@Alan – Thanks for adding that piece of info. That kin of thing is what can be so frustrating.

Factoids get plucked out of context and ideologically weaponized. One never can be certain if others are just disinformed or dishonest, but in either case it makes meaningful and useful public debate near impossible. We can’t get to the truth when even facts are unfairly presented and interpreted.

This demonstrates an important lack in Haidt’s moral foundations theory, precisely the lack of the liberal moral value that is measured in social science as the dual trait of openness (to experience) and intellectuality. This dual trait is what makes possible both intellectual curiosity and intellectual humility.

And one could note that this dual trait measures high in liberals and low in conservatives, along with low in authoritarians. In fact, it might be the single most defining feature of liberalism and liberal-mindedness, and yet it’s entirely omitted from Haidt’s writings, as far as I know (please correct me, if he has talked about it somewhere).

@Marc – I’m back here visiting the comments section and read your criticism again. I totally agree with you and Haidt’s seeming blindness to social reality on the ground is what irritated me so much about his book, even as it intrigued me in other ways, especially as he basically accuses liberals of being disconnected from reality. That is, ironically, an unfair accusation, and harmful to boot; so it seems from my liberal concern for fairness. But was he actually trying to be fair, was he upholding the moral value of fairness, or just hoping to score a rhetorical point in an ideological fight, or just trying to be outrageous to gain public and media attention? Whatever the motivation, maybe he should look in the mirror. You articulate his failure well. He doesn’t see how all of the moral values are expressed on the political left as well, but he can’t see them because he too often interprets them according to a conservative or even right-wing bias, refusing to think about what the same values mean in the liberal-minded and left-wing worldview.

As a quick note, the individualizing vs binding distinction maybe doesn’t really make sense or isn’t as useful as it could be, in the way it’s presented. Both are about boundaries, the difference between conservatives and liberals being what kind of boundaries, where they’re located, how they’re socially constructed, and whether they’re thick/thin, tight/loose, rigid/flexible, exclusive/inclusive, narrow/broad, etc. So, right off the bat, the main distinction is already confused, but one could argue that there is still a meaningful distinction in this to be salvaged, if requiring a total interpretive overhaul. A better and/or simpler theory, for example, would be Ernest Hartmann’s boundary types. All of Haidt’s supposed moral foundations might actually be secondary attributes of the two basic boundary types; largely coming down to a personality trait difference between, on one side, high conscientiousness and low openness (conservatism) and, on the other, low conscientiousness and high openness (liberalism).

Anyway, even ignoring that, to think liberals only focus on care and fairness, to the degree of sacrificing the binding values, is utterly obtuse and clueless. The main difference is that liberals apply all values universally to all humans, sometimes emphasizing a pro-outgroup bias, whereas conservatives only narrowly apply it to themselves and those like themselves, and even then inconsistently. This is what leads to a greater degree of hypocrisy on the political right, as social science research shows, because the illiberal are less concerned about the universal and hence principled application of values. But does someone really hold a value that they only apply when it’s convenient and self-serving?

Let’s break it down. Fairness/cheating is actually one of the key left-liberal values, of which conservatives tend to be weak. To put it more clearly, it’s basically egalitarianism and positive freedom, precisely what so many on the political right dismiss in conflating it with communism or whatever. Conservatives most definitely do not care about fairness/cheating for everyone and, if it’s not applied equally to everyone, then it’s not fairness, rather it’s explicitly unfairness. It would be utterly dishonest to suggest conservatives hold this value to any great degree, and to the degree they do it probably only could be fairly interpreted as how liberalized their supposed ‘conservatism’ has become (e.g., a majority of conservatives have finally come around to accepting same sex marriage, that is to say a fair application of marriage rights for all).

What about loyalty/betrayal? Once again, who is it applied to and who is excluded? Liberals don’t have loyalty to a narrow in-group, if anything loyalty to the out-group or rather various larger circles of concern, that is to say broader and more inclusive social identities. This relates to empathy, particularly cognitive empathy. Liberals have much more vast capacity of cognitive empathy in understanding others and including them as part of their perceived group, meaning those others aren’t really any longer an ‘out-group’. So, liberals are loyal to far more people, often to all of humanity. It’s why liberals concern themselves with global issues like environmentalism that not only affect themselves but also strangers and foreigners, not to mention that also affect future generations. They are so loyal they are willing to sacrifice their own narrow individual and ‘group’ self-interests, something conservatives are far less willing to do.

