Haidt’s claim is that liberals rely on purity/sacredness relatively less often, but it’s still there. Some of the earlier work on the purity axis put heavy emphasis on sex or sin. Since then, Haidt has acknowledged that the difference between liberals and conservatives might even out if you add food or environmental concerns to purity.
Yeah, environmentalist attitudes towards e.g. GMOs and nuclear power look awfully purity-minded to me. I’m not sure whether I want to count environmentalism/Green thought as part of the mainline Left, though; it’s certainly not central to it, and seems to be its own thing in a lot of ways.
(Cladistically speaking it’s definitely not. But cladistics can get you in trouble when you’re looking at political movements.)
Maybe it’s about rationalization. The same feeling could be expressed by one person as: “this is a heresy” (because “heresy” is their party’s official boo light) and by another person as: “this could harm people” (because “harming people” is their party’s official boo light). But in fact both people just feel the idea is repulsive to them, but can’t quickly explain why.
I think this could be generalized into a model with predictions: If we suppose that it’s easier to get people to nominally than actually abandon one of Haidt’s moral axes (from Wikipedia, to save people some lookups: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation), we should expect that people who disclaim one of the axes will find ways to relabel violations of that axis to make it sound like it’s violating a professed axis.
To be specific, if you have a group that officially disclaims the fairness/cheating axis, I expect they’ll be quick to explain how cheating is a form of harm. Or drop the care/harm axis, and we’ll probably hear about how harm is a form of oppression. And so forth.
Haidt’s claim is that liberals rely on purity/sacredness relatively less often, but it’s still there. Some of the earlier work on the purity axis put heavy emphasis on sex or sin. Since then, Haidt has acknowledged that the difference between liberals and conservatives might even out if you add food or environmental concerns to purity.
Yeah, environmentalist attitudes towards e.g. GMOs and nuclear power look awfully purity-minded to me. I’m not sure whether I want to count environmentalism/Green thought as part of the mainline Left, though; it’s certainly not central to it, and seems to be its own thing in a lot of ways.
(Cladistically speaking it’s definitely not. But cladistics can get you in trouble when you’re looking at political movements.)
Maybe it’s about rationalization. The same feeling could be expressed by one person as: “this is a heresy” (because “heresy” is their party’s official boo light) and by another person as: “this could harm people” (because “harming people” is their party’s official boo light). But in fact both people just feel the idea is repulsive to them, but can’t quickly explain why.
I think this could be generalized into a model with predictions: If we suppose that it’s easier to get people to nominally than actually abandon one of Haidt’s moral axes (from Wikipedia, to save people some lookups: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation), we should expect that people who disclaim one of the axes will find ways to relabel violations of that axis to make it sound like it’s violating a professed axis.
To be specific, if you have a group that officially disclaims the fairness/cheating axis, I expect they’ll be quick to explain how cheating is a form of harm. Or drop the care/harm axis, and we’ll probably hear about how harm is a form of oppression. And so forth.
Related: Fake Morality