❤️🩹⚖️🤝👑😇🗽 Moral Foundations Theory
🤖 AI Summary
🧠 Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) is a social psychological theory that explains the origins of and variations in human moral reasoning. 👨🏫👩🏫 Developed primarily by psychologists 🧠🤝🐘 Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, the theory proposes that our moral judgments are not based on pure reason but are rooted in a set of innate, evolved psychological systems. These systems, or “foundations,” act as a kind of intuitive ethics 🤔 we use to evaluate what’s right and wrong.
🧱 The Moral Foundations
MFT originally identified 🖐️ five, and later 6️⃣ six, foundational domains. 👅 Haidt likens these foundations to taste buds, arguing that while all people possess them, different cultures and individuals “turn up” or “turn down” the importance of each, leading to diverse moral and political views. The six moral foundations are:
- ❤️🩹 Care/Harm: This foundation is based on our ability to feel and dislike the pain of others. 🙏 It underlies virtues like kindness and compassion and motivates us to protect vulnerable individuals.
- ⚖️ Fairness/Cheating: This foundation is linked to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It concerns justice, 🧑⚖️ rights, and the idea that people should be treated fairly and that wrongdoers should be punished.
- 🤝 Loyalty/Betrayal: This foundation is tied to our history as tribal creatures. 🚩 It emphasizes group loyalty, patriotism, and self-sacrifice for the well-being of one’s in-group.
- 👑 Authority/Subversion: This foundation is based on our history of hierarchical social interactions. It values respect for tradition, 🏛️ legitimate authority, and social order.
- 😇 Sanctity/Degradation: This foundation is rooted in the psychology of disgust and contamination. 🧼 It relates to the idea of living in an elevated, more noble way and underlies concepts of purity, wholesomeness, and religious notions.
- 🗽 Liberty/Oppression: This foundation, added later, is about the resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their freedom. It motivates a desire to unite and oppose oppressors or bullies. 💪
🗣️ MFT is often used to explain why people with different political ideologies hold such different views. For example, research has shown that political liberals tend to place greater moral value on the ❤️🩹 Care/Harm and ⚖️ Fairness/Cheating foundations, while conservatives tend to value all six foundations more equally.
💬 Gemini (flash-2.5) Prompt
What is Moral Foundations Theory?