Update

A letter in response to Pinker's article on the New York Times website suggests the following:

Among the five “moral spheres” of harm, fairness, community, authority and purity, Jonathan Haidt “found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity.” In fact, liberals do put weight on these spheres: Haidt may simply have been asking the questions from an inappropriate point of view and disregarding Peter Singer’s “Theory of the Expanding Circle.” Liberals put great weight on loyalty to the entire human race (or even all animals), as opposed to one’s own race, nation or clan. They put weight on the authority of empirical evidence (over dogma), the international community (over one’s own country) or the Constitution (over the flag). And they put weight on purity in terms of the environment and sustainability. What appears to be moral “lopsidedness” is the result of applying the spheres to larger groups and more universal, all-encompassing entities.

STEPHEN W. SMITH

Minneapolis

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