When morality oppos justice:
Conrvatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize
Jonathan Haidt and Jes Graham
University of Virginia
February 1, 2006
羊皇后
Second draft of invited submission to special issue of
日本宪法Social Justice Rearch,国防教育课件
on emotions and justice
[8026 words for full MS]
查看源代码Abstract
Rearchers in moral psychology and social justice have agreed that morality is about matters of harm,
rights, and justice. With this definition of morality, conrvative opposition to social justice programs has appeared to be immoral, and has been explained as a product of various non-moral process, such as system justification or social dominance orientation. In this article we argue that, from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader, encompassing many more aspects of social life and valuing institutions as much or more than individuals. We prent theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are in fact five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world’s many moralities. The five foundations are psychological preparations for caring about and reacting emotionally to harm, reciprocity (including justice, fairness, and rights), ingroup, hierarchy, and purity. Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily bad upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conrvatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.
Suppo your next-door neighbor puts up a large sign in her front yard that says “Cable television will destroy society.” You ask her to explain the sign, and she replies, “Cables are an affront to the god Thoth. They radiate theta waves, which make people sterile.” You ask her to explain how a low voltage, electrically-shielded coaxial cable can make anyone sterile, but she changes the subject. The DSM-IV defines a delusion as “a fal belief bad on incorrect inference about external reality t
hat is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone el believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary” (APA, DSM-IV, 1994, p.765). Your neighbor is clearly delusional, and possibly schizophrenic. She is responding to forces, threats, and agents that simply do not exist.
But now suppo your other neighbor puts up a large sign in his front yard that says “Gay marriage will destroy society.” You ask him to explain the sign, and he replies, “Homoxuality is an abomination to God. Gay marriage will undermine marriage, the institution upon which our society rests.” You ask him to explain how allowing two people to marry who are in love and of the same x will harm other marriages, but he changes the subject. Becau your neighbor is not alone in his beliefs, he does not meet the DSM-IV criteria for delusion. However, you might well consider your homophobic neighbor almost as delusional, and probably more offensive, than your cable-fearing neighbor. He, too, ems to be responding to forces, threats, and agents that do not exist, only in this ca his widely shared beliefs have real victims: the millions of men and women who are prohibited from marrying the people they love, and who are treated unjustly in matters of family law and social prestige. If only there were some way to break through your neighbor’s delusions – some moral equivalent of Thorazine – which would help him e the facts as you e them.
But what makes you so certain that you e the moral world as it really is? If you are reading Social Justice Rearch, it is likely that you care a great deal about issues related to justice, fairness, equality, and victimization. It is also likely that you don’t care as much about patriotic displays, respect for authority, or chastity. In fact, the last three topics might even make you feel uneasy, calling up associations with political conrvatism, the religious right, and other movements that limit the autonomy and free expression of the individual.
Our thesis in this article is that there are five psychological foundations of morality, which we label as harm, reciprocity, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity. Cultures vary on the degree to which they build virtues on the five foundations. As a first approximation, political liberals value virtues bad on the first two foundations, while political conrvatives value virtues bad on all five. A conquence of this thesis is that justice and related virtues (bad on the reciprocity foundation) make up half of the moral world for liberals, while justice-related concerns make up only one fifth of the moral world for conrvatives. Conrvatives have many moral concerns that liberals simply do not recognize as moral concerns. When conrvatives talk about virtues and policies bad on the ingroup, hierarchy, and purity foundations, liberals hear talk about theta waves. For this reason, liberals often find it hard to understand why so many of
their fellow citizens do not rally around the cau of social justice, and why many Western nations have elected conrvative governments in recent years. In this paper we try to explain how moral emotions and intuitions that are not related to justice can often oppo moral emotions and intuitions that are. In the process we suggest ways that social justice rearchers can broaden their appeal and engage in a more authentic, productive, and ultimately persuasive dialogue with the political moderates and conrvatives who compo the majority of the electorate in many democratic nations.
Kohlberg and Social Justice
Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) founded the modern field of moral psychology. He did so by proposing a grand theory that unified moral psychology as the study of the progressive development of the individual’s understanding of justice. Building on the work of Piaget, Kohlberg propod that moral development in all cultures is driven forward by the process of role-taking: as children get more practice at taking each others’ perspectives, they learn to transcend their own position and appreciate when and why an action, practice, or custom is fair or unfair. Children may be blinded by their need for approval (Kohlberg’s stage 3) or by the overbearing pronouncements of authority figures (stage 4), but if given enough practice and exposure to democratic institutions they will, in ad
olescence, reach the post-conventional level of moral reasoning (stage 5), at which actions and cultural practices can be critiqued bad on the degree to which they instantiate justice.
