Australia S Moral Compass And Societal Wellbeing

To be published in: D. Costache, D. Cronshaw and J.R. Harrison (eds), Wellbeing, Personal
Wholeness and the Social Fabric: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge
Scholars Press.
Australia’s Moral Compass and Societal Wellbeing
Wendy Mayer*
The theory that I set out in this article, with what I believe are large implications for Australian
societal wellbeing, is one that has a particular origin. Four years ago, as it was becoming
increasingly clear that Australia was not immune from the global impact of religious conflict,1
I began research on the question of what generates such conflict in the first place. At that time,
the bulk of research across all disciplines on the question was focused on its extreme,
violence.2
Very little work was being done on tracing what causes such radicalisation in the
first instance – that is, the early stages of radicalisation and how to identify them – or on the
theoretical underpinnings of the phenomenon – in particular, the precise role of religion in
religious conflict. The latter is a question that shapes the very way we view the problem and its
solution, yet is rarely posed.3
Is it religion that is responsible for – that is, the root cause of –
what we perceive as religious conflict?4
If it is the case that religion is not responsible or is not
*
The research on which this article is based was conducted in the Centre for Early Christian Studies, Australian
Catholic University and also in the Department of Biblical and Ancient Studies, University of South Africa, where
the author is a Research Fellow. She is also a Research Associate at Sydney College of Divinity.
1
The concern for Australian society and its government of the reach and influence of radical Islam has been
demonstrated in multiple incidents since then, including the shooting of a New South Wales police civilian
employee by 15-year-old Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammad in 2015 (www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-03/nsw-police-
headquarters-gunman-was-radicalised-youth/6825028), and the arrest after year-long monitoring of 18-year-old
Tamim Khaja by NSW police in May 2016 on the basis of a suspected imminent terrorist act
(www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-17/teenager-arrested-for-allegedly-planning-a-terrorist-act/7421072). For an
overview of the CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) initiative launched in 2010 see
www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1415/Quick_G
uides/Extremism (published February 10, 2015). Similarly concerning is the related rise in Australia of
Islamophobia and anti-Muslim political parties. See, e.g., Oliver Murray, “Far-Right-Wing Parties After your
Vote on Election Day,” April 26, 2016 (www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/farrightwing-parties-after-your-
vote-on-election-day/news-story/dea024a911e4e5bf2d8d6bb6fbd1f0b0); and Tom King, “Explainer: Australia’s
Tangled Web of Far-Right Political Parties,” The Conversation, August 11, 2015 (theconversation.com/explainer-
australias-tangled-web-of-far-right-political-parties-45619). All articles were accessed June 16, 2016.
2
See Wendy Mayer, “Religious Conflict: Definitions, Problems and Theoretical Approaches,” in Religious
Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam, ed. W. Mayer and B. Neil (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 1-19,
esp. 1-2. This focus is shared by the Australian Government (as indicated in n. 1), and continues to dominate
research on the phenomenon. See the activities of, among others, The Colloquium on Violence & Religion
(violenceandreligion.com) and The Center for Research on Extremism (www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/).
3
Again, the lens through which the question is viewed, when it does arise, tends to be that of violence. See, e.g.,
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of
Violence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
4
The perceived role of religion varies depending on the discipline from within which the issue is assessed. For the
view from within sociology that religious conflict is not sui generis and that “many putatively religious conflicts
are fundamentally similar to other conflicts over political power, economic resources, symbolic recognition, or
cultural reproduction” see Rogers Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence,”
Sociological Theory 33.1 (2015): 1-19, doi: 10.1177/0735275115572153. On the other hand, within political
science scholars have been scrambling since 9/11 to reintroduce religion as a significant social variable into social,
political, and international relations theory. See Jonathan Fox and Schmuel Sandler, “The Question of Religion
and World Politics,” in Religion in World Conflict, ed. Jonathan Fox and Schmuel Sandler (London-New York:
Routledge, 2006), 1-10, at 5-6, 10; and Klaus-Jürgen Nagel and Ferran Requejo, “Nationalism and Religion:

the primary cause, should we stop using labels like “religious conflict” or “religious
extremism” as misleading and misdirecting when it comes to seeking out solutions? At the
time that I began this project it had, for the most part, been assumed that not just religion but a
particular kind of religion was at fault, with blame cast in particular on monotheist religions or
so-called “religions of the book” – that is, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.5
This has led me to
engage with the history of religion as a concept,6
and with the theory of religion, particularly
the sociology and cognitive science of religion.7
At the same time, two other projects in which
I have been engaged have been contributing to this same area of research from completely
different and less self-evident perspectives. My primary research focus is the period of late
antiquity,8
with a particular interest in early Christian preaching. Inspired by a conundrum
posed by Brent Shaw in his book Sacred Violence, I have been working to explain how what
seem to be perfectly ordinary (that is, not hate-filled or polemical) sermons in the past had the
capacity over time to radicalise their audiences.9
As Shaw observed, while exploring some
hundred or more sermons in Latin generated by the Donatist side in a protracted and violent
North African religious dispute between two groups with no real doctrinal difference, the
impact of these sermons on the two parties can be demonstrated historically.10
At the time, he
struggled, however, to explain how the language of this “huge mountain of normative
ordinariness,”11
on the surface little different from that of the sermons of the “Catholic”
Friends or foes?,” in Politics of Religion and Nationalism: Federalism, Consociationalism and secession, ed.
Ferran Requejo and Klaus-Jürgen Nagel (New York-London: Routledge, 2015), 1-11.
