![]() ![]() ![]() There’s been no response to that critique so far, Sinn told me. “ Instead, ECT contends that liberalism reflects concern with a wider world, one that includes all people and extends morality to include the natural world.” But that’s only part of the picture, he noted. Haidt also "underspecifies liberalism," Sinn said, by giving it a limited, individualistic focus. In other words, according to this analysis xenophobia and out-group demonization are a feature of "conservative values," not a bug. The former, “binding morality,” reflects the influence of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), while the darker motivations Haidt overlooks reflect "social dominance orientation" (SDO). ![]() This analysis draws on two well-studied ideological attitudes that overwhelm all other factors when it comes to explaining bias or bigotry. As he sees it, that morality "arose because it steeled coalitions against adversarial out-groups,” which also “blends in practice with a darker orientation specifically motivated to dominate and exploit vulnerable out-groups." (Sinn and Hayes' theory carries the somewhat unwieldy label of "evolutionary-coalitional theory," or ECT.) Haidt's “binding morality" idea "underspecifies conservatism," in a crucial sense, Sinn told me. In contrast, Sinn and Hayes explain conservative values in more realistic evolutionary terms, reflecting the navigation of different sorts of threatened harm. Haidt also leaves a great deal unexplained, not least the question of where such values originally came from in our evolutionary past - as well as why and how they can veer into darkness, as they have clearly done with some of the support for Trump, and have done before in human history with distressing frequency and dreadful results. It’s a tantalizing just-so story, satisfying to both conservatives, who feel liberals have disrespected them intellectually, and liberals, who want to be inclusive and fair-minded.īut Haidt’s key claim that “liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral mechanisms (or foundations)” is contradicted by evidence that “moral judgment involves a common template grounded in perceived harm,” as detailed in “ The Unifying Moral Dyad ,” by Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray. Conservatives are "good people" too, Haidt claims, but are concerned with a cluster of three "binding morality" issues, which he defines as "authority/respect," "in-group/loyalty" and "purity/sanctity." In a nutshell, MFT claims that liberals think of morality in narrower, more individualistic terms (focused on such dichotomies as harm vs. Now a new paper by Sinn goes a long way towards fleshing out that alternative and revealing its superior explanatory power. ” It wasn’t the first time I’ve criticized MFT based on specific researchers' work (see here and here ), but it was the most promising in terms of suggesting a compelling alternative approach. What does a more realistic assessment might reveal about ideological motivations?Ībout a month after Donald Trump’s election, long before we had heard the phrase "very fine people on both sides, I wrote a story here questioning the "good people on both sides" logic of Jonathan Haidt's "moral foundations theory,” or MFT, based on a paper by Jeffrey Sinn and Matthew Hayes, “ Replacing the Moral Foundations: An Evolutionary-Coalitional Theory of Liberal-Conservative Differences. More than a year after the violence in Charlottesville, just as midterm campaign rhetoric starts to heat up for, it's a useful moment to examine what's wrong with even the most intellectually serious attempts at the mode of political analysis known as both-sides-ism. Are Donald Trump's supporters driven by immoral hatred, or simply shaped by moral codes that most liberals or leftists don't understand? That question, phrased in more sophisticated and technical terms, has sharply divided political scientists ever since Trump's emergence on the scene - and in fact long before that.
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