#moral foundations

Moral Foundations has a "care/harm" valence which talks about how much someone's values are influenced by a desire to care for people or harm people. It's one of five (or six) Moral Foundations in the theory. It has nothing to do with justifying one's actions, only with measuring what kinds of moral arguments will be most persuasive to others because of their value systems. There's nothing in the theory about harm reduction, or any connection with justifying behavior. Your acquaintance wildly misread my writing and/or the Moral Foundations theory.

I wrote a summary of someone else's theory on tumblr, for a totally different reason; your friend misread the re-posted words on reddit and is applying the theory badly. I can't make any of that my responsibility and all I've got to go on is your description of their behavior. So I'm not going to float an opinion about your friend except to say that Moral Foundations doesn't apply here.

Moral Foundations Test

I haven’t fully discerned how I feel about it, despite having read some of his (and his coauthors’) research that the book is based on (Moral Foundations theory).

But what I do find striking is that I’m only a chapter in and I already suddenly feel like I understand fandom discourse / fandom purity culture so. much. better. than I did before. From the bizarre rationalizations about harm that don’t hold water to the way some fandom folks approach taboos as if they are pure (moral) evil to how someone might end up on one side of these debates vs. another.

I took the test on YourMorals.com based on Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral foundations. According to Haidt, there are five aspects of morality: care/harm, fairness, loyalty to one’s in-group, respect for authority, and purity/disgust, which includes ideas you find repulsive. Liberal morality (shown in blue) is centered primarily on care and harm reduction, and conservative morality is more evenly distributed, but compared to liberals have a greater respect for authority and in-group loyalty, and a reduced tolerance for disgust. 

There are a few criticisms that can be made. Authority here refers to traditional institutions of authority: the church, the military, etc. Had academia or science been included I assume liberals would score higher, but overall I find this to be sound.