5
In situating the roots of religious violence and intolerance in monotheism, the work of the Egyptologist Jan
Assmann has been particularly influential. See, e.g., Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in
Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); id., Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder
der Preis des Monotheismus (München: Hanser Akzente, 2003); id., Monotheismus und die Sprache der Gewalt
(Wien: Picus Verlag, 2006); and more recently the essay, “Monotheismus und Gewalt,” January 29, 2013
(www.perlentaucher.de/essay/monotheismus-und-gewalt.html; accessed June 16, 2016); and, for a sample of
critiques of his views, Joachim Losehand, “‘The Religious Harmony in the Ancient World’: Vom Mythos
religiöser Toleranz in der Antike,” Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaft 12 (2009): 99-132, at 111-112; Jan
Bremmer, “Religious Violence and its Roots: A View from Antiquity,” Asdiwal. Revue genevoise d’ánthropologie
et d’historie des religions 6 (2011): 71-79; and René Bloch, “Polytheismus und Monotheismus in der paganen
Antike: Zu Jan Assmanns Monotheismus-Kritik,” in Fremdbilder-Selbstbilder. Imaginationen des Judentums von
der Antike bis in die Neuzeit, ed. René Bloch et al. (Basel: Verlag Schwabe, 2010), 5-24.
6
The existence of “religion” before the Reformation is a major topic of discussion at present, led by scholars such
as Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven-London: Yale University Press,
2013); and Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
(Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press, 2012). See further Russell T. McCutcheon, “The Category ‘Religion’ in Recent
Publications: Twenty Years Later,” Numen 62 (2015): 119–141.
7
For an overview of the cognitive science of religion (CSR), its key scholars and theories, see Aaron C.T. Smith,
Thinking About Religion: Extending the Cognitive Science of Religion, Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of
Religion (London-New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). For an overview of sociology of religion as a field, see
Bryan Turner, “The Sociology of Religion,” in The SAGE Handbook of Sociology, ed. Craig Calhoun, Chris
Rojek and Bryan Turner (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 284-301.
8
As an historical period late antiquity has been variously defined. The latest view extends its chronological
definition from the second to the eighth century CE. Its geographic boundaries, originally confined to the former
Roman empire, have also recently been exploded. See the definition proposed by Studies in Late Antiquity: A
Journal (www.ucpress.edu/page.php?q=sla), accessed June 16, 2016.
9
For the first fruits of this research see Wendy Mayer, “A Life of Their Own: Preaching, Radicalisation, and the
Early Ps-Chrysostomica in Greek and Latin,” in Pseudepigrapha Graeca, Latine et Orientalia. Mélanges en
l’honneur de Sever J. Voicu, ed. Francesca P. Barone, Caroline Macé and Pablo Ubierna (Turnhout: Brepols),
forthcoming; and ead., “Preaching hatred? John Chrysostom, Neuroscience, and the Jews,” in (Re)Visioning John
Chrysostom: New Theories and Approaches, ed. Chris L. De Wet and Wendy Mayer (Leiden: Brill), forthcoming.
10
Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 409-440.
11
Shaw, Sacred Violence, 436.

opponents, mobilised hatred against the latter to the point of violence. This phenomenon has
obvious implications for the present, not just in relation to Islamic preaching and radical web
sites, but the less obvious impact of newspapers, television, and social media. The third angle
that has provided an unexpected contribution is research I have been conducting on the
reception of so-called “popular” Graeco-Roman moral philosophy within this same body of
preaching, with its particular view of the interrelationship of the body-mind-soul and the very
real therapeutic – or harmful – impact of speech or rhetoric on the human person.12
As
Christopher Gill has recently argued, that branch of ancient philosophy approximates very
closely to modern cognitive behavioural therapy.13
As Brett Ingram argues, there are also
lessons to be learned in marrying recent findings concerning how emotional rhetoric affects the
listener’s brain with the ancient conception of rhetoric as both healing drug and poison.14
It is these three seemingly disparate areas of research from which the core components
of my theory derive and that set me on the path of pursuing the intersection between morality,
cognition, and language and its deep-historical societal implications. By deep historical, I mean
that the mechanisms to which I refer can usefully explain certain societal shifts in past and
present with equal facility. As I set out the components of my theory and its neuroscientific and
cognitive underpinnings, it is important that the reader bear in mind that this is a theory that
addresses the macro level – that is, broad societal trends. At the micro level – the level of a
specific small group or individual – one could argue in detail and with some disagreement
about the contributing impact of culture and other cognitive processes and societal factors. At
the macro level, however, this theory offers a potentially useful explanation for the correlation
between some observable recent trends in Australian society – the off-shore detention of “boat
people,” the rise in domestic violence, the increasing gender wage gap, the emergence of new
right-wing political parties, overcrowding of prisons, heightened bullying in schools and the
workplace, and the spread of Islamophobia, to name but a few. It also raises some challenging
questions about solutions.
The first point to be made is that when I speak about morality, I am not referring to
ethics or moral philosophy – that is, defining or determining what actions are right or wrong –
but am concerned with moral psychology and cognition – why and how we make decisions,
largely unthinkingly, about what is good or bad in the first place.15
The principles I discuss
12
See Wendy Mayer, “The Persistence in Late Antiquity of Medico-Philosophical Psychic Therapy,” Journal of
Late Antiquity 8.2 (2015): 337-351; ead., “Shaping the Sick Soul: Reshaping the Identity of John Chrysostom,” in
Christians Shaping Identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium: Studies inspired by Pauline Allen, ed.
Geoffrey D. Dunn and W. Mayer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 140-164; and ead., “Madness in the Works of John
Chrysostom: A Snapshot from Late Antiquity,” in The Concept of Madness from Homer to Byzantium:
Manifestations and Aspects of Mental Illness and Disorder, ed. Hélène Perdicoyianni-Paléologou (Amsterdam:
Adolf M. Hakkert Editore, 2016), 349-373.
13
Christopher Gill, “Philosophical Therapy as Preventive Psychological Medicine,” in Mental Disorders in the
Classical World, ed. W.V. Harris (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 339-360. The potential utility of this research becomes
more evident when we observe that in the ancient to late-ancient world both moral philosophy and religion were
conceived of as a politeia or way of life. Regarding the former see esp. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life,
trans. M. Chase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), original ed., Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique
(Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1981). This holistic conception, quite different from the post-Enlightenment
insistence on the separation of politics and religion, is both indicative of a long-standing relationship between
these two domains, and aligns closely with the way in which contemporary Islam, in Indonesia, for example,
views itself.
