Values Difference

I don’t agree with all of this post of Ozy's about value difference, but I think it’s an honest take on a very important issue that needs more attention than it is getting. Please go read it because I don’t think I have a similar enough perspective to do it justice. 

I  - Reassurance

First I want to provide some comfort and reassurance as a first step towards bringing clarity. So let's take a look at what the work these adjectives are doing:

"I imagine someone actively rejoicing in denying a person a fair trial because they deserve to be in prison– not just accepting this as a grim reality, but thinking it is good and right and virtuous– and I shudder. They must feel similarly about me.

However, from my perspective, conservatives are perfectly willing to sacrifice things that actually matter in the world …  in order to suck up to unjust authority or help the wealthy and undeserving or keep people from having sex lives they think are gross."

-Unfair trials

I don't think conservative moral foundations lead to less concern for fair trials. A respect for authority foundation means we start out with a higher prior for trials being fair, but once we have enough evidence to see it is unfair we would have just as much tendency to condemn it as liberals. Recently conservatives have been loudly condemning campus rape trials we are convinced are unfair. 

-Unjust authority

Conservatives don't respect just any authority, only their society's legitimate authority. And one of the requirements for an authority to be legitimate is for it not to be unjust. Now a human institution of any kind will mess up and do individual unjust things from time to time. Conservatives do have a more visceral sense of this which comes out both in more pessimistic predictions about the net good future government programs can do, and also in being less easily disappointed in actual government behavior, due to lower expectations. But if we see evidence that it's not just the fundamental attribution error applied to a group, but really that the authority is fundamentally unjust, then we will see it as illegitiment and be willing to trim it.

-Undeserved wealth

This is a tricky thing that is an important crux. I do think liberals and conservatives have an instinctively different reaction to accumulations of wealth. Their is a general positive feeling about people having stuff that makes them happy. But also a general awareness that people get unhappy when others have more than them. In honesty, my conservative tribal instincts say that it’s a liberal tendency towards envy and greed, at least towards the power that money conveys, that makes liberals so focused on this latter point. But I see other possibilities too. Conservatives are instinctively aware that material prosperity is constantly decaying and you must continually pump more wealth into the society to keep the same level of goods. And conservatives sense that accumulations of wealth are a generally necessary catalyst for rapid wealth creation, as well as often a marker of were successful wealth creation has taken place. Even beyond that, I do see good created by wealth differentials in that they can enable certain relationships that help stabilize social structure.  I think the place that it’s easiest to see is between teenagers and parents.  As teenagers explore their own identity and become independent, their relationships with their parents are naturally shaken.  If the parents have a much greater ability to provide economically, that provides a point of stability within the relationship as it changes.  If teenagers were wealth equals with their parents that dynamic would not be there to provide stability. And conservatives do value stability in family bonds. And in many other subtler ways economic flows, that would not be possible with absolute wealth equality, contribute to a web of social relationships that are stable over time. For conservatives, individuals that were a key player in creating their wealth and/or that are using their (legitimately acquired) wealth in a positive manor are exempt from the “undeserving wealthy” category. It may be hard for liberals to see these categories, but once conservatives can be shown someone is outside these categories, really undeserving wealthy, then they will not want to sacrifice other moral goods to protect them.

So I hope it's reassuring that on a lot of the most painful instances the difference is only different priors that then require more or different evidence before an adjective is applied, rather than a different response once we agree on the adjective.

II Clarification

That said, I agree that their really is a fundamental value difference. I really really like order, structure, stability, and regularity. They feel like terminal values to me. And when I imagine a situation where everyone is extremely happy but their is no fixed social structure, group boundaries, or incentivized commitment , I wouldn't prefer that. I would want to trade in some of that happiness for more order and rigidity. And I don't think those on the far left would agree with this intuition.

And this is an issue. Each side may judge that the other has the "wrong" values and that that is unacceptable. But I don't think that would be a good situation at all. For one thing these different tastes in fundamental values are not conscious choices and in fact may have a genetic component. For another there is not just homogeneous left and right types, but a spectrum of the degrees to which people feel the different foundations. Even if the US breaks up into several smaller nations, or even worse has a civil war which kills a bunch of people, its still highly unlikely that anyone will end up in a society were everyone's moral taste buds are like theirs. And it is a bad situation to have to live with people who find your moral instincts unacceptable, and few people are going to be willing to productively participate in society under these conditions.

