Paper: Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust ,George Lakoff, 1995

Original paper.

Summery

Lakoff set several moral metaphors used liberals and conservatives.

Conservative metaphors

The most important is strength metaphor:

• Good
  • Being good is being upright
  • Morality is strength (Conservatives tel you to stand up and fight. It correlate with the FFFF for fighting against danger to survive. Tal Yaron 13:12, 15 August 2012 (IDT))
    • Through sufficient self-discipline to meet one's responsibilities and face existing hardships.
      • punishment can be good for you, since going through hardships builds moral strength.
    • Actively through self-denial and further self-discipline.
    • Two moral strengths:
      • External threats: Courage is the strength to stand up to external evils.
      • internal threats: Cases where the issue ofself-control arises.
• Bad
  • Being bad is being low
  • Doing Evil is falling
  • Evil is a force (Conservatives tend to see evil as something done by somebody, and this relate to the FFFF mode of somthing that try to harm us. Tal Yaron 13:10, 15 August 2012 (IDT))

The world is divided in to good and evil (FFFF style Tal Yaron 13:24, 15 August 2012 (IDT))

• To remain good in the face of evil (to "stand up to" evil), one must be morally strong.
• One becomes morally strong through self-discipline and self-denial.
• Someone who is morally weak cannot stand up to evil and so will eventually commit evil.
• Therefore, moral weakness is a form of immorality.
• Lack of self-control (the lack of self-discipline) and self-indulgence (the refusal to engage in self-denial) are therefore forms of immorality.

Other forms of moral used by conservatives:

Moral Bounds: Here action is seen as motion, and moral action is seen as motion within prescribed bounds or on a prescribed path. Immoral people are those who transgress the bounds or deviate from the path. The logic of this metaphor is that transgressors and deviants are dangerous to society not only because they can lead others astray, but because they create new paths to traverse, thus blurring the clear, prescribed, socially accepted boundaries between right and wrong.

Moral Authority: Moral authority is patterned metaphorically on parental authority, where parents have a young child's best interests at heart and know what is best for the child.

The Nation-as-Family Metaphor :What links Strict Father family-based morality to politics is a common metaphor, shared by conservatives and liberals alike -- the Nation-as-Family metaphor, in which the nation is seen as a family, the government as a parent and the citizens as children.

Morality is Obedience: Just as the good child obeys his parents, a moral person obeys a moral authority, which can be a text (like the Bible or the Koran), an institution, or a leader.

Moral Essence: Just as physical objects are made of substances, which determines how they will behave (e.g., wood burns, stone doesn't), so people are seen as have an essence -- a "character" -- which determines how they will behave morally. Good essential properties are called virtues; bad essential properties are called vices. When we speak of someone as having a "heart of gold" or as "not having a mean bone in his body" or as "being rotten to the core," we are using the metaphor of Moral Essence. The word "character" often refers to Moral Strength seen as an essential moral property. To "see what someone is made of" is to test his character, to determine his Moral Essence. The logic of Moral Essence is this: Your behavior reveals your essence, which in turn predicts your future behavior.

Moral Health: Immorality is seen as a disease that can spread. Just as you have a duty to protect your children from disease by keeping them away from diseased people, so you have a duty to protect your children from the contagion of immorality by keeping them away from immoral people. This is part of the logic behind urban flight, segregated neighborhoods and strong sentencing guidelines for nonviolent offenders. Since purity and cleanliness promote health, morality is seen as being pure and clean.

Moral Wholeness: We speak of a "degenerate" person, the "erosion" of moral standards, the "crumbling" of moral values, the "rupture" or "tearing" of the moral fabric. Wholeness entails an overall unity of form that contributes to strength. Thus moral wholeness is attendant on moral strength.

Counter liberalism example: From the perspective of these metaphors, multiculturalism is immoral, since it permits alternative views of what counts as moral behavior. Multiculturalism thus violates the binary good-evil distinction made by Moral Strength. It violates the welldefined moral paths and boundaries of Moral Bounds. Its multiple authorities violate any unitary Moral Authority. And the multiplicity of standards violates Moral Wholeness.