14
Brett Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric in the Age of Neuroscience” (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts –
Amherst, 2013).
15
Morality in this sense is described in the literature as social-functional; that is, values and their associated
emotions that are “concerned primarily with the preservation of social relationships” in that they function to bind
groups together for mutual benefit. On this point see Jacob K. Farnsworth, Kent D. Drescher, Jason A. Nieuwsma,
Robyn B. Walser and Joseph M. Currier, “The Role of Moral Emotions in Military Trauma: Implications for the

here are in themselves neither right nor wrong – they simply describe the way we think –
although they each have specific entailments that could be labeled pro- or antisocial. Societal
wellbeing, we assume here, is aligned with behaviour that is prosocial, whereas antisocial
behaviour is aligned with societal harm. The second point is that in talking about moral
cognition, we adopt a growing consensus over the past two decades within the neurosciences
concerning the embodied mind and the interconnectedness of cognitive and physical brain
processes.16
One of the most important implications, in addition to how language is received by
the brain and processed at the preconscious level, is the consensus that moral decision-making
occurs at the preconscious or gut level and that we rationalise such decisions after the fact.17
This finding – that emotion has primacy in moral-decision making, although not dictatorship18
– calls on us to abandon modern, post-Enlightenment ways of thinking about religion and
society, particularly the secularisation thesis, which assigns religion to the private domain and
defines it in a very restricted way, and the assumption of the primacy of reason.19
This has very
particular implications for current governments that deny the relevance to the present of
historical studies, as these findings suggest that it is precisely to the pre-Enlightenment past
and to societies until now labeled “primitive” that we should look in order to understand the
social implications of an embodied-mind perspective.20
It is no coincidence, for instance, that
Brett Ingram, in arguing for the incorporation of the findings of brain studies into
contemporary critical rhetorical theory, points to the renewed relevance of the ancient Greek
view of language as causative of real changes in the material world, in that the ideational and
corporeal were seen as part of an integrated circuit composed of the body, the word, and the
world. As he goes on to argue: “If we dismantle this circuit and isolate just one of these parts
for the purpose of making claims about the nature of human events [as the bulk of
contemporary social theorists have done], we are left with a limited interpretive apparatus
through which to perceive and evaluate those events.”21
The point he makes, that the language
in which public ideas are communicated has a real impact on the brain, is significant.
Similarly, the finding that the Age of Reason is an illusion calls into question our reading of
religion and its social role. One of the questions that my own research is raising is whether we
should not in fact see religion in both past and present as something that is experiential rather
Study and Treatment of Moral Injury,” Review of General Psychology 18.4 (2014): 249-262,
dx.doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000018, at 251.
16
So, for instance, in cognitive linguistics the process via which we think about abstract concepts metaphorically
is rooted in the mapping of abstract ideas onto basic everyday physical experiences. See Zoltán Kövecses,
Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn 2010), 18 and 86-88.
17
On the dual-processing model of cognition that has become the consensus, see the overviews in Steve Clarke,
The Justification of Religious Violence (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 75-81; and in Joshua D. Greene,
“Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)science Matters for Ethics,” Ethics 124.4 (2014): 696-
706.
18
This is the position of Jonathan Haidt, “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion,” in The
Believing Primate: Scientific, philosophical, and theological reflections on the origin of religion, ed. Jeffrey
Schloss and Michael J. Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 278-291.
19
Until the first decade of the twenty-first century these principles were foundational for most theorists from
within the sociology of religion. See Turner, “Sociology of Religion.”
20
This is the case argued in Wendy Mayer, “Theorizing Religious Conflict: From Early Christianity to Late
Antiquity and Beyond,” in Reconceiving 'Religious Conflict', ed. Chris L. de Wet and Wendy Mayer (London:
Routledge, forthcoming).
21
Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric,” 180.

than institutional, that is, as something that is much more amorphous and holistic and that more
closely approximates the self-perception of Greco-Roman moral philosophy.22
A third point concerns the relationship between morality and religion and the role each
plays in pro- and antisocial behaviour. Whereas scholars of religious violence concerned with
the current global rise in religious intolerance are focused on the nature of religion and its role,
neuroscientific research and experimental psychology are suggesting that those questions are
only minimally relevant. There is nothing inherently good or bad about religion per se, just as
in evolutionary terms religion is not special.23
Moreover, while “it is perfectly possible to be
moral without religious beliefs”24
– a view that Australia, a society that views itself as
primarily secular and a-religious, would endorse – morality, which sits beneath social systems
such as religion, politics and economics, is, on the other hand, essential to binding groups
together by mitigating against selfishness.25
The key point here is that if what binds groups
together at the fundamental level is morality, then morality equally lies at the heart of what
breaks groups apart or sets them against each other. This is precisely the point that the moral
psychologist Joshua Greene makes in his book Moral Tribes,26
and offers one of the most
persuasive explanations as to why all religions can inform both pro- and antisocial
behaviours.27
As he argues, from an evolutionary perspective our brains are wired for in-group
favouratism and ethnocentrism. Our basic morality in this respect serves cooperation by
enforcing beneficial social norms. It is about solving what he calls the problem of “me versus
22
On Graeco-Roman moral philosophy as “a way of life,” see n. 13. Viewing religion as concerned not with
belief but rather with praxis or emotions offers another dimension in which pre-Enlightenment conceptions and
current neuroscientific research are coming into alignment.
