Keeping the Moral Books
The metaphors we use in discussing moral questions are abundant. We use these metaphors to frame moral issues: to interpret them, understand them, and explore their consequences. We will see that they play an absolutely central role in our judgments about what is good behavior and what is bad, what is the right thing to do and what is wrong.
There is at least one class of metaphors for morality, however, that do not in themselves tell you exactly which actions are moral or immoral. They are in that sense metamoral. When combined with other metaphors, they generate moral conclusions about various kinds of behavior.
One of the most important metamoral concepts concerns how moral books are kept. It is this metaphor through which we understand concepts like justice, fairness, retribution, and revenge.
The Moral Accounting Metaphor
We all conceptualize well-being as wealth. We understand an increase in well-being as a “gain” and a decrease of well-being as a “loss” or a “cost.” When we speak of the “costs” of a fire or an earthquake, we do not mean just the monetary cost but also the “cost” in human well-being—deaths, injuries, suffering, trauma. When we speak of “profiting” from an experience, we are speaking of the kinds of well-being we might “gain” from that experience—perhaps knowledge, enjoyment, sophistication, or confidence.
The metaphor by which we conceptualize well-being as wealth is a metaphor that is ubiquitous and important in our conceptual systems. Whenever we are not talking literally about money, and we ask whether a course of action is “worth it,” we are using this financial metaphor to treat the resulting well-being or harm as if they were money and to see if the course of action is sufficiently “profitable.” This economic metaphor allows us to use the ways that we think and talk about money to think and talk about well-being. Most important, it allows us to think about something qualitative (well-being) in terms of something quantitative (money), which in turn allows us to bring to bear our extensive forms of quantitative reasoning on something as elusive as well-being.
The metaphor of Weil-Being As Wealth can be combined with a very general metaphor for causal action in which causation is seen as object transfer—as the giving of an effect to an affected party, as in “The noise gave me a headache.” The conception Well-Being As Wealth allows us to see an effect that helps as a gain and one that harms as a loss. Under normal circumstances, moral action is seen as action intended to help (provide a gain) and immoral action as action intended to harm (provide a loss). By this conceptual mechanism, an action of moral import is conceptualized in terms of a financial transaction, with a moral interaction being metaphorically equivalent to a financial transaction, one in which the books are balanced. Just as literal bookkeeping is vital to economic functioning, so moral bookkeeping is vital to social functioning. And just as it is important that the financial books be balanced, so it is important that the moral books be balanced.
Of course, the source domain of the metaphor, the domain of financial transaction, itself has a morality: It is moral to pay your debts and immoral not to. When moral action is understood metaphorically in terms of financial transaction, financial morality is carried over to morality in general: There is a moral imperative not only to pay one’s financial debts but also one’s moral debts.
The Moral Accounting Schemes
The general metaphor of Moral Accounting is realized in a small number of basic moral schemes: reciprocation, retribution, restitution, revenge, altruism, and others. Each of these moral schemes is defined using the metaphor of Moral Accounting, but the schemes differ to how they use this metaphor, that is, they differ as to their inherent logics. Here are the basic schemes.
RECIPROCATION
If you do something good for me, then I “owe” you something, I am “in your debt.” If I do something equally good for you, then I have “repaid” you and we are even. The books are balanced.
From the perspective of cognitive science, there is much here to be explained. Why are financial words like “owe,” “debt,” and “repay” used to speak of morality? And why is the logic of gain and loss, debt and repayment used to think about morality?
The answer given here is that we use conceptual metaphors to think about aspects of morality and that among the general conceptual metaphors used to think and talk about morality are Well-Being As Wealth, and Moral Action As Financial Transaction. But the discovery of these conceptual metaphors (see References, A1, Taub 1990; Klingebiel 1990; A6, Johnson 1993) raises still another question. Why should well-being be conceptualized as wealth? The answer was discussed in the previous chapter. Our metaphors for morality rest on our notions of basic experiential well-being. Wealth forms one basis for a metaphor for morality and, as we shall see, health, strength, and other forms of experiential well-being lead to other metaphors for morality.
But let us return to the moral scheme of reciprocation, where your doing something good for me places me in your “debt,” and I can repay what I “owe” by doing something equally good for you.
Even in this simple case, there are two principles of moral action. The positive-action principle: Moral action is giving something of positive value; immoral action is giving something of negative value. The debt-payment principle: There is a moral imperative to pay one’s moral debts; the failure to pay one’s moral debts is immoral. Thus, when you did something good for me, you engaged in positive action, which is moral. When I did something equally good for you, I engaged in both forms of moral action. I did something good for you and I paid my debts. Here the two principles act in concert.
