I just finished listening to this podcast episode, http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.or...nding-moral-disagreements-jonathan-haidt.html (transcript here) and I was impressed by Johnathan Haidt's thesis that there are universal (and likely evolved) moral foundations. These 6-ish foundations are analogous to taste buds, in that everyone has them, but a culture wires them together and expresses them in different ways (tastes). I'm even more impressed by his arguments that liberals and libertarians tend to ignore the loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation foundations, at least amongst themselves and when making arguments to try to convince voters, if perhaps not individually. Pages 8-12 of the transcript really stand out (sorry, I don't remember what the timestamps are, but figure it's about ⅓-½ way through). I'm not 100% sure that I buy it, and I'm definitely not on board with deferring to conservatives on questions of what sorts of legal prohibitions are appropriate in a multi-ethnic small-L liberal society, which is one of the under-explored implications of the thesis*, but empathy for a person whose moral system that includes more loyalty, authority, and sanctity? I can get behind that. Should be able to formulate more convincing arguments this way too. (Conservatives: yes, this means that no argument from those three alone is going to convince a liberal or libertarian (at least not a real one, very much not counting the "libertarians for Trump" types) of much of anything, at least public policy-wise. You need to appeal to fairness and harm reduction.) *it seems to me that in a lot of cases, agreeing that a set of concerns are valid is tantamount to agreeing that a legislative fix for them is needed. Not in every case, but it certainly gets harder to push back on. Haidt denies this is an implication at all. I'm not so sure.
