What influences your moral reasoning? What factors do you consider in evaluating something as right or wrong?
In the current issue of Science, Jonathan Haidt has an article titled “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology” regarding research on what influences human moral judgment. The conclusion of surveys was that people who described themselves as liberal focused on “harm” and “fairness.” Self-described conservatives took a more widespread review, with intuitions about ingroup-outgroup dynamics and the importance of loyalty, authority, and the importance of respect and obedience. A graph of the difference looks something like this:
The graph was drafted by asking respondents 15 questions about which considerations are relevant to deciding “whether something is right or wrong.”? Those who described themselves as “very liberal”? gave the highest relevance ratings to questions related to the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations and gave the lowest ratings to questions about the Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity foundations. In other words, the more conservative the participant, the more the first two foundations decrease in relevance and the last three increase. The data in the graph above was aggregated from two surveys citizens of the United States, and data for 476 citizens of the United Kingdom revealed a similar result.
As a rather conservative person myself, I take comfort in that the survey appears to show that the more conservative you are, the more sophisticated moral compass you have. But some may disagree with that (admittedly simplified, and therefore rather ironic) conclusion.
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