RETRIBUTION
Suppose someone does something to harm you and you say, “I’ll pay you back—with interest!” What you are doing is threatening retribution. Why, exactly, should a statement about repayment with interest be a threat of retribution? To see why, we have to look at moral transactions where the values are negative.
Moral transactions get complicated in the case of negative action. The complications arise because moral accounting is governed by a moral version of the arithmetic of keeping accounts, in which gaining a credit is equivalent to losing a debit and gaining a debit is equivalent to losing a credit.
Suppose I do something to harm you. Then, by Well-Being As Wealth, I have given you something of negative value. You owe me something of equal (negative) value. By moral arithmetic, giving something negative is equivalent to taking something positive. By harming you, I have taken something of value from you. Are you going to “let me get away with it”?
By harming you, I have placed you in a potential moral dilemma with respect to the first and second principles of moral accounting. Here are the horns of the dilemma: The first: If you now do something equally harmful to me, you have done something with two moral interpretations. By the positive-action principle, you have acted immorally since you did something harmful to me. (“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”) By the debt-payment principle, you have acted morally, since you have paid your moral debts. The second: Had you done nothing to punish me for harming you, you would have acted morally by the positive-action principle, since you would have avoided doing harm. But you would have acted immorally by the second principle: in “letting me get away with it” you would not have done your moral duty, which is to “make me pay” for what I have done. You would not have lived up to the debt-payment principle.
No matter what you do, you violate one of the two principles. You have to make a choice. You have to give priority to one of the principles. Such a choice gives two different versions of moral accounting: The Morality of Absolute Goodness puts the first principle first. The Morality of Retribution puts the second principle first. As might be expected, different people and different subcultures have different solutions to this dilemma, some preferring retribution, others preferring absolute goodness.
In debates over the death penalty, liberals rank Absolute Goodness over Retribution, and conservatives tend to prefer Retribution: a life for a life.
Suppose again that you do something to harm me, which is metaphorically to give me something of negative value. Moral arithmetic provides another version of retribution. By moral arithmetic, you have taken something of positive value from me by harming me. If I take something of equal positive value back from you, that too is retribution, another way of balancing the moral books.
Up to now, I have used the word “retribution” in too loose a fashion. Actually, “retribution” is limited to cases where the balancing of the moral books is carried out by some legitimate authority. “Revenge” occurs when the same principle is used without legitimate authority.
Thus, when a father spanks a child for being naughty, it is retribution, not revenge. When a court sentences a convicted criminal to jail, it is retribution, not revenge. But when a man takes the law into his own hands and shoots his brother’s murderer, that is revenge.
RESTITUTION
If I do something harmful to you, then I have given something of negative value and, by moral arithmetic, taken something of positive value. I then owe you something of equal positive value. I can therefore make restitution—make up for what I have done—by paying you back with something of equal positive value. Of course, in many cases, full restitution is impossible, but partial restitution may be possible.
An interesting advantage of restitution is that it does not place you in a moral dilemma with respect to the positive-action and debt-payment principles. You both perform a positive action and you pay your debt.
ALTRUISM
If I do something good for you, then by moral accounting I have given you something of positive value. You are then in my debt. In altruism, I cancel the debt, since I don’t want anything in return. I nonetheless build up moral “credit.”
The concept of moral credit arises from moral accounting. In a moral system, the moral books must be balanced. Therefore, if you have a credit to your account in the form of a debt from someone else, the credit doesn’t just disappear when you cancel the debt. Instead, it becomes a moral credit. For someone to be a good person, he has to have a lot of moral credit. A great deal of morality has to do with the principles by which you amass moral credit.
TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK
If I harm you, I have (by Well-Being As Wealth) given you something of negative value, and (by moral arithmetic) taken something of positive value. Therefore, I owe you something of positive value. Suppose you then refuse both retribution and revenge. You either allow me to harm you further or, perhaps, you even do something good for me. By moral accounting, either harming you further or accepting something good from you would incur even further debt: by turning the other cheek, you make me even more morally indebted to you. If I have a conscience, then I should feel even more guilty. Turning the other cheek involves the rejection of retribution and revenge and the acceptance of basic goodness—and when it works, it works via this mechanism of moral accounting.
