Morality as Cooperation, Politics as Conflict

Abstract

What is the relationship between morality and politics? If morality is a collection of cooperative rules, and politics is conflict over which cooperative projects to pursue, then we should expect the two to be related. People who expect to benefit from a particular type of cooperation will be likely to endorse the corresponding moral values and political policies. Here we examine the relationship between moral values and political liberalism-conservatism, with data from the Morality-As-Cooperation Questionnaire and the Social and Economics Conservatism Scale in samples of participants from the USA (N = 518), Denmark (N = 552), the Netherlands (N = 353), and an international online population (N = 1,337). We found that political conservatism was consistently related with deference values. We also found some support for the hypotheses that political orientation has different associations with family values versus group values and has different associations with fairness values versus reciprocity values. However, for most of our hypotheses, the results showed no support or did not reach statistical significance, largely due to poor model fit or measurement error associated with the political scales. We conclude that improved measurement of political preferences is needed to illuminate the relationship between morality and politics.

Evolutionarily stable preferences

“…By contrast, an individual Homo moralis preferences of the form ( 4.8 ) with a positive degree of morality κ > 0 would not react to information about the opponent’s fitness: (s)he instead evaluates different courses of action by taking into account what own fitness would be if—hypothetically—the course of action was universalized to all the interactants. Experimental research shows that these motivations can be distinguished empirically [ 39 , 40 ].…”

Evolution of semi-Kantian preferences in two-player assortative interactions with complete and incomplete information and plasticity

“…For example [21,40], use dictator games to estimate individuals' preference parameters assuming other-regarding preferences. More recent studies in this literature have been inspired by results in the evolutionary theory of preferences to design economic games that further allow the researchers to discriminate between other-regarding and semi-Kantian preferences [76], and to estimate the importance of Kantian concerns relative to other-regarding concerns [96]. The latter study indicates that many individuals appear to be driven by a combination of self-interest, semi-Kantian concerns, and other-regard.…”

Aggregating evidence from conceptual replication studies using the product Bayes factor

“…The R-package bain version 0.2.9 or later is required, which can be installed by running install.packages("bain") in the R console. The data used in this tutorial are included in the bain package, and have been simulated based on the data presented in (Leeuwen, Van Lissa, Papakonstantinou, Petersen, & Curry, 2022). A more detailed description of the datasets is found in (Leeuwen et al, 2022); additionally, the dataset documentation is accessed by running ?synthetic_us, ?synthetic_dk or ?synthetic_nl in the R console.…”

“…The data used in this tutorial are included in the bain package, and have been simulated based on the data presented in (Leeuwen, Van Lissa, Papakonstantinou, Petersen, & Curry, 2022). A more detailed description of the datasets is found in (Leeuwen et al, 2022); additionally, the dataset documentation is accessed by running ?synthetic_us, ?synthetic_dk or ?synthetic_nl in the R console. Van Leeuwen and colleagues conducted a theory-driven, preregistered study to address the research question whether political orientation and moral dispositions are associated.…”