Two Strategies for Making Value-Based Decisions
And the dangers of relying on the same value over and over again.
One of the common themes that we talk is the distinction between behavior and value. In this week’s episode of Sexvangelicals, part one of our intro to How to Do Social Justice Without Being a Jackass, Julia notes an important distinction:
“Behavior focuses on what a person or relationship decides to do. Value focuses on how a person or relationship chooses to do.
Conservatives, in many cases fueled by purity culture, often focus on the behavior, on the what rather than the how. For example, not kissing until you get to that altar and you can have your first kiss on your wedding day.
I think liberals can do the same thing. Except rather than talking about behaviors, they talk about identities.
Identities are really, really important. We're not suggesting that we don't talk about it. The work of social justice in many ways requires it.
But we can't end the conversation there. Too often, liberals end the conversation there.”
Moral Foundations Theory: A Summary
There’s a lot of ways that folks write about values and morals. One example is moral foundations theory, popularized in Jonathan Haidt’s 2013 The Righteous Mind.
In summary, Haidt and his colleagues describe two moral systems that inform human behavior:
Individualizing moral system, which focuses on the protection and celebration of the rights and expansiveness of the individual.
Binding moral system, which focuses on the protecting and strengthening the sanctity of the larger system.
The individualizing moral system consists of three primary morals:
Harm/care. To what extent does the behavior in question support or threaten the life and livelihood of an individual or community?
Fairness/cheating. To what extent does the behavior allow an individual to have a greater proportion of value or suffering when compared to other people?
Liberty/oppression. To what extent does the behavior allow an individual to have greater equity and equality when compared to other people?
The binding moral system consists of three primary morals:
Loyalty/betrayal. To what extent does the behavior honor the previously existing system, including its structure and explicit/implicit rules that guide said system?
Authority/subversion. To what extent does the behavior honor people with power in the previously existing system, as well as the processes that grant decision making power?
Sanctity/degradation. To what extent does the behavior uphold and maintain the moral reputation of the system and the people in it?
Moral Foundations Theory and the 2024 Election
Haidt suggests that moral foundations are contextual. Different scenarios or contexts may be driven by different morals.
However, when it comes to political alignment, especially in the 20th century, people with higher individualizing morals tend to support left-leaning, pro-democratic political parties. People with higher binding morals tend to support right-leaning, pro-authoritarian political parties.
This graph, taken from Wikipedia (and borrowed from a Ted Talk in which Haidt describes his model), charts how voters align with certain values. I want to note three additional things that this chart clarifies:
The average American voter places harm/care as their most important value, regardless of how they vote. Conservatives are more likely to worry about the harm/care of people in their inner circles, including family members, neighbors, and other conservatives.
Authority, loyalty, and purity are extremely unimportant for liberals, while conservatives value authority, loyalty, and purity as much as they value whether or not something harms someone.
Liberty/oppression doesn’t appear in Haidt’s original model. However, I would project that its line would have a slightly larger slope than the lime green line that represents fairness, so that the endorsement for conservatives would be somewhere between 2.5 and 2.75.
I also want to introduce the research of Dr. Maja Kutlaca, professor of psychology at Durham University in the UK, and Leon Walter, PhD student at Bielefeld University in Germany. They invited 775 Americans to evaluate a fictitious Twitter conversation between two politicians. At a certain point, the politician made a derogatory comment about their opponent, as well as folks who might be voting for said opponent. Kutlaca and Walter then asked their participants how they found themselves reacting to the negative comments. They also assessed for political alignment and moral foundations that were most important to them.
They determined that participants had more tolerance for bad behavior, so long that the bad acting politician was someone that aligned with their political beliefs and party. Kutlaca and Walter explain:
“They perceived them to be more competent and warmer, and felt more pride and less shame. They assumed that the politician did not have malicious intentions but rather acted out of loyalty to their part/need to defend themselves” (p. 171).
Two caveats here.
Republicans were much more likely to condone bad behavior from their politicians, seeing the behavior as a sign of loyalty to their political party. Which makes sense given that loyalty/betrayal is both a value that is more important to conservatives, and this particular brand of conservatism, the Republican Party, is actively threatening to punish and criminalize what they deem as political dissidents, such as doctors who provide healthcare for trans people. (And that’s before we get to the billion dollar conservative media machine which propagandizes that Republicans, Christians, and White people are victims of some larger agenda.)
