The Two Moralities: Conservatives, Liberals, and the Roots of Our Political Divide

by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman

The most complete picture to date of the moral worlds of the political left and right and how their different views relate to specific political issues

The left and right will always have strong policy disagreements, but constructive debate and negotiation are not possible when each side demonizes the other. We need to move past our poisonous politics. In this book, social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman provides a new framework for understanding why and how we disagree.

Janoff-Bulman asks readers to consider the challenging possibility that both liberalism and conservatism are morally based and reflect genuine concern for the country. Moral psychology is an invaluable lens for understanding the roots of political differences. She presents a “Model of Moral Motives” that maps the most fundamental motivations recognized by psychology—approach and avoidance—onto these differences. Liberal morality focuses on providing for the group’s well-being and ensuring social justice. Conservative morality focuses on protecting the group from threats and preserving order.

These moralities can account for the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives and for why certain positions resonate on each side of the political spectrum. Why, for example, do conservatives oppose abortion and favor unfettered free markets while liberals favor a woman’s right to choose and economic regulation? Understanding that our political differences are rooted in two natural forms of morality can help us begin to detoxify our politics.

Genres: Politics, Psychology, Nonfiction

360 pages, Hardcover

Published April 18, 2023

Reviews

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was so close to being an excellent book. Actually, the first half really was great, but then she nearly ruined it in the second half.

RJB’s project here is to explain the different moral foundations that are used by people on each side of the political spectrum, with the ostensible goal of promoting understanding and tempering polarization. She proposes a “Model of Moral Motives” as a counter to the popular framework set out by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind.

Haidt examines 6 separate axes of morality:
Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation. His research shows that those on the political right use all 6 axes when making moral judgments, but those on the left only consider the first 3 axes. Thus conservatives understand the moral reasoning of liberals, but not vice versa. And it should be noted that Haidt himself considers himself a liberal.

RJB’s model is more comprehensive and has more explanatory power than Haidt’s. But while she pays lip service to the idea of promoting understanding and unity, she’s not nearly as charitable to her political opponents as Haidt is.

She starts by examining the fundamental dichotomy in human motivation: approach and avoidance. This distinction leads to two separate categories of morality: proscriptive and prescriptive. Proscriptive morality is avoidance-based and involves avoiding negative outcomes, specifically harm to others. It inhibits "bad" behaviors. It seeks to protect. Prescriptive morality is approach-based. It is focused on positive outcomes and activates "good" behaviors. It seeks to provide. The shorthand for each category is Protect and Provide.

She then examines how these two moralities play out in 3 different domains: personal, interpersonal, and collective (or self, other, and group). Thus a 2 x 3 grid.

For the domain of the self, the Protect morality focuses on moderation and self-discipline, while Provide stresses industriousness and hard work.

In the interpersonal domain, the Protect morality involves not harming and not cheating, while the Provide morality promotes helping and fairness.

RJB points out for these first four cells of her grid there is no difference between how the political right and left behave. People from both political persuasions agree that all of these values are important.

For the collective domain however, the right favors the Protect morality which focuses on Social Order, while the left favors the Provide morality stressing Social Justice. This moral lens is what defines the difference between the right and left today.

The goal of Social Order morality is the safety and security of the group. The goal of Social Justice morality is to provide for the group by improving group welfare and promoting greater equality.

A common characterization of the political divide is that the right wants a small government while the left desires a large one. RJB rejects this simplistic distinction. She contends that each side pushes for more regulation in their own area of concern. For the right, it’s regulations on social behaviors (abortion, gay marriage), but they are anti-government regarding economics. Meanwhile the left favors more laws in the economic sector (regulation of businesses, wealth redistribution), but are libertarian regarding social issues.

I think her model makes a lot of sense and has great explanatory power. It’s a significant improvement over Haidt’s model, although it’s still not perfect. RJB argues that the left desires to regulate economics while allowing autonomy in the social realm, but there are clearly certain social issues that the left wants to enforce through the force of government. For instance, the left is not anti-government when it comes to enforcement of the trans ideology (proper use of pronouns, anti-discrimination laws, Title 9 regulations, hate-speech rules on campus, etc). Nevertheless, I think RJB’s framework is still very useful, and a helpful advance over Haidt’s. I think her MMM grid is a great way to understand the psychology that lies beneath the political viewpoints and demonstrates the reasonableness of both perspectives. Surely an optimal society requires consideration of both. We can debate exactly where the ideal balance lies, but we cannot ever (and shouldn’t desire to) defeat and eliminate the political opposition.

If the book had ended here it would be an easy five stars. But she kept going. And the second half of the book is where her myside bias really gets the better of her. Although she repeatedly affirms both moral lenses as legitimate and important for the proper functioning of society, when she turns her focus to examining today’s controversial political issues, she apparently believes that the Social Justice lens is ultimately superior to the Social Order lens.

In her chapter, What Conservatives Are Protecting, she evaluates many specific political issues, demonstrating how the conservative positions align with what her model would predict. And then proceeds to explain how in every instance they are actually wrong. And in her chapter, What liberals Are Providing, she shows that by opposing each of these policies conservatives are again in the wrong.

