The first moral foundation Jonathan Haidt writes about in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is the Care-Harm foundation. This foundation developed as evolution favored mothers, and to a lesser extent fathers, who cared for their children rather than deserted them. This foundation is activated when we see others being harmed and prompts us to aid them. Haidt writes, “the suffering of your own children is the original trigger of one of the modules of the Care foundation.”
Since this foundation is so deeply embedded in humanity, I don’t think it’s necessary to explain what it is. Unless you’re a psychopath, you’ve felt the visceral impulse to care for at least one other person and to prevent that person from being harmed. What is worth noting, however, is how differently this foundation influences liberals, conservatives, and libertarians.
Moral Foundations Theory argues this foundation strongly influences liberals, and because liberals are less group-focused than conservatives, the foundation’s influence on liberals ranges from caring for their own families all the way out to caring for people and animals in other countries as well.
How this foundation influences conservatives is more complicated. Because all six foundations influence conservatives, conservatives tend to divide people into in-group and out-group arrangements. Conservatives care for in-group members–perhaps even more deeply than liberals, but conservatives care for perceived out-group members much less than liberals. Research shows that for some conservatives, caring for out-group members is even considered immoral. It’s wrong to think of conservatives as heartless. It’s just conservatives reserve that care for much smaller sets of people than do liberals and libertarians, and conservatives want to protect their groups from harm caused by perceived outsiders.
This foundation only weakly influences libertarians. Libertarians are strongly influenced by the Liberty-Oppression, and, to a lesser extent, the Proportionality foundation split out from the original Fairness-Cheating foundation in 2023.