Who Counts as a Victim?
Liberals and conservatives both want to reduce harm and help victims; they just disagree about who the victims are
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Liberals and conservatives both want to reduce harm and help victims. Where they differ is in who they see as the victims.
The disagreement isn’t that liberals think Black people are the victims whereas conservatives think White people are, or that liberals think poor people are the victims whereas conservatives think rich people are.
Instead, each side conceptualizes victimhood in a fundamentally different way.
Liberals tend to see victimhood as group-based, dividing the social world into vulnerable oppressed groups and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives, in contrast, tend to see victimhood as individual-based and more evenly distributed across groups.
This pattern is shown in the graph below.
The graph comes from a recent paper by Jake Womick and colleagues. Here’s the abstract:
Moral disagreement across politics revolves around the key question, “Who is a victim?” Twelve studies explain moral conflict with assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs): liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization, harm, and mistreatment. AoVs predict moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charitable behavior—and explain the link between ideology and moral judgment (usually better than moral foundations). Four clusters of targets—the Environment, the Othered, the Powerful, and the Divine—explain many political debates, from immigration and policing to religion and racism. In general, liberals see vulnerability as group-based, dividing the moral world into groups of vulnerable victims and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives downplay group-based differences, seeing vulnerability as more individual and evenly distributed. AoVs can be experimentally manipulated and causally impact moral evaluations. These results support a universal harm-based moral mind (Theory of Dyadic Morality): moral disagreement reflects different understandings of harm, not different foundations.
You can access the paper here or download a free version here.
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Steve
Fascinating chart! Have not read the paper yet.
Question arises: Does the conservative position look more like conpassion and the liberal position look more like empathy? Or are they not measuring the right grouping so that similar gaps would appear on the conservative side?
Hoffer, Zizek and Chomsky all recognised the problem with empathy and antipathy which seems to be reflected in the gaps on one side and perhaps compassion in convergence on the other....