Haidt, the Mormon Church, and Libertarian Conservatism

Some federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional laws in 11 states banning gay marriage.  By refusing to hear the appeals of these decisions, the United States Supreme Court has forced these states to legalize gay marriage.  Many people have wondered why the Supreme Court has refused to rule on this contentious debate over gay marriage and thus establish a national legal standard, instead of forcing the debate to be taken up state-by-state.  One possible explanation is that the Court does not want to move too quickly to declare a constitutional right to gay marriage.  By allowing the spread of gay marriage across the states, the Court allows the shift of public opinion towards favoring gay marriage to continue, so that when the Court does rule, the ruling will be seen as conforming to what the general public has already decided in their states.  This is what the Court did in deciding the debate in the 1960s over whether the state laws forbidding interracial marriage were unconstitutional.  The Court waited until these laws had been overturned in most states, reflecting a shift in public opinion, before declaring in Loving v. Virginia (1967) that interracial marriage was a constitutional right.

Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt who study the moral psychology of the "culture war" between liberals and conservatives in the United States will say that the legalization of gay marriage is a victory of liberals over conservatives, because conservatives believe in moral standards of divinity and sanctity that condemn homosexuality (as well as interracial sex and marriage) as disgusting violations of God's law.  But that Haidt is mistaken about this becomes clear when one notices how almost all conservatives today condemn the legal prohibition of interracial marriage as a violation of individual liberty, and increasingly most conservatives now see that the principle of liberty applies in the same way to gay marriage.

As I have indicated in my previous posts on Haidt, his mistake comes from his not recognizing that most American conservatives are actually liberal or libertarian conservatives, in contrast to the illiberal conservatives that one could find elsewhere in the world today and in past history.  As Louis Hartz argued in The Liberal Tradition in America, American political thought has been dominated almost totally by Lockean liberalism, so that even those who identify themselves as conservatives are liberal or libertarian in their conservatism.  One possible exception to this might be the pro-slavery Southern thinkers, whose position was defeated in the Civil War and in the civil rights movement.

American libertarian conservatism is a fusion of political liberty and social virtue that depends on the distinction between government and civil society.  The purpose of government is to secure individual liberty by using legal coercion to punish force and fraud and to enforce the rule of law and property rights, while leaving individuals free to live as they choose so long as they do not exercise coercive force against other individuals.  The purpose of a free society is to allow individuals to shape their moral and intellectual virtues in the natural and voluntary associations of life.

Much of Haidt's data to support his theory comes from his "Moral Foundations Questionnaire".  But since his questions do not ask people about using governmental coercion to enforce their moral principles, conservatives are not allowed to identify themselves as libertarian conservatives who can be committed to binding moral standards of loyalty, authority, and sanctity as enforced through the voluntary exchanges of social life, while also being committed to the individualizing moral standards of liberty that forbid government from using coercion to enforce the binding moral standards.

This conservative fusion of liberty and virtue explains the recent statement of the Mormon Church in response to legalization of gay marriage in Utah.  The Church has reaffirmed its belief that "only a marriage between a man and a woman is acceptable to God."  "Nevertheless," its statement continued, "respectful coexistence is possible with those with differing values."  And "as far as the civil law is concerned, the courts have spoken."  Thus, they distinguish between the divine law that must be accepted by those who voluntarily join the Church and the civil law that is enforced by government.  Their belief that they should strive for "respectful coexistence" with those whose moral values differs from theirs coincides with Haidt's main idea--that a peaceful coexistence of people who have deeply conflicting moral commitments can overcome the tendency to brutal violence in moral tribal conflicts.

In this way, libertarian conservatism promotes peaceful cooperation in a morally pluralistic society that can combine the moral norms of individual liberty and social virtue.  Introducing political diversity into social psychology, as Haidt and some of his colleagues have recommended, should make social psychologists more knowledgeable about how conservative political thought embraces the broadest set of moral concerns, so that all six of the moral foundations are valued equally.