What you see is all there is: Libtards, MAGAs, and moral reasoning

Full disclosure right up front: I’m a “libtard.” Actually, that’s not entirely true. “Libtard” is too weak of a term. My political leanings lie far to the left of libtarded, well into libimbecile range—even the libtards think I’m soft-headed. But, like the libtards, I am perpetually shocked, angered, and amazed by the barely coherent thoughtforms Donald Trump excretes daily, and dumbfounded by the way that his racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, hate-filled followers slurp them up as if each of his grammarless tweets was a honey-flavored drop of colostrum oozing from their mother’s teat. 

A fundamental psychological reality is that each of us interprets the world in terms of our personal knowledge and experience. It is impossible for us to do otherwise. And yet we fail to see the broad limits this sets on our ability to understand. Most of what falls outside of our current scope of understanding—which, in our unimaginably complex universe, turns out to be the vast majority of things—might as well not exist. The rest is distorted and forcefully altered in order to make it consistent with our previous knowledge and experience. We never see things as they truly are, but only in terms of what we think we already know. But not all things are equal in this regard. The broader your education and experience, the more extensive your knowledge base and the easier it is to interpret and integrate something new. It’s a rich-gets-richer situation, where the more you know, the more you can know, the more accurate and useful your knowledge becomes, and the easier it is to learn new things.

As a group, liberals, because they tend to be more highly educated, probably have the advantage in this regard. In addition, the liberal/conservative divide to some extent also parallels the urban/rural divide. Living in cities provides greater exposure to people from different racial, ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds. Rural areas tend to be socially homogeneous places, where an individual’s knowledge of people from different racial, ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds is more heavily influenced by myth and media stereotypes, and less likely to involve personal experience.

No doubt some of the tension and animosity between progressive-leaning liberals and the conservative MAGA folks has its source in underlying differences in knowledge and experience, with each side distorting the facts to make them comport with what they already believe is true. But there may be something else going on as well. Distorted facts alone cannot explain the dramatic polarity between the two sides on issues such as gun control, abortion rights, immigration policy, health care, climate change, and a growing number of other points of contention. The opposing standpoints on these issues seem too extreme to be explained by differences in education and experience alone. The issues are being framed in radically different ways by the two camps. It appears that the two sides are reading from an entirely different rulebook when it comes to what makes something good or bad, right or wrong. It appears as if they are living in two completely different moral universes.

In the 1970s, Lawrence Kohlberg came up with a theory about the development of moral reasoning. Kohlberg’s theory includes six stages spread across three levels that involve progressively sophisticated modes of reasoning about right and wrong. The first level to emerge in childhood is the preconventional level, and includes two stages in which decisions about whether an act is right or wrong are based on its potential consequences. Guiding ethical principles at this lowest level include “do whatever you want as long as you can get away with it” and “the ends justify the means.” The golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated, is an appeal to the self-focused, punishment-and-reward sensibilities of people operating at this level. The two stages of the second level, the conventional level, probably apply to the majority of adults. At the conventional level, rules, laws, and social conventions determine what is right and wrong. Any act that breaks the law or violates the rules is wrong regardless of the larger context in which the act occurred, and regardless of whether the act led to a good or bad outcome. Behavior that falls outside the norm is bad because it falls outside the norm. The highest level of moral reasoning in Kohlberg’s scheme is the postconventional level. Right and wrong at this level are based on self-chosen higher-order ethical principles, and are relative to the specific situation in question. The first stage of this level deals with social contract notions of what is good and bad for civil society as a whole—Kant’s categorical imperative that we should act in ways that we would wish were universal law probably fits here—and the sixth and final stage deals with notions of universal human rights and human dignity. It is important to note that, despite the fact that this is a developmental theory, not everybody makes it to the postconventional level, and that quite a few people never make it beyond the preconventional level.

