nucleation

THEORY-539: Moral judgment draws on several innately prepared intuitive foundations, at least Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity, each a response to a different adaptive challenge, and Sanctity descends from pathogen avoidance rather than from cooperation

3 min read

Properties6
StatusProposed
Tagsmoral-psychology, social-science
SourceLIT-499 — Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism, LIT-502 — Intuitive ethics: how innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues, LIT-500 — Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures
Extended byTHEORY-613 — The Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2's six factors, Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, fit across 19 nations, Equality and Proportionality are nearly uncorrelated in WEIRD nations, and the US split between individualizing and binding foundations appears in only three national networks
RivalsTHEORY-468 — Morality is the set of solutions to recurrent problems of cooperation, so each of the seven cooperation problems game theory identifies yields a moral domain valued in every culture, and behaviour unrelated to cooperation is morally neutral, THEORY-494 — Puritanical norms against harmless bodily pleasures are cooperative morality: people believe cooperation needs self-control, which indulgence erodes and discipline trains, and condemn indulgence as an indirect threat to cooperation, THEORY-626 — Moral judgments are made relative to the social relationship an act is taken to occur within: each of four relational models (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing) carries a moral motive (Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, Proportionality), so the same act can be required under one and wrong under another
PresupposesTHEORY-558 — Moral judgment is usually caused by quick affective intuitions, and moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc search for supporting reasons that changes judgments mainly by triggering intuitions in other people

Graph View

Source

Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik & Ditto (2013), LIT-499, read in full in NOTE-396. Haidt & Joseph (2004), LIT-502, read in NOTE-400, the first statement. Atari et al. (2023), LIT-500, read in NOTE-398, the revised questionnaire.

What was actually shown

The account. Four claims (LIT-499): a first draft of the moral mind is organized in advance of experience, culture edits it, it works through fast intuitions (THEORY-558), and there are several foundations because there were several adaptive challenges. Table 2.1 pairs each foundation with its challenge: Care with protecting children, Fairness with two-way partnerships, Loyalty with coalitions, Authority with hierarchies, Sanctity with communicable disease.

Where the list came from. Haidt & Joseph (LIT-502) counted the concerns shared by five surveys of moral content and found suffering, hierarchy and reciprocity. They added purity from their own work on disgust, and named ingroup as the likeliest fifth (fn. 15). No data are reported there.

Evolutionary models (Table 2.4). Care: kin selection and attachment. Fairness: reciprocal altruism. Loyalty: multilevel selection. Authority: rank and dominance. Sanctity: disgust and the behavioural immune system. Primate and infant evidence is listed for Care, Fairness and Loyalty. Authority has primate evidence only. Sanctity is “not yet shown in NHP or infants”, and is presumed the most recent foundation, “perhaps coevolving with human religiosity” (p. 112).

Revision (LIT-500). The MFQ-2 splits Fairness into Equality and Proportionality, reversing the 2013 chapter’s “We do not believe that there is an ‘equality’ foundation” (p. 114). Six factors fit across 19 nations (THEORY-613).

What this does not say

  • That these five, or six, are the foundations. The chapter grants the list may change (p. 57). Its criteria screen candidates; they do not generate them. Liberty, Efficiency, Ownership and Honesty are named candidates, and the authors suspect Loyalty and Authority may be one.
  • That Sanctity’s origin is shown. Its preparedness evidence is the thinnest in the table. The disgust evidence it relied on was later disputed: a meta-analysis and replications find disgust does not amplify condemnation, and pathogen-free “spiritual purity” violations do not produce disgust’s facial expression (reviewed in LIT-101, NOTE-132).
  • That the foundations were derived from evolutionary theory. They were matched to existing models. The match for Loyalty rests on group-level selection, which the chapter notes is disputed (fn. 5).
  • That pluralism is shown by the MFQ’s factor structure alone. The MFQ-1 fits poorly in several samples (LIT-496, LIT-513), and MFQ purity items form a factor in some samples and not others.

Connections

  • Rivals. Morality-as-cooperation (THEORY-468) derives its domains from games and leaves Sanctity out. Fitouchi, André & Baumard (THEORY-494) explain puritanical condemnation by perceived self-control, not disgust. Rai & Fiske (THEORY-626) fold Sanctity and Loyalty into one motive, Unity.
  • The evidence it rests on. The liberal–conservative profile (THEORY-435) is the theory’s strongest finding, and it is a finding about self-report. That purity is moralized at all (THEORY-632) does not distinguish this account from its rivals; why it is moralized does.

Backlinks