AKA Moral Dumbfounding AKA Moral Blindspots

Source
Jonathan Haidt's A Righteous Mind

Statements that confound liberals: Are the following statements immoral?

Right wing say YES.
Left wing struggle because there isn't a clear value being violated, but they don't feel right.

• A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house.  They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.
• Cutting up a US flag and using it to clean the bathroom
• Brother and sister kissing each other and/or having non-reproductive intercourse
• Others involving cannibalism
• A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken.  But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it.  Then he cooks it and eats it.

Is this morally wrong? Hard to say. Definitely taboo! And maybe for good reason!

But "I think it's disgusting and they shouldn't have done it, but I don't know that it's morally wrong" is a weak statement.

From that framework, easy to see why right wing may see lefties as immoral.

Other dumbfoundings

(source)

• The participant is asked to drink from a glass of juice both before and after a sterilized cockroach has been dipped into it.
• The participant is offered two dollars to sign a piece of paper and then rip it up; on the paper are the words "I, (participant's name), hereby sell my soul, after my death, to Scott Murphy, for the sum of two dollars." At the bottom of the page a note was printed that said: "this is not a legal or binding contract"

What makes a moral?

• Authority (vs independence)
• Fairness / Harm
• Strong Condemnation (e.g. smoking, soul example above)
• Universal applicability (unsure about this one)

Values by Politics (see note)

source (March 2023)

Left

• Care / Harm (kindness, gentleness, nurturance)
• Fairness / cheating (justice, rights, autonomy)
  • Sometimes (but not always) considered to be about equality as well.
    • The preferred term is "proportionality", which conservatives also endorse.

Right

• Fairness / Harm
• Loyalty / Betrayal (self sacrifice for the group, patriotism, one for all, all for one)
• Authority / Subversion (leadership, followership, deference for authority, respect for traditions)
• Sanctity / degradation (disgust, contamination, living in an elevated, noble, less carnal way. "body is a temple" (an idea not unique to religion!))
  • See also flag example, above
  • See also roach example, above

The right cares about more things and balances them! The left "only" cares about fairness and harm.

A sixth value?

(possibly) Liberty / Oppression (resentment towards dominators and those restricting liberty)

• Hatred of bullies
• At odds with authority
• Unions?

Another source discussing the 5 moral foundations and how they split by conservatives vs liberals (Labour), with a focus on how this manifests on Twitter

The findings are in line with what Haidt anticipates. The Labour account tweeted marginally more about care (50% vs 48%) and a lot more fairness (49% vs 30%). Whereas the Conservative feed featured far more references to loyalty (54% vs 28%) plus authority (78% vs 19%). Note that both foundations were even alluded to in the party moto: “strong and stable leadership in the national interest”. And although neither profile posted often about purity, this was also a more frequent topic on the Tory one (11% vs 8%).

See Also

• Right Wing vs Left Wing Values

Note: it's a little unfair to call this left/right when it's more correct that this is correlated with socioeconomic status moreso even than cultural background (source)