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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Eight - The Conservative Advantage - Continued
[Rick Santelli, in February 2009, voices The Tea Party’s opposition to the] $75 billion program to help homeowners who had borrowed more money than they could now repay... “The government is promoting bad behavior.” He then urged President Obama to... hold a national referendum to see if we really wanted to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water... This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?... [sic]
p177 ...in fact Santelli was arguing for the law of karma.
p178 It took me a long time to understand fairness because, like many people who study morality, I had thought of fairness as a form of enlightened self-interest...
In the last ten years, however, evolutionary theorists have realized that reciprocal altruism is not so easy to find among nonhuman species... It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.
...Reciprocity works great for pairs of people, who can play tit for tat, but in groups it’s usually not in an individual’s self-interest to be the enforcer -- the one who punishes slackers. Yet punish we do, and our propensity to punish turns out to be one of the keys to large-scale cooperation...
p179 [Another clever experiment shows that] ...Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. And just as Glaucon argued in his ring of Gyges example, when the threat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.
Why [in the experiment I skipped] did most players pay [their funds] to punish [people who were not carrying their water]? In part, because it felt good to do so. We hate to see people take without giving. We want to see cheaters and slackers “get what’s coming to them.” We want the law of karma to run its course, and we’re willing to help enforce it.
p180 When people trade favors, both parties end up equal, more or less, and so it is easy to think (as I had) that reciprocal altruism was the source of moral intuitions about equality. But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se. The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors.
...we began to notice that in our data, concerns about political equality were related to a dislike of oppression and a concern for victims, not a desire for reciprocity. And if the love of political equality rests on the Liberty/oppression and Care/harm foundations rather than the Fairness/cheating foundation, then the Fairness foundation no longer has a split personality; it’s no longer about equality and proportionality. It is primarily about proportionality.
When people work together on a task, they generally want to see the hardest workers get the largest gains. People often want equality of outcomes, but that is because it is so often the case that people’s inputs are equal. When people divide up money, or any other kind of reward, equality is just a special case of the broader principle of proportionality. When a few members of a group contributed far more than the others -- or, even more powerfully, when a few contributed nothing -- most adults do not want to see the benefits distributed equally.
... now... we can look beyond individuals trying to choose partners (which I talked about in the last chapter). We can look more closely at people’s strong desires to protect their communities from cheaters, slackers, and free riders, who, if allowed to continue their ways without harassment, would cause others to stop cooperating, which would cause society to unravel. The Fairness foundation supports righteous anger when anyone cheats you directly... But it also supports a more generalized concern with cheaters, leeches, and anyone else who “drinks the water” rather than carries it for the group.
p181 In a large industrial society with a social safety net, the current triggers [of the Fairness foundation] are likely to include people who rely upon the safety net for more that an occasional lifesaving bounce. Concerns about the abuse of the safety net explains... the man who did not want his tax dollars going to “a non-producing, welfare collecting, single mother, crack baby producing future democrat.” It explains the conservative’s list of reasons why people vote Democratic such as “laziness” and “You despise people who work for their money, live their own lives, and don’t rely on the government for help cradle to grave.” It explains Santelli’s rant about bailing out homeowners, many of whom had lied on their mortgage applications to qualify for large loans they did not deserve...
A personal aside here, I got one of those 1990's loans that banks shouldn't have been making (I was a free-lance programmer with no guaranteed source of income). I didn't actually lie -- so far as I can recall, and I tend to remember things like that -- but that was because they were so eager to make the loans that they didn't bother to ask the obvious questions. I paid off my 30 year mortgage in about 10 years, and am very grateful to the idiot bankers who made these loans. If I hadn't been forced to buy my apartment; and if the banks weren't in the middle of a sort of banking rave at that moment, I wouldn't be able to live in San Francisco. So from my point of view, it all worked out for the best.
Three Versus Six
...The various moralities found on the political left tend to rest most strongly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundation. These two foundations support ideals of social justice, which emphasize compassion for the poor and a struggle for political equality among the subgroups that comprise society. Social justice movements emphasize solidarity -- they call for people to come together to fight the oppression of bullying, dominating elites. (This is why there is no separate equality foundation, People don’t crave equality for it’s own sake; they fight for equality when they perceive that they are being bullied or dominated, as during the American and French revolutions, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s.)
