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Concept
Moral foundations theory
Summary
Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder. It has been subsequently developed by a diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. The theory proposes six foundations:
Care/Harm
Fairness/Cheating
Loyalty/Betrayal
Authority/Subversion
Sanctity/Degradation
Liberty/Oppression.
Its authors remain open to the addition, subtraction, or modification of the set of foundations.
Although the initial development of moral foundations theory focused on cultural differences, subsequent work with the theory has largely focused on political ideology. Various 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), and have suggested that it can explain variation in opinion on politically charged issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion.
The two main sources are "The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism" (2013) and "Mapping the Moral Domain" (2011). In the first Haidt and Graham describe their work as looking, as anthropologists, at the evolution of morality and finding the common ground between each variation. In the second they describe and defend their method, known as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Through studies that jointly consisted of over 11,000 people, from a variety of ages and political beliefs, they found results that supported their prediction.
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.
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