But on the other hand, I think there are ways of avoiding this impasse. Because it also feels like that picture of total happiness without order is weird and unlikely. I feel like having at least some stable social structure as a context is necessary to move towards goals, which is necessary for happiness. Order generally also feels like an instinctively instrumental value. It also seems like situations where there was a lot of random disorder would cause many to become fonder of order. In fact there is a little bit of evidence that situations were a moral foundation would be need increases the prevalence of a predisposition to it.

It also seems obvious that it's instrumentally beneficial for liberal's policy goals if people pay their taxes, obey regulations, and are polite to fellow citizens. So conservative’s innate taste for these things as a benign or even beneficial quirk that liberals can manage to work with. Liberals often use some sort of hierarchy in their internal endeavors and often prefer group loyalty within their own circles. I think that if the liberals look at it calmly they could see that even if they don’t like as an abstract thought, in the real world at least a little order is often an instrumental good.  And given how biased and prone torationalization humans are, surely it’s a provident safety feature that there is a spectrum of initial priors on protection of such basic and generally useful instrumental goods.

III - Complaint

When we’re both looking at dirty dishes piled up, my husband’s sense of big-enough-pile-to-be-worth-doing-dishes has a lower threshold than mine.  In fact he generally does the dishes before it ever gets to the point I would feel like it’s time to do dishes.  The couple of times he has left the dishes there until there’s a big enough stack of dishes for me, not only does he have to wait through the irritation of the dishes there that are past his threshold, he has to point out to me when there’s actually a big pile. That's because I've gotten out of the habit of checking for dishes. Then when I do the dishes it feels like a weird imposition, because I don’t have a slot in my chore scheduler for doing dishes; it’s just not in my model. When I introspect on my preferences for daily routine items, I don’t see any value on getting the dishes done. It doesn’t feel like it’s worth trading off any other good, like walking the dog or doing the laundry, against it. I don’t think it’s because I have an intrinsic quality of not caring about dishes, but rather because it’s a reliable feature of my environment that I get sufficient ‘the-dishes-are-clean-now’ without having to put any effort into it.

hummm.... maybe I better reconsider my threshold for doing dishes, or at least make sure my husband knows how much I appreciate that he does them.

This reminds me of a dear friend of mine who is always pushing pro-immigration arguments. I once gave her an argument for why I thought unlimited immigration would collapse US society and lead to no benefits to any immigrants. And she said that of course she wasn't for open borders, because America couldn't handle everyone. But when she sees any specific process or proposal to limit immigration she still reacts to it as wrong and awful. What I think is happening is that conservative pressure has always provided more than enough immigration restrictions for her tastes. So if feels to her like this is just a feature of the environment, rather than something someone has to work to produce. So when she sees someone arguing for or implementing restrictions she sees it as only producing harm (without seeing the contribution to good) and therefore evil.

I think there's a danger of liberals being desensitized to the need to make provision for creating social order and cohesion because they aren't involved in providing that. This can make liberal goals unrealistic.But it can also make conservatives feel they an being misunderstood and taken advantage of, making them resentful and unnecessarily encouraging hostility.

For various reasons beyond the scope of this post, conservatives have concerned as you might expect about some things that relate to conservative foundations, for example Trump's impure sex life or Russian pokes at group loyalty. And many liberals have been very upset about this. Now some of the this is just because they want to use these things as political levers to pursue their goals. But perhaps some of this because their is a sense that it's the conservatives job to be the prudish guardians of moral norms and the adhesive militants on national pride. Some On the left may have a visceral unease to the role being vacated, maybe even a need to step into the breach. It might why they looks to conservatives so erratic and unhinged. Because they don't have a lot of practice at this, and maybe they don't even have as much inborn instinct for it.

hummm.... maybe liberals had better reconsider cultivating more moral foundations, or at least make sure my they show conservatives their appreciation.