Understanding and Applying Morality: Haidt Moral Foundation Theory

When I reflect on life from child to adulthood, I reflect on all of the moments this life entails. The good, the bad, the ugly and the gloomy. All in all, I never forget the understandings and teaching from those around me. Constantly employing the perspective of stabilization and morals. “Learn to think before you do”. It is with this thinking that I moved through life. Mistakes were made and I’ve learned to grow from these.

Morality is known as the principles that distinct right from wrong and good from bad. Johnathan Haidt’s moral foundation theory was grounded in the idea that moralities differ while still sharing the same fundamental characteristics of life. Haidt essentially believes that as individuals we are all equipped with the ability to distinguish emotion through approval and disapproval. “Intuitive Ethics” is what he refers to it as, this is our minds intuition to react to human behavior. Haidt envisioned Moral Foundations theory as “facilitating new approaches to resolving and understanding moral conflicts, through the recognition that cultures built their unique moralities on top of a foundation of shared, universal intuitions.”

He centralized his theory on five themes. Harm/care related to our innate instinct to protect others, Fairness/Reciprocity related to our instinct to punish those who cheat, Ingroup/Loyalty which intertwines with our ability to maintain closeness and share a sense of devotion, Authority/Respect which entails our innate ability to know when to obey those above us or in high positions and Purity/Sanctity which refers to our distaste against things that are against our beliefs. Throughout the course of this paper, I aim to relate each of these themes to various aspects of my life and I will explain in depth how these themes guided me through my own personal quest of morality.

Harm/Care

It’s interesting because whether we realize it or not, we employ all five of these themes in our daily lives. When Haidt first proposed this theme, he correlated it with a mammal’s adaptive challenge to caring for offspring. “Rather, mammalian life has always been a competition in which females whose intuitive reactions to their children were optimized to detect signs of suffering, distress, or neediness raised more children to adulthood than did their less sensitive sisters.” (Graham,J., Haidt, J., Koleva,S. , Motyl, M. Iyer, R., Wojck, S.P., & Ditto, P.H. 2012) Most mothers have an innate ability to protect their children, this in return increases their sense of watchfulness which allows them to build a different type of bond with their offspring. I look to new parents and most of them have the same mindset, “I will do anything for my child” and I think to myself, “Wow, How on earth could anyone love someone, a stranger, so much to where they would go to the ends of the earth just to protect them”.

Haidt believes that we as mammals instinctively have the ability to care for one another whether without having to put in much effort. In life, we see things every day that evokes this theme from within us. Whether it be a Facebook video that just shows a Samaritan helping a homeless person and we get that warm and fuzzy feeling inside or the mistreatment of people on the news and social media where feelings of anger and protection arise. This is our distinctive ability to care about other people resurfacing.

Ingroup/Loyalty

I feel as though, this theme goes hand in hand with the harm/care theme mentioned above. The theme of loyalty “Underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.” Truthfully, as previously mentioned, I can’t speak from the standpoint of a mother, but I can say that from the perspective of an offspring – the sense of loyalty that my mother in particular has towards her three children is like no other and vice versa. Throughout life, I have gone to great heights to protect my mother, even when she felt as if she didn’t need it. It is with this learned sense of loyalty that I began to instill it in everyday relationships. Before allowing myself to open up to an individual I have to have 100% assurance that they are just as devoted to me as I am to them. I make sure that this be the case with anyone who I encounter and consider a close person. This being the focus of Haidt’s loyalty theme, it is with this mindset that I will hope to instill in my future children.

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Ideally, I would prospect that the virtue of loyalty helps shape the political ideology that I hold near and dear. I’m speaking from a sense of varying social movements rather the political party I associate myself with. With this theme, I am able to assert my beliefs into varying aspects within the political world. Whether it be my acquired allegiance to the #TimesUp or #BlackLivesMatter movements. I truly believe that the leaders who commenced these movements resonated a sense of loyalty within me because their dedication to said programs. I believed their sense of urgency which encouraged me to follow them on their journey to find truth and resolutions. This allowed me to place more faith into the organization so much so to where I can speak and fight alongside other people who share this same allegiance.

Fairness/Reciprocity

This is a theme that we were all well acquainted with growing up. “Treat others the way you would like to be treated”. This was plainly what was to be said in our morning pledge every day in elementary school. This theme is fairly self-explanatory, with whatever you may venture through in life, always maintain a positive sense of justice and impartiality. In the Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism it was stated that “The original triggers of the Fairness/cheating foundation involved acts of cheating or cooperation by one’s own direct interaction partners, but the current triggers of the foundation can include interactions with inanimate objects (e.g., you put in a dollar, and the machine fails to deliver a soda), or interactions among third parties that one learns about through gossip. People who come to be known as good partners for exchange relationships are praised with virtue words such as fair, just, and trustworthy.” We as a society have become so familiar with the idea of just action and equality that we label not only people as so.

Authority/Subversion

Now, it took me a while to actually gain the mindset to apply this theme to my everyday life. According to Haidt in his NYU stern journal , he realized that with Authority and Subversion “ the challenge of negotiating rank in the social hierarchies that existed throughout most of human and pre-human evolution made it adaptive for individuals to recognize signs of status and show proper respect and deference upwards, while offering some protection and showing some restraint toward subordinates.” It is with this that humans or mammals have the innate ability to understand rank and respect. Relative to my life, the idea to “respect authority” was always a central part of teachings instilled in me and my siblings, but I had a hard time actually conveying this principle. My mindset was always, “why should I respect someone who doesn’t respect me”? A snarky child I was. For the life of me, I couldn’t fathom the idea that we were to respect people simply because they were older or simply knew more than me.

It wasn’t until I started to move through adolescence that I understood why. It’s not because Haidt said it to be or even because my mother said that was just what we were to do. It is viewed as morally correct. Granted, I don’t always agree with what someone above me thinks to be correct but there is a right and wrong way to disagree and even as a young adult, needless to say, I am still learning and coming to grasps with this theme.

Purity/Sanctity

The final of Haidt’s five themes employs the idea of both disgust and contamination. Haidt believed that this foundational theme allows for individuals to live life in both and elevated and noble way. He believes that ultimately our body is like a temple therefore we should treat it as such. He relates this to varying pathogens and contaminates we may come across and the profound disgust we get towards things immoral or distasteful. Disgust and the behavioral immune system have come to undergird a variety of moral reactions, e.g., to immigrants and sexual deviants (Faulkner, Schaller, Park, & Duncan, 2004; Navarrete & Fessler, 2006; Rozin, Haidt & McCauley, 2008). This theme can relate to our aversion to things taboo-like. For instance, sexual deviants like bestiality or incest. In a society where we are taught that these things are just morally wrong – any person or thing that goes against this has an ethical and moral uncleanliness to them.

Denominationally, I related this most to the bible and its similar thinking that we should treat our body as a temple. Having been raised as a Christian, a vast majority of the people around me harped on the notion that our bodies are sacred thus we should treat them as such. Granted they referred to outside influences like, body markings like tattoos and piercings etc., As Haidt stated, this theme can be applied to varying aspects of life.

Works Cited

1. Graham, Jesse and Haidt, Jonathan and Koleva, Spassena and Motyl, Matt and Iyer, Ravi and Wojcik, Sean P. and Ditto, Peter H., Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism (November 28, 2012). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2184440
2. Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2009). Planet of the Durkheimians, where community, authority, and sacredness are foundations of morality. In J. Jost, A. C. Kay & H. Thorisdottir (Eds.), Social and psychological bases of ideology and system justification (pp. 371-401). New York: Oxford.
3. Horberg, E. J., Oveis, C., Keltner, D., & Cohen, A. B. (2009). Disgust and the moralization of purity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(6), 963–976. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017423
4. Moral foundations and Loyalty. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/exploring-our-moral-foundations-haidt-loyalty/.
5. Schaller, M., & Park, J. H. (2011). The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(2), 99–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411402596