Will Wilkinson (The Fly Bottle) discusses moral psychology with Jonathan Haidt on Blogging Heads. It's worth a listen.
Lizardbreath (don't let the name put you off) has a quick summary and thoughtful comments on Haidt:
[Haidt's] big insight is that people experience moral intuitions along five axes: harm reduction, reciprocity and fairness, purity, respect for authority, and in-group loyalty. Of those five axes, highly educated upper-middle-class Westerners, and in that group liberals more than conservatives, tend to define only the first two axes, harm reduction and fairness, as really about morality, and think of the other three as being matters of personal preference or emotional reaction rather than right and wrong; in contrast, most people outside that fairly small class feel that all five axes are of comparable moral importance. In political matters, he argues that liberals are disadvantaged by speaking this impoverished language of morality: most people feel that in-group loyalty, purity, and respect for authority are matters of fundamental importance, and liberals don't give those concerns the weight they deserve - to create a more appealing message, liberals would need to talk more about those issues.
Descriptively, I can buy this as a characterization of liberal versus conservative morality, and agree that conservatives are more in tune with most people than liberals in this regard. But [Haidt's] advice to focus on the three neglected axes of morality, particularly in the US, is nutty and unworkable. Liberal morality doesn't focus on harm reduction and fairness arbitrarily, it focuses on them because they are the only bases for morality that function reasonably when you are trying to consider the claims of people outside of your own ingroup. Read the rest...
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