23
The latter is the conclusion of Smith, Thinking About Religion, 10-11: 10: “I think the available evidence
demonstrates that human cognition drives social engagement and identification where religion reveals a
prototypical but not unique expression. In my view, the evidence decisively presents religion as a socially
advantageous practice. But, does religion possess something distinctive and more powerful than other social
formations that encourage solidarity and group identity such as nationality, ethnicity or kin connections? To
summarise ... I think that human minds are susceptible to religious content, but no more so than other culturally
prolific activities that also engage emotion, memory, belonging and belief. ... While I acknowledge some
convergence pressures upon cultural activities, they lead towards more generic tendencies such as the ability to
hold belief sets, rather than a predisposition to hold religious beliefs. Religious cognition is not a unique domain,
but a generic domain incorporating social relationships between agents. Although some evidence suggests that
religious content will be attractive to human minds, it is not inevitable. In fact, religion is not sustained by natural
cognitive mechanisms alone; the structure of cultural reinforcement remains essential.” His position is not
universally held, but aligns with the results emerging from research in moral psychology. For the view that there
is something special about religion in evolutionary terms, see, e.g., Graham Ward, Unbelievable: Why We Believe
and Why We Don’t (London, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
24
Ilkka Pyysiäinen, “Servants of Two Masters: Religion, Economy, and Cooperation,” in Religion, Economy, and
Cooperation, ed. Ilkka Pyysiäinen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 1-34, at 11. See further Smith, Thinking About
Religion, 10; and Ryan McKay and Harvey Whitehouse, “Religion and Morality,” Psychological Bulletin 141.2
(2015): 447-473; supported by Wilhelm Hofmann, Daniel C. Wisneski, Mark J. Brandt, and Linda J. Skitka,
“Morality in Everyday Life,” Science 345, No. 6202 (September 2014): 1340-1343.
25
See Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, “Planet of the Durkheimians. Where Community, Authority, and
Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,” in Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification,
ed. John T. Jost, Aaron C. Kay, and Hulda Thorisdottir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 371-401.
26
Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: Penguin
Books, 2013).
27
That even religions traditionally viewed as individualistic and prosocial can give rise to antisocial behaviours
was demonstrated in The Fundamentalism Project conducted by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby in the 1980s and
1990s. For the published results, see the five volumes Fundamentalisms Observed, Fundamentalisms and the
State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance, Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the
Family, and Education, Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, and
Fundamentalisms Comprehended, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991, 1993, 1993, 1994, 1995).

us.” But whereas our gut emotional reactions serve inner group cooperation, once multiple
groups come into play there is a reversal in morality. When we encounter the problem of “us
versus them,” the gut reactions that were socially beneficial are no longer trustworthy and
become problematic.28
As Chris Mooney writes in summary of Greene’s research: “From an
evolutionary perspective, morality is built to make groups cohere, not to achieve world
peace.”29
One of the profound implications of this finding for how Australia regulates itself and
for governmental decision-making, particularly in a multicultural context in which religion is
tied to ethnicity in the public consciousness,30
is that conflict between different social, and
particularly ethnically-based, groups should be predicated as the norm, not the exception. That
is, we need to begin from the assumption that inter-group hostility is the default and
concentrate on developing policies that, acknowledging this social truth, help to mitigate
against this.
This brings me to my fourth point, that only when as a society we understand what the
basic preconscious moral foundations are, their agency and how the public language that we
use reinforces or weakens them, can we understand their social entailments and begin to work
with or mitigate against them. The relatively new discipline of Moral Foundations Theory
(MFT), based on experimental work in both western and non-western countries, identifies five
moral foundations that have an evolutionary basis and that serve to bind groups together (fig.
1).31
Care / harm Fairness /
cheating
Loyalty /
betrayal
Authority /
subversion
Sanctity /
degradation
Adaptive
challenge
Protect and
care for
children
Reap benefits of
two-way
partnerships
Form
cohesive
coalitions
Forge
beneficial
relationships
within
hierarchies
Avoid
contamination
28
Greene, Moral Tribes, 4-5: groups share some core values; each group’s philosophy is woven into its daily life;
each group has its own version of moral common sense; they fight, not because they are immoral, but because
when they come into competition, they view the contested ground from very different moral perspectives. He
labels the inter-group conflict that can result “the tragedy of commonsense morality.” Jonathan Haidt, The
Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 219-
366, describes this as “morality binds and blinds”, concluding (366): “[Morality] binds us into ideological teams
that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the
fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
29
Chris Mooney, “6 Surprising Scientific Findings About Good and Evil: Harvard’s Joshua Greene on the
Evolution of Morality and Why Humanity May, Objectively, be Getting Better in the Long Run,” Dec. 13, 2013,
www.motherjones.com/print/240996, accessed July 2, 2016.
30
See, e.g. the following extract from the political party One Nation’s statement on immigration: “Australians
have the right to a cohesive society and deny immigration to anyone who does not abide by our law, culture,
democracy, flag or Christian way of life. Australians have been tolerant and welcome new migrants coming to
find a new homeland. We don’t want or need migrants bringing their problems, laws, culture and opposing
religious beliefs on us.” Accessed July 24, 2016. http://www.onenation.com.au/policies/immigration. Italics
added.
31
For the article in which MFT is set out in full, see Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, Sena Koleva, Matt Motyl,
Ravi Iyer, Sean P. Wojcik, and Peter H. Ditto, “Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral
Pluralism,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2013): 55-130. These five are not the only moral
foundations or intuitions, but are considered the most important ones “for explaining human morality and moral
diversity.” See Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, “The Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the
Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules,” in The Innate Mind, vol. 3:
Foundations and the Future, ed. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 385.

Original
triggers
Suffering,
distress, or
neediness
expressed by
one’s child
Cheating,
cooperation,
deception
Threat or
challenge to
group
Signs of
dominance
and
submission
Waste
products,
diseased people
Characteristic
emotions
Compassion Anger,
gratitude, guilt
Group pride,
rage at
traitors
Respect, fear Disgust
Relevant
virtues
Caring,
kindness
Fairness, justice,
trustworthiness
Loyalty,
patriotism,
self-sacrifice
Obedience,
deference
Temperance,
chastity, piety,
cleanliness
Fig. 1 Moral foundations, adapted from Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 146, fig. 6.2.
