[MD] Tastey morality

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
As you'll see [in Haidt's Ted Talk], conservatives are more interested in loyalty, authority and sanctity than their liberal counterparts.


Craig replied:
... I think such correlations should be taken with a grain of salt, until a cause & effect relation can be determined.



dmb says:
Cause and effect relations? This is not physics, Craig. Haidt is talking about moral categories and their role in shaping our perspectives. These correlations are the about strongest relations that could ever be established. It's just not the kind of thing that's given to causal relations and it will never follow anything like a natural law. 

What his findings reveal, I think, is the visceral feelings behind the conservative mind. The ideology itself is widely known because it's so widely advertised and written about. It has a history and a track record just like liberalism does. You know, there's a long paper trail. But Haidt gives use a way to get inside this worldview, to feel it in a more sympathetic way. Liberals are aren't oblivious to loyalty, authority or sanctity of course. We all share the same evolutionary history, after all.

I don't know if Haidt would agree or not but I think each of these categories (all five) also has a vertical dimension. Each of them can and should develop. They all begin as a visceral response but, hopefully, as we mature and broaden our understanding and gain wider perspectives these moral categories become more, well, moral. Take authority, for example.

As children, we give authority to anyone who's bigger or has a deeper voice. Then as teenagers, maybe we like tough-guys and cowboys in the movies. Authority is given to the people who wear the right uniform. The glorification of authority in politics is not very different for this kid stuff. It is a huge improvement when the concern becomes the limits and legitimacy of authority, which is what you're supposed to get in democratic societies. And then there is intellectual and scientific authority, which isn't even about the exercise of political power. This kind of authority isn't even asserted over us. There are no cops to enforce this kind of authority and there is no penalty if you refuse to submit. It's something reasonable people will recognize and respect without coercion. 

Loyalty is the same way. At first, you're loyal only to your momma's breast, your family's blood, your friends and neighbors. But hopefully, the morality of loyalty becomes ever wider and less self-serving. You can be loyal to your country and then you can be loyal to principles and even to morality itself. Sanctity begins with something as simple as being disgusted by rotten food or smelly people but it can go real bad and turn into a political ideology of racial purity or cultural supremacy, as was the case in Fascist Germany. We're seeing a bit of that now in the conservative's position on immigration and general attitude toward immigrants. But this can be raised to the intellectual level too. Hopefully we develop and grow so that the concern is for the sanctity of realities more important than meat or blood.