Moral Self-Interest: It is based on a folk version of Adam Smith's economics: if each person seeks to maximize his own wealth, then by an invisible hand, the wealth of all will be maximized.

Liberal Metaphors

Liberal Metaphors for Morality

Morality as Empathy: Empathy itself is understood metaphorically as feeling what another person feels.

Morality as Nurturance: Nurturance presupposes empathy. A child is helpless and to care for a child, you have to care about that child, which requires seeing the world through the child's eyes as much as possible. (Here I think there is a mix with liberal-empathy, with FFFF that demand that the state will help the week Tal Yaron 13:55, 15 August 2012 (IDT))

• The Community is a Family
• Moral agents are Nurturing parents
• People needing help are Children needing care
• Moral action is Nurturance

Moral Self-Nurturance: You can't take care of others if you don't take care of yourself. Part of the morality of nurturance is self-nurturance: maintaining your health, making a living, and so on. (I think it is not part of the real liberal world view. it is an excuse against cons. alot of real liberals have hard time take caring of themselves. They prefer to be couriose rather to work Tal Yaron 14:00, 15 August 2012 (IDT))

Morality as Social Nurturance: There are two varieties of moral nurturance -- one about individuals and the other about social relations. If community members are to empathize with one another and help one another, then social ties must be maintained. The metaphor can be stated as follows:

• Moral agents are Nurturing Parents
• Social ties are Children needing care
• Moral Action is the Nurturance of Social Ties

Morality as Happiness: This is based on the assumption that unhappy people are less likely to be empathetic and nurturant, since they will not want others to be happier than they are. Therefore, to promote your own capacity for empathy and nurturance, you should make yourself as happy as possible, provided you don't hurt others in the process. ' Morality as Fairness': Fairness is understood metaphorically in terms of the distribution of material objects. There are three basic liberal models of fair distribution:

1. equal distribution;
2. impartial rule-based distribution; and
3. rights-based distribution.

Moral Growth: Given that morality is conceptualized as uprightness, it is natural to conceptualize one's degree of morality as physical height, to understand norms for the degree of moral action as height norms, and to therefore see the possibility for "moral growth" as akin to physical growth. Where moral growth differs from physical growth is that moral growth is seen as being possible throughout one's lifetime.

The Nation-as-Family Metaphor

Applying the metaphor of the Nation as Family, with the government as parent, we get the liberal political worldview:

• The government, as nurturant parent, is responsible for providing for the basic needs of its citizens: food, shelter, education, and health care.
• Regulation: Just as a nurturant parent must protect his children, a government must protect its citizens -- not only from external threats, but also from pollution, disease, unsafe products, workplace hazards, nuclear waste, and unscrupulous businessmen.
• Environmentalism: Communion with the environment is part of nurturance, part of the realization of one's potential as a human being. Empathy includes empathy with nature. Caring for children includes caring for future generations. Protection includes protection from pollution. All of these considerations support environmentalism.
• Feminism and Gay Rights: Nurturant parents want all their children to fulfill their potential, and so it is the role of government to provide institutions to make that possible.
• Abortion: Women seeking abortion are either women who want to take control of their lives or teenage children needing help. Considerations of nurturance for both require providing access to safe, affordable abortions.
• Multiculturalism: Nurturant parents celebrate the differences among their children, and so governments should celebrate the differences among its citizens.
• Affirmative Action: Since women and minorities are not treated fairly in society, it is up to the government to do what it can to make sure that they have a fair chance at self-fulfillment.
• Art and the Humanities: Knowledge, beauty, and self-knowledge are part of human fulfillment, and so the government must see to it that institutions promote such forms of human nurturance.
• Taxation: Just as in a nurturant family it is the duty of older and stronger children to help out those that are younger and weaker, so in a nation it is the duty of citizens who are better-off to contribute more than those who are worse-off.