These five foundational ways of viewing the world are held to be intuitive. Intuitive here does
not mean innate, but refers rather to a preconscious gut emotional response that is subsequently
rationalised.32
Our most basic moral concepts, it is thought, are acquired experientially in
childhood. These intuitive concepts, such as light is good, dark is bad; good is up, bad is down;
good is pure/clean, bad is dirty/rotten, tend to be universal, acultural and deep-historical.33
The
facts that the five foundations are intuitive and thus part of our unconscious “commonsense”;
that the moral judgments we make on the basis of these five foundations are strongly
associated with emotion;34
and that, although we can change our intuitive moral judgments
through conscious reasoning, we are more likely not to,35
helps to explain why, when these
pre-conscious moral foundations are involved, human behaviour can seem difficult to shift as
well as irrational and counterintuitive.36
32
See Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral
Judgment," Psychological Review 108.4 (2001): 814-34; and id., The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are
Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 32-60.
33
See George Lakoff, The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and its Politics (New
York: Penguin Books, 2009), 93-99. Regarding the pan-human nature of the moral foundations, see Haidt, The
Righteous Mind, 144-45.
34
The characteristic emotions are of particular interest in that they correlate with the automatic, intuitive response
that occurs before rationalization. Rationalization then usually occurs within the conceptual framework of the
corresponding moral foundation. On this point see the summation of their work on disgust in Paul Rozin, Jonathan
Haidt, and Clark R. McCauley, “Disgust,” in Handbook of Emotions, edited by M. Lews, J. M. Haviland-Jones
and L. F. Barrett (New York: Guilford Press, 3rd edn, 2008), 757-76. The characteristic emotions are: compassion
(care/harm); anger, gratitude, guilt (fairness/cheating); group pride, rage at traitors (loyalty/betrayal); respect, fear
(authority/subversion); disgust (sanctity/degradation). See fig. 1.
35
This phenomenon is addressed from the perspective of the relationships between emotion/intuition and reason
by Haidt (n. 32), but can also be approached from the perspective of the limitations of neural plasticity and the
agency of emotional rhetoric in strengthening neural circuitry associated with particular moral intuitions.
Regarding the latter, see Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric,” 45.
36
Long before experimental moral psychology confirmed it, the rhetorician Kenneth Burke argued this case on
the basis of his work in the 1920s and ’30s with the US Bureau of Social Hygiene. Stimulated by his exploration
of the link between drugs and crime, he developed his theory of internal “piety.” This enabled him to explain the
“psycbic disturbance” that accompanies a radical shift in a person’s central unifying beliefs, since any new
orientation will seem “impious” if it fails to connect to the old orientation. The latter, even when self-destructive,
can be remarkably resistant to change. This, he argued, is because any change in orientation must first “address a
set of deeply-engrained social behaviors, habits, and beliefs.” See Jordynn Jack, “‘The Piety of Degradation’:

While there is some variation in the labelling as Moral Foundations Theory has
progressed, the five foundations identified are: care/harm; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal;
authority/subversion; and sanctity/degradation.37
Purity, triggered by the emotion of disgust, is
particularly significant as it is supplies the basis for the contagion discourse promoted not just
by terrorist and nationalist groups, but by our own and other western governments in their
response to waves of unsolicited immigration.38
It drives the desire to close and police borders
and, in Australia, to isolate “boat people” in detention camps or quarantine them in off-shore
processing centres.39
There is also a correlation between the increasing prominence in public
and private discourse of purity language and the escalation of war.40
The five moral
foundations are pan-human; culture expresses in the degree to which emphasis is placed on
each of the five foundations.41
What Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues found in their
experiments is that progressives placed strong emphasis on the first two foundations, whereas
conservatives placed more equal emphasis on all five.42
This led Haidt to propose
that there are two common ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two
visions of what society is and how it ought to work [...] the contractual approach and the
beehive approach.43
In the contractual (= progressive) approach the individual is the fundamental unit of value; in
the beehive (= conservative) approach, it is the group and its territory. This model further led
Haidt to describe care/harm and fairness/cheating as individualising foundations, in that they
generate virtues and practices that protect individuals from each other and allow them to live in
harmony as autonomous agents who can focus on their own goals; and loyalty/betrayal,
authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation as binding foundations, because the virtues,
Kenneth Burke, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, and Permanence and Change,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.4
(2004): 446-68, dx.doi.org/10.1080/0033563042000302180, esp. 450-51.
37
Variants to the last four are: fairness/reciprocity; ingroup/loyalty; respect for authority/subversion;
authority/respect; purity/sanctity. See McKay and Whitehouse, “Religion and morality,” 454-55; and Jonathan
Haidt, “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion,” The Edge, 9.21.07, accessed September 5,
2014, http://edge.org/conversation/moral-psychology-and-the-misunderstanding-of-religion, revised and published
under the same title in The Believing Primate: Scientific, philosophical, and theological reflections on the origin
of religion, edited by Jeffrey Schloss and Michael J. Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 278-91.
38
For recent studies of public media in which the language of immigrants or refugees as contaminants, parasites,
or as diseased or infecting agents is prominent, see Maciej Paprocki, “Infecting the Body Politic? Modern and
Post-Modern (Ab)use of Immigrants are invading pathogens metaphor in American socio-political discourse”, in
Cognitive Linguistics in the Making, ed. Kinga Rudnicka-Szozda and Aleksander Szwedek, Warsaw Studies in
English Language and Literature 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014), 211-30; Andreas Musolff,
“Dehumanising Metaphors in UK Immigrant Debates in Press and Online Media,” Journal of Language
Aggression and Conflict 3.1 (2015): 41-56, doi: 10.1075/jlac.3.1.02mus. For the agency of the parasite metaphor
in genocide when married with the concept of the nation as a body to be cured of disease, see Andreas Musolff,
“What Role do Metaphors Play in Racial Prejudice? The Function of Antisemitic Imagery in Hitler’s Mein
Kampf,” Patterns of Prejudice 41.1 (2007): 21-43, doi: 10.1080/00313220601118744.