Kohlberg’s theory has received a lot of criticism over the years. For one thing, his postconventional level seems to reflect Western ideals that might not apply in other cultures. In addition, his theory’s focus on an ethics of justice has a decidedly masculine bias to it. Females tend toward a more socially-embedded ethics of caring and compassion. Because of this, women are more likely to top out at the conventional level. Nevertheless, his theory provides a useful rubric for distinguishing differences in the ways that individuals think about right and wrong, as well as providing insight into a potential source of disagreements among political factions.

Consider what might happen when a person operating at the conventional level, the level at which right and wrong are a matter of established rules and social norms, confronts the principle-based situational ethics of a postconventional argument. The conventional thinker is not able to consider the argument on the level that it was formulated, but that doesn’t prevent them from interpreting the argument in terms of their own prior moral reasoning experience. Conventional thinkers were once preconventional thinkers, and it is easy for them to translate the argument in ways that fit with a lower level of moral reasoning. The conventional thinker is likely to miss the whole point, and interpret the postconventional argument in preconventional terms in which principle-driven situational ethics becomes “ignore the rules and do whatever you want.”

Donald Trump is quite clearly operating at the preconventional level of moral reasoning (although I balk at ascribing any actual reasoning to his reasoning—let alone attaching moral status to it). His morality, like his third-grade emotionality and social proclivities, is entirely absent even rudimentary sophistication. To the extent that his followers share his ideals and approve of his methods, it is likely that they are operating at a similarly primitive level of reasoning as well. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that the majority of the MAGA folks are not postconventional thinkers. And, judging by the content of their posters and their hate-filled chants of “lock her up” and “send her back,” few of the attendees at Trump rallies are likely candidates for even the conventional range. Perhaps a major difference between progressive-leaning liberals—libtards—and MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters has to do with differences in the sophistication of their moral thought.

Although I am not aware of any hard data that would back this up, there is overwhelming anecdotal evidence to suggest that part of the reason the left and the right are talking past each other is because they are arguing from incompatible levels of moral reasoning. The border security issue makes a good example case. The liberal mantra “A border wall is a stupid waste of money and won’t solve the problem” gets translated as “liberals want open borders.” Liberals and progressives are up in arms about the way that flesh and blood human beings crossing the southern border are being treated: children separated from their parents; people held in holding pens for weeks under conditions that would be illegal to treat livestock. The right-wing crowd seems to think that there is nothing wrong here. Conservatives operating from the conventional level of moral reasoning focus on the illegal part of illegal immigration, and lump desperate asylum seekers in with common criminals. Since many of these people entered the country illegally, they deserve what they get. Those conservatives operating from a preconventional level see them as greedy people wanting to take advantage of the system, either looking for a free handout or wanting to steal our jobs. Although there are probably postconventional arguments for refusing these people entrance into the country, it gets progressively harder to justify ill treatment of asylum seekers and others crossing the southern border as you get into the postconventional range of reasoning. Basic principles of fairness and due process, as well as notions of civility and respect for human dignity, demand that we treat people humanely and with compassion.

A similar story can be told about left/right differences in environmental policies, and entitlement programs, and whether Trump is guilty of obstructing justice, where the extremes of the debate pit punishment-and-reward preconventional perspectives and black-and-white conventional logic against more nuanced postconventional views. The sharp disparity between republican and democrat talking points might signal more than just different beliefs about the role of government, or different views on the best economic, social, and environmental policies. Beneath the stark differences between left and right political agendas might lie fundamentally different modes of reasoning about right and wrong.

What you see is all there is; we can only work with what is available to us to work with. How we work with what is available to us is important too. How we determine right and wrong in a complex universe is determined by the ways that we frame the questions, what principles, if any, we apply to the situation, and what we already believe is important. As a highly educated city-dweller occupying the left-most reaches of the libtard spectrum, and as a fan of nuance and higher-order principles, I cringe at the simplistic and childish babble spewing up from lower Trumpistan. As a cognitive psychologist, I am painfully aware that my perspective is not without bias, but I am nonetheless convinced that, when it comes to the competing views offered by left/right factions of the political debate, one of them is clearly less wrong.