Different Populations Agree on Which Moral Arguments Underlie Which Opinions

Abstract

People often justify their moral opinions by referring to larger moral concerns (e. g., “It is unfair if homosexuals are not allowed to marry!” vs. “Letting homosexuals marry is against our traditions!”). Is there a general agreement about what concerns apply to different moral opinions? We used surveys in the United States and the United Kingdom to measure the perceived applicability of eight concerns (harm, violence, fairness, liberty, authority, ingroup, purity, and governmental overreach) to a wide range of moral opinions. Within countries, argument applicability scores were largely similar whether they were calculated among women or men, among young or old, among liberals or conservatives, or among people with or without higher education. Thus, the applicability of a given moral concern to a specific opinion can be viewed as an objective quality of the opinion, largely independent of the population in which it is measured. Finally, we used similar surveys in Israel and Brazil to establish that this independence of populations also extended to populations in different countries. However, the extent to which this holds across cultures beyond those included in the current study is still an open question.

Predicting how US public opinion on moral issues will change from 2018 to 2020 and beyond

“…The method we use for measuring the argument advantage of a moral opinion has been described in detail in prior work [ 5 , 11 ]. It relies on a list of generic moral arguments derived from moral foundations research [ 9 ].…”

“…Using this procedure, the argument advantage of 98 moral opinions covered by the General Social Survey (GSS) [ 17 ] was estimated by Vartanova and colleagues [ 11 ]. Importantly, even though the argument advantage measure of an opinion is a subjective measure aggregated across many respondents, it was found to be robust across demographic groups.…”

“…Below we make predictions for 102 opinions that were asked in the GSS during the last 10 years. For 75 of them, we use existing measures of argument advantage obtained by the method we have described [ 11 ]. The argument advantages of the remaining 27 opinions had not been measured before.…”

How does political discussion frequency impact political moral opinions? The moral argument theory of opinion dynamics

“…On any given issue, one opinion will therefore have a "HVFL argument advantage" in the sense that this opinion is easier to justify by the generally acceptable HVFL kinds of arguments than the opposite opinion is. Studies conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Israel have demonstrated that measures of which arguments justify which opinions are virtually identical across different groups, such as across liberals and conservatives (Vartanova et al, 2021). Thus, these measures reflect genuine connections between opinions and different kinds of arguments, the perceptions of which are largely independent of what opinion people hold (Strimling et al, 2019).…”

“…From the General Social Survey items included in any of the six aforementioned waves, we selected 81 items previously identified as opinions on moral issues (Vartanova et al, 2021). A full list is provided in Supplementary Table 2.…”