protect and support one’s underlings, and thus may be the psychological basis of the Pacification Process in which overlords protect their subject peoples from internecine violence. In a similar way, it furnishes the moral rationalizations employed by slaveholders, colonial overlords, and benevolent despots. But Authority Ranking also justifies violent punishment for insolence, insubordination, disobedience, treason, blasphemy, heresy, and lèse-majesté. When welded to Communal Sharing, it justifies group-over-group violence, including imperial and jingoistic conquest and the subjugation of subordinate castes, colonies, and slaves.
More benevolent is the obligation of reciprocal exchange in Equality Matching, which gives each party a stake in the continued existence and well-being of the other. Equality Matching also encourages a modicum of perspective-taking, which, as we have seen, can turn into genuine sympathy. The pacifying effect of commerce between individuals and nations may depend on a mindset in which exchange partners, even if they are not genuinely loved, are at least valued. On the other hand, Equality Matching supplies the rationale for tit-for-tat retaliation: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, blood for blood. As we saw in chapter 8, even people in modern societies are apt to conceive of criminal punishment as just deserts rather than as general or specific deterrence.194
Rational-Legal reasoning, the add-on to the moral repertoire in literate and numerate societies, does not come with its own intuitions or emotions, and by itself neither encourages nor discourages violence. Unless all people are explicitly enfranchised and granted ownership of their own bodies and property, the amoral pursuit of profit in a market economy can exploit them in slave markets, human trafficking, and the opening of foreign markets with gunboats. And the deployment of quantitative tools can be used to maximize kill ratios in the waging of high-tech war. Yet Rational-Legal reasoning, as we shall see, can also be put in the service of a utilitarian morality that calculates the greatest good for the greatest number, and that titrates the amount of legitimate police and military force to the minimum necessary to reduce the aggregate amount of violence.195
What, then, are the historical changes in moral psychology that encouraged reductions in violence such as the Humanitarian Revolution, the Long Peace, and the Rights Revolutions?
The direction of the change in prevailing models is clear enough. “Over the last three centuries throughout the world,” Fiske and Tetlock observe, “there has been a rapidly accelerating tendency of social systems as a whole to move from Communal Sharing to Authority Ranking to Equality Matching to Market Pricing.”196 And if we use the polling data from chapter 7 as an indication that social liberals are at the leading edge of changes in attitudes that eventually drag along social conservatives as well, then Haidt’s data on the moral concerns of liberals and conservatives tell the same story. In judging the importance of moral concerns, recall, social liberals place little weight on In-group Loyalty and Purity/Sanctity (which Fiske lumps under Communal Sharing), and they place little weight on Authority/Respect. Instead they invest all their moral concern in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. Social conservatives spread their moral portfolio over all five.197 The trend toward social liberalism, then, is a trend away from communal and authoritarian values and toward values based on equality, fairness, autonomy, and legally enforced rights. Though both liberals and conservatives may deny that any such a trend has taken place, consider the fact that no mainstream conservative politician today would invoke tradition, authority, cohesion, or religion to justify racial segregation, keeping women out of the workforce, or criminalizing homosexuality, arguments they made just a few decades ago.198
Why might a disinvestment of moral resources from community, sanctity, and authority militate against violence? One reason is that communality can legitimize tribalism and jingoism, and authority can legitimize government repression. But a more general reason is that a retrenchment of the moral sense to smaller territories leaves fewer transgressions for which people may legitimately be punished. There is a bedrock of morality based on autonomy and fairness on which everyone, traditional and modern, liberal and conservative, agrees. No one objects to the use of government violence to put assailants, rapists, and murderers behind bars. But defenders of traditional morality wish to heap many nonviolent infractions on top of this consensual layer, such as homosexuality, licentiousness, blasphemy, heresy, indecency, and desecration of sacred symbols. For their moral disapproval to have teeth, traditionalists must get the Leviathan to punish those offenders as well. Expunging these offenses from the law books gives