The clearest example of Haidt’s cognitive bias and cognitive blindness is with authority/subversion. As social creatures, all humans value authority, but they don’t value all kinds of authority equally, nor do they relate to authority in the same way. For example, historically, religious conservatives have bowed to the authoritarian and theocratic church hierarchy, whereas religious liberals have instead tended to look to the inherent authority of Jesus’ teachings, God, the kingdom of God all around us, divine truth, liberation theology, and natural law that supersedes human law; along with adhering to the authority of a culture of trust, as part of liberal secularism, in defending religious freedom by separating it from politics. Liberalism couldn’t function without the authority it has so effectively wielded these past several centuries, authority upon which all of modern liberal society is built.

Liberals also are more likely to respect the authority of neutral Biblical scholarship that challenges apologetics used as indoctrination and propaganda. Likewise, liberals are more likely to adhere to the authority of intellectual, educated, scientific, medical, and democratic authority figures; while conservatives subversively attack them. The entire conservative movement (religious right, MAGA, Republican Party, right-wing media, right-wing think tanks) have precisely organized around seeking to destroy or delegitimize nearly all of the major institutions of authority within modern Western civilization. Heck, President Donald Trump even went after the military. No authority is sacrosanct to the reactionary right, only treated worthy to the degree it can be used to gain power for the sake of power, so as to oppress others (i.e., maintain order with authoritarianism and social dominance).

On positive note, Haidt did bring up liberty/oppression, which is as central to liberalism as is possible. The fact that many conservatives have emphasized this indicates how liberalized the entire Western world has become. It also demonstrates how different conservatives are from traditionalists, as the latter would have little concern with this value. That is the complicating factor. Western conservatives are more liberal than most people in the world, and modern conservatives are more liberal than the average liberal was a century ago. So, everything and everyone has gone further left, which complicates everything since conservatives at this point are also defined by centuries of liberal progress and dominance. The fact that Haidt could even make an argument, however unconvincing, that conservatives have all the values as much or more than liberals is because conservatives have at this point adopted all of the liberal values.

Haidt thinks liberals lack certain values while conservatives don’t because he is using a framework that is based on conservative values or, oddly in some cases, based on a conservative interpretation of liberal values. Meanwhile, when he is not portraying liberal values as conservative, he ignores many other liberal values (and values-related traits) that have been heavily studied in the social sciences and/or have been historically central to liberal motivation, thought, perception, behavior, relating, and politics (along with liberal spirituality, mysticism, and religion). Some of the following could fall under some of Haidt’s moral foundations, if they were expanded upon, while other of these presumably would require new values categorizations, particularly the first two as a dual trait which is the defining feature of liberalism:

Openness to experience, intellectuality, intellectual humility, intellectual debate, curiosity, love of learning, wonder, critical thinking, truth-seeking, skepticism, questioning, inquiry, experimentation, exploration, travel, discovery, development, progress, change, seeking new experiences, fluid intelligence, abstract thought, universalism, aesthetic appreciation, ambiguity tolerance, systems thinking, pattern recognition, perspective shifting, multiperspectivity, cognitive flexibility, cognitive complexity, culture of trust, non-judgment, tolerance, acceptance, broader affective empathy, stronger cognitive empathy (theory of mind, mind reading), sympathy, loving-kindness, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, leniency, giving people the benefit of the doubt, understanding, mutuality, solidarity, inclusivity, diversity, democracy, egalitarianism, justice, rights (civil, human, women, minority, animal), freedom (not the same as liberty), anti-authoritarianism, anti-dominance, anti-conventionalism, anti-prejudice, anti-xenophobia, anti-fear-mongering, anti-scapegoating, etc.

While we’re at it, what about such things as joy and awe, representing a very liberal preference in relating to the world where one’s sense of self opens up to the world, rather than guardedly closing down and turning inward to one’s in-group? Of course, that is just another way of speaking of the personality trait (and moral value) of openness to experience, part of the dual trait with intellectuality on the other side of the coin, and hence the combined expression of intellectual curiosity and all that relates to it. Quite possibly, combined with the personality trait conscientiousness, all of the moral values and nearly all that I describe above could be accounted for. That then brings us back to Hartmann’s boundary types, and hence we are forced to question what exactly is meant by binding vs individualizing, the psycho-social push and pull underlying it all.

