Combining Moral Foundations and Justice Sensitivity Perspectives to Understand Political Orientation

Abstract: Political orientation is systematically related to individuals’ endorsement of different moral domains. Yet, current findings suggest that differences between conservatives and liberals can also be explained by a sensitivity to self-oriented or other-oriented moral transgressions. We argue that conceptualizing moral foundations as perspective-specific advances our understanding of differences in moral judgments across the political spectrum. We test a new instrument measuring perspective-specific moral foundations in a nationally representative German sample ( N = 2,042). Our findings indicate that (a) an Integrated Foundations × Perspective Model fits the data better than models only representing moral foundations or moral perspectives and (b) a self-oriented moral sensitivity is related to right-wing political orientation, while an other-oriented moral sensitivity is related to left-wing political orientation across all moral foundations.