When morality and politics intersect — Why our perspective matters too

An everyday scene that may seem familiar to many: Four friends are sitting at a table, discussing something — a glass of beer in one hand, a hot dog in the other.

One of them shakes her head: ”I just can’t stand how rudely people are treated in the refugee shelters. Some of them are sick, some have lost everything. Anyone who looks away is complicit.”

The second counters: “What about us? My sister has been looking for an apartment for months. If we only ever think about the immigrants, there will be nothing left for us in the end.”

The third interjects: “Honestly, rules are there to be followed. If someone is here without papers, then that’s illegal. Period.”

Finally, the fourth smiles and raises his glass: “And while you’re arguing about who’s right, we’re all sitting here eating meat, drinking beer, celebrating — and pretending that it’s all clean. But it’s clear that neither factory farming nor our lifestyle are innocent in global migration.”

For a moment, the group falls silent. Four voices, four perspectives — and each claims to know something about “right” and “wrong.” Several moral issues contradict each other, overlap, ignore each other, then collide. Morality shapes how we see the world, how we judge, how we act, and it is also one of the reasons why we are often so deeply divided when it comes to political opinions.

One of the best-known theories describing differences in moral sensibilities is Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham (2007). It assumes that there are several moral “pillars” (thematic areas) that every person can consider more or less morally relevant. In one variant of the theory, five such pillars (called “foundations” in the original English) are distinguished:

1. Care: Avoid suffering, protect others
2. Fairness: Share fairly, punish cheating
3. Loyalty: Stick with your own group
4. Authority: Respecting rules and hierarchies
5. Sanctity: Taking ideas of holiness seriously

Research by Haidt and Graham shows that those on the political “left” emphasize above all the “individualizing” pillars of care and fairness, i.e., moral norms that ensure the protection, rights, and freedoms of individuals. Those who are more politically “right-wing” also consider the pillars of loyalty, authority, and sanctity to be morally significant; values that ensure community cohesion and are therefore referred to as “binding foundations” (Graham et al., 2009).

These findings have been replicated in many countries — from the US to Sweden and Turkey (Kivikangas et al., 2021; Nilsson & Erlandsson, 2015; Yalçındağ et al., 2019). And they seem to explain some of the political trench warfare: whether it’s migration, the environment, religion, or social issues, political differences of opinion are also rooted in different moral priorities (Koleva et al., 2012; Milesi, 2016).

But as far-reaching as this theory is, it overlooks one crucial factor: perspectives.

The second major research tradition stems from the literature on justice sensitivity (Baumert & Schmitt, 2016). It asks how sensitively people react to injustice; in other words, where their individual threshold lies for perceiving injustice and reacting to it emotionally. It is important to note that each of us has several such thresholds, depending on our role in a situation involving injustice and the perspective we take.

Four perspectives are crucial:

• Victim perspective: I am being treated unfairly.
• Observer perspective: I see someone else being treated unfairly.
• Beneficiary perspective: I benefit from someone else being treated unfairly.
• Perpetrator perspective: I recognize that I have treated someone unfairly.
   

This distinction is crucial. Studies show that people who react particularly strongly to their own disadvantage (“victim-sensitive”) tend to have typically conservative attitudes and values: right-wing populism, rejection of migration, skepticism toward climate policy. People who react more strongly to injustices towards others (“observer, beneficiary, or perpetrator sensitive”) tend to have more liberal attitudes and values and prefer solidarity, inclusion, and environmental protection (Nicolai et al., 2022; Rothmund et al., 2017, 2020).

In our research, we combined both strands of moral psychology research: the five moral pillars and the four perspectives. The result was an integrated Moral Foundations × Perspectives Model. 

The logic behind this: based on the literature on justice sensitivity, it should make a difference whether I assess a morally relevant situation from the perspective of the person affected — for example: “My authority has been undermined” — or from the observer's perspective — for example: “Another person's authority has been disregarded.” Previous research on “moral foundations” has not taken this differentiation into account and has thus probably mixed-up different meanings of the experience of authority.

We therefore developed a new scale that explicitly captures each moral pillar from all four perspectives. In a representative survey of over 2,000 people in Germany (financially supported by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology; ZPID), we tested whether this “combined” model better explains how moral sensibilities and political orientation are related.

1. The combined model fits better.
   The intersection of moral pillars and perspectives fits the data better than the two simple models: the model that only includes moral pillars, or the model that only includes perspectives.
    
2. Self-oriented moral sensitivity → right.
   People who react strongly to situations in which they themselves are disadvantaged—regardless of whether this disadvantage relates to care, fairness, loyalty, authority, or purity—tend to have more conservative attitudes and support conservative parties (compared to people who react less strongly to their own disadvantage).
    
3. Other-oriented moral sensitivity → left.
   People who react strongly to situations in which others are disadvantaged (observers), in which they are responsible for such disadvantage (perpetrators), or from which they themselves benefit (beneficiaries) show—again across all moral pillars — a stronger affinity for left-wing positions and parties (compared to those who react less strongly to such situations).
    
4. Perspective-dependent evaluation of moral pillars.
   A well-established effect should be reconsidered. Until now, it was considered certain that right-wing individuals place greater emphasis on “binding” moral pillars such as loyalty or authority than left-wing individuals. However, when we take perspectives into account, this picture changes. It turns out that it is not the issue (i.e., the moral pillar) itself that is relevant, but only in relation to perspective: Conservatives consider violations of loyalty or authority to be morally wrong, especially when they themselves or their group is affected. Liberals, on the other hand, consider violations of loyalty or authority to be morally wrong when others are affected.

