We’ve been talking about the values and moral profile of libertarians, liberals, and conservatives, with the understanding that differences between groups are a matter of degree. This is not a “libertarians are from Jupiter, liberals are from Neptune” piece.  To illustrate my point, here’s some data on group means, care of Iyer et al (2012):

We'll focus first on the Moral Foundation Questionnaire group differences. This questionnaire is based on Moral Foundations Theory, which posits five innate moral intuitions: Care/Harm, Loyalty/Ingroup, Sanctity/Purity, Authority/Respect, and Fairness/Reciprocity. Researchers and science writers have not been consistent in how they label these moral intuitions, so I included the two more common terms for each. In previous posts I used the first term for each intuition but I'm switching here to match the terms in the table: Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity.

Per the table, group differences between liberals and conservatives are consistent with previous findings. Liberals are big on Harm (as in protection from harm), pretty big on Fairness, and not so big on Ingroup, Authority, or Purity; conservatives are moderately strong on all the moral intuitions. Although conservatives clearly care about Harm and Fairness, liberals care about these two moral intuitions even more - that is, on average.

But check out those libertarians: like liberals, they don't care much about Ingroup, Authority, or Purity.  Unlike liberals, Harm does not figure prominently in their moral universe. So what matters to libertarians? Mostly Liberty - as in freedom from interference/coercion and freedom to pursue happiness.  Libertarians care way more about liberty than liberals and quite a bit more than conservatives.

Next: some semi-final words on the psychology of political identity.

Reference:

Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, Haidt J (2012) Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLoS ONE 7(8): e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366