What I find fascinating about this study is not so much that it is supposed to show conservatives as insensitive, but that it correctly and completely defines the difference between the two ideologies when it comes to moral issues.

Are there universal moral truths or aren’t there? This study shows conclusively that conservatives think there are and liberals think there aren’t.





“Does being religious or being conservative promote a rule-based ethic or does having a rule-based ethic promote religiosity and/or conservatism?” Piazza told PsyPost. “This question is difficult to answer definitively without running a longitudinal study, since you cannot really manipulate religious orientation, or being in possession of a deontological orientation, and then look at the consequences.”

The study’s cross-sectional methodology makes it impossible to say anything more than religion and conservativism are associated with deontological ethics. However, Piazza said prior research suggested that being religious underlies the adherence to deontological ethics

“I think it is more likely that being religious — and being religious in a particular way — is what promotes deontological commitments, and not the other way around,” he told PsyPost. “In a recent unpublished study I conducted with my colleague Justin Landy at Penn, we found that it is a particular sub-class of religious individuals that are strongly opposed to consequentialist thinking. Specifically, it was religious individuals who believe that morality is founded upon divine authority or divine commands, and that moral truths are not obtained via human intuition or reason, who were strong deontologists (i.e., they refused to find various rule violations as permissible even when the consequences were better as a result).”

Do conservatives believe that moral truths are only obtained through divine authority? Certainly, many Christians do. But the point is, being a conservative means accepting the existence of certain universal human values and moral truths no matter where they arise, be it from God or “natural law” as Thomas Aquinas believed when it came to man governing his actions. Liberals appear to disdain the very idea of moral truth and substitute a relativistic worldview where consequences of one’s actions aren’t “moral” in any classical Christian or enlightenment sense, but rather, their morality is based on a “positive outcome” — even if the action taken to obtain that outcome violates a universally recognized moral precept.

It’s a nice out as far as living a life where the only rule is “do what feels good.”