To expand upon the moral foundations theory, others have noted he doesn’t include efficiency/waste (maybe or maybe not overlapping with or identical to care and harm; related to exploitation, destruction, pollution, etc; specifically in terms of precautionary principle, conservation, sustainability, regenerative, etc), ownership/theft (including collective or communal ownership, indigenous territory, natural resources, public land; and hence involving private theft from the commons and plutocratic theft from workers, involving victimization of indigenous, citizens, community members, peasants, indentured servants, slaves, or oppressed laborers), honesty/deception (humility, truthfulness, low hypocrisy, low dark personality traits like Machiavellianism; but obviously involving openness, intellectuality, critical thinking, truth-seeking, skepticism, etc), and equity/undeservingness (either separate from fairness or another aspect of fairness clarifying it’s liberal nature, under the larger umbrella of egalitarianism, specifically in terms of anti-hierarchy and anti-dominance).

To get back to my criticism that a simpler division might be at play, there are also critics who argue the moral foundations are redundant. They possibly all could reduce to the value of harm. Or else they could reduce to a division between threat response and empathy response. It’s true that there is a lot of overlap between the disgust response and threat response, along with what might be called stress-sickness response (parasite-stress theory and behavioral immune system), as shown in increased population levels of socio-political conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation (what one might call the dark political triad), all of which are defined by low rates of some combination of openness, liberalism, and egalitarianism. For example, numerous studies show that, under stressful and sickly conditions (high parasite load, high pathogen exposure, high inequality, etc), one sees higher population levels of the ‘dark political triad’, though each part of that triad measures separately at the individual level.

Rather, it’s only specific parts of the white working class (Southern, rural, less educated) that is feeling particularly drawn to Republicans, but these demographics don’t represent the majority of the white working class, much less the working class in total. The question then is not only why is the working class divided but, specifically, why is the white working class divided. Yet why do Democrats maintain their hold on the working class, despite forces working against them? And why aren’t we talking about all of those other lower class whites, particularly the majority that is non-Southern and non-rural?

Also, the larger set of data indicates that most interesting is how the situation is fluctuating and uncertain. Consider that a large part of Trump voters said they voted for Barack Obama and would’ve voted for Bernie Sanders instead, if he had been nominated — that means Trump was their second choice as a protest vote, following a Democratic candidate being their first choice. Then again, that is part of the failure of the DNC in shutting out populist and leftist leadership. What this demonstrates is that working class whites haven’t actually gone right.

They simply haven’t been given any real choices on the left. That is because we have a one-party state with two right wings. But there is a pattern here in what many Americans are demanding, specifically in the context of a left-liberal majority. The commonality of Bush, Obama, Sanders, and Trump has been economic populist rhetoric. The problem is, other than Sanders, none of those were actually economic populists. The elite in both parties keep the actual economic populists out of power, through control of the party machines and control of the corporate media. That class war will tell you a lot about the present working class.

To put it another way, Democrats tend to serve new industries (tech, media, etc) and financing. Whereas Republicans tend to serve old industries (natural resources, etc) and old money (inherited wealth of plutocracy).

Consider the Bush family that made it’s wealth from oil, the grandfather having sold to both Stalin and Hitler. Even Trump’s family is more in line with an old industry and it’s ties to old power structures.

By the way, I love your second suggestion. I’m a white working class left-liberal. I used to belong to AFSCME, but stopped paying dues. The reason is, though union members supported Sanders in 2016, the union leadership officially backed Clinton.

Unions are no longer a real force of labor organizing. They’ve become controlled opposition that are beholden to corporate interests, by way of corporatist politicians. The only way to break this would be something along the lines of your Plan B.

I don’t want to organize as a worker. Being a worker is such a small part of my identity. And I have no love of my job, much less pride for merely working. Most of all, I’m a human, a citizen, a community member, and a neighbor. Worker rights would be moot, if we had effective civil rights, in terms of both negative and positive freedoms.

That is an interesting comment.

Has the white working class gone Republican? Or is it merely the polarized partisanship of the Southern white working class since the Southern Strategy? Inquiring minds would like to know.

As a working class white in the Midwest, I despise Republicans, not that I’m a big fan of Democrats either. Like most Americans, I’m to the left of the elites in both parties.

The narratives of political and media elites are often false. The most immigrant friendly president in recent history was George W. Bush who underfunded the border guard. This meant a lot of immigrants crossed without data being kept. And neither was he interested in deporting. Democrats almost always deport more immigrants than Republicans. Both Obama and Biden deported more than both Bush and Trump.

But Democrats don’t tend to advertise this because it’s not what they’re trying to sell to voters. It’s all about branding not reality. That is also why Republicans act tough on immigration but actually are relatively weak. Many of the corporations Republicans represent hire illegal immigrants. So, Republicans are just putting on a show of caring, but in the end they’ll serve their source of money.

