Recap: According to Moral Foundations Theory, there are five core moral intuitions that relate to political identity: Care/Harm, Loyalty/Ingroup, Sanctity/Purity, Authority/Respect, and Fairness/Reciprocity. Some researchers have added Liberty to this list. In the past couple posts, I've been discussing Iyer et al (2012), which compares the psychological profiles of libertarians, liberals and conservatives.

Consistent with prior research, Iyer et all found that Care/Harm and Fairness/Reciprocity are particularly important to liberals while conservatives are moderately strong on all the moral intuitions. Libertarians value Liberty much more than either liberals and conservatives.  Libertarians, liberals, and conservatives also differed on many other measures (e.g., openness to experience, perspective taking), although most of the differences were modest.  Taken together, the results converge to paint a picture of libertarians as fairly rational and utilitarian in their moral deliberations.

A fascinating piece, which the authors almost ruin with reductionist psychologizing at the end. To wit: they close with the observation that people tend to create virtues out of the necessity of their psychological preferences, a tendency made easier by handy political narratives like libertarian philosophy. Hence, cold fish people tend to embrace cold fish political inclinations.

But that's a trivial point. Whatever we think or feel is inseparable from our psychology. Doesn't matter if we're libertarians, liberals, conservatives, neurologists, or tattoo artists. It has no bearing on whether we're right or wrong about what's happening in the world. Or whether our approach to governance has merit.

Also, people often change their political philosophies as they get older - and not just in lock-step with changes in their moral intuitions. Experience matters.  Arguments and evidence matter. Reflection matters. Our ideas about how to make the world a better place aren't frozen in time or temperament. Of course we can't escape our psychology - but our psychology is not the absolute ruler of our politics.

Reference:

Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, Haidt J (2012) Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLoS ONE 7(8): e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366