Nature and Nurture

The term "nurture" has two related senses, one having to do with nurturance (nurture-1) and the other with environmentally determined rather than genetically determined factors in human development (nurture-2), as in the opposition between "nature" and "nurture." Nurturance is certainly an environmentally determined factor, and it leads liberals to look almost exclusively at environmentally determined factors in social and political explanations.

Though Strict Father morality is opposed to the goal of a nurturant society, it is extremely concerned with environmental factors, such as childrearing and the more general use of reward and punishment. But there are other parts of Strict Father morality that are concerned with nature as opposed to nurture-2.

Strict Father morality gives high priority to Moral Essence and the idea that the Moral Order is the natural order of dominance. Thus, there is a strain in conservatism that uses nature, as well as environmentally determined factors, as a means of explanation for social problems. Conservatives can have it both ways. Unsuccessful people can fail for one of two reasons: because they lack either (1) character (which is environmentally determined) or (2) talent (which is natural). That is why conservatives tend to like books like The Bell Curve, while liberals tend not to. The Bell Curve provides the second explanation for the economic failure of blacks – lack of talent; but if that can't be proved, there is always lack of character as an explanation.

Preventing Crime

The difference in conservative and liberal moral systems leads to different views of the role of nature and nurture and of the explanatory validity of concepts like class and social forces. To conservatives, any appeal to social forces is always just an excuse for lack of talent (nature) or lack of character (nurture-2). Conservatives therefore don't address crime by looking for social causes. They address crime just the way they would address the refusal of a child to abide by his parents' rules – according to the Morality of Reward and Punishment. Conservatives punish crime, and they assume that if crime is punished harshly enough, it will end, because criminals will have a strong enough disincentive to keep them from committing crimes. If disincentives don't work, then the criminals must be inherently bad – rotten to the core – and should be locked away for life or for a very long time.

Given the central position that the Morality of Reward and Punishment has in the conservative moral system, it is no surprise that conservatives in most cases prefer retribution over restitution as a form of justice, as a way of balancing the moral books. It is therefore no surprise that conservatives are in favor of the death penalty. It is a form of retribution, a life for a life.

Liberals, of course, look at these issues very differently. The primacy of empathy leads to an overriding concern with fairness toward anyone committing a crime (Moral Action Category 1). Given the overwhelming power of the state, any citizen is helpless by comparison unless the rule of law is carried out scrupulously. Great care must be exercised that people accused of crimes be given a fair trial and that their rights as citizens not be overridden by the state. Liberals are acutely aware that the police can abuse their power and act unfairly to get a conviction. This is especially true where the accused is someone who is poor or a member of a minority group. Poor people cannot get as good representation in court as rich people, and members of minority groups are subject to prejudice. Most of the people who have been given the death penalty and are on death row are poor members of minority groups. Overwhelming concerns for empathy and fairness, which grow out of the Nurturant Parent model, lead liberals to have a paramount concern for the abuse of state power.

Conservatives see such a concern as coddling criminals, as caring more about the criminal than the victim. They are puzzled by liberal behavior. If liberals are so concerned about protecting the helpless, why aren't they more concerned about protecting the victims of crime? Why aren't they promoting stricter penalties in the name of protection?

It is not that liberals are not concerned about the victims of crimes. Rather, they disagree about how crime is to be minimized overall. First, the rule of law must be upheld. If the state can act like a criminal, framing innocent people and trampling on the rights of the accused, then all hope for the rule of law is lost. To keep the state and its representatives – the police and the courts – honest, the rights of everyone accused of a crime must be upheld strictly.

Fairness is the issue here. If the legal system is not fair, it will have no legitimacy. Fairness is a consideration that arises, in Nurturant Parent morality, out of concerns for empathy and nurturance for all.

Second, liberals do believe in social causes; they believe that if children are not raised in nurturant environments, they will not learn to behave responsibly toward others. If a gang is the closest thing to a nurturant community a child knows, then he will engage in gang behavior. Thus, the way to best inculcate responsible behavior over the whole society is to provide nurturant environments for as many people as possible. The best long-range approach to fighting crime is to fund programs like Project Head Start, to provide high-quality day care for poor working parents, to provide high-quality education for the poor, and so on. That is why a liberal like Anthony Lewis (New York Times, August 8, 1995) is so outraged when he sees conservatives cutting $137 million from Project Head Start and simultaneously giving the military $7 billion more than it said it needed. It costs more than $20,000 a year to house one prisoner for a year – the cost of tuition at an Ivy League college. Liberals argue that, in the long run, it is more effective, a lot cheaper, and a lot better for everyone to fund Project Head Start, day-care centers, and so on. But conservatives believe that there can be no such thing as social causes of crime, that crime is always a matter of individual moral weakness. It follows then that it is silly to spend money on countering nonexistent social causes.

Third, liberals do not believe in the overriding Morality of Reward and Punishment. They do not believe that it is mainly fear of punishment that binds society together and makes people act kindly, responsibly, or at least civilly, toward each other. Liberals believe that it is nurturance that brings this about, that loving and supportive parent-child bonding creates communities in which there are strong social ties. It is not that rewards and punishments are never appropriate, but they are not the basis of morality, nurturance is.

Simply increasing penalties, liberals argue, will not eliminate crime. The death penalty, liberals argue, has been shown not to be a deterrent to murder. Murderers apparently do not do a cost-benefit analysis before killing someone, and so the death penalty does not deter them.