KARMA: MORAL ACCOUNTING WITH THE UNIVERSE
The Buddhist theory of Karma has a contemporary American counterpart: What goes around comes around. The basic idea is that you can affect the balance of good and bad things that happen to you by your actions: You will get what you deserve. The more good things you do for people, the more good things will happen to you. The more bad things you do to people, the more bad things will happen to you.
In another version of moral balance with the universe, the good and bad things that happen to you are balanced out. Thus, we occasionally find people saying things like, “Things have been rotten for a long time. They’re bound to get better,” or “Too many good things have been happening to me. I’m starting to get scared.”
REWARD AND PUNISHMENT
Another basic schema using the metaphor of moral acounting is that of reward and punishment. The basic reward-punishment schema is one in which one person has authority over another. A reward is reciprocation by a person in authority, while a punishment is retribution by a person in authority. As in reciprocation and retribution, performing an act for someone’s benefit is conceptualized metaphorically as giving something of positive value, and performing an act to someone’s detriment is seen as giving something of negative value (or taking something of positive value).
Thus, a father may reward his child for helping him clean out the garage, but a child doesn’t reward his father for helping him clean out his room. Similarly, a father may punish a child for throwing plums at passing cars, but if a child hits his father with a toy for refusing to let him stay up late, the child isn’t punishing the father (unless the father has ceded him authority).
Rewards and punishments are moral acts; giving someone an appropriate reward or punishment balances the moral books. An important special case arises when the person in authority gives an order. That order imposes an obligation to obey. The obligation to obey is a metaphorical debt. You owe obedience to someone who has authority over you. If you obey, you are paying the debt; if you don’t obey, you are refusing to pay the debt—an immoral act, equivalent by moral arithmetic to stealing, a crime. When you disobey a legitimate authority, it is moral for you to be punished, to receive something of negative value or have something of positive value taken from you. Moral accounting then, of course, says that the punishment must fit the crime.
But actually disobedience involves two crimes. To see why, recall that, in reciprocation, there are two moral acts, determined by two principles: The positive-action principle: Moral action is giving something of positive value; immoral action is giving something of negative value. The debt-payment principle: There is a moral imperative to pay one’s moral debts; the failure to pay one’s moral debts is immoral. Disobedience violates both principles. It is both a refusal to engage in positive action and a refusal to pay your debts. The first violation is specific: you were obligated to do something specific and you didn’t do it. But the second violation is general: it is a violation of the whole system of authority in terms of which obedience is defined.
In a system where authority is of the utmost importance, the debt-payment principle is given much heavier weight than the positive-action principle. Consider an example. Suppose you are a private in the army and your sergeant throws a shoe on the floor and orders you to pick it up. If you refuse to pick up the shoe, you are violating two obligations—the obligation to pick up the shoe and the obligation to obey orders. Not picking up the shoe is a minor thing in itself, but not obeying orders is a major offense—an offense against the entire authority-based system of the army. In the army, it is moral for the sergeant to punish the private heavily for challenging the basis of the entire system. Indeed, some sergeants may see such punishment as a moral duty, a duty to uphold the most fundamental principle that allows the system to operate.
In a common interpretation of the Old Testament, God punished Adam and Eve for taking bites out of a fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The punishment was banishment from the Garden of Eden and the loss of immortality for them and their descendants; that is, the punishment was death and suffering for all mankind forever. Now that might seem a little extreme for taking two bites out of a piece of fruit. But the issue wasn’t the fruit itself; the issue was disobedience—the violation of the debt-payment principle upon which all authority rests. Eating the fruit was not just eating a fruit, it was metaphorically a loss of innocence and a giving in to the temptation to satisfy one’s desires—giving in to the temptations of the flesh. It showed that all people are susceptible to temptations of the flesh, to a loss of innocence, and therefore to disobedience, which challenges the entire principle of God’s legitimate authority.
God relented somewhat and offered back immortality and freedom from suffering, not to all mankind, but on a one-by-one basis. Each person who accepted God’s legitimate authority and who became sufficiently self-disciplined to overcome the temptations of the flesh and obey God’s commandments for the remainder of his life on earth would get everlasting life and relief from suffering in heaven. That would be God’s reward for obedience. A person who could do that would have earned that reward. In short, one common interpretation of the Judeo-Christian tradition rests on the metaphor of Moral Accounting, on the ideas of reward and punishment, and on the two principles of positive action and debt-payment. An interpretation that places authority above all else will give much greater weight to the debt-payment principle than to the positive-action principle.
