Absolutely. This is an extremely pragmatic approach, actually. If one considers problems which bother liberals such as pornography (the assumption being that it harms women somehow - as opposed to conservatives, who hate it because pleasure is bad), using the above moral framework forces the liberals to answer the question "how does it harm women?" Because if it does not, or if it does but there is more harm in some other related activity (such as the labor ethics behind the porn production), then one should switch attention to the other activity. In any case it switches attention away from prohibition to parsing how it creates harm, and we all know how ridiculously pants-on-fire anti-porn advocates are when it comes to showing harm.

Nicely said, Charles.

There are times Charles, when I read you and shake my head and say to myself in exasperation “Oh Charles…”
And then there are times when I read you, and it’s a little crystal moment of clarity or beauty and I say to myself “Oh Charles!
And that’s why I keep reading you.
Oh and the emoticons help.

Exactly. Great post.

It hurts baby Jeebus' feelings when two men want to marry. The right only wants to protect their sensitive and fragile religious beliefs.

Jonathan Haidt gave a really interesting TED talk about the moral systems of liberals & conservatives. He expands on the harm/care system and discusses five different traits: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity. They surveyed thousands of people on those traits, and liberals define morality only on the first two and conservatives define it as all five. So, liberals do not consider purity, loyalty, and respect to be part of their moral systems....

Julie, you beat me to it. More from Haidt at
http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft…

Perhaps this is why abortion is such a difficult issue. You can argue the hurt side of this pretty effectively from either angle, you can be correct, and you will still not convince the opposite view to change their mind.

Jesus, this was actually really insightful. Can you please start writing like this more?

If Charles replaced "the right" with "conservatives," and "the left" with "liberals," I'd agree with this completely. History (and the present) is filled with examples of people on the left being conservative, hurting instead of helping.

The problem I have with the morality of the left is with it being called 'morality' in the first place. This term is often wielded by those on the left who are often atheists or at least agnostic with religious righteousness. They don't actually believe there is some metaphysical thing called morality but generally out of intellectual laziness they act as if they do. I would argue that ethics would be a better term. We make it up, it has to do with the social contract, the kind of world we wish to live in. It is not divine law.

Can someone please explain this rash of intelligent and insightful posts from Charles? Some kind of "freaky friday" switcheroo, perhaps?

@11 is correct. Left and right are just two flavors of conservative orthodoxy. Liberalism - data driven, open minded, rational, pragmatic - is the counterpoint to conservatism.

Nice post, Charles. I'm going to have to check out that book as well.

De Waal studies primates for a living, but the sight of differing cultural norms confuses him? People do not act on "moral systems", whatever those are; they act because they have cultures. Breast-feeding and getting upset by breast-feeding doesn't have anything to do with morality. What you're calling "cultural norms" is EVERYTHING.

There are plenty of things that Dutch people do that are inexplicable to others.

Since you're being a tad more lucid today, have you thought about helping your neighbors who you hurt by allowing their home to be burgled? I still think you should help them with a new TV.

Ah, reductionism - always so fun for the internet.

@15 I don’t know if Haidt uses the term “moral system” or not, but what he’s looking for are what factors does someone consider when they are deciding whether an action is moral or immoral. One of the interesting things he found was that generally, the liberal-conservative divide (liberals only caring about the first two things, conservative about all five) held true within a country no matter what country they looked at. So, while Canadians or Australians overall may weight each of the five things differently from Americans (reflecting a different "culture", to the extent that “culture” can be defined on a country-by-country basis), the 2/5 thing still held out. Point being, even within a specific culture, people make decisions about whether they think things are moral or not based on different factors, and the factors they used are related to whether they identify as liberal or conservative.

There was nothing conservative about Lenin.

Morality is subjective, always has been, always will be.

@19, that's funny, because I think everything about Lenin was conservative. I know he was a radical change from what came before, but that doesn't mean he was liberal.

The way I see it (and maybe I've got my semantics askew here) conservatives want to control people, they want to limit their individual activities, not out of any concern for public safety, but out of fear for society's moral fiber and the authority that supposedly regulates it. This is the essence of what Lenin and every other communist leader did. It's also exactly the same way that Christian fundamentalists see the role of the government.

@21 I didn't say Lenin was a liberal. Lenin was against everything liberalism stands for. But Lenin was not conservative or right-wing. He was a Marxist revolutionary and a progressist. Not in any way my kind of progress. But that's what he was. He wasn't trying to protect the status quo or to return to some past tradition. I'm a leftist and a progressive liberal. The Bolsheviks were leftists too, but extremists and un-liberal. The idea that the left or the right has a monopoly on morality or violence is ridiculous. Authoritarianism is unrelated to the left/right axis.

@21 "and maybe I've got my semantics askew here"

Yeah, you do. To impose contemporary definitions of liberalism, conservatism, left, right, whatever on the past without *also* confronting what the definitions of those things were at the time hides, erases, and misleads. I'm not saying that we shouldn't apply modern categories to the past, or that it isn't fruitful in some way to do so, but it is a fundamental mistake which undermines every argument subsequent argument. It is like saying that Republicans in 1860 are the same Republicans today.

@24 (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