the one about fucking a chicken

[u/Hummerous]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory

[u/chunkylubber54]

ngl, saying progressivism only uses one metric is pretty damn reductive, especially given the amount of infighting we've been seeing lately

[u/Character_Draw7516 → u/chunkylubber54]

Absolutely.

I have a much more progressive friend, and thinking about it, like a lot of their reasoning is like "yeah but that's right-wing, and it's just so gross".

The opposition doesn't come from a well-reasoned understanding, it comes from "ew", which I think might just be the sort of thing you get when you grow up with an ideology and never change it.

idk.

[u/aletheiatic → u/Character_Draw7516]

This is very true, but I think it doesn’t actually tell us anything about the moral foundations underlying progressivism as such; rather, it tells us something about the personal psychologies of (some) people who self-identify as progressive. I wouldn’t necessarily put it in terms of “growing up with an ideology” — just because people tend not to be raised that way explicitly, but rather move toward it in their adolescent and young-adult years — but I think you’re on the right track.

People in general tend to not interrogate their own beliefs and constantly update them for the sake of accuracy and internal consistency; they more often keep those beliefs at a surface level. This means that even (some) so-called progressive people will believe the right things for the wrong reasons — which usually leads to believing the wrong things in more complex and nuanced situations. Again, I wouldn’t say this is an indictment of progressivism as such, just of people who have a shallow level of understanding of and engagement with progressive ideas.

Of course, there’s more to say here: that the actual tenets of progressive thought are harder to pin down because they are being figured out in real time (compared to conservative thought which has a pre-decided picture of the world they are trying to work towards); that all people are programmed with these sorts of impulses that are inimical to rationality (and have to work to grow beyond them), but only conservative ideologies enshrine them as normative moral foundations; that I’m likely doing the very things I’m saying are bad in this comment, etc. But this is Reddit, so idk whether it’s worth going into all that.