I wrote earlier about how I found Jonathan Haidt’s claim “a bit offensive”, but the more I think about this the more irritating and offensive I find it.
I just don’t buy the claim that ” Conservatives appear to endorse all 5 values” any more equally than liberals. For a less fraught example, the question of whether I am more sensitive to variations in colour or to those in musical pitch does not make sense – because in each case the sensitivity is defined in terms of the unit of change, and changing the sizes of the units used can change the relative magnitudes of the two sensitivities. Furthermore, it is not possible to have a situation in which conservatives are at the “midpoint” of a distribution and liberals above or below it since then it would no longer be the midpoint. If we have roughly equal populations of conservatives and liberals, then for each variable, whatever the midpoint is, if liberals are above it conservatives must be equally below it and vice versa. To define where the conservatives end up as the “midpoint” is biased and forces me to question either Haidt’s competence or his honesty. (Which brings up another question for me. Why is not truthfulness identified as a value in its own right?)
P.S. While I don’t think there is any ground for declaring whether or not a person is or is not equally sensitive to each of the values, I do think that it might make sense to compare the amounts by which they attach “moral” weight to that sensitivity. For example the question of whether I am more sensitive to variations in colour or to those in musical pitch does not make sense – because in each case the sensitivity is defined in terms of the unit of change, and changing the sizes of the units used can change the relative magnitudes of the two sensitivities. But on the other hand, regardless of my sensitivity levels, if I were to consider any noticeably offensive sound combination as evil but considered offensive colour combinations just ugly without any moral weight, then that might be compared with someone else who attaches equal moral weight to both a noticeably (to them) offensive sound and an offensive colour. If the distinction between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives assign equal moral weight to anything that offends or delights them along any of Haidt’s five axes while liberals assign more moral weight to some than others, then what Haidt describes as “balance” might be interpreted more as saying that conservatives lack a moral compass and just consider anything that offends them as evil rather than possibly reflecting a deficiency on their own part (as perhaps a liberal might do on feeling disgust when encountering a deformed or otherwise “ugly” person).
Source: Moral Foundations | alQpr