Kohlberg’s theory was famously criticized by Carol Gilligan (1982), who propod an alternative foundation for ethics: care. Gilligan thought that women, more than men, bad their moral judgments and actions on concerns about their obligations to care for, protect, and nurture tho to whom they are connected, particularly tho who are vulnerable (Gilligan & Wiggins, 1987). Kohlberg and most other moral psychologists ultimately conceded that justice and care were two parate foundations of morality. Despite disagreements about which foundation was more important, or whether one could be derived from the other, nearly everyone in moral psychology was united behind a central axiom: morality is about protecting individuals. Justice and care both mattered only insofar as they protected individuals. Practices that do not protect or help individuals were en as mere social conventions at best, and as moral affronts at worst. Elliot Turiel, a student of Kohlberg, codified this individual-centered view of morality when he defined the moral domain as:
prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to
relate to each other. Moral prescriptions are not relative to the social context, nor are they defined by 腰在哪
it. Correspondingly, children's moral judgments are not derived directly from social institutional systems but from features inherent to social relationships -- including experiences involving harm to persons, violations of rights, and conflicts of competing
claims. (Turiel, 1983, p.3)
When the moral domain is limited by definition to two foundations (harm/welfare/care, and justice/rights/fairness), then social justice is clearly the extension of morality out to the societal level. The programs and laws that social justice activists endor aim to maximize the welfare and rights of individuals, particularly tho whom the activists believe do not receive equal treatment or full justice in their society. If social justice is just morality writ large, it follows that opposition to the programs must be bad on concerns other than moral concerns. Social justice rearch is therefore in part the arch for the non-moral motivations – such as lfishness, existential fear, or blind prejudice – of tho who oppo social justice, primarily political conrvatives. For example, one of the leading approaches to the study of political attitudes states that political conrvatism is a form of motivated social cognition: people embrace conrvatism in part “becau it rves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity, and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals” (Jost et al., 2003, p.340; e also Social Dominance Orientation, Pra
tto et al., 1994). This view of conrvatives is so widespread among justice rearchers that it sometimes leads to open expressions of lf-righteousness and contempt. At a recent conference on justice rearch, for example, a well-known rearcher began her talk by stating categorically that affirmative action was the morally and practically correct policy. She then asked why many people oppo it. She dismisd the reasons conrvatives sometimes give (mere theta waves) and then enumerated the lf-rving mechanisms that gave ri to their delusions. For this speaker, affirmative action embodies justice and care, end of story. In her moral worldview, that’s all there is.
The moral basis of conrvatism has been defended by the “principled conrvatism” account (Sniderman & Piazza, 1993), but it is important to note that this debate has been conducted entirely by examining competing notions of fairness that can be derived from the reciprocity foundation. Hing, Bobocel, and Zanna (2002), for example, showed that some portion of conrvative opposition to affirmative action is truly bad on concerns that affirmative action programs sometimes violate the principle of merit. Our claim here goes further: we argue that the “principles” of principled conrvatism go beyond fairness to include principles that liberals do not acknowledge to be moral principles, such as unconditional loyalty to one’s group, respect for one’s superiors, and the protection of female chastity.
There Is More to Morality Than Justice and Care
It is interesting to note that the leading theories in moral psychology were shaped by the social and moral tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, and that most of the leading figures were embedded in two of the most politically liberal communities in the United States: Cambridge, Massachutts, and Berkeley, California. Tho who have studied morality from a more anthropological or historical perspective, however, have generally found a much broader
morality which cannot be supported by only two foundations.1 Take, for example, the Old Testament, the Koran, Confucius, or almost any ethnography of a non-Western society. Issues of loyalty to the group, respect for one’s elders, lf-restraint, and the regulation of bodily process (e.g., rules about food, x, and menstruation) are highly elaborated in most human societies. Are the concerns just manifestations of an immature “conventional” morality (Kohlberg’s stages 3 and 4)? Are they mere social conventions (a la Turiel), to be distinguished from the “real” individual-centered morality of harm/welfare/care and justice/rights/fairness?