There are, of course, other interpretations in which God’s grace is given heavier weight than his authority, that is, where positive action is given heavier weight than obedience, which is a form of debt-payment (see chapter 14).
WORK
There are two different common metaphors for work, each of which uses moral accounting. We will call them the Work Exchange metaphor and the Work Reward metaphor. In the Work Reward metaphor, the employer is conceptualized as having legitimate authority over the employee, and pay is a reward for work. The metaphor can be stated as follows:
• The employer is a legitimate authority.
• The employee is subject to that authority.
• Work is obedience to the employer’s commands.
• Pay is the reward the employee receives for obedience to the employer.
This metaphor makes work a part of the moral order—a hierarchical chain of legitimate authority. This conception of work implies the following:
• The employer has a right to give orders to the employee, and to punish the employee for not obeying those orders.
• Obedience is the condition of employment.
• The social relationship of employer to employee is
• one of superior to inferior.
• The employer knows best.
• The employee is moral if he obeys the employer.
• The employer is moral if he appropriately rewards the employee for obeying his orders.
In the Work Exchange metaphor, work is seen as an object of value. The worker voluntarily exchanges his work for money. The metaphor can be stated as follows:
• Work is an object of value.
• The worker is the possessor of his work.
• The employer is the possessor of his money.
• Employment is the voluntary exchange of the worker’s work for the employer’s money.
In the context of labor unions and contracts, the nature and value of the work are mutually agreed on in the contract. Payment is a matter of agreed upon exchange, not reward. Work is a matter of trade, not obedience. The nature and limits of authority are spelled out in the contract.
Both of these conceptualizations of work depend upon the metaphor of Moral Accounting—in the first case to define appropriate reward, in the second case to determine the value of the work. Both conceptions are metaphorical, though they may seem literal if everyone involved agrees to abide by one metaphor or the other. What these metaphors show is that the concept of work is not absolute; it varies with the metaphors used to conceptualize it. They also show that work is part of a network of moral concepts, including moral accounting.
Some Basic Moral Concepts
The moral accounting metaphor allows us to see better how we conceptualize fundamental moral notions. As examples of concepts defined relative to moral accounting, we will consider trust, credit, justice, rights, duties, and self-righteousness.
CREDIT AND TRUST: MORAL CAPITAL
By moral accounting, a moral action is part of an exchange. When you do something good for someone, you give something of positive value to him and what you get in exchange is “credit.” Credit for acting morally can accumulate. It is a form of capital.
What does it mean to trust someone with money? It means that you give him money with the confidence that he will give it back when you need it, or at an agreed upon time. To place your trust in someone morally is to give him advance moral credit, credit he has not yet earned, on the assumption that he will repay you by acting morally. If someone that you place your trust in acts very immorally, then you “lose trust” in him, that is, you lose the moral credit that you gave him in advance as prepayment for acting morally. He is “discredited” and “morally bankrupt.” “Trust” is a prepayment of moral credit for future moral action. But in general, people do not trust just anyone. To be trusted, a person has to “build trust,” to establish a history of being trustworthy, a moral credit rating.
JUSTICE
In the Moral Accounting metaphor, justice is the settling of accounts, which results in the balancing of the moral books. Justice is done when people get what they “deserve,” when moral debits and credits cancel each other out.
RIGHTS AND DUTIES
The metaphorical conception of rights in Moral Accounting can be seen very clearly in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s classic “I Have A Dream” speech. The financial expressions concerning rights are in italics.
In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds” in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check—a check that will give us on demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
Rights, in the financial domain, are rights to one’s property. If a bank is keeping your money, you have a right to get it. If someone has borrowed money from you, you have a right to get it back. The metaphor Well-Being As Wealth applies to this financial notion of a right to one’s wealth, yielding a notion of a broader right, a right to one’s well-being—special cases being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In short, a right to well-being in general is metaphorically understood as a right to wealth. That is why Dr. King could speak of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, which guarantee rights, as a promissory note. If you have a right to opportunity, then coming to Washington to demand opportunity can be conceived of as coming to cash a check.
This understanding of rights is not mere rhetoric. It is one of two understandings that we have of rights in general. If rights in general are understood as rights to property, then there are two special cases: If the property is land, the right is a right of way, that is, a right of access to your property. If the property is money, it is the right to have your money given to you.
