Moral foundations theory

Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. At present, the theory proposes six such foundations: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity; however, its authors envision the possibility of including additional foundations. The theory was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder, subsequently developed by a diverse group of collaborators, and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind.

Although the initial development of moral foundations theory focused on cultural differences, subsequent work with the theory has largely focused on political ideology. Various scholars have offered moral foundations theory as an explanation of differences among political progressives (liberals in the American sense), conservatives, and libertarians, and have suggested that it can explain variation in opinion on politically charged issues such as gay marriage and abortion. In particular, Haidt and fellow researchers have argued that progressives stress only two of the moral foundations (Care and Fairness) in their reasoning, and libertarians stress only two (Liberty and Fairness), while conservatives stress all six more equally.

Origins

Moral foundations initially arose as a reaction against the developmental rationalist theory of morality associated with Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget. Building on Piaget's work, Kohlberg argued that children's moral reasoning changed over time, and proposed an explanation through his six stages of moral development. Kohlberg's work emphasized justice as the key concept in moral reasoning, seen as a primarily cognitive activity, and became the dominant approach to moral psychology, heavily influencing subsequent work. Haidt writes that he found Kohlberg's theories unsatisfying from the time he first encountered them in graduate school because they "seemed too cerebral" and lacked a focus on issues of emotion.

In contrast to the dominant theories of morality in psychology, the anthropologist Richard Shweder developed a set of theories emphasizing the cultural variability of moral judgments, but argued that different cultural forms of morality drew on "three distinct but coherent clusters of moral concerns," which he labeled as the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity. Shweder's approach inspired Haidt to begin researching moral differences across cultures, including fieldwork in Brazil and Philadelphia. This work led Haidt to begin developing his social intuitionist approach to morality. This approach, which stood in sharp contrast to Kohlberg's rationalist work, suggested that "moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions" while moral reasoning simply serves as a post-hoc rationalization of already formed judgments. Haidt's work and his focus on quick, intuitive, emotional judgments quickly became very influential, attracting sustained attention from an array of researchers.

As Haidt and his collaborators worked within the social intuitionist approach, they began to devote attention to the sources of the intuitions that they believed underlay moral judgments. In a 2004 article published in the journal Daedalus, Haidt and Craig Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality, including the work of Donald Brown, Alan Fiske, Shalom Schwartz, and Shweder. From their review, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. According to Haidt and Joseph, each of the ethics formed a module, whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world," while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently. This article became the first statement of moral foundations theory, which Haidt, Joseph, and others have since elaborated and refined.

The six foundations

• Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm.
• Fairness or proportionality: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating.
• Liberty: the loathing of tyranny; opposite of oppression.
• Loyalty or ingroup: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal.
• Authority or respect: obeying tradition and legitimate authority; opposite of subversion.
• Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation.

Applications

Political ideology

Three Political Camps in 6D Moral Foundation Space

Researchers have found that people’s sensitivities to the six moral foundations correlate with their political ideologies. While all three of the political camps studied by Haidt are sensitive to the Fairness foundation, progressives are particularly sensitive to the Care foundation, libertarians to the Liberty foundation, and conservatives roughly equally sensitive to all six foundations. According to Haidt, this has significant implications for political discourse and relations. Because members of two political camps are to a degree blind to one or more of the moral foundations of the others, they may perceive morally-driven words or behavior as having another basis—at best self-interested, at worst evil, and thus demonize one another. Further research has shown that while members of all ideological camps have difficulty understanding others, conservatives are measurably better at understanding the point of view of progressives than vice versa, presumably because conservatives operate in a six-dimensional moral matrix that contains all of the progressives’ dimensions. This would benefit conservatives in passing an Ideological Turing Test.

Researchers postulate that the six moral foundations arose as solutions to problems common in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, in particular inter-tribal and intra-tribal conflict. The three foundations unique to conservatives (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity) bind groups together for greater strength in inter-tribal competition; the other three foundations balance those tendencies with concern for individuals within the group. With reduced sensitivity to the groupish moral foundations, progressives tend to promote a more universalist morality. In attempting to show which moral matrix is "correct", progressives and libertarians may argue that the six moral foundations arose in a now non-existent tribal environment, and their evolution lags behind modern conditions, with larger-scale cities, countries, and supranational unions. Conservatives may counter that human beings remain cognitively designed for life in groups whose size does not exceed Dunbar's number, and that it is wishful thinking to expect group competition and conflict to disappear in the foreseeable future; Haidt hypothesizes an innate but normally dormant "hive switch".

Other moral matrices may be possible, suggested by common political parties such as environmentalists or greens on the left and fascists on the right. Moral-foundations political research focused initially on the differences between conservatives and progressives in the context of the two-party system of United States; libertarians and the Liberty foundation were added later.

Cross-cultural differences

Haidt’s initial field work in Brazil and Philadelphia in 1989, and Odisha, India in 1993, showed that moralizing indeed varies among cultures, but less than by social class (e.g. education) and age. Working-class Brazilian children were more likely to consider both taboo violations and inflictions of harm to be morally wrong, and universally so. Members of traditional, collectivist societies, like political conservatives, are more sensitive to violations of the community-related moral foundations. Adult members of so-called WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies are the most individualistic, and most likely to draw a distinction between harm-inflicting violations of morality and violations of convention.

Subsequent investigations of moral foundations theory in other cultures have found broadly similar correlations between morality and political identification to those of the US. In Korea and Sweden, the patterns were the same, with varying magnitudes.