NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt suggests that human beings are evolved for the capacity for these five foundational moral concepts and the strong emotions associated with them.

Moral Foundation Theory

Our fascination with dramatizations of moral conflict, and the implications in our classrooms.

Jonathan Haidt has discovered that morality is not just about thinking, but also about feeling. That is, human beings make moral decisions based on how they feel when confronted with an experience. For example, disgust is a moral emotion, and evolutionary biological theory suggests that those humans who feel disgust for things that might harm them (e.g., blood, incest, rotting flesh) will live to have more successful offspring. Thus, Haidt’s argument is that we are biologically capable of experiencing moral emotions in ways that are “organized in advance of experience.”

While we all have the capacity for moral emotion, it stands to reason that different people are born with different sensitivities (or strengths in those capacities) or distributions of those. For example, some people are disgusted by the sight of feces, but it doesn’t seem to bother others. Haidt says that, socialization teaches us which experiences should activate our capacities for moral emotion.

The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. — Jonathan Haidt

Haidt applies this thinking to explain the current schism between liberals and conservatives. He says there are five dimensions along which liberals and conservatives disagree, and he calls them the “moral foundations”.

The 5 moral foundations are describe in greater detail in his book The Righteous Mind (Haidt 2013).

1. Harm/care,
2. Fairness/reciprocity,
3. Ingroup/loyalty,
4. Authority/respect, and
5. Purity/sanctity.

At least as far back as the ancient morality plays, dramatizations of conflict between these moral foundations have captured audiences and the imagination of writers from William…