Democrats reacted much more poorly to bad behavior of all politicians, even the fictitious Democrat, if they had higher levels of binding moral values. Democrats who had lower levels of binding moral values condoned the bad behavior of Democratic politicians almost as much as Republican voters condoned Republican politicians’ bad behavior.
Check out their article “Tolerance of Political Intolerance: The Impact of Context and Partisanship on Public Approval of Politicians’ Uncivil Behavior” for a full read. It’s in January 2024’s Group Processes and Intergroup Relationships.
Take a look at the chart again. It suggests that for conservatives, all of these moral values hold some level of equivalence. In theory, that means for every ethical situation, there would be a robust internal and communal dialogue about which value makes the most sense in this particular situation, which would actually represent the diversity of perspectives, family structures, and socioeconomic positions of our communities. However, the Republican Party and the conservative media machine, influenced largely by Evangelical theology and a long history of unacknowledged economic growth as the result of owning Black people, have veered in the opposite direction, eliminating the desire to care for others, even their own community members, in the name of prioritizing values of authority, loyalty (especially loyalty to Trump), and purity.
I would suggest that one of the ways that we can do social justice without being a jackass is having a decision making process where all six of these values are in conversation with each other.
How to Hold Multiple Values
In The Righteous Mind, Haidt suggests that polarization (or righteousness, which speaks more to the inflexibility of a person or system) happens by a person or group using the same value or set of values to solve their problems.
Julia and I study the Purity Culture, which we specifically refer to as a media and theological movement in the 80s, 90s, and 00s that favored moralized a specific type of relationship, the heterosexual marriage, and created content that shamed people from exploring different types of sexuality. However, many 20th and 21st century Republican leaders use the value of purity to address a lot of topics: immigration, education (the elimination of critical race theory and promotion of private schools), and political structure (as we’re seeing through the funneling of specific cases to individualized judges, like Matthew Kaczmarek). This has led to a more polarized, extremist political party and ensuing community.
The first relationship tip that we’d share is remembering that there are situations in which each value system plays an important role in the functioning of a particular system.
As much as we rail on Purity Culture, there are situations in which the value of purity holds a high value. I appreciate medical facilities, restaurants, and energy companies that have established practices for providing purity so that germs, viruses, and access materials stay out of our bodies to the best of our ability. I appreciate systems that have a clear leadership hierarchy and structure; if I’m engaging with a new system or company, I want to know who I can talk to who will give me the best guidance and support. (This also ties into the values of authority and subversion.)
The second relationship tip that we’d share is to think of values from the perspective of rank-choice voting, rather than a multiple choice test where we have to choose one specific value and develop a communication strategy around that.
When I’m making a decision about what restaurant I want to have lunch at, all six values are at play:
Harm/care: How am I treated, both by the staff there and by the food? (Which is a super geeky way of assessing for how yummy their food is.)
Fairness/cheating: What is the price of the food? And does the price of food align with what I would pay for at a similar restaurant?
Liberty/oppression: How is the ambience and culture of the restaurant get communicated? For instance, if I want to show up in a t-shirt and gym shorts, will I get weird looks? More importantly, if someone else shows up in a t-shirt and gym shorts, either because they just came from the gym or those are the clothes they can afford, how do they get treated?
Loyalty/betrayal: How much am I willing to try a new place? If I want a burrito, will I feel like I’m cheating on Chipotle if I go to the local taco shop down the street?
Authority/subversion: Who’s in charge at this restaurant? Is there someone present who will welcome me and take my order?
Sanctity/degradation: How clean is this restaurant?
I will rank these values differently depending on the situation I’m in.
If I’m having a really bad day, I want some comfort food, and loyalty/betrayal may hold a higher priority.
If I’m feeling anxious about money, fairness/cheating may hold a higher priority.
If I’m feeling extra gregarious, I’ll go to a restaurant that I know doesn’t have great coffee, but I know the barista there and I want to see how they’re doing. I’ll value harm/care more in that context.
I recognize that the restaurant analogy holds some privilege to it. But the good news is that we can use this model with any context that we have. Decisions we make about children. Decisions we make about the type of sex and/or pleasurable experience that we want to have.
Context matters.
And giving more attention to the contextual factors that inform our decisions, and the decisions of others builds empathy, creates clarity around the messiness of all of our lives, and hopefully, helps us be less of a jackass.
Stay tuned to for more episodes and Substacks about How to Do Social Justice This Election Season Without Being a Jackass.
Let’s heal together!
This is very good. I love your concept and vision.
Such a great filter to better understand our own and others’ decision making.