Ideas@TheCentre
Care, but responsibly
In common with many other people, I have been reading Jonathon Haidt’s stimulating new book, The Righteous Mind. Unfortunately, judging by his recent article in The Age, Don Edgar hasn’t.
Haidt’s book reports the results from a variety of fascinating psychology experiments that suggest we humans share some very basic and innate ‘gut feelings’ (he calls them ‘intuitions’) about how to behave. He thinks these intuitions evolved in us over hundreds of thousands of years as natural selection favoured those of our ancestors who knew without having to think too much about it how to respond quickly to the behaviour of others.
If his theory is correct, it means that our fundamental rules governing right and wrong behaviour are not arbitrary or artificial but reflect deeply embedded moral instincts. Of course, infants and children have to be taught the specific rules of their particular society, but they are born with instinctive feelings about the right and wrong way to behave, and formal laws and social norms are mapped onto these intuitions in the course of their socialisation.
Haidt’s book identifies six of these basic instincts, which he calls ‘moral foundations.’ We have (a) an urge to look after and nurture the weak and defenceless (‘care’); (b) a rage against people who don’t pull their weight (‘proportionality’); (c) a reaction against being dominated and pushed around (‘liberty’); but also (d) an acute sense of hierarchy (‘authority’); (e) strong feelings of belonging to a group (‘loyalty’); and (f) feelings of revulsion and awe triggered by exposure to external symbols and objects (‘sanctity’).
Haidt is a man of the Left, but he has come to realise the fundamental weakness in socialist and social democratic ideologies. Conservatism, he says, expresses all six of these basic moral sentiments, but the traditional politics of the Left express only two or three of them.*
Leftists feel the ‘care’ instinct very strongly, which is why their rhetoric and programs echo with calls for compassion for those who are less fortunate. They also emphasise the ‘liberty’ instinct in their hostility to big capitalist corporations and their support for minority rights. But there is little room in modern left-wing sentiment for the authority instinct (doing as you are told), the loyalty instinct (putting your own group or nation first), or the sanctity instinct (the religious sense of being part of something bigger and more important than yourself), and the proportionality instinct (ensuring people don’t take what they don’t deserve) is only weakly expressed.
Which brings me back to Don Edgar. Writing in The Age on 26 April, Edgar attacked Joe Hockey’s recent call for an end to ‘the culture of entitlement’ in the welfare system. But without realising or intending it, Edgar offers us a brilliant illustration of the problem Haidt identifies with the Left’s stunted moral compass.
Edgar’s article strongly emphasises the care instinct (‘The goal should be to raise up the disadvantaged’), and it triggers the liberty instinct with its attack on the ‘upper echelons of society,’ who are dismissed as ‘individualistic’ and ‘greedy.’ But the other four moral considerations are missing entirely in what he has to say.
In particular, what is missing is any recognition of the importance of what Haidt calls proportionality. Indeed, Edgar ends his article by explicitly denying that we should pay any attention to proportionality: ‘We should not pit the “deserving” against the “undeserving poor”,’ he warns.
A concern with ‘just deserts’ is precisely what the morality of proportionality is all about, but Edgar doesn’t get it. We humans share a strong gut feeling that, while it is right to help those who cannot help themselves, it is also right to ensure that free riders get excluded from sharing in the benefits of collective effort and cooperation.
This is why, in recent years, welfare programs in Australia, Britain, the United States and elsewhere have belatedly begun to be reformed to try to prevent claimants ripping them off. It feels right to try to distinguish between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor, and it feels wrong when people like Edgar insist we shouldn’t.
Edgar should invest in a copy of Haidt’s book. It might help him understand where he and others like him have been going wrong all these years.
Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
* Libertarians, or as we at CIS prefer, ‘classical liberals,’ are also lopsided in their moral values according to Haidt, strongly emphasising the ‘liberty’ and ‘proportionality’ foundations at the expense of the other four.