These findings are relevant because they may contribute to our understanding of political polarization. We can illustrate how moral issues and perspectives divide people with the following example:

Let's imagine that the government decides to allocate significant financial resources to international climate aid.

Right-wing people react with outrage because they take a victim perspective: they see the decision as a betrayal of their own population — “we have to bear rising energy costs ourselves, and yet our money is going abroad.”

Left-leaning people react with outrage because they take an outside perspective: they see it as a moral failure when wealthy countries do not take enough responsibility for poorer countries — “These people are suffering from the consequences of a problem that we have played a significant part in causing.”

Both sides therefore invoke moral principles — one based on fairness and loyalty to their own group, the other on care and justice towards others. But because they assess the issue from different perspectives, polarization arises: the same political decision is interpreted either as an unfair disadvantage to ourselves or as an immoral failure toward others.

It is important to note that both sides claim to be acting morally, and from their position, they are based on their respective moral pillars and perspectives. Precisely because each side sees its actions as morally legitimate, there is often a lack of recognition that the other side is also arguing from a moral logic. It is precisely this circumstance that can exacerbate polarization: moral arguments are particularly divisive because they pit not only different interests against each other, but also different ideas of “right” and “wrong” (Abeywickrama et al., 2020).

This makes the polarization in Western societies more tangible: it is not only a dispute about values, but also a conflict about perspectives.

This knowledge has practical consequences: if you want to improve political communication, you have to enable a change of perspective. Only when people recognize that the other side is not always “immoral,” but may simply have a different point of view, can understanding arise.

Our research makes it clear that morality is not a uniform measure, but rather a prism. What matters is not only which moral pillars are important to us, but above all the perspective from which we perceive moral issues. 

Right-wing attitudes are more strongly influenced by self-oriented sensitivity — that is, by concern for one’s own disadvantage or that of one’s “own group.” Left-wing attitudes, on the other hand, are more strongly influenced by other-oriented sensitivity — with an eye for violations of norms that affect others.

Both follow moral principles, but they anchor these principles in different perspectives. What sounds like “justice” to one side appears to the other as “discrimination” — and vice versa.

The consequence:

• If you want to understand debates, you must not only ask, “What values are important to you?”
• But also, “From whose perspective are you viewing the situation?”

This shift in thinking could help bridge political divides to some extent. It explains why arguments often come to nothing — and shows where dialogue needs to start: not in the conflict between values, but in understanding perspectives.

Read the OA article “Combining Moral Foundations and Justice Sensitivity Perspectives to Understand Political Orientation.”

Abeywickrama, R. S., Rhee, J. J., Crone, D. L., & Laham, S. M. (2020). Why Moral Advocacy Leads to Polarization and Proselytization: The Role of Self-Persuasion. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 8(2), 473–503. 
doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v8i2.1346

Baumert, A., & Schmitt, M. (2016). Justice Sensitivity. In C. Sabbagh & M. Schmitt (Eds), Handbook of Social Justice Theory and Research (pp. 161–180). Springer. 
doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3216-0_9

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046. 
doi.org/10.1037/a0015141

Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98–116. 
doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z

Kivikangas, J. M., Fernández-Castilla, B., Järvelä, S., Ravaja, N., & Lönnqvist, J.-E. (2021). Moral foundations and political orientation: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 147(1), 55–94. 
doi.org/10.1037/bul0000308

Koleva, S. P., Graham, J., Iyer, R., Ditto, P. H., & Haidt, J. (2012). Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes. Journal of Research in Personality, 46(2), 184–194.
doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2012.01.006

Milesi, P. (2016). Moral foundations and political attitudes: The moderating role of political sophistication. International Journal of Psychology, 51(4), 252–260. 
doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12158

Nicolai, S., Franikowski, P., & Stoll-Kleemann, S. (2022). Predicting Pro-environmental Intention and Behavior Based on Justice Sensitivity, Moral Disengagement, and Moral Emotions – Results of Two Quota-Sampling Surveys. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. 
doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.914366

Nilsson, A., & Erlandsson, A. (2015). The Moral Foundations taxonomy: Structural validity and relation to political ideology in Sweden. Personality and Individual Differences, 76, 28–32. 
doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.049

Rothmund, T., Bromme, L., & Azevedo, F. (2020). Justice for the People? How Justice Sensitivity Can Foster and Impair Support for Populist Radical-Right Parties and Politicians in the United States and in Germany. Political Psychology, 41(3), 479–497. 
doi.org/10.1111/pops.12632

Rothmund, T., Stavrova, O., & Schlösser, T. (2017). Justice Concerns Can Feed Nationalistic Concerns and Impede Solidarity in the Euro Crisis: How Victim Sensitivity Translates into Political Attitudes. Social Justice Research, 30(1), 48–71. 
doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0280-7

Yalçındağ, B., Özkan, T., Cesur, S., Yilmaz, O., Tepe, B., Piyale, Z. E., Biten, A. F., & Sunar, D. (2019). An Investigation of Moral Foundations Theory in Turkey Using Different Measures. Current Psychology, 38(2), 440–457. 
doi.org/10.1007/s12144-017-9618-4