How Moral Foundations Theory Succeeded in Building on Sand: A Response to Suhler and Churchland

Moral Foundations Theory

“…In response to their critique, we offered a more detailed discussion of moral modularity (Haidt & Joseph, 2011; see also Haidt & Joseph, 2007). We have also tried to be much more specific in this chapter about what exactly a foundation is, and how you know when something is innate (see Section 4.2).…”

Moral Foundations' Methodological Foundations: A Systematic Analysis of Reliability in Research Using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire

“…The human mind, according to MFT, comes primed to learn these five foundations, but that experience leads some individuals to rely more heavily on certain foundations than others (Haidt & Graham, 2007;Haidt & Joseph, 2008), which can, at least in part, account for modern "culture wars" (Koleva et al, 2012). Although much early work on MFT proposes, defines, or tests these five foundations exclusively, Haidt and Joseph (2011) stated they are working on developing or modifying these foundations in response to criticisms of the moral foundations specifically as ad-hoc and MFT's modularity more broadly as possibly "conveniently vague and context-morphable" (Suhler & Churchland, 2011, p. 2105.…”

Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology

“…All five are argued to be universal to humans, yet there is considerable individual‐ and group‐level variation in how these modules are developed and expressed. While clearly seen as evolved and innate traits (i.e., “organized in advance of experience”; Haidt and Joseph ), these modules are also extensively modified by socialization. The institutions and collective social values found in a given cultural context play an important role in encouraging or retarding the development of particular foundations in a given individual (Haidt ; Haidt and Joseph ).…”

“…The role of culture and the environment in developing these psychological modules is an important element of MFT, yet there is no question that at the individual level, MFT assumes moral foundations to be stable, dispositional, and genetically influenced (Haidt , 325–28). As Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (, 1031) put it, MFT assumes that “human beings have the five foundations as part of their evolved first draft, but … there is heritable variation.” Haidt and Joseph () describe moral foundations as likely to be polygenic traits with developmental characteristics similar to many other heritable social phenotypes, that is, the product of the incremental influences of many genes interacting in complex ways with their environments. The combination of differing genetic endowment and social reinforcement explains individual‐level variation in moral intuition and thus moral judgments.…”