39
Also prominent in the treatment of “boat people” by the Australian government and media is the
fairness/cheating foundation. The discourse of “illegal” immigrants and “queue-jumpers” taps into and hardens
the conceptualisation of immigrants who come by boat as frauds and cheats. Immigrants in this category are thus
undeserving of compassion (which would invoke the care/harm foundation).
40
This was a feature in the Chechnyan conflict. See Aleksandar Pavković, “Chechnya: the Islamization of a
secession,” in Politics of Religion and Nationalism: Federalism, Consociationalism and Secession, ed. Ferran
Requejo and Klaus-Jürgen Nagel (New York-London: Routledge, 2015), 93-105.
41
Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 144-45.
42
See Haidt and Graham, “Planet of the Durkheimians,” esp. fig. 1. The greater the degree of conservatism,
however, the greater the emphasis on the last three. The language of “progressives” and “conservatives” derives
from modern political theory. We retain it here for convenience.
43
Haidt, “Moral Psychology.”

practices, and institutions they generate function to bind people together into hierarchically
organized interdependent social groups that try to regulate the daily lives and personal habits
of their members.44
In political terms, the first is exemplified in liberal democratic systems, the
second, in its extreme form, in fascism. The hivist approach promotes a classic ingroup bias,45
and becomes stronger when a community or group feels under threat. More importantly,
neither approach to social cohesion is good or bad in itself. Both have pro- and antisocial
entailments.46
The most significant finding is that groups that place strong emphasis on either
set may work towards the same prosocial goals, but, as a result of the different moral
foundations that drive the group, disagree strongly on the best way to achieve them.47
It is also
critical to keep in mind that this model is descriptive. It is also ideal and expresses in reality in
multiple variants. When an expansive range of historical evidence is taken into account, on the
other hand, all five moral foundations, in varying degrees of emphasis, can be seen to
underwrite all forms of social organisation. The purity foundation, for instance, can be seen as
operative in ancient societies and their religions from at least the first millennium BCE.48
When linked with ingroup loyalty, it can be one of the most socially problematic.49
Before concluding, some final pieces of theory regarding language, morality and
cognition need to be mentioned in brief. These concern the moral biconceptualism
(“progressive-conservative”) of the human brain,50
how language and neural binding works,51
the effect on neural binding of empathy versus fear,52
and the role in the pre-conscious mind of
44
Ibid.
45
The entailments can be both pro- and antisocial in that ingroup bias and outgroup derogation are not reciprocal.
On this point, see the classic article by Marilynn B. Brewer, “The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or
Outgroup Hate?,” Journal of Social Issues 55.3 (1999): 429-44; and the review of the current state of research,
Jim A. C. Everett, Nadira S. Faber and Molly Crockett, “Preferences and Belief in Ingroup Favoritism,” Frontiers
in Behavioral Neuroscience 9 (February 2015), article 15, doi: 10-3389/fnbeh.2015.00015.
46
In The Righteous Mind and “Planet of the Durkheimians” Haidt, himself originally a contractualist, in fact
advocates the hive approach to some degree as having greater prosocial benefits than cultural progressives allow.
This assertion has received criticism from political and social justice theorists due to a confusion of ethics with
social-functional morality. For an example, see Matthew Kugler, John T. Jost and Sharareh Noorbaloochi,
“Another Look at Moral Foundations Theory: Do Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orietnation Explain
Liberal-Conservative Differences in ‘Moral’ Intuitions?,” Social Justice Research (published online November
16, 2014), doi: 10.1007/s11211-014-0223-5.
47
Greene, Moral Tribes, 4-5, makes this same point. See n. 28.
48
The work of Yitzhaq Feder is rapidly demonstrating this point. See Yitzhaq Feder, “Contagion and Cognition:
Bodily Experience and the Conceptualization of Pollution (tum’ah) in the Hebrew Bible,” Journal of Near
Eastern Studies 72.2 (2013): 151-67; "Defilement, Disgust and Disease: The Experiential Basis of Hittite and
Akkadian Terms for Impurity," Journal of the American Oriental Society 136.1 (2016): 99-116; "Purity and
Sancta Desecration in Ritual Law: A Durkheimian Perspective," in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Law, ed.
Pamela Barmash (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See also Thomas Kazen, “The Role of Disgust
in Priestly Purity Law: Insights from Conceptual Metaphor and Blending Theories,” Journal of Law, Religion and
State 3.1 (2014): 62-92.
49
Haidt and Joseph, “The Moral Mind,” 384, describe this pairing as capable of producing “horrific violence and
oppression.”
50
See Lakoff, The Political Mind, 69-73, 108-110, 119. Lakoff discusses this with explicit reference to the
political domain, but social-functional morality lies equally underneath politics, economic ideology, and religion.
On this latter point, see Spassena P. Koleva, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Peter H. Ditto, and Jonathan Haidt,
“Tracing the Threads: How Five Moral Concerns (Especially Purity) Help Explain Culture War Attitudes,”
Journal of Research in Personality 46.2 (2012): 184-94, doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2012.01.006.
51
The role of language, especially emotional political rhetoric, in activating and entrenching neural circuits
associated with particular moral concepts and modes of thought, in the process weakening others, is discussed at
length in Ingram, “Critical Rhetoric.”
52
For how empathy can inhibit strong hivist moral neural bindings, see Lakoff, The Political Mind, 101-104. The
work he references is that of Joshua Greene et al.: e.g., Joshua D. Greene, Leigh E. Nystrom, Andrew D. Engell,

moral conceptual metaphors. Closely related to the research of Haidt, Greene and other moral
psychologists is the work over the past twenty-five years of the cognitive linguist George
Lakoff and his successors. Building on his now famous work with Mark Johnson on how
metaphors inform the way we think,53
Lakoff identified two family-based conceptual models
for Nation operative at the preconscious level in polarising individuals between a liberal and
conservative bias within politics. These he labelled Nurturant Parent (NP) and Strict Father
(SF) morality, respectively, demonstrating that in terms of government structure and policy
each has very particular social entailments.54
Each is associated with a number of very basic
preconscious moral metaphors that result in particular automatic moral judgments (fig. 2).
