The different concepts of purity today

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist who has been extremely helpful in explaining why people think about right and wrong in the way they do.

One particularly useful insight of his was to point out that those who leaned to the liberal left tended to decide that things were morally wrong if they harmed people; conservative people would agree, but also tended to have a whole extra moral category – purity.

So, for conservatives, acts that did not seem to harm anyone could still be immoral; but liberals were more likely to see harm as the only moral category that mattered. That is why conservatives cared more about such things as sexual purity and the sanctity of marriage, whereas liberals would not consider a sexual act outside marriage as immoral, as long as it was consensual and didn’t harm anyone else.