What set of moral criteria?

By Massimo Pigliucci

In the course of my research for a new book I am writing (tentatively entitled “The Intelligent Person’s Guide to the Meaning of Life” — an obvious dig at “The Idiot’s Guide” series), I again ran across the work of Jonathan Haidt, at the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia (he is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, about “finding modern truth in ancient wisdom — a concept, I confess, about which I am somewhat skeptical).

In an article published in Science on 18 May 2007 (volume 316, pp. 998-1002) Haidt goes over his research on the different moral conceptions of people who consider themselves politically conservative or progressive. In particular, he identifies five types of moral concerns, and asks people of various political ideologies how they rank each of the types of concern when it comes to exercising moral judgment.

The five types are: 1) Harm (to others); 2) Fairness; 3) In-group loyalty; 4) Respect for authority; and 5) “Purity,” meaning respect for the sacred or the proper. Two interesting findings emerge from this research. First, both conservatives and progressives recognize and respond to all five criteria of moral judgment. For instance, even a good number of liberals are disturbed by situations like “attending a performance art piece in which the actors act like animals, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage (this one falls under the category of purity / sanctity); or by being told to “slap your father in the face — with his permission — as part of a comedy skit” (respect for authority); or by “saying something slightly bad about your nation while calling into a talk-radio show in a foreign nation” (in-group loyalty).

[If you are wondering, situations of the first two types of moral concerns include scenarios like “stick a pin into the palm of a child” (harm / care); and “accept a plasma TV that a friend of yours gives you, even though your friend bought it from a thief who had stolen it” (fairness).]

The second, more interesting, outcome of the research is that there is nonetheless a sharp difference between conservatives and progressives: the more one moves from “very liberal” to “very conservative” (going through seven gradations) the more in-group loyalty, respect for authority and concerns with purity become important, while at the same time concerns for harm and fairness become less important.

In other words, though the researchers showed the existence of a continuous spectrum (once again defying the simplistic, media-trumpeted “red vs. blue” narrative), the fact is that conservatives really do have a significantly different concept of morality than progressives. Big surprise, you might say, but please pay attention to the fact that the difference is not (just) about one’s opinion on a range of specific issues — more fundamentally it is about which categories of moral concern are or are not important.

This distinction between people concerned mostly with harm and fairness and people concerned more with in-group loyalty, respect for authority and purity may find an interesting parallel in the difference between two of the three major philosophical conceptions of morality: consequentialism and deontology (the third one is the one I actually find more congenial: virtue ethics). Broadly speaking, an argument can be made that consequentialists (such as utilitarians) put a premium on issues of harm (they wish to reduce it) and fairness (which they wish to maximize), but are not really concerned with the other three. A deontologist — a la Kant, for instance — bases his moral precepts on a set of rules, which is more likely to include some that directly address in-group loyalty, respect for authority and purity (just think of the most famous non-secular deontological system, the Ten Commandments).

Needless to say, I place myself at the very extreme liberal side of Haidt’s axis, and accordingly I am usually little concerned with authority, country and purity, and very much disturbed by what I perceive as harm and unfairness in human affairs. Haidt, however, has argued (elsewhere, not in the Science paper) that conservatives have an “enlarged” view of morality, almost implying (though of this I cannot be sure) that in some sense liberals are morally deficient. Setting aside debates about meta-ethics (we have done that recently at Rationally Speaking, here and here!), can one make an argument for or against a given moral criterion to be considered, well, moral at all?

I think that argument has best been made by thinkers of the Enlightenment and by John Stuart Mill (particularly in his On Liberty). That is, precisely by the sort of intellectuals that have shaped the American Constitution and the modern Western conception of democracy, respectively. I don’t think one needs to mount a sustained defense of the moral importance of fairness and concern for harm, since even very conservative people share them (though to a significantly lesser degree than very liberal ones). The problem, then, rests with the remaining three criteria.

It seems to me that the root of this dichotomy is that the three conservative criteria for moral judgment are either not intrinsically good (unlike concern for harm and fairness), or too often run into logical opposition with the other two criteria. Take respect for authority, for instance. Notice that we are not talking about the sensible idea of provisionally deferring to people who have more experience or knowledge, especially in case of emergencies, if we ourselves lack that experience or knowledge. In the midst of a medical crisis affecting a loved one, your best bet is to stay on the sideline and let the pros do what they can to stabilize the situation. That is not what we are talking about here. The concern instead is with respect of authority for authority’s sake, as in “Honor your father and your mother,” or “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God,” that sort of thing.

But respect, from a rational point of view, is something that makes sense to bestow only provisionally and in proportion to whether it has been earned. If my father beats me regularly, or if my god indulges in genocide (think Noah’s ark), then they ought (moral ought) to lose my respect. (My father disagreed, for the record; I haven’t heard from god.)

The same goes for in-group loyalty. Some Americans are fond of sound bite patriotism, such as “my country, right or wrong,” but in fact my country can (and has, in the case of the United States) engaged in horrific moral deeds, and I would argue that love for my country actually imposes on me a moral duty to criticize it in order to make it better.

As for purity, the problem there of course is that it is pretty much an arbitrary concept. What is sacred to you may not be sacred (or, indeed, may even be despised) to others, which means that the only rational thing to do is to allow people to practice their own rituals while not obliging others to follow them. When I lived in Tennessee I was confronted by an endless number of people who kept saying that my atheism “offended” them (apparently without even considering that their fundamentalism might, just might, offend me), and that they had a Constitutional right not to be offended! Of course they didn’t; if anything, the American Constitution (based as it is on Enlightenment principles, and interpreted through a view of democracy that is impregnated with Mill) guarantees my (and anyone else’s) right to offend (which I try to exercise wisely and sparsely).

So, far from having a “broader” conception of morality, I think the conservative mind is a leftover of a pre-Enlightenment, Medieval period when authority (usually of the government or the church) and religion dominated human affairs. It is the legacy of thinkers like Hume, Voltaire and Mill that morality is concerned with fairness and harm, and for the rest, let people worship whoever or whatever they wish, as long as they don’t intrude on our right not to follow them.