Behavioral science · framework
Moral foundations theory
Jonathan Haidt & Jesse Graham, 2007
Haidt and Graham proposed that moral intuition is not one thing but several — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and later liberty — each an innate-but-tunable foundation that cultures and individuals weight differently. On this account much moral disagreement is not one side seeing clearly and the other failing to; it is people standing on different foundations and feeling the floor in different places.
Working definition
Morality rests on multiple innate-but-tunable foundations; disagreement often reflects different weightings, not different facts.
Where Vela uses this
Vela cites moral foundations theory for contrast: where in-group/out-group dynamics names a situational mechanism, MFT offers a dispositional map of why the loyalty and sanctity intuitions run so hot in some communities and so cool in others. It is useful for reading the moral texture of the religious communities the corpus engages without flattening them into a single 'morality.' Pairs with shame-family work where sanctity and degradation are in play.
Origin & lineage
Haidt & Graham (2007); Haidt's *The Righteous Mind* (2012) → the six-foundation revision adding liberty → ongoing debate over the number, innateness, and measurement of the foundations.
Where it shows up in Vela
Related concepts
- In-group / out-group dynamics
Sits next to — The loyalty foundation overlaps with social-identity in-group bias.
- Collective effervescence
Reads against — MFT is dispositional; effervescence is situational.
Scholars
Honest framing
The foundations' count and innateness are contested, and the theory's political applications have outrun its evidence in places. Vela presents it as an influential map of moral intuition, not as a settled inventory of the moral mind.