Does the Political Right Have a More Complex Morality Than the Left?

If so, this could help explain the growing political divide.

Source: Click On Detroit

This article is based on Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Highly recommended!

Have you ever wondered why it’s so difficult to talk to people on the other side of the political spectrum? We call them words like “crazy”, “stupid”, “racist”, and “naive”. But, could it really be that simple? Or, could something else be going on that makes understanding each other difficult at the best of times, and impossible at the worst?

Moral Foundations Theory, examined by Jonathan Haidt in his excellent book, The Righteous Mind, suggests that there are at least six dimensions to morality. Depending on where people fall on the political spectrum, they will tend to value certain dimensions more than others.

According to Haidt, people on the political right tend to value all six dimensions roughly equally, while people on the left tend to value three much more than the others. This means that when people on the political right justify their political perspectives, the political left doesn’t register many of their justifications as valid. On the flip side, the political right judges the political left’s justifications as incomplete.

There’s a significant push and pull between the six moral dimensions. Fixating on one, or some, to the neglect of others blinds us to what’s in our best interest. And, despite what you might want to hear, this blindness occurs all along the political spectrum.

In the rest of this article, I’ll describe the six moral dimensions, show how they differ across political affiliation, and give examples where neglecting some of these dimensions causes us to make costly mistakes.

For simplicity, I’ll be calling people on the political left “progressives”, people on the political right “social conservatives”, and people who value liberty above all else “libertarians”.

The six moral dimensions

Here are the six moral dimensions, as described by Haidt:

• Care / Harm: We feel compassion for those who are vulnerable…