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