Strict Father Morality Nurturant Parent Morality
Core Concept
Moral Strength: Being Good is Being Upright
Being Bad is Being Low
Doing Evil is Falling
Evil is a Force (internal/external)
Morality is Strength
Entailments
• The world is divided into good and evil
• To remain good in the face of (“stand up to”)
evil, one must be morally strong
• One becomes morally strong through self-
discipline and self-denial
• A person who is morally weak cannot stand up
to evil and so will eventually commit evil
• Moral weakness is thus a form of immorality
• Self-indulgence (the refusal to engage in self-
denial) and lack of self-control (the lack of self-
discipline) are thus forms of immorality
Associated Concepts
Moral Bounds: Morality is Following a Path
Immorality is Deviating
Morality is Staying within
Boundaries
Immorality is Transgression
Moral Authority: Morality is Obedience
Immorality is Disobedience
Moral Essence: Your behaviour reveals your
essence, which in turn predicts
Core Concepts
Morality as Empathy: Do unto others as they
would have you do unto them
Morality as Nurturance: Morality is caring for
the vulnerable
Immorality is Not Caring/Causing
Harm
Entailments
• Moral action requires empathy
• Moral action involves sacrifices
• Helping those who need help is our moral
responsibility
• One cannot care for others unless one takes care
of oneself
• Nurturing social ties (society) is as important as
caring for individuals
Associated Concepts
Moral Fairness: Morality is Fairness
Immorality is Unfairness/
Cheating
Morality as Happiness: Morality is Happiness
Immorality is Misery
John M. Darley, and Jonathan D. Cohen, “The Neural Bases of Cognitive Conflict and Control in Moral
Judgment,” Neuron 44 (2004): 389-400. Much of this research is discussed in more popular terms in Greene,
Moral Tribes, passim. On the activation of the norepinephrine circuit in the brain by fear, anxiety and anger, and
the link between emotional pathways and the dramatic event circuitry (the narrative patterns or frames we use to
make sense of the world), see Lakoff, The Political Mind, 27-28, 40-42, 93-94. The more these negative emotional
pathways are evoked, the greater the reduction in the capacity to notice (deliberative awareness).
53
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980),
but see also the second edition (2003), with updated Afterword, 243-76.
54
See George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1996, 2nd edn 2002). The two models are described in full at pp. 65-140. For a summary, see
Lakoff, The Political Mind, 77-83. As Lakoff points out, these are conceptual models of idealised family life
mapped onto conceptual models of idealised national life that may or may not have any correlation with reality.
They are about the way we think about the world, not descriptive of the world itself.

your future behaviour
Moral Health: Morality is Health
Immorality is Disease
Morality is Purity
Immorality is Rottenness
Moral Wholeness: Moral wholeness entails
an overall unity of form that
contributes to strength
Immorality “erodes/ruptures”
moral standards/values
Fig. 2 The metaphors that inform SF and NP morality and their entailments (based on Lakoff, Moral
Politics, 71ff)
Each activates in the brain a very particular preconscious narrative frame (fig. 3).
The SF Narrative The NP Narrative
The strict father is the moral leader of the family,
and is to be obeyed. The family needs a strict
father because there is evil in the world from
which he has to protect them – and Mommy can’t
do it. The family needs a strict father because
there is competition in the world, and he has to
win those competitions to support the family – and
Mommy can’t do it. You need a strict father
because kids are born bad, in the sense that they
just do what they want to do, and don’t know right
from wrong. They need to be punished strictly and
painfully when they do wrong, so they will have
an incentive to do right in order to avoid
punishment. That is how they build internal
discipline, which is needed to do right and not
wrong. With that discipline, they can enter the
market and become self-reliant adults, they can go
off on their own, start their own families, and
become strict fathers in their own households,
without any meddling by their own fathers or
anyone else.
Parents can be two parents with equal
responsibilities without gender constraint or one
parent of either gender. Their job is to nurture
their children and raise them to be nurturers of
others. Nurturance is empathy, responsibility for
oneself and others, and the strength to carry out
those responsibilities. This is opposite of
indulgence: children are raised to care about
others, to take care of themselves and others, and
to lead a fulfilling life. Discipline is positive; it
comes out of the child’s developing sense of care
and responsibility. Nurturance requires setting
limits, and explaining them. It requires mutual
respect – a parent’s respect for children, and
respect for parents by children must be earned by
how the parents behave. Restitution is preferred
over punishment – if you do something wrong, do
something right to make up for it. The job of
parents is protection and empowerment of their
children, and a dedication to community life,
where people care about and take are of each
other.
Fig. 3 The SF and NP narrative frames, cited from Lakoff, The Political Mind, 77-78, 81.
55
Of particular interest is the potency of the Morality is Strength/Immorality is Weakness
concept within SF morality, and the entailments for the justice system of the SF and NP
moralities when they inform politics.56
Allied with these descriptive models for explaining
55
As Lakoff, Moral Politics, 67, points out in the SF model the Strict Father is conceptual and functionally not
gender exclusive; “there are many mothers, especially tough single mothers, who function as strict fathers.”
