Since my last journal, I’ve skimmed/skipped a couple chapters here and there in order to really get into the meat of my current focus: Moral thinking and how it relates to our partisan politics (mainly Liberals vs. Conservatives).
In essence, Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory has 6 pillars (with the last one being added on later): care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. The reason why we have these inclinations has to do with natural selection, biology, etc. I could go more in-depth on how these moral foundations evolved, but I’ll save that for the future.
Haidt believes that conservatives have a definite advantage in politics because they tend to place more equal emphasis across the six various moral foundations. Liberals on the other hand, value care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression noticeably more than the other foundations. And sometimes, even interpretations of the same moral value will differ. For example, Liberal fairness is often related to equality, while on the right, fairness means proportionality. This means that people get rewarded what they contribute, even if it guarantees unequal outcomes. After reading that, I thought: “Then aren’t both sides believing in the same noble truth i.e to be fair to each other? Everyone wants the same good concept! So how can politics be so polarizing when they’re simply different interpretations?” Simply because one side will believe the other doesn’t care at all about a certain foundation, when in reality they do — just in a different way.
To corroborate this as a Democrat myself, I often can’t understand why conservatives/those on the right would ever make certain policies. For example, rural/working-class Americans often vote Republican when it is the Democrats who want to distribute the money more evenly. This truly boggles me on how this could ever logically make sense. Aren’t they just voting against their economic self-interest? But if you consider the Moral Foundations Theory, rural/working-class voters are simply voting for their moral interests — a society that values self-control, duty, loyalty, some authority, etc. in order to get things done because if you believe in a more individualistic society like Liberals, conservatives believe that results in selfish human desires taking over. This would ruin the fragile balance of the country. Hence, rural/working-class voters don’t want their country to be focused on taking care of victims.
After reading/skimming this passage, it made more sense. I feel like in partisan politics, we never truly understand the other side because we haven’t been in their shoes, to be cliche. We impose our different moral interpretations on others without considering their circumstances. In reality, left vs. right probably each have their own lists of pros and cons that boil down to what you think is most important for a human to have.
This concludes journal seven. I think I went on slight tangent at the end and may have lost focus a little? Anyways, I think my next journal is going to be relatively similar to this one because I want to fill in the cracks of knowledge. Today, I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I wanted to journal because I ended up getting absorbed into my book, skimming chapters in order to reach the next idea and just barely keeping the main content intact in my brain. But I had to put something down, lest I forget it! Simply put, details are needed!
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