Presumably the author's (Jonathan Haidt's) moral foundation theory is what was referenced in the post on The.Other.Board.
Liberals tend to judge something's morality by whether it does harm. We also care about fairness and loyalty.
Liberals? Maybe so; there are so few of us left it's hard to get a statistically significant sample.
But when progressives care about loyalty it usually means something different from when conservatives do. Haidt's questionnaires ask questions like "How important to you is it that somebody be loyal to his group?".
His group. That's a question that specifically measures conservative loyalty, not progressive loyalty. Conservatives will typically respect somebody for being loyal to
his own group, regardless of whether it's the conservatives' group. Progressives will typically respect somebody for being loyal to
the progressives' group, regardless of whether it's his own group.
When conservatives make moral judgements, they tend to weight these about equally: Harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
We all care, to some extent, about all five of these moral bases, but conservatives care about authority and sanctity much more than liberals do.
Haidt's claim is poorly evidenced -- after all, it isn't conservatives who are campaigning against genetically engineered plants. The left and the right regard different things as sacred and authoritative, and Haidt's questionnaires are not well-designed to detect veneration of the left's sacred-cows and deference to the left's authorities.
Haidt would agree that conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives (because conservatives share our concerns about harm, fairness, and loyalty, whereas we are often baffled by their claims that it's immoral to disobey some self-styled "authority," or that deviant sex (when you don't do it the way your legislators want you to assume they do it) is bad because unsanctioned).
The left wouldn't be baffled by a claim that it's immoral to disobey an authority if it hadn't brainwashed itself into taking for granted that an authority always looks like one of the authorities the conservatives demand obedience to. Here's an example of the very common leftist concern for obedience to authority. We've all seen it a hundred times, and most of the leftists here probably read it with a subconscious "Yeah, you tell 'em.", and never move on to "Hey, that's an appeal to authority!" :
"When conservatives realize they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will abandon democracy."
Over and over, in every thread, the author keeps implicitly criticizing conservatives for failing to submit to the authority of the entity he styles as the legitimate authority. It's a puzzling thing to accuse people of -- after all, we're atheists; we know what it is to be a despised minority. Well, if atheists realized we can't win democratically, would we abandon atheism? If the Christian majority voted to outlaw expressions of skepticism about God, would we accept majority rule? Would we keep our doubts silent and teach our children to believe in their God? Or would we take the bastards in the majority to court and try our damnedest to force our preference for religious toleration on them, and if we lost in court go right on subverting as best we could the Will of the People?
But of course those cases aren't the same at all, because choosing conservatism over democracy would be an entirely different thing from choosing atheism over democracy in one vital respect: atheism is something we believe, whereas conservatism is something
they believe. By and large, people don't really value authority for its own sake; people value authority because they've identified candidate authorities whom they expect
to agree with them; and an argument from authority is a ton less effort than an argument from reason. So if leftists realized conservatives were invoking conservatives' authorities for exactly the same reason leftists invoke leftists' authorities, they would be less baffled.
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