Moral Foundations as Property Rights


(a central concept of Propertarianism)

[O]f Haidt’s evolutionary origins of moral intuitions, three can be expressed as individual property rights:

    1. Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm. (The asset of life and body.)
    2. Proportionality/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions. (The asset of goods.)
    3. Liberty/Oppression, characterizes judgments in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized. (The asset of time, opportunity.)

And three others can be expressed as community property rights covering social capital. Which obviously enough, have been, and continue to be, mirrored in corporate shareholder agreements.

    4. In-Group Loyalty/In-Group Betrayal to/of your group, family, nation, polity.
    5. Respect/Authority/Subversion for tradition and legitimate authority.
    6. Purity/Sanctity/Degradation/Disgust, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions.

It should be noted that the male reproductive strategy among chimpanzees as well as humans evolved to kill off males in opposing groups and collect females. And that females evolved to place greater emphasis on children and females than the (fungible) tribe.

As such the distribution of moral intuitions varies in intensity between the feminine (1-3) and the masculine (4-6). This difference in moral intuitions roughly reflects the voting pattern we have seen since the enfranchisement of women into the electorate: an increase in the use of political violence to produce an increase in the female reproductive strategy (individual dysgenic reproduction) and a decrease in the male reproductive strategy (tribal eugenic reproduction).

When I first read a paper by Jonathan Haidt, years ago now, I immediately understood the implication.  Just as the ten commandments are reducible to “There is but one law: property, and thou shalt not steal”, all our moral rules can be reduced to one: “thou shalt not steal directly or indirectly, by action or inaction.”  These rules are genetic in origin.  They are necessary and immutable.

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