“In Australia the Conservatives decided that guns killed people so they voted to bring in much tighter gun control. They were all voted out of office by cnservatives. Since then gun violence and murder have drastically dropped.”

This is an age old comment/conversation, but I have to comment because that is simply false.

What happened was that gun related crime dropped clearly, but homicides did not. Those continued steadily on same slightly downward trajectory which it had already done BEFORE the tighter gun control/ban. Amount of serious/lethal violence had been on a longer decline in Australia and that decline had started before 1990’s.

‘Gun ban’ did not have any clear major effect on amount of killings/murders because curiously if a person wants to kill another they are not going to give up the thought if they do not happen to have firearm available. If that logic worked societies should have been mostly non-violent before firearms were invented, but everything seems to point out opposite. Societies were MORE violent because it had little to do with weapons but structures of societies and their development level in general.

E.g. in western world many churches had banned swords in the premises to quell violence in them. Similar kind of rules were enacted in various places of medieval Japan due casual sword violence.

We could e.g. use United States as another example. Before 1990’s gun legislation was way more lax, than after the so called ‘Federal Assault Weapons Ban’ which was enacted in 1996. But so were mass shootings targeting innocent people. Before 1990’s e.g. such things as school shootings were exceedingly rare and mostly very different than they are now.

Most of school shootings in US pre turn of the millennium were not mass shootings, they were cases where a person had a gun they went and shot some other person in school over some personal dispute, then they fled. They were murders/killings that happened in schools premises. Rarely other casualties outside some cases where someone started fighting the shooter where there could have been extra casualty or two. There simply was no culture of people going to public places and started shooting strangers, even if they had access to weapons.

That changed mostly around mid 1990’s early 2000’s where modern concept of school shootings started to become way more common. It actually just accelerated AFTER Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which is clear indication it has not that much to do with weapons, but something else had changed in society. They had enacted stricter gun legislation and amount of mass shooting started increasing.

If reason was guns, then e.g. period between second world war and 1990’s should have been mass shooting galore because gun laws were way more liberal and guns already could be classified what we know as “modern firearms”; bigger magazines, selective and automatic fire capabilities.

But outside very few cases for some reason it took over 50 years before people “figured out” to start to target their fellow citizens. That is a clear indication that it’s not guns, but something else that have triggered the development.

We could also compare it to other countries which also have quite a lot of guns per capita like Switzerland or Finland but clearly way different culture because clearly mass shootings are not happening proportionally compared e.g. to US. E.g. in Switzerland soldiers can keep their service rifles at home and many areas have very strong hunting culture so there are plenty of all kinds of private weapons. But how many mass shootings they are famous for?

Even eight years down the track it seems worth making this comment:
Sweden became the “rape capital of Europe” because they changed the laws around reporting. A gang rape, rather than being one single crime, is several counts, depending on the number of individuals involved. Similarly, marital rape in the context of an abusive marriage, rather than being one single rape, is a separate count for every instance.

This seems wildly off-base, and more an effort at defensiveness than understanding. Look at Horseshoe Theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

There are typical problems with strongly centralized governments. Marxists and Fascists see each other as antagonistic movements. But they share many common characteristics due to their mutual disrespect for individual rights.

Also, emotional empathy needs to be distinguished from cognitive empathy.

Terrorists are high on emotional empathy. The quickest route to generate empathy within a group is through hatred of and war against an outgroup. And terrorists have tremendous hatred for their outgroup and love of their ingroup. And that’s the problem. The endless religious wars of Europe were the result, in part, of emotional empathy and the ingroup benefits from hatred of an outgroup.

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/15/712249664/the-end-of-empathy

Look, if we said that women were sex providers and that they should be forced to provide sex fairly I hope we can agree that that’s a *really* objectifying position to hold. It’s also objectifying to believe that employers are jobs providers who have to provide jobs fairly. But if employers are your outgroup and employees are your ingroup, the objectification will be invisible to you.

Opposition to objectification is easily interpreted as a lack of empathy because it means someone isn’t hating the correct enemies and seeing them as objects to serve the proper ingroups.

We could talk all day about libertarian opposition to coercion or whatnot. But it’s worth noting that classic liberalism was a way to move away from the endless, costly internicean fighting that dominated human history. We see that internicean fighting now in the United States between Social Conservatives and Progressives. Civil wars are horrible. There’s absolutely nothing wrong about wanting to avoid them, when possible.