliefs and battle you. This won't lead anywhere, and most times it will end with mudslinging.

The choice of words isn't the only problem; many things that liberals value tend to disgust people that have a broader moral matrix. For example, multiculturalism is a threat to the identity that these people have formed, since it is based on a certain set of values and traditions that are fixed. You might scoff at that idea, but a strong in-group cohesion (not favoring multiculturalism and diversity) has been key to the success of most groups throughout history. Think of the Scandavian countries, which are able to create incredibly inclusive and generous social institutions, largely due to the fact that there is almost no diversity there. There is also a lot of evidence that diversity leads to social breakdown. As Michael Jonas writes,

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

This is why the racism label doesn't exactly work when addressing conservatives; they're more concerned with the protection of their own identities and groups than supporting the integration of others. It's not the same as hating black people, and it's not an argument that I wholly disagree with. If I'm going to choose between my group of loved ones and a group of black people I have no connection to, I'm always going to support the interests of my people. That doesn't necessarily make me racist: it makes me biased to the well-being of my in-group.

There's a fundamental myth about the formation and maintenance of human societies that Haidt lays out in his book, and it's crucial to the understanding of both sides' fundamental fears. While Chimpanzees tended to be dominated by alpha males, early human hunter-gatherers are largely egalitarian. In other words, it seems that once weapons got entered into the equation, groups of early men gathered together and overthrew the alphas dominating their group. They used violent methods to enforce their relative equality, just as the alphas had used violence to guarantee their status.

Liberals are a lot like those early usurpers; we look for issues where small numbers of individuals dominate us and enforce a hierarchy. We eliminate the "elite's" strength through taxes and wealth distribution. Conservatives hate the opposite situation, the tyranny of the weak, and they hate government for enforcing it upon them. They see things like welfare leeches, they are disgusted. People are getting things that they don't deserve. And we're the ones have to subsidize their laziness. It's fundamentally unfair.

In the simplest sense, it boils down to the difference between forced equality or remorseless proportionality.

So go back through these arguments and see how these different foundations pop up. Now that I've got a bit of a hold on them, I'm starting to see the pattern everywhere (I guess this must be the beginning of my Beautiful Mind descent into complete madness). So much of it boils down to just a simple idea of fairness. As Haidt points out,

One of the biggest disagreements between the political left and right is their conflicting notions of fairness. Across many surveys and experiments, we find that liberals think about fairness in terms of equality, whereas conservatives think of it in terms of karma. In our survey for YourMorals.org, we asked Americans how much they agreed with a variety of statements about fairness and liberty, including this one: "Ideally, everyone in society would end up with roughly the same amount of money." Liberals were evenly divided on it, but conservatives and libertarians firmly rejected it.

So, liberal friends, in making your arguments, are you taking the conservative perspective into account? Are you anticipating how they'll react? You can see the difference when liberals actually do this. Arguments about eliminating free-riders with an individual mandate mostly avoids challenges because it takes a traditionally liberal goal (universal health care) and presents it as karmic fairness, a conservative value. The mandate is about eliminating cheaters, people who are ruining health care for the rest of us. What they do is not fair. From a social order standpoint, this makes perfect sense.

It's a track to start looking at in the future. Is gay rights about a disenfranchished group or the importance of having strong families? Should taxes on the rich be about redistribution or fairness, eliminating Mitt Romney's loopholes? Policies have many justifications, and we can frame then in different ways. At the very least, it is definitely a way to move the dialogue forward into more productive territory.