Moral Universes

[drcuriosity]

elissa_carey found this interesting article, looking at the essential differences in moral priority between U.S. liberals and conservatives:

Conservatives Live in a Different Moral Universe — And Here's Why It Matters [motherjones.com]

It's an interesting read for people who want to look a bit deeper at why people with different political leanings disagree with and often misunderstand or mischaracterise each other. However, I'm going to be geeky (quelle surprise!) and apply it to world building for games and stories. One of the major points in the article is a taxonomy of moral impulses, outlined below:

• Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
  
• Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
  
• In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
  
• Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.
  
• Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

I can see this being used in a descriptive way to explore reasons why certain groups in a game/story world may come into conflict or work with other groups: if they differ greatly on some of their core moral priorities, then there's a reasonable likelihood of tension even if their worldviews are otherwise similar. It may also be a nice way of getting away from the old Dungeons and Dragons-style Law-Chaos/Good-Evil alignment compass, while still having a workable framework for characterising societies' moral values. In this frame of reference it's still possible for people to commit good or evil acts, but what count

Note that similar priorities wouldn't necessarily mean that groups would be firm friends, however: two groups who care strongly about purity may have different ideas of what constitutes "pure", and people who're greatly concerned about fairness may have different ideas about what rights should be upheld and how justice should be applied.

It's definitely more a design lens than a golden hammer, mind, but something to ponder perhaps.

[Current music courtesy of skonen_blades and the Unknown Origins podcast team. Nice tunes, guys, and you crack me up regularly.]

Comments

[elissa-carey.livejournal.com]

Talvin Singh did a great song, "Traveller," the remix of which by Kid Loco I adore.

[drcuriosity]

Listening to that now :-)

[elissa-carey.livejournal.com]

Good deal! Great stuff, innit?

[drcuriosity]

Indeed, I like. Nice low-volume work music, or slightly higher-volume relaxation music.

[lwoodbloo.livejournal.com]

Is your default icon Rowland S. Howard, or is it just me.

[elissa-carey.livejournal.com]

It's in the article. As presented, it's also a Judeo-Christian ethic, connected by the idea of remaining spiritually pure: lust and greed are of the Seven Deadly Sins, and thus are spiritual impurities.

[drcuriosity]

Some connect physical and spiritual cleanliness issues relatively regularly. Lustful activities are "dirty", money earned through unprincipled means is "filthy lucre" and various acts of physical washing or anointing are used to enact ritual purification.

That said, I was quoting the article directly there rather than coming up with my own changes or embellishments. I'd probably draw the lines in different places if I were coming up with my own taxonomy from scratch.

For a different outlook on virtue/vice in roleplaying, you might find this NPC personality generator [active JS roller] interesting, though I'm sure there are holes to be picked in that model too.

[lwoodbloo.livejournal.com]

aw man! yeah, pew was the one who dressed up like a leatherman cowboy. DOH.

I fail.

[rane500.livejournal.com]

You'd be surprised at how well the AD&D morality system actually applies sometimes.

[slothphil.livejournal.com]

I headed off to their Web site which gathers data on moral issues and found I was unable to meaningfully respond to the study on moral foundations. Many of my answers would be "It depends" or "I have no particular opinion", and they don't allow for that.

A shame really, because the guy's idea's are interesting.

[drcuriosity]

I agree. I'm not fond of having to triangulate answers on questionnaires.

[muerk.livejournal.com]

Money laundering for example.

[cookiemon.livejournal.com]

Or you can wait for the movie.

[aigantighe.livejournal.com]

Heh. Haidt pops up in the strangest places.

There's a good, and much more thorough, discussion of his ideas in a NYTimes article from early last year that you may have had to listen to me yabbering about.. It's at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html

There's also an interview with him and Will Wilkinson of Cato on bloggingheads.tv that's quite good, as it gets into the impact of this sort of thing on social policy. Turns out there's another more recent one with a different interviewer, too.. http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/11740 and http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/13700

My understanding is that this isn't so much a devised taxonomy as the results of a PCA study on the collected results of various morality studies. I'm not too sure how familiar you are with PCA, but basically it attempts to distinguish the various orthogonal factors at play in a large data set; these factors are then often named and described by the experimenter.

So, if I'm correct in my recollection, it's less a case of Haidt making up these categories and more that those are the ways in which the various respondents cluster together; an example might be that people who worry about food purity are also more likely to worry about sexual purity. Of course, I haven't got a paper to refer you to, just my memory, so take this with a grain of salt :)

I really like the idea of applying this to cultures and NPCs in games, though - it's a really nice framework for fleshing them out, and much more descriptive than the old saw of good and evil. In particular, those categories are less subjectively defined, so you don't get as much of the fluff over what good or evil actually is. Of course, there's still the content question - what food or act is considered pure, per se, but at least then you're comparing similar world views.

I really like Haidt's conception of morality, though, particularly because it ties neatly into evolutionary theories of morality, which make it a much more concrete and useful concept (imgo).