Consider the following moral foundations that guide the decisions people make. How would you rank them in terms of their importance to you? Which one is top on your list? Which is least important to you?
Take your time. Order them from most to least in how important they are as guides to your moral decisions.
Care/Harm: This foundation is related to our ability to feel the pain of others and underlies the virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
Fairness/Cheating: This foundation underlies the ideas of justice, rights, proportionality, and independence.
Liberty/Oppression: This foundation relates our feelings toward those who dominate and restrict our liberty. Tension with authority can bring people together in attempts to remove the oppressor.
Loyalty/Betrayal: Evolved from our tribal history and the formation of coalition groups with others. Patriotism and sacrifice for our group are two ways this foundation is expressed.
Authority/Subversion: Related to the hierarchy of social interactions within our coalition groups. Emergence of leaders, followers, acceptance of authority, and respect for traditions form from this foundation.
Sanctity/Degradation: Feelings of disgust and contamination guide our attempts to live in a more pure and less carnal way. This foundation underlies the idea that immorality and contaminants can desecrate the temple of the body. It is often part of religious practice.
Source of Moral Foundations
The foundations listed above were identified and tested across cultures by MoralFoundations.org. They found that people have innate feelings in these categories which intuitively guide them as they make decisions. Each culture builds upon these foundations a set of institutions, stories, and particular virtues valued by that culture. What each culture builds is unique to the others yet they are all based upon the same set of foundations. Each culture builds different religions and moral codes to reflect those values. The religions and codes are used to draw people in that culture together. And, they are used as justification for violence and war between cultures.
Those who consider themselves liberal in their thinking tend to value the first two moral foundations of Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating higher than the other foundations.
Those who consider themselves conservative in their thinking, especially the religious, tend to value all of the moral foundations more equally in their thinking and decisions.
The growth of the culture wars in recent decades has centered strongly on the last three of the moral foundations of Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation. These three foundations are held in high regard by most conservatives and less so by most liberals. The psychology of those differing value systems is manifested today in the deepening divide we feel in society. We wonder how the other side can be thinking the way they do. It leaves us wondering how can we be so different?
These are not new behaviors for we humans in our societies. What is new is the ease with which we can express our state of mind to large numbers of people, both those in agreement and in opposition. There is less time for cooling of tensions. Rhetoric is hot. Reactions are almost instant. Is our #comment trending? Tempers flare on both sides of even the smallest issues.
We are all paying the price for our intolerance. It is a sad state of affairs.
In 2012, I was quite involved locally as a volunteer and precinct captain for the Democratic party campaign. I encountered people whose moral compass pointed very liberal and some very conservative with most people in the middle. What I found difficult to understand was the rationale of those who favored the most conservative path. Why was their thinking so different from mine?
Soon after that campaign I followed the link to MoralFoundations.org and found questionnaires which allowed me to evaluate my moral decisions in a number of situations. My results were plotted with others who had answered the same questionnaires. The results confirmed I was mostly a liberal in my thinking. But, I also had some conservative values I felt were important.