Morality, like art, consists in drawing the line somewhere

Fascinating article from UVA researchers on the nature of moral reasoning:

We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world's many moralities.

The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to:

1) harm/care,
2) fairness/reciprocity,
3) ingroup/loyalty,
4) authority/respect, and
5) purity/sanctity.

Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.

The essence of the argument is that it is often hard to convince another person, via moral reasoning, what is the "right" thing to do, since there isn't always common agreement on the nature of "moral" conduct. By way of contemporary example, they basically go on to argue that much of the modern political culture war can be illustrated through the lens of differing moral philosophies.

Conservatives generally believe, as did Durkheim (1951/1897), that human beings need structure and constraint to flourish, and that social institutions provide these benefits. As Muller (1997, p. 7) explains:

For the conservative, the historical survival of an institution or practice—be it marriage, monarchy, or the market—creates a prima facie case that it has served some human need. That need may be the institution's explicit purpose, but just as often it will be a need other than that to which the institution is explicitly devoted.

Muller then quotes the modern conservative Irving Kristol:

Institutions which have existed over a long period of time have a reason and purpose inherent in them, a collective wisdom incarnate in them, and the fact that we don’t perfectly understand or cannot perfectly explain why they “work” is no defect in them but merely a limitation in us. (Muller, 1997, p.7; taken from Kristol, 1978, p.161)

These are not crazy ideas. They are practical and ultimately utilitarian justifications for some of the intuitions related to the authority/respect foundation. Traditions and institutions which have been vested with authority over the ages should be given the benefit of the doubt; they should not be torn down and rebuilt each time one group has a complaint against them. (Liberals might perhaps examine their instinctive distrust of institutions and authorities, and the ways that this distrust “motivates” their own social cognition.)

Viewed from this perspective, the conservative fear that gay marriage will “destroy marriage as we know it” is no longer incomprehensible—it is correct.

You can take your own quiz here to see where you fall on the 5 vectors (and contribute to the research at the same time!!).

Although, I have to say that the knowledge of how the questions were going to be evaluated affected the way I thought about the questions. But, so what if it's not a double-blind experiment, it is still fun (if you are similarly geek-oriented).

Here’s my results from the first test.
Green = Me
Blue = Liberal
Red = Conservative



(Harm, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity)


Given my antipathy to George Bush, not only at a policy-level, but even more distinctly to his political persona, these results resonate my comments in a previous post.

On the one hand, I struggle at times to condemn those who gravitate to Bush or Palin on cultural affinity issues. Since, one can dismiss the attachment to cultural signals as things that "don't matter" and should be superfluous to hard policy positions formulated by experts beavering away in political think-tanks and debated with great earnestness throughout the campaign season.

But, my own gravitation to Obama is simply the inverse of that which I might otherwise denigrate. I am simply seeking different markers of affinity of thought and perspective.

Obama appeals because he demonstrates that he thinks like me and thus I hope he will make judicious decisions about the correct course of action in my stead. Because, as we are now finding with the financial crisis and with 9/11 in the case of Bush, the actual course of a Presidency is only tangentially related to specific campaign promises or party platform statements.

I may not be from Kenya, but I am of Obama's tribe.