Why The Right Is Morally Right

The world’s top moral psychologist’s research shows that mankind, as a species, is hardwired for capitalism.

It was while surfing the net idly that I chanced upon Jonathan Haidt. I had never heard of him, and obviously I had no clue that he was the rock star of an area of study that has now become a full-fledged discipline: Moral Psychology.

Haidt is currently professor of business ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and, according to his website, works ‘with economists and other social scientists to figure out how to make businesses, non-profits, cities, and other systems work more efficiently and ethically by doing ethical system design’. But what shot him to fame was his work, at the University of Virginia, on morality and political belief.

His insights, based on the structure of morality he had developed—Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), rocketed him on to the lecture circuit, especially among US Democratic Party supporters who couldn’t figure out why Democrats had done so badly in US elections since 1980 (with the notable exception of William Jefferson Clinton).

Halfway through Barack Obama’s first Presidential campaign, worried that he would also go the way of previous Democratic Party candidates Al Gore and John Kerry, Haidt published an essay What Makes People Vote Republican? on the influential website Edge.org, advising Democrats on how they could talk about policy issues that would activate voters at a moral level. The essay went viral and may have contributed, however marginally, to Obama’s win.

MFT, based on more than a decade of multidisciplinary and cross-cultural research (for instance, Haidt spent a year in Bhubaneshwar studying Hindu moral structures), says that though morality varies a great deal across cultures, it still exhibits many similarities and recurrent themes. MFT proposes that several innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of ‘intuitive ethics’. Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world.

MFT originally identified five foundations:

Care/ Harm: This underlies the virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance. So we care for our children, empathise with famine-stricken people on the other side of the planet, and love cute cartoon characters like Pikachu in Pokemon or the Powerpuff Girls.

Fairness/ Cheating: Related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism (the basis of all good partnerships), this foundation generates ideas of justice, trustworthiness and rights. Today, Haidt has modified this concept, with radical implications (more of that later).

Loyalty/ Betrayal: This is the basis of concepts like patriotism, self-sacrifice and going into deep depression every time Brazil fails to win the soccer World Cup. It also underlies our feelings of rage at people who we consider traitors to our group or cause.

Authority/ Subversion: We have a long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This is the foundation of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions. The associated emotions would be respect—for, say, the Dalai Lama—and fear—for that hellhound of a boss you are reporting to.

Sanctity/ Degradation: In his first few weeks in Bhubaneshwar, Haidt was intrigued by the emphasis Hindus appear to place on bathing, food choices, and concerns about who and what one has touched. Why do Hindu gods care about the state of their devotees’ bodies? he wondered. He then realized that it’s not just Hindu gods; the Koran and the Hebrew Bible reveal similar concerns, and many Christians believe that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’.

The sanctity foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way, and the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants. It also forms the basis of the moral disgust we feel towards pedophiles or wife-beaters.

Later, a sixth (still provisional) foundation was added: Liberty/ Oppression. This, most probably, evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully and constraint others. The hatred of bullies and dominators motivates people to come together, in solidarity, to oppose or take down the oppressor. The Liberty foundation obviously operates in tension with the Authority foundation. We all recognize some kinds of authority as legitimate in some contexts, but we are also wary of those who claim to be leaders unless they have first earned our trust. We’re vigilant for signs that they’ve crossed the line into self-aggrandizement and tyranny.

So what do these five-and-a-half foundations of morality, as enunciated by MFT, have to do with being left-wing or right-wing (Haidt uses the US terminology of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’)? Plenty, as Haidt’s subsequent research showed.

Over the web, Haidt and his team has administered what they call the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) to hundreds of thousands of people (you too can take the test at yourmorals.org), and correlated their responses to various moral-choice questions to their stated political beliefs (from ‘very liberal’ to ‘very conservative’). The respondent is asked how strongly she agrees or disagrees with statements like ‘When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone is treated fairly’, and ‘People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed’.