Let us see what follows from the metaphorical concept of a right as right to one’s money. If that’s what a right is, what is a duty? A duty is a metaphorical debt, something that is due to someone else, something that you have to pay. Duties can be of either a positive or negative nature, things you must do or things you must refrain from doing despite a possible desire or other reason to do so. Carrying out a duty, whether through action or refraining from action, is doing a form of moral work that counts as paying a moral debt. A failure to do one’s duty is akin to a failure to pay a debt, which by moral arithmetic is a metaphorical form of stealing. Rights in general, like rights to property, can be either earned or inherited.
Rights and duties fit together: whenever someone has a right, someone else has a duty, and conversely. If you have a right to an education, someone has a duty to provide it. If you have a right to free speech, others have a duty to protect that speech or refrain from interfering with it. You cannot have a right to breathe clean air unless others have a duty to refrain from polluting it or to guarantee that there is clean air to breathe. In many cases, it falls to government to perform the duties that make rights possible. Where the duty of guaranteeing rights falls to the government, those rights are “purchased” through taxation. Lower taxes may mean fewer rights. If you want rights, somebody’s got to pay for them or provide them. Rights and duties don’t come into existence out of nothing. They require social, cultural, and political institutions and require at least metaphorical economics and often literal economics.
Because rights and duties are interdefined via moral accounting, it follows that the more rights people get, the more duties people get. The duties are often literal debts, as well as metaphorical debts—taxes that need to be paid to purchase those rights.
But it is not always clear that when certain people get more rights, the same people get more duties. This has led to what has been called the communitarian critique of rights. The critique is also based on moral accounting. It says (in the broadest terms) that having rights given to you by the community confers upon you duties to the community. If a right is a letter of moral credit and a duty is a moral debit, the credits and debits should balance out.
SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS
A self-righteous person is someone who carefully keeps his own moral ledger books, who makes sure that, according to his own system of moral accounting, he is morally solvent and that, in his accounting system, his credits always outweigh his debits. A thoroughly self-righteous person knows neither shame nor gratitude, since he has no moral debts, again according to his own method of accounting.
There are three things that make him not righteous but self-righteous. The first is that he recognizes no moral values other than his own as valid. The second is that he keeps his own books. There is no external auditing. And the third is that he must communicate his moral standing to his interlocutors.
The self-righteous person’s superfluity of moral credit is the basis of his discourse. He presupposes his own moral values and his own righteousness as a condition of conversation. The effect of this is that anyone talking to a self-righteous person must either agree with his moral values and act equally self-righteous, or face being put in a morally inferior position in the discourse. This is what makes self-righteous people particularly infuriating to talk to.
Children learn very early what is and isn’t fair. Fairness is when the cookies are divided equally; when everybody gets a chance to play; when following the rules of the game allows for an equal chance at winning; when everybody does his job; and when you get what you earn or what you agree to. Unfairness is not getting as many cookies as your brother; not getting a chance to play; cheating, or bending the rules of the game to increase your chances of winning; not doing your job and therefore making others do it for you; or not getting what you earn or what is agreed upon.
In short, fairness is about the equitable distribution of objects of value (either positive or negative value) according to some accepted standard. What is distributed may be material objects—say cookies or money—or metaphorical objects, such as chances to participate, opportunities, tasks to be done, punishments or commendations, or the ability to state one’s case.
There are many models of fairness:
• Equality of distribution (one child, one cookie)
• Equality of opportunity (one person, one raffle ticket)
• Procedural distribution (playing by the rules determines what you get)
• Rights-based fairness (you get what you have a right to)
• Need-based fairness (the more you need, the more you have a right to)
• Scalar distribution (the more you work, the more you get)
• Contractual distribution (you get what you agree to)
• Equal distribution of responsibility (we share the burden equally)
• Scalar distribution of responsibility (the greater your abilities, the greater your responsibilities)
• Equal distribution of power (one person, one vote)
Here procedural fairness is the impartial rule-based distribution of opportunities to participate, talk, state one’s case, and so on.
One of the most basic conceptions of morality we have conceptualizes moral action as fair distribution and immoral action as unfair distribution. However, different versions of what constitutes fairness result in different versions of Morality As Fairness. Equality of distribution is very different from equality of opportunity. Rule-based fairness invites dispute over how impartial the rules really are. Rights-based fairness differs according to one’s conception of what counts as a right. The communist slogan, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” is a composite of two schemas: the scalar distribution of responsibility and need-based distribution. It therefore invites two challenges: Is need-based distribution moral? And is the scalar distribution of responsibility moral? In short, seeing morality as fair distribution raises another set of thorny questions.
