#dismediation

As I watch Trump pick his cabinet and staff, I’m trying to think of a way to coherently describe why this might be bad for people to those who don’t already agree with me.  I keep coming across the work of psychologist  Jonathan Haidt: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

Long story short, there are 6 moral criteria (five in earlier versions) that people use to make moral decisions

Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm. Fairness or proportionality: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating. Liberty: the loathing of tyranny; opposite of oppression. [new addition] Loyalty or ingroup: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal. Authority or respect: obeying tradition and legitimate authority; opposite of subversion. Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

In the linked video and elsewhere, Haidt does a good job of giving examples of how we can frame arguments differently for different ideologies.  But he never really addresses two big problems:

1. The typically conservative values of Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity are fairly, well, slippery, right?  They’re all dependent on the identity of the person, authority, or group in question without any qualifiers.  If I can condemn anything as long as I can successfully label it ‘impure’, then why should that foundation get the same standing as Fairness or Care?  I admit what constitutes fairness and caring across cultures and ideologies is not uniform, but I’d argue that they are more measurable and have a tighter consensus around them than the others.

It’s easy to see that someone who has broken their leg has come to harm.  But it’s less easy to judge if that same person has become impure by breaking their leg.  Your immediate reaction might be ‘of course they’ve not become impure’, but how are you determining that, given that you’re the kind of person who otherwise uses that foundation to make moral justifications?  Is it just that your church, or personal feelings of disgust happen not to make any negative rulings on broken legs?  And, is that really a sufficient basis for morality?  Further, how can you use this to convince a conservative of anything while these standards are being consistently reinforced within their community?  I can try to make some kind of argument from authority, but because there’s no qualifier on who should be that authority or what counts as authority, any argument I make can be easily beaten by louder or more numerous voices.

2. I’m not convinced that Conservatives are particularly consistent when applying the foundations of  Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.  Would they still stand by them as moral foundations when they are an outsider, on the wrong side of authority, or considered impure by other standards of purity?  After reading through the research, I did not find that this was explored.

For example, we could ask a typical Christian Conservative American whether or not it’s OK for a city or neighborhood with a Muslim majority to enforce, say, the wearing of burqas for anyone passing through, regardless of religious affiliation.  I don’t know this, but I imagine they’d reject the idea.  If I were to point out that such a city ordinance has a moral basis built on Authority, Loyalty, and Sanctity of the community that created it, I imagine they would not accept that reasoning and would anticipate some appeal to Fairness or Care (any conservative reading, I invite your input).  If that’s the case, and Conservatives only accept the standards of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity when they are the beneficiaries, doesn’t that disqualify those standards.  Or at least make them secondary?