Invoking the American and French revolutions here may have been a mistake. My understanding of the American Revolution is that it was entirely in agreement with what is given here as conservative or libertarian morality. The Colonists wanted to be left alone to trade with whomever they pleased and to exploit the Native American lands to the west without restriction. Just as the secessionists of the Confederate States of America wished to exploit their “property” as they saw fit. The bullying and domination was that of a parent refusing to allow a child to set the cat on fire.
The French Revolution (and the recent Occupy movement) are somewhat more complex as they involve coalitions with different agendas. The moderate/liberal faction was indeed attempting to redress perceived wrongs. But the more radical factions -- besides simply wanting to see things burn -- had class or faction favoring regime change and wealth reallocation in mind.
p182 Everyone -- left, right, and center -- cares about Care/harm, but... liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering, compared to conservatives and especially libertarians.
Everyone -- left, right, and center -- cares about Liberty/oppression, but each political faction cares in a different way. In the contemporary United States, liberals are most concerned about the rights of certain vulnerable groups (e.g., racial minorities, children, animals). and they look to government to defend the weak against oppression by the strong. Conservatives, in contrast, hold more traditional ideas of liberty as the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the groups that liberals care most about. (Note 56. Berlin 1997/1958 referred to this kind of liberty as “negative liberty” -- the right to be left alone. He pointed out that the left had developed a new concept of “positive liberty” during the twentieth century -- a conception of the rights and resources that people needed in order to enjoy liberty.) For example, small business owners overwhelmingly support the Republican Party in part because they resent the government telling them how to run their businesses under its banner of protecting workers, minorities, consumers, and the environment. This helps explain why libertarians have sided with the Republican Party in recent decades. Libertarians care about liberty almost to the exclusion of all other concerns, and their conception of liberty is the same as that of the Republicans... the right to be left alone, free from government interference.
Except -- for the Republicans -- when drugs or sex is involved when they want government all up in your business.
p183 The Fairness/cheating foundation is about proportionality and the law of karma. It is about making sure that people get what they deserve, and do not get things they do not deserve. Everyone -- left, right, and center -- cares about proportionality; everyone gets angry when people take more than they deserve. But conservatives care more, and they rely on the Fairness foundation more heavily -- once fairness is restricted to proportionality. For example, how relevant is it to your morality whether “everyone is pulling their own weight”? Do you agree that “employees who work hardest should be paid the most”? Liberals don’t reject these items, but they are ambivalent. Conservatives, in contrast, endorse items such as these enthusiastically.
You could look at the antipathy on the left for the very rich and for corporations to be this same, “people get what they deserve, and do not get things they do not deserve”.
Liberals may think that they own the concept of karma... but a morality based on compassion and concerns about oppression forces you to violate karma (proportionality) in many ways... liberals are often uncomfortable with the negative side of karma -- retribution... After all, retribution causes harm, and harm activates the Care/harm foundation. A recent study even found that liberal professors give out a narrower range of grades than do conservative professors... [who are] more willing to reward the best students and punish the worst.
The remaining three foundations -- Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation -- show the biggest and most consistent partisan differences. Liberals are ambivalent about these foundations at best, whereas social conservatives embrace them. (Libertarians have little use for them, which is why they tend to support liberal positions on social issues such as gay marriage, drug use, and laws to “protect” the American flag.)
p184 ...Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm. Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.
p185 ...Why do rural and working-class Americans generally vote Republican when it is the Democratic Party that wants to redistribute money more evenly?
...[They are] in fact voting for their moral interests... they don’t want their nation to devote itself primarily to the care of victims and the pursuit of social justice. Until Democrats understand the Durkheimian vision of society and the difference between a six-foundation morality and a three-foundation morality, they will not understand what makes people vote Republican...
Class morality - Haidt is looking at this from the perspective of current American politics, but how do these moral foundations map with pre-bourgeois class structures? The peasants. The Gentry. The Church.
I'd guess they were all conservative and socicentric. I still think the nobility is a special -- individualistic -- case. And recalling Thorstein Veblen's brilliant insight into the similarity between the upper and under classes, whatever would pass for an underclass in a traditional society would also probably reject many moral foundations. But, then again, Veblen was mostly looking at Calvinist attitudes toward work. Still, the upper and under (criminal) classes both tend to act as parasites on the remainder of the population, and that would seem to be common to traditional and bourgeois societies.
And I have to repeat, once again, what I learned from Annie Dillard, that in nature 10% of insects are parasitic. I think there is a similar proportion among humans.
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