Another issue in fairness is what is to count as an instance of distribution in deciding upon an equitable distribution. Is it distribution over individuals or over groups defined by race, ethnicity, or gender? Is it a single act of distribution or multiple acts? Is it distribution at a single time or over a period of history? Disputes over whether affirmative action is fair (and hence moral) are disputes about such matters. Both sides in affirmative action assume the concept of Moral Action As Fair Distribution, but differ over such issues. In general, conservatives and liberals agree that Moral Action Is Fair Distribution, but they disagree strongly about what counts as fair distribution, for reasons that we shall see below.
Fairness necessarily involves a form of moral accounting, though it is the keeping of a different kind of moral books. What is distributed is taken to be something of positive value, something that may be actual wealth (in the case of taxation) or something that increases your well-being, and hence is treated as wealth by the Well-Being As Wealth metaphor. To guarantee fairness, somebody has to keep track of who gets what.
There is a language that goes with Moral Action As Fair Distribution. “That’s not fair!” is a classic accusation that an immoral decision has been made. “You’re not playing by the rules” or “You’re cheating” are also accusations of unfair, and hence immoral, behavior. The same goes for “She’s been denied her rights” or “He got something he didn’t deserve.” Any time these expressions are used, morality is being conceptualized as fair distribution, but the type of fair distribution differs from case to case.
Summary
There is a fundamental economic metaphor behind much of morality, the ubiquitous conception of Well-Being As Wealth, which brings quantitative reasoning into the qualitative realm of morality. It is so fundamental a metaphor that it is rarely even noticed as being metaphoric. Linguistically, the metaphor is made manifest by the use of economic words like owe, debt, and pay in the moral domain. Logically, the metaphor shows itself in the use in the moral domain of such quantitative forms of reason as moral arithmetic, which is taken from accounting.
There are two distinct general uses of the Well-Being As Wealth metaphor, one concerning the results of interaction and the other the results of distribution. The former is the Moral Accounting metaphor, with special cases such as reciprocation, retribution, restitution, reward and punishment. The latter is Moral Action As Fair Distribution, with many versions of what is to count as fair distribution.
Such moral schemes are not usually thought of as metaphorical, because the Well-Being As Wealth metaphor is so commonplace in everyday life. The metaphorical nature of these moral schemes is revealed in the transfer of words and forms of reason from the quantitative financial domain to the qualitative moral domain. These forms of metaphorical thought and language are both conventional and normal. The use of metaphorical thought and language in moral reasoning and discourse in no way impugns the metaphorical moral schemes involved. It does, however, serve to remind us that these are commonplace products of the human mind, not principles built into the objective structure of the universe.
This example should serve to introduce the notion of conceptual metaphor, as it has come to be used in contemporary cognitive linguistics. A conceptual metaphor is a correspondence between concepts across conceptual domains, allowing forms of reasoning and words from one domain (in this case, the economic domain) to be used in the other (in this case, the moral domain). It is extremely common for such metaphors to be fixed in our conceptual systems, and thousands of such metaphors contribute to our everyday modes of thought. For the most part, we use them without effort or conscious awareness. Yet, as we shall see, they play an enormous role in characterizing our worldviews.
In the next two chapters, we examine two family-based moral systems: strict father morality and nurturant parent morality. The point of each chapter is to present a collection of metaphors of morality that are prioritized differently by each of those models of the family. The metaphors have been arrived at independently by looking at two kinds of evidence: (1) how the language of a nonmoral domain (e.g., the financial domain) is used to talk about the moral domain, and (2) how the forms of reason used in nonmoral domains (e.g., health, strength) are used to reason about the moral domain.
The two models of the family are common stereotypes within our culture and should be immediately recognizable. The claims made in these chapters are these: The metaphors for morality that are cited do exist in the conceptual systems of Americans. The models of the family described are common models of what family life should be. Each model of the family motivates giving priority to the metaphors cited over other metaphors for morality. The result is two different family-based moral systems. The different metaphors of morality in each system give rise to different forms of moral reasoning.
At this point in the book nothing is claimed about the relevance of these family-based models of morality to political life. I will argue in later chapters that these pairings of family models with metaphors for morality are, in fact, central to the conservative and liberal conceptual worldviews. When we get to that discussion, the basis for those claims will be that they meet the adequacy conditions set forth in Chapter 2. But for now, we are merely outlining two organizations of moral priorities.