The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal has a simple moral code: the two H's. One is Help, the other is Hurt. In any situation, you doing one (helping) or the other (hurting). In his important book Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (important not because of its style, very plain, but because of its content, surprisingly profound), de Waal describes the culture shock he received upon reading in an American newspaper that a woman had been charged for breast feeding in public. For de Waal, this situation had nothing to do with morality—who is actually hurt by this act, be it in public or private? Indeed breast feeding helps rather than hurts. This situation was all about a convention, a cultural norm. A convention was broken, and nothing more.

Let's now think about the right and its sense of morality. For the right, real morality is often confused with conventions. The right's position on gay marriage, for example, has nothing to do with hurting anyone. No one is actually hurt by two men marrying each other. So, in short, the right's thing about the "moral majority" is really a "cultural norms majority." The left, on the other hand, must be about real morality, morality of the body and the senses—food stamps, health care, housing. These are not conventions, these are matters of the body. One body helping another body.