Richard Shweder (1990) has long argued that the individual-centered moralities of Kohlberg and Turiel reflect just one of three widespread moral “ethics,” each bad on a different ontological presu
pposition. In the “ethics of autonomy” the moral world is assumed to be made up exclusively of individual human beings, and the purpo of moral regulation is to “protect the zone of discretionary choice of 'individuals' and to promote the exerci of individual will in the pursuit of personal preferences” (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997, p.138). Rights, justice, fairness, and freedom are moral goods becau they help to maximize the autonomy of individuals, and to protect individuals from harms perpetrated by authorities and by other individuals. The “ethics of community,” in contrast, has a different ontological foundation. It es the world not as a collection of individuals but as a collection of institutions, families, tribes, guilds or other groups. The purpo of moral regulation is to “protect the moral integrity of the various stations or roles that constitute a 'society' or a
'community,' where a 'society' or 'community' is conceived of as a corporate entity with an identity, standing, history, and reputation of its own” (Shweder et al., 1997, p.138) Key virtues in this ethic are duty, respect, loyalty, and interdependence2. Individuals are office-holders in larger social structures, which give individual lives meaning and purpo. Finally, the “ethics of divinity” is bad on the ontological presupposition that God or gods exist, and that the moral world is compod of souls houd in bodies. (See Bloom, 2004, for evidence that this presupposition is the natural, default ass
umption of our species.) Each soul is a bit of God, or at least a gift from God, and so the purpo of moral regulation is to “protect the soul, the spirit, the spiritual aspects of the human agent and 'nature' from degradation” (Shweder et al., 1997, p. 138). If the body is a temple housing divinity within, then people should not be free to u their bodies in any way they plea; rather, moral regulations should help people to control themlves and avoid sin and spiritual pollution in matters related to xuality, food, and religious law more generally.
From Shweder’s perspective it is clear that social justice is the ethics of autonomy writ large, but the two other ethics – community and divinity – are at work in most cultures and in
1 Kohlberg (1969) and Turiel (Hollos, Leis, & Turiel, 1986) both conducted cross-cultural rearch, but they went to other cultures only to measure age trends on the constructs of their theories, not to examine local moral concerns.
2 People sometimes think that Gilligan’s ethic of care falls into Shweder’s ethic of community, becau both involve interdependence; it does not. The ethic of community is about protecting non-voluntary groups and institutions. The ethic of care is about relationships between pairs of individuals to enhance their welfare, and as such it is a part of the ethics of autonomy. See Jenn, 1997, for further discussion.
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many Western subcultures. Political conrvatism is often defined by its strong valuation of institutions and its concern that ideologies of “liberation” often destroy the very structures that make society and well-being possible (Muller, 1997). Most conrvatives (with the exception of some economic conrvatives) therefore embrace the ethics of community, and are morally oppod to the extreme individual freedom promoted by a pure ethics of autonomy – and by most social justice activists. Conrvative groups that are religious (such as the American “religious right”) share this embrace of institutions and traditions embodied by the ethics of community, and then add in a passionate concern for the ethics of divinity; they e “cular humanism” as an organized effort to encourage people to live in an ungodly way, each person choosing her own goals and values bad on what feels good or right to her alone. So when the electorate fails to embrace liberal policies and candidates, when a nation fails to rally around social justice concerns, it is at least plausible that there are moral motivations at work – motivations that liberals may not recognize as moral at all. If conrvative morality goes far beyond justice, then it may often happen that moral emotions and intuitions that are not related to justice can oppo moral emotions and intuitions that are.
The Five Foundations of Morality
描写人物品质的成语Shweder’s three ethics were derived from a cluster analysis of moral discour in India and the Unite
d States (data first reported in Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller, 1987), and its utility was later demonstrated in studies in Brazil (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993) and the United States (Haidt & Hersh, 2001; Jenn, 1997). In each ca, educated cular Westerners revealed a narrower moral domain, more heavily focud on the ethics of autonomy, while other groups made greater u of two or all three of the ethics. Haidt and Joph (2004) wanted to go beyond discour patterns and arch for the psychological systems that give ri to moral intuitions around the world. They examined veral comprehensive theories of morality and values (including Shweder’s, but also Fiske, 1992, and Schwartz & Bilsky, 1990) as well as lists of human universals (Brown, 1991) and a description of the social lives of chimpanzees (de Waal, 1996) to try to identify the kinds of intuitions and automatic emotional reactions that appear widely across cultures, along with the social functions for which the intuitions and emotions may have evolved. Haidt and Joph concluded that there are five psychological systems, each with its own evolutionary history, that give ri to moral intuitions across cultures3. Each system is akin to a kind of taste bud, producing affective reactions of liking or disliking when certain kinds of patterns are perceived in the social world. Cultures then vary in the degree to which they construct, value, and teach virtues bad on the five intuitive foundations. The five foundations are:
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3 Haidt and Joph (2004) focud on four foundations, but suggested in a footnote that ingroup concerns are likely to be a parate foundation, rather than a part of the hierarchy foundation. Haidt and Bjorklund (in press) discusd all five foundations.