56
On retributive justice as the entailment of SF morality, restitutive justice of NP morality, see Lakoff, The
Political Mind, 78-81. Merit (huge salaries or bonuses for CEOs, Vice Chancellors and politicians) and
punishment (strict laws, imprisonment, detention) are essential components of the SF model, which places a
strong emphasis on competition, hierarchy, authority, discipline and obedience. Similarly, welfare is viewed as
encouraging moral weakness; poverty is the result of ill-discipline. He originally characterised SF morality as the
morality of reward and punishment (Lakoff, Moral Politics, 67). In NP morality justice is less about punishment
than empowerment and providing support and resources to restore the individual to a capacity to contribute back
to society, since the emphasis is on “empathy, responsibility for oneself and others, and the strength to carry out

current political ideology in the United States is a significant discussion concerning the
preconscious impact of conceptual frameworks in political rhetoric and how by directly
addressing the opposition’s framework in rational argument one subconsciously reinforces the
concepts in the listener’s brain, rather than weakening them.57
The SF/NP Morality model and
MFT offer different ways of talking about and viewing morality and the brain, but have
considerable crossover.58
As McAdams et al. were able to show, Lakoff’s thesis “that political
ideology is rooted in different metaphors that people internalize regarding family life” and that
of the moral psychologists “that political ideology reflects deeply ingrained moral intuitions”
are complementary and speak to similar neural mechanisms.59
Even though their sample group
was religious and comprised practising Christians, more recent work on the primacy of
morality over religion and the real-time study of Hofmann et al. argue for the independence of
these findings from religion.60
What is of particular interest with regard to Australia is that, on
the one hand, we can observe fairness/cheating, purity and ingroup loyalty discourse informing
Australian political rhetoric of the past decade about asylum-seekers (“queue-jumpers,” “a
threat to our prosperity”), while on the other we can observe Strict Father morality underlying
political rhetoric and decision-making by the recent Newman government in Queensland and
the Abbott (now Turnbull) government federally, the entailments being an overburdened court
and prison system, the stripping of citizenship from and threatened prosecution of persons
engaged in the conflict in Syria, the persistent cutting of welfare programs, the creation of a
paramilitary border force, and the perception of Australia’s aging population, remote aboriginal
communities and welfare recipients as burdens on society. If we look back through Australian
history, we can see these same subconscious moral mechanisms lurking behind many political
decisions with socially harmful consequences that were widely accepted and endorsed as moral
and just at the time, such as the White Australia policy and the Stolen Generation.
This body of research has significant implications for how we as a nation and as
political and religious bodies work together for the wellbeing of an increasingly racially and
culturally complex Australian society. Australian political ideology may not be explicitly
religious. The neurosciences require us, however, to acknowledge that it is inescapably, if
largely unconsciously, morally-informed. Recognising on which moral foundations emphasis is
currently being laid empowers us as either policy-makers or social critics to assess the societal
costs/benefits and entailments. This research also challenges us to recognise the power of the
words we use – whether in political rhetoric, public or social media – to feed into and
subconsciously reinforce these foundations and the implicit moral frameworks that they
engender. We need to ask ourselves, for instance, whether a gross upward trend in domestic
those responsibilities” (Lakoff, Moral Politics, 81). Although, note that Lakoff (ibid.), views restitutive justice as
doing something right to make up for doing something wrong.
57
On neural competitiveness, the cost of neural plasticity and the role of repetition in strengthening neural
binding see the discussion and literature cited in section 3.3, Mayer, “Preaching hatred?.”
58
SF and NP morality, for instance, exemplify two of a number of possible moral tribes in Greene’s model. See
Greene, Moral Tribes, 1-27. Similarly, the work of Greene and his colleagues on conceptions of moral
responsibility supports Lakoff’s thesis about the agency of the concept of Moral Strength in engendering a more
punitive approach to justice. See Azim F. Shariff, Joshua D. Green, Johan C. Karremans, Jamie B. Lugari, Cory J.
Clark, Jonathan W. Schooler, Roy F. Baumeister, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Free Will and Punishment: A
Mechanistic View of Human Nature Reduces Retribution,” Psychological Science (June 10, 2014) 8 pages, doi:
10.1177/0956797614534693, accessed July 30, 2016.
59
Dan P. McAdams, Michelle Albaugh, Emily Farber, Jennifer Daniels, Regina L. Logan, and Brad Olson,
“Family Metaphors and Moral Intuitions: How Conservatives and Liberals Narrate Their Lives,” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 95.4 (2008): 978-90, doi: 10.1037/a0012650.
60
See nn. 24 and 50.

violence, a growing gender wage gap,61
an unquestioning acceptance of the punishment of
asylum-seekers, and the rise of Islamophobia are not all interconnected and indicative of a
moral shift towards the right,62
resulting from a sustained public rhetoric that whips up fear.
This same body of research helps to explain why a growing body of Australians view these
social developments as just, and why over time the numbers who describe them as unjust, or
remain confused and uncertain fluctuate. It also offers explanations for why it is difficult to
reach agreement on what is good or socially healthy for Australia and why our governments
make political decisions – such as the continued imprisonment as opposed to rehabilitation of
aboriginal males on alcohol-related or drug-use charges in Western Australia – that as often go
against Australia’s economic and societal best interests. What this research calls upon us to do
is to abandon the illusion that we are reasoned and objective decision-makers. It also calls on
us to disentangle morality from religion, requiring us to acknowledge and unpack the morality
that subconsciously drives us as a nation. Only when we do so, can we recognise and ask
ourselves if we are willing to accept the social entailments. Agreement that a particular
entailment or set of entailments are socially harmful and that we should set out to address them
comes with a requirement that we monitor and reframe the language that we publicly use in
order to weaken the subconscious moral thinking that underpins negative behaviours and
strengthen those that underpin behaviours that we agree are prosocial. In short, when Malcolm
Turnbull in 2015 called for a cultural change in the attitude towards women to the point that
domestic violence comes to be viewed as un-Australian, he was both promoting a nurturant
view of what it means to be a moral society and reframing the loyalty foundation in light of the
care/harm foundation (patriotism = non-violence, care for others). In order to effect that
change, what he requires is what a change in Australian culture would be indicative of – an
underlying fundamental shift in the moral compass of Australia as a nation.
61
On the agency of the Moral Order or Great Chain of Being metaphor in promoting gender discrimination and
the oppression of women and people of other races, see Lakoff, Moral Politics, 98-99.
62
That the language of “left” and “right” to describe morally-based ideological positions has conceptual validity
is argued by Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, and Craig Joseph, “Above and Below Left-Right: Ideological
Narratives and Moral Foundations,” Psychological Inquiry 20 (2009): 110-19, doi: 10.1080/10478400903028573.

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