Could you do a post comparing and contrasting your three-axis model with Haidt’s five-or-six parts of mortality? (Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, etc.)
The main contrast is in terms of purpose. With the three-axis model, I do not propose to explain why people differ in their political views. I think of someone’s preferred axis as the easiest way to communicate with them about an issue. When you hear an issue described in terms of your preferred axis, it resonates with you. When you hear it described on someone else’s axis, it does not resonate with you so well.
Haidt’s moral foundations are supposed to explain political views. He describes them as six dials that are set to different levels. The idea is that if you measure each person’s moral dial settings, you can predict their political leanings. There is an implication that there is a causal relationship between the dial settings and political views.
I do not think of the causality as running from the three axes to political views. It might very well be the other way around–once you choose your political tribe, your preferred axis follows from that. I am agnostic about causality.
It has been my impression that you do occasionally use the three axis model to explain people’s views, not just how they communication them. A recent example was your post about the three axis model and Jews. Unless I’m misreading something, you seem to be using the oppressor/oppressed model to explain the actual lack of sensitivity to anti-semitism. It is hard to understand that post otherwise.
Which parts?
I wonder to what degree the “dials” are set via nature and nurture. I’m sure part of it is heritable, but I also suspect that someone brought up in a culture where the purity dial was cranked to 11 would probably tend to develop similar habits of thought, if for no other reason than social desirability bias.
Actually, I think there’s a pretty direct mapping from Haidt to at least one of the 3 axes. The loyalty, authority, and sanctity moral concerns that conservatives emphasize more than progressives and libertarians map quite directly onto civilization/barbarism axis. That one’s kind of a slam dunk.
It’s trickier with progressives and libertarians. At first glance oppressor/oppressed and liberty/coercion seem almost synonymous. But the care/harm moral dimension seems to push progressives in thinking more along the lines inequality than fairness. So it does not matter to progressives very much if someone is wealthy because they have invented and produced a valuable new product vs being wealthy because they are well-connected and have profited from insider deals. Wealth is objectionable regardless of how it was obtained. But for libertarians, it makes all the difference in the world.
And there’s another dimension that Haidt does not capture that I think that is important in pushing progressives and libertarians apart — namely an affinity for systemizing by libertarians that isn’t shared by progressives. Progressives seem much less interested in considering long-term and secondary effects and worrying about both seen and unseen. So progressives want poor people to have more money and so they favor passing a law to require employers to give them a raise, and that’s that; they discount any predictions of what kind of effects this might have (and if that happens, well it’ll be time for another mandate). This kind of thinking drives libertarians around the bend.
What about the “men of system”?
I see a micromanagement impulse amongst progressives. Perhaps progressives want to design systems to achive their proactive/positive goals.
On the other hand Libertarians appreciate and seek to describe and understand evolving systems. Our care/harm axis tends to diminish as it crosses from harm into forcing people to care. So we tend to at most nudge systems and only intervene when they are firmly in the net harm- perhaps because we appreciate that coercion is a big harm in itself.
Like you said, we systemic 🙂
Are ‘Men of System’ really systematizers? I don’t think they really are — they seem to operate under the illusion that their intents and actions will result simply and directly in the desired outcomes and the (entirely predictable) disasters arise from the side effects and complexities that they’re not willing and able to consider. In Smith’s famous quote, he is emphasizing both their arrogance and their simple-mindedness:
“The man of system…seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. “
Why would a language resonate with you if it is not connected to your moral/personality makeup?
Maybe the point is that to make the observation of external behavior, it doesn’t matter what’s inside the box.
From the abstract of Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology
Personally, I remain skeptical of some of Haidt’s moral foundation theory claims and wonder whether they are an artifact of the wording of his questions since the findings don’t jive with my personal experiences.
For example, Haidt claims conservatives are more disgust-sensitive on average, but ask any progressive what they think about, say, Donald Trump and you will see the tell-tale body language and visceral reactions of disgust and they will articulate their sentiments using the language of revulsion.
Haidt says conservatives are more sensitive to notions of sanctity, but, again, I’m pretty sure that if you ask the right questions you’ll discover concepts that liberals treat as sacrosanct and to which they respond to any hint of degradation with hysterical outrage. Indeed is it a common trope among conservatives and libertarians to use religious vocabulary as the best descriptors of relations and reactions to progressive ideology – orthodoxy, dogma, blasphemy, heresy, and so forth.
I like Haidt but his model doesn’t do much for me.
Arnold’s 3-axis model maps nicely to British parliamentary politics around 1900, with the Conservative (civilization), Liberal (liberty), and Labour (equality) Parties. That was the peak of the British Empire, and was hugely influential around the world. Much of the Western world had a similar 3 party system during the Cold War. For example, West Germany had the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats, and the Social Democrats.
I think that model is slowly breaking down as the main axis becomes similarity-difference. I have an ultra-reductionist model that at one pole are people who tend toward concentric loyalties, while the other pole are people who tend toward leapfrogging loyalties:
http://takimag.com/article/the_self_righteous_hive_mind_steve_sailer/print#axzz45h9aFwT7