Haidt's Vindication of Fusionist Conservatism and Aristotelian Liberalism

Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind has provoked a lot of discussion and controversy primarily because of his claim that conservative Republicans have a better grasp of moral psychology than do liberal Democrats.  Haidt argues that Darwinian evolution has shaped human nature to be innately predisposed to grasp six foundations of morality, identified with six pairs of antithetical terms: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.  The first three foundations support individual autonomy.  The second three support communal bonding.  Insofar as human beings have evolved to be both individually selfish and socially groupish--or "90% chimp and 10% bee"--they need all six moral foundations.  But while liberals stress only the first three foundations, conservatives stress all six foundations.  And thus Darwinian moral psychology supports conservatism as having a superior understanding of evolved moral dispositions.

Haidt struggles, however, with the confusing one-dimensional idea that everyone must be either "liberal" or "conservative."  First of all, it's only in recent years that he was forced to recognize "libertarianism" as a third position.  And it's only recently that he has begun to study libertarian morality in a paper that has not yet been published--"Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology."  Moreover, the criticisms coming from libertarians complaining that their morality of individual liberty was being ignored eventually persuaded him to add "Liberty" as a sixth foundation of morality.

It is only slowly that Haidt has come to see that this addition of Liberty to his Moral Foundations Theory is crucial, because this is the one moral foundation that is shared by liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, and it is the one foundation that makes it possible for them to live together peacefully.  What this really means is that in a liberal regime like the United States, almost everyone is a "liberal" in the sense of classical liberalism.  Although modern liberals have moved towards emphasizing "positive liberty" as requiring more governmental intervention in the economy than would be justified by "negative liberty," the modern liberals still agree with the libertarian principle of individual freedom that allows for pluralist toleration.

In his study of libertarian morality, Haidt concludes that libertarians care for their own individual liberty to the exclusion of all other moral principles: "libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g., respect for authority, personal sanctity) are not assigned much importance" (13), and thus "libertarians place lower value on morality as typically measured by moral psychologists" (16).

But Haidt is missing something here, which is suggested by his comment that "libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives (as measured by the MFQ) are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights--libertarians' sacred value" (16).  He also observes that libertarians "might feel little emotional attraction to modern liberalism's emphasis on altruism and positive liberty, and turned off by its willingness to compel some citizens to help other citizens (through redistributive tax policies)" (30).  The crucial word here is "compel."  Oddly, this is the only place in Haidt's paper that he mentions compulsion, even though this is the overriding concern of libertarian morality.  Libertarians object to compulsion or coercion, and thus to any enforcement of morality through governmental coercion.  But they don't object to the moral order and character formation that arises in the spontaneous orders of civil society.  In his surveys of libertarian attitudes, Haidt never distinguished between compulsory and voluntary enforcement of morality, and thus he never captured the true character of libertarian morality.

David Boaz conveys this libertarian morality in chapter 7 of his Libertarianism: A Primer-- the chapter on "Civil Society" as the intermediate social realm between the individual and the state.  He contends that libertarians see human beings as having natural desires "for connectedness, for love and friendship and community," and they think those social desires are best satisfied in the natural and voluntary associations of civil society--in families, in churches, in schools, in fraternal societies, and in commercial associations.  Moral character formation is achieved better through such natural and voluntary associations than through governmental coercion, which "undermines the moral character necessary to both civil society and liberty under law."

This indicates that libertarians believe that political liberty is the condition for social virtue, which has been the fundamental idea of "fusionist" conservatism as most fully stated by Frank Meyer.  Meyer argued that American conservatism rightly understood combined libertarianism or classical liberalism with traditionalist conservatism.  If we see that liberty is the condition for virtue, then we can see that the proper purpose of politics is securing liberty, while the proper purpose of society is shaping our moral and intellectual virtues.  Although Haidt in his paper on libertarianism mentions fusionist conservatism only briefly (4), he captures its main insight when he says that libertarians believe "the liberty of the individual is the essential precondition for human flourishing" (5). 

This fusionist conservatism might also be called Aristototelian liberalism, based on the thought that while Aristotle was right about ethics as directed to virtue, Locke was right about politics as directed to liberty.  (Although he doesn't elaborate the thought in his book, Haidt endorses Aristotelian "virtue ethics" [369, n. 68]; and he speaks favorably of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in his book The Happiness Hypothesis.)  This conception of Aristotelian liberalism has been developed by Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl.

Although I am surely guilty of confirmation bias, I am happy to see Haidt's work as suggesting that a Darwinian moral psychology supports Darwinian conservatism.

These points have been elaborated in some previous posts here, here, here, and here, and in a lecture for the Philadelphia Society.

Jon Haidt has posted this comment on my post of September 13:

"As always, you have done a very close and fair reading of my work. And as before, you see things in my work that I was not fully aware of, but which I agree with. I think you're right to call me on some potential contradictions. I am indeed a Darwinian, and I am indeed sympathetic to both classical liberalism and Burkean conservatism -- more so than to modern leftism or 1970s liberalism. So I'll have to think about this, and about the conundrums of tolerance and nested incompatible moral matrices that you raise. Thank you!"