(In live interviews, the team studies responses to stories like these: ‘A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a frozen chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.’ Most people would find it disgusting, but no one is harmed, so is it morally wrong? Why would you not, for instance, consider it a more efficient use of natural resources?)

The site has been up since 2007, and the results consistently show that a left-leaning person values Care and Fairness far more than Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity, while a right-leaning person endorses all five foundations more or less equally (These results are from before the Liberty foundation was added to MFT). But hard right-wingers (who describe themselves, in standard US terminology, as ‘very conservative’) value Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity above Care and Fairness.

When the Liberty/ Oppression foundation was added to the matrix, it was found that both left and right valued Liberty. As Haidt explains: ‘This foundation supports the egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism of the left, as well as the don’t-tread-on-me and give-me-liberty anti-government anger of libertarians and some conservatives.’

Thus, the left-leaning person has a three-foundation morality while a right-leaning one uses all six. It would be interesting to analyse the 2014 Lok Sabha elections using Haidt’s theories. Think of some of Narendra Modi’s rallying cries as he campaigned. ‘India first’.

In fact, Haidt says that he was perturbed enough to write his Edge.org essay when he saw Obama’s Republican Party opponent John McCain launching his slogan ‘Country First’, while Obama spoke about being ‘a fellow citizen of the world’ and ‘global citizenship’.

Back to Modi. ‘Give me a strong government, I’ll give you a strong India’ (Authority and Loyalty).

‘I have sold tea, but I never sold my country.’ (Fairness, Loyalty and Sanctity).

One could go on.

But let’s go deeper. The MFT test results indicate that right-leaners are more willing than their left counterparts to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their other moral objectives.

And this, though Haidt does not say so explicitly, is the fundamental difference, at a moral level, between socialism and capitalism.

Haidt has been continuously refining his questionnaires and drilling deeper into the data over the years. By 2011, he had reached an extremely interesting conclusion about the Fairness/ Cheating foundation. He had started off, assuming—going by the conventional wisdom of social psychology—that fairness was about reciprocal altruism. If A covers for B at work when the boss is on a rampage, and B later refuses to give A a lift home, A thinks B has cheated him—it’s just not fair.

But as the data accumulated, Haidt realised that people considered Fairness not in terms of individual transactions, but in community terms. Whether they expressed it that way or not, they thought of Fairness entirely in terms of Proportionality.

To put it simply, we humans want people to be rewarded in proportion to their contribution, we do not want everyone to be rewarded equally. In Haidt’s words (from his book The Righteous Mind): ‘When people work together on a task, they generally want to see the hardest workers get the largest gains. People often want equality of outcomes, but that is because it is so often the case that people’s inputs were equal. When people divide up money, or any other kind of reward, equality is just a special case of the broader principle of proportionality.

When a few members of a group contributed far more than the others—or, even more powerfully, when a few contributed nothing—most adults do not want to see the benefits distributed equally.’ It’s important to note that Haidt found this to be true across the spectrum—from hard left-wingers to half-crazed rightists.

Oops, there falls Marx. There goes socialism. We are hardwired to militate against the principle of ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. Of course, we have known this instinctively, and we have watched the descent and fall of Communism, but Haidt’s research tells us that this aversion to Marxist principles lies at the very core of mankind’s moral values. It is Fair Competition and Just Rewards that we feel is morally correct.

This also tells us why political policies based on doles and entitlement economics do not work in the long run. It tells us that even if governments give people money to perform some meaningless tasks that develop no skills, there will be some in that group who will still work a bit harder and, against all odds, develop some skills, and want to move on and up and dissociate themselves from the freeloaders. This is a profound finding because it goes beyond economic arguments.

Because morality, most evolutionary biologists and social psychologists have now agreed, is first intuition—an automatic biological process, and then—and to a much lesser degree—a rational or strategic decision (but that’s another story).

Haidt describes himself as decidedly left-of-centre. But as a scientist, he has proved that competition, individual aspiration and free markets are something that is deeply ingrained in us as a species, as morally right.