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Moral foundations theory

Theory in social psychology

  • 12 min read
  • 5 chapters

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The theory's proponents are open to adding, subtracting, and otherwise modifying the content of theory's foundations.

Initial development of moral foundations theory focused on cultural differences. Later work has concentrated on political ideology. Scholars have offered moral foundations theory as an explanation of differences among political progressives (liberals in the American sense), conservatives, and right-libertarians (libertarians in the American sense). Proponents believe that it can explain variation in opinion on politically charged issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and even vaccination.

Origins

Studies on what Haidt and his colleagues termed "moral dumbfounding" preceded the moral foundations theory. Moral dumbfounding is the experience where a person has an intuitive response that an act is moral or immoral, but cannot rationally articulate what makes the act moral or not. Haidt argued that moral dumbfounding supported moral sentimentalism, the philosophical idea that emotion drives moral judgement, over moral rationalism. Work on exploring moral dumbfounding presented individuals with scenarios that did not cause physical harm, such as incest or cannibalism of the dead, to develop a framework based on moral intuitionism. Haidt and Joseph proposed five criteria to identify the potential innate emotional bases of morals:

  1. A common effect on judgement from others
  2. An immediate emotional response
  3. Presence across multiple cultures
  4. Evidence of a biological predisposition
  5. Plausible evolutionary advantage.

Moral foundations theory was first proposed in 2004 by Haidt and Joseph. The theory emerged as a reaction against the developmental rationalist theory of morality associated with Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget, which argues that moral reasoning changes and develops over six stages of moral development, each more adequate than the last in addressing moral complexity. Kohlberg's work emphasized justice as the key concept in moral reasoning, seen as a primarily cognitive activity, and became the dominant approach to moral psychology, heavily influencing subsequent work. Haidt writes that he found Kohlberg's theories unsatisfying from the time he first encountered them in graduate school because they "seemed too cerebral" and lacked a focus on issues of emotion.

In contrast to the dominant theories of morality in psychology at the time, the anthropologist Richard Shweder developed a set of theories emphasizing the cultural variability of moral judgments, but argued that different cultural forms of morality drew on "three distinct but coherent clusters of moral concerns", which he labeled as the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity. Shweder's approach inspired Haidt to begin researching moral differences across cultures, including fieldwork in Brazil and Philadelphia. This work led Haidt to begin developing his social intuitionist approach to morality. This approach, which stood in sharp contrast to Kohlberg's rationalist work, suggested that mostly "moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions" while moral reasoning simply serves largely as a post-hoc rationalization of already formed judgments. Haidt's work and his focus on quick, intuitive, emotional judgments quickly became very influential, attracting sustained attention from an array of researchers.

As Haidt and his collaborators worked within the social intuitionist approach, they began to devote attention to the sources of the intuitions that they believed underlay moral judgments. In a 2004 article published in the journal Daedalus, Haidt and Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality, including the work of Frans de Waal, Donald Brown and Shweder, as well as Alan Fiske's relational models theory and Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values. From their review of these earlier lines of research, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity.

Invoking the notion of preparedness, Haidt and Joseph claimed that each of the ethics formed a cognitive module, whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently. Their Daedalus article became the first statement of moral foundations theory, which Haidt, Graham, Joseph, and others have since elaborated and refined, for example by splitting the originally proposed ethic of hierarchy into the separate moral foundations of ingroup and authority, and by proposing a tentative sixth foundation of liberty.

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