We interrupt our normal schedule of godless religion-bashing to talk about something important: morality.

How do you know what’s moral? Why do good people differ on moral issues? When people’s ideas of morality conflict, is that because different people focus on different aspects of morality? Has anyone tried to construct a taxonomy of morality?

For the last question, yes, and here is one such attempt that I found intriguing.

Moral Foundations Theory proposes that five innate psychological systems form the foundation of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture constructs its particular morality as a set of virtues, values, and ideas based on or related to these five foundations (as well as to many other non-moral aspects of the evolved mind).

The five parameters they’ve come up with are:

  • Harm/Care
  • Fairness/Reciprocity
  • Ingroup/Loyalty
  • Authority/Respect
  • Purity/Sanctity

I’m not sure what they’re basing these groups on (I can think of better values than ‘Ingroup/Loyalty’), but if you don’t like them and you can show them some other empirically-based reason to split or lump them, they’ll change it and pay you. (What would that experiment look like?)

Where things get interesting, and where you actually get some predictive validity, is the application to politics.

The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying almost exclusively on the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. In every sample we have examined (including samples in the US, UK, Europe, Latin America, and Asia), political conservatism correlates negatively with endorsement of the Harm and Fairness foundations, and positively with endorsement of the Ingroup, Authority, and Purity foundations.

At first, I didn’t like the idea that conservatives use all five parameters — what’s fair about regressive tax laws or lack of health care for the very poor? But after looking at a few cases, it seems to me that conservatives do use the first two parameters, but their ability to do so accurately is challenged by their over-reliance on bad information and emotional reasoning with respect to the other three.

Let’s try it out. Pick a political issue. My lovely and talented assistant Miss Perfect has chosen ‘immigration’.

According to this taxonomy, we should expect Liberals to be geared towards maximising fairness and minimising harm. Certainly putting children in detention camps, as Australia does, falls short of fairness and care. Conservatives would care about fairness and care, too — for themselves (they’re taking our jobs!), but their feelings about these would be mingled with ideas about Ingroup/Loyalty (They come over and don’t speak the language!) and Authority/Respect (They know they’re here illegally!).

Pornography. Our Standard Liberal (let’s call him Mr Liberal) would oppose pornography only to the extent that someone’s being harmed by it. Which is to say that for most forms of non-violent erotica involving adults, Mr L would say, “Eh.”

Mr Conservative might also oppose porn where people are being harmed, but his ideas about harm would be mingled with his ideas about purity and sanctity. He might argue that porn does harm its users, perhaps defining harm so broadly as to include everyone in a society where pornography is being made.

Gay marriage: Mr Liberal might say, “It’s not hurting anyone. And it doesn’t seem fair that gay people are being denied the right to get married, along with the insurance and inheritance perks.”

But Mr Conservative would say “It does harm the institution of marriage. And it’s defiling the Purity/Sanctity of marriage.” He’d also want to keep the gays out of the marriage club (Loyalty/Ingroup), though he’d probably keep that to himself around Mr Liberal.

Mr L and Mr C are both moral actors, but Mr Conservative defines harm in a very self-referential way. If something is good for his in-group, it’s good. Out-group? Not so much. And Mr C is more fearful. He thinks that things he doesn’t like have a magical ability to reach in and hurt him. Possibly a result of all that magic thinking he learned in church.

This taxonomy gave me some interesting thoughts to chew on. What do you think?

(h/t Jewish Atheist)