It’s really a shame that this book which claims to be a project to bridge the divide between right and left ends up just telling conservatives, “yeah, I understand why you think the way you do, but you’re still not as enlightened as I am.” At least Haidt had the humility to grant that those with a political viewpoint that differed from his own might actually be perceiving something true and real that he was not attuned to. RJB does not share this mindset.

In the introduction she claims that she tried very hard to be objective and suppress her leftward bias. She really should have tried harder.

[Lydia DePoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

More skewed than I would have liked. I'm a Democrat so I began reading already agreeing. I would have liked to have seen more credence given to the morality of the other side. I went in thinking this would be explanatory. This was argumentative. I agree with every point. But I already agreed with every point. This was marketed as a way to bring people like me together with people on the opposite side of the aisle. It did not do that. There was a clear narrative that the people on my side are superior to people on the other side. It just wasn't what I thought. There are genuinely good, moral conservatives out there. I want their side.

[Russell Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful improvement upon Jonathan Haidt on the psychological roots of the ideologies which we build out of and through articulating political preferences; Janoff-Bulman's primary argument is that Haidt failed to effectively measure how various prescriptive concerns, including social justice, have a binding, group-building effect, whereas Haidt saw binding being entirely subsumed under the category of social order. Not a compelling written book, but a smart one.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very good book and highly useful for the book project I'm currently working on. RJB offers useful ways to think about people's moralities, especially liberals v conservatives. Liberal morality is justice-oriented and proscriptive, as it seeks to enjoin people and government to provide for the basic needs of a broad community while being fairly chill about how they conduct their personal lives. It focuses on how to improve the world.Conservative morality is prescriptive, threat-sensitive, and order-based. It focuses on how to maintain social order/hierarchy and prevent things from getting worse. These differences shape how conservatives and liberals respond to and think about political issues. I like that RJB shows how big v small govt is a misnomer for the liberal/conservative divide. Conservatives want big govt in the social realm but not economics, while liberals are the opposite.

RJB's book is designed as a critique of JOnathan Haidt's well-known "The Righteous Mind." Haidt believes that liberals have a moral narrow morality focused on harm and equality that does not appeal to people's other moral senses such as loyalty, authority, and purity. I've always found that to be somewhat persuasive, but RJB also makes a good case that liberals do have a socially binding morality: justice. I think that's a good rejoinder to Haidt, as I don't think liberal morality is as spare and unappealing as Haidt often argues. On the flip side, justice is a more abstract concept compared to community, nation, tribe, etc, all of which conservatives are generally better at appealing to. Still, looking at RBJ's critique of Haidt made me want to read more into this field.

RJB's politics leak into the book a little bit, but I tend to agree with her on most stuff, and she backs up her points with data and evidence consistently. I definitely plan on using this as a resource for my own book on how conservatives have viewed the problem of terrorism through a moral lens since the 1960s. This is excellent work in the field of moral/social psychology, and a pretty easy argument to follow even if you aren't an expert in those fields.

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

The heart of the book is Janoff-Bulman laying out her six-element "model of moral motives" meant to compete with the five-item "moral foundations" system of Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham. You can summarize her approach in one table.

Haidt and Graham argue that liberals and conservatives differ because while liberals and conservatives both care about "Care" and "Fairness," conservatives also care about "Authority," "Loyalty," and "Sanctity." Janoff-Bulman's basic view is that this list is a bit ad hoc, and that hers is more systematic: there's a difference between harming and not helping (in psychology, if not in ethics), and there's a difference between how people approach themselves, those close to them, and their broader society, and that for each class of people there are dominant approaches to both helping and not-harming. Her take is that liberals and conservatives agree broadly on how people should treat themselves and those closest to them, but differ in whether they emphasize preventing harm versus helping when it comes to the nation as a whole.

These are the kinds of things that make me wonder about whether the whole social psychology program is doomed. Say what you will about economics, but it at least has a theoretical foundation that's deep, largely unchanging, and was not cobbled together haphazardly. Janoff-Bulman's system seems less arbitrary to me than Haidt and Graham's, but both make me ask: what we doing here, exactly? Are we trying to figure out psychological attributes that make people more left or right-wing? Then where do those attributes come from? (No clues in this book.) And when we get to categories like Janoff-Bulman's "social order" versus "social justice" moralities, are we explaining ideologies, or just giving them different names? To say that "social justice" minded people are more liberal seems less like an explanation than a redundancy.

To make matters worse, the entire back half of the book turns into a thinly veiled political rant that barely even refers back to her theory at points, preferring to go on at length explaining why TRAP laws are bad. I agree, they're bad! But even eminent senior academics need an editor to tell them that if they're writing a book that, per its introduction, is trying to bridge political divides through fostering mutual understanding of where we're coming from, ending the book with tirades about the evils of conservatives is probably counterproductive.

[Frederic · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed contemporary window into the moral machinery that divides liberals and conservatives in the U.S. Janoff-Bulman draws on the latest theorizing and evidence from moral psychology to illuminate the moral divides that separate our current political climate, with important lessons on how to reconcile ongoing polarization processes.

[Rosemary · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the book is billed as Conservatives, Liberals, and the Roots of Our Political Divide it is also left leaning. As a more right leaning centrist I find my views are not fully fleshed out and her views are more of the same liberal leaning narratives. If the bias could be removed by a more balanced non judgmental approach it might achieve a more reasonable path to cooperation and debate.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come...