Moral Philosophy and Politics 2023; 10(1): 139–159

Adrian Kreutz*
Moral and Political Foundations: From
Political Psychology to Political Realism
https://doi.org/10.1515/mopp-2021-0067
Published online April 28, 2022

Abstract: The political psychologists Hatemi, Crabtree and Smith accuse orthodox
moral foundations theory of predicting what is already intrinsic to the theory,
namely that moral beliefs influence political decision-making. The authors argue
that, first, political psychology must start from a position which treats political and
moral beliefs as equals so as to avoid self-justificatory theorising, and second, that
such an analysis provides stronger evidence for political attitudes predicting moral
attitudes than vice versa. I take this empirical result as a starting point to intervene
in a debate in contemporary normative political theory which has, to my mind,
become largely unwieldy: the political realism controversy. I advise the realists to
‘downplay’ the (thus far) inconclusive debate over realism’s metanormative
standing in favour of a non-metanormative inquiry. Hatemi, Crabtree and Smith’s
study makes for an excellent backdrop. It affirms the realist hypothesis that politics
is in some relevant sense – a causal, psychological sense – prior to morality.

Keywords: political realism, political psychology, moral foundations theory,

political foundations, moralism, metanormativity

1 Introduction
‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’
[First comes the grub, then comes morality]
—Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper

In a recent article entitled ‘Ideology Justifies Morality: Political Beliefs Predict

Moral Foundations’, Hatemi, Crabtree, and Smith (2019) (henceforth HCS) explore
the causal pathways between political and moral beliefs with the help of structural
and predictive modelling. They challenge the orthodoxy of the moral foundations

*Corresponding author: Adrian Kreutz, New College, University of Oxford, Holywell Street, OX1
3BN Oxford, UK, E-mail: adrian.kreutz@politics.ox.ac.uk. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7617-
1362

Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
140 A. Kreutz

theory (MFT) as discussed in, among others, Haidt (2008, 2012), accusing MFT of
predicting what is already intrinsic to the theory, namely that moral beliefs in-
fluence political beliefs. HCS argue that, first, political psychology must start from
a position which treats political and moral beliefs as prima facie equals to avoid
self-justificatory theorising, and second, that an analysis based on a level-playing
field between moral and political beliefs provides stronger evidence that political
attitudes (towards gay rights, abortion, stem cell experiments, etc.) and ideology
(liberal–conservative) at time one predict moral attitudes at a later time (time two
and even time three) than vice versa.1 HCS’s findings, I argue, have ramifications
for methodological choices in normative political theory: in particular, they supply
evidence for the viability of the political realist approach.
Political realism is sometimes (though neither exhaustively nor exclusively)
understood as promoting the metanormative discontinuity of politics and moral-
ity.2 There are sources of normativity—that is, phenomena that generate normative
force—and some of those are genuinely political sources of normativity, distinct
from moral sources of normativity.3 Neither the realists nor the moralists (the
realists’ adversaries) have thus far proposed an intelligible account of the structure
of metanormative reality.4 When one tries to disambiguate realist avowals, such as
political theory not being applicable to ethics, in a non-metanormative way, we
briskly come to the conclusion that any firm distinction between politics and ethics
must eventually break down. As I think Baderin (2021, 174) argues successfully, on
the only sensible non-metanormative interpretation of many of the realist’s most
elusive catchphrases, ‘contemporary political theory’s failures of realism reflect
[the] political theorists’ tendency to replicate mistakes to be found within partic-
ular traditions of ethics’. Baderin concludes that realism’s aim can ‘no longer [be]
to separate political theory from ethics but only from bad ethics’ (2021, 174);
collapsing realism into moralism. The failure to account for a clear distinction
between political theory and ethics suggests that the debate has become largely

1 I would like to thank Charles Crabtree for pressing me on the right phrasing of this formulation.
2 For a recent critique of ‘discontinuity realism’, see Baderin (2021), Erman and Möller (2015; 2020)
and Leader-Maynard and Worsnip (2018), who also use the ‘discontinuity’ terminology. It might be
fair to say that it is mostly moralists, the realists’ adversaries, who define realism as discontinuous
with morality and ethics.
3 See, for instance, McPherson (2011, 233), Jubb (2015), Larmore (2018), Leader-Maynard and
Worsnip (2018), Kiss (2021).
4 See Nye (2015) for a metaethical assessment of this situation. A very interesting (and urgently
needed) project would look at the realist’s metanormative commitments to see whether the
polymorphous ideas of priority and discontinuity hold water when interpreted as robust meta-
ethical concepts. Gathered from my understanding of the metanormativity literature, which, by the
way, runs mostly orthogonal to the realist’s normativity issue, my hunch is: they won’t.
 Moral and Political Foundations 141

unwieldly. To remedy this situation, I argue that the realists should ‘downplay’ the
(thus far) inconclusive debate over realism’s metanormative standing in favour of a
non-metanormative inquiry exemplified by HCS’s empirical analysis of moral and
political beliefs. Using HCS’s clinical studies of the causal pathways between
moral and political beliefs,5 realists may better position themselves to defend
political realism’s central claim: the rejection of the priority of the moral over the
political.

2 Moral Foundations Theory

People hold beliefs, convictions and opinions for reasons that are often opaque to
both themselves and others. As early as 1908, the Fabian socialist Graham Wallas
(1908) argued against the technocratic assumption that political opinions are
determined by relational calculation. As one of the first serious examples of social
and political psychology, Wallas’ Human Nature in Politics expressed deep concern
about democracy’s vulnerability to technocratic manipulation of political opinion.
The political opinion of the masses, Wallas contended, could best be controlled by
exploiting the masses’ subconscious.
The early Frankfurt School picked up on Wallas’ observation. Adorno et al.
merged social, individual and political levels of psychological analysis in
The Authoritarian Personality. One of the central insights of this heavily criticised
study—criticised on both ideological and methodological grounds—is that specific
‘ideologies have for different individuals, different degrees of appeal, a matter that
depends upon the individual’s needs and the degree to which these needs are
being satisfied or frustrated’ (Adorno et al. [1950] 2019, 2). Individuals, Adorno
et al. argued, hold political beliefs and appeal to underlying (moral) values in
political argument because they are expressions of deep-seated psychological
needs for order, security, cohesion, and self-esteem. Ideologies, as the Frankfurt
School referred to amalgams of political convictions, serve psychological func-
tions. Those functions may or may not be fully transparent to both the individuals
themselves and others. From the perspective of the political psychologist (or the
ideology critic), however, those functions and their reference points in the human
psyche can help make sense of how actual politics shapes the matrix of our
attitudes.6

5 I will in what follows use the following terms interchangeably: ‘beliefs’, ‘attitudes’, and ‘con-
victions’. The quoted political-psychology literature itself is not very precise in that regard, either.
6 See Stanley (2015).
142 A. Kreutz

Political psychology later went in search for the ‘holy grail’ of the most
simplistic theory of political ideology. A study by Jost et al. (2003, 2012) is exem-
plary in illustrating the quest for maximum simplicity. Theirs is a theory of political
ideology as motivated social cognition. As they see it, individuals with strong
psychological needs for cohesion, order, and certainty are attracted to conserva-
tism and repulsed by liberalism. The needs for cohesion, order, and certainty, they
argue, are present in all individuals to varying degrees. Contemporary political
psychology calls those innate (but socially formed) needs ‘moral foundations’.
Those ‘foundations’ can be triggered and temporarily activated by, for instance,
propaganda.7
Haidt (2012) and Graham (2013), both pioneers of the moral foundations
theory (MFT), have criticized Jost’s theory of ideology as motivated social
cognition for its implicit devaluing of conservative moral principles8—principles
that liberals, according to MF theorists, don’t even ‘acknowledge to be moral
principles, such as unconditional loyalty to one’s group, respect for one’s su-
periors, and the avoidance of carnal pleasures’ (Jost et al. 2013, 101). A suitably
differentiated account of political psychology, both Haidt and Graham (2007)
argue, would uncover the liberal’s impoverished sense of morality. Liberals, they
say, don’t recognize the reduction of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty as being of
moral normative importance. A liberal’s moral arsenal knows only issues of
fairness and harm-avoidance. Conservatives, on the other hand, value loyalty,
obedience, and purity in addition to fairness and harm-avoidance.
This insight on the liberal’s impoverished view of morality forms the backbone
of MFT, which proceeds by codifying a sample set of normative moral attitudes into
psychological modules—that is, moral foundations—which are then tested as to
how they relate to other normative domains, such as, in our case, the political
domain. In other words, there are basic moral foundations, five in the case of Haidt
and Graham (2007), and those moral foundations make up an individual’s ‘moral
palette’. The hypothesis: differences in the weighting between fairness, harm-
avoidance, loyalty, obedience, and purity have an effect on, and make predictable,
an individual’s political attitudes and beliefs.
MFT rests on four pillars. The idea that evolution encourages moral pluralism
is the first pillar. The quest for stability, order, and cohesion is not the only
psychological determinate. According to Haidt and Graham, there is no reason to
expect nature to be parsimonious with respect to our moral foundations. There

7 Again, see Stanley (2015).

8 Jost et al. (2013, 340) argue that ‘people embrace conservatism in part because it serves to reduce
fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity, and to explain, order,
and justify inequality among groups and individuals’.
 Moral and Political Foundations 143

are five moral foundations at a minimum, each expressing a binary set of

negative and positive moral attitudes: (1) care–harm, (2) fairness–cheating,
(3) authority–agitation, (4) loyalty–betrayal, (5) disgust–purity. Those binary
sets are supposed to measure an individual’s sensitivity to (1) the suffering of
others, (2) exploitation, (3) social hierarchy, (4) social rivalry, and (5) taboos.
Graham et al. (2011) further distinguish between the categories of individual
morality (1, 2) and group morality (3, 4, 5).
The second pillar can be referred to as nativism. Marcus (2004, 39f.) describes
it as ‘nature [providing] a first draft, which experience then revises’. Reminiscent
of Chomsky’s idea of universal grammar, MF theorists think that genes write the
first draft of a moral set-up into the child’s neural tissue, experience (i.e., cultural
learning) does the editing of this draft. The first draft cannot be inferred from the
moral set-up of an individual (or one culture), but only by examining the shared
moral nexus of individuals from different cultural backgrounds. From this, MF
theorists infer the common starting point of all moral psychology. As Graham
et al. (2013, 61) say, ‘morality is innate and highly dependent on environmental
influences.’
Cultural learning is the third pillar. If there were no common starting point of
moral psychology, ‘then groups would be free to invent utopian moralities … and
they’d be able to pass them on to their children because all moral ideas would be
equally learnable. This is clearly not the case’, say Graham et al. (2013, 61).9
Without cultural learning, moral attitudes would have to be homogenous across
cultures, and accordingly, there couldn’t be any differences in political ideology
across polities, which is evidently not the case (see Haidt, Koller, and Dias 1993).
MFT claims that ‘the universal (and incomplete) first draft of the moral mind gets
filled in and revised so that the child can successfully navigate the moral “matrix”
he or she actually experiences’ (Graham et al. 2013, 61). There are thus, meta-
phorically speaking, moral foundations on top of which additional and more
complex moral structures may be formed.
The final pillar concerns the possibility of recognizing moral foundations,
which Bargh and Chartrand (1999, 475) think reveal themselves through rela-
tively immediate, automatic intuitive means. The social intuition model defines
moral intuitions, which serve as the MF theorist’s access point to an individual’s
moral matrix, as ‘the sudden appearance in consciousness, or at the fringe of

9 See also Spiro (1956) and Pinker (2002). An example of utopian morality, argue Graham et al.
(2011), is the Marxian ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’. What it is
precisely that makes this Marxian concept of justice utopian, (which is controversial, given the
extensive ‘Marx and justice’ debate, and the elaborate literature on Marx’s and Marxist utopian-
ism), they do not discuss. They also don’t discuss why such a morality couldn’t spring from the
moral foundations they proposed.
144 A. Kreutz

consciousness, of an evaluative feeling (like–dislike, good–bad) about the

character or action of a person, without any conscious awareness of having gone
through steps of search, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion’ (Haidt
2001, 818).10 Moral reasoning is the post-hoc rationalization of those ad-hoc
moral intuitions, and consequently more likely to be ideologically distorted.11
Studies in political psychology may therefore only be based on those ad hoc
moral intuitions.
In sum, MFT predicts that moral foundations determine political attitudes.
Crudely put, whether an individual is an alt-right fascist or a volunteer at refugee
support groups is thus a matter of the individuals’ moral foundations. According to
MFT, knowing about individuals’ moral foundations makes predictable their po-
litical attitudes. If we want to translate this position into the language of normative
political theory, moral principles must be the starting and pivotal point of political
argument and analysis. This, critics say, is where MFT displays an unwarranted
bias towards the priority of moral attitudes. A bias that eventually, and unwar-
rantedly, gets codified into the theory’s conclusions.

3 Problems of the Moral Foundations Theory

MFT posits that substantive political attitudes—such as being a liberal, a socialist,
or a conservative—differ with respect to the moral foundations adhered to in po-
litical judgments.12 Liberals, for example, say Graham et al. (2013), seek founda-
tions for their political attitudes more often on the negative side of individual
morality (that is, harm and cheating) than do conservatives. This points towards
the first of the objections to MFT that I want to discuss: the liberal–conservative
divide is a self-imposed limitation on MFT, one that is perhaps a hereditary defect
derived from the scaling models introduced in The Authoritarian Personality and its
infamous f-scale. This means that MFT does not test on robust political attitudes
but only on the relatively narrow dimension of liberal versus conservative atti-
tudes. Put differently, MFT works on simplified models at the cost of losing out on
expressiveness.
Another worry is the problem of missing contestation. A given political
concept, say freedom, ‘means one thing to liberals and another to socialists’
(Prinz and Rossi 2017, 355). MFT generally lacks dimensions that a more complex

10 On intuitive access to the moral nexus, see also Haidt and Bjorklund (2008).
11 Which is not to say that ad-hoc moral reactions are necessarily ideology-free.
12 See Graham et al. (2011) and Schein and Gray (2015).
 Moral and Political Foundations 145

analysis, one that makes more detailed models of the relations between political
attitudes and moral attitudes, would cover.
MFT’s main flaw, however, is the circular self-justification of its predictions.
In most of its applications, the causal priority of moral attitudes to political
attitudes is simply being asserted rather than argued for, and this is not a matter
of chance, but a matter of theory design. Recall that MFT is based on a sample set
of normative moral attitudes codified into psychological modules, the moral
foundations, which are then tested on their command over other normative do-
mains, such as, