Liberals Don’t Understand the Importance of Order

How much pain can you tolerate?

Jonathan Haidt is a left-of-center social psychologist I’ve referenced a number of times before because he has done some amazing work on the moral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Basically, Haidt would say that you can break morality down into six areas:

1) Care/Harm

2) Fairness/Cheating

3) Liberty/Oppression

4) Loyalty/Betrayal

5) Authority/Subversion

6) Sanctity/Degradation

According to Haidt, the liberal sense of morality (ahem, such as it is) revolves around the first three areas in that list – care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression, while conservatives tend to weigh all six factors.

Because conservatives get all six factors, while liberals only really care about three of them, this leads to conservatives understanding liberals much better than liberals understand conservatives, who struggle to understand the importance of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.

Haidt would not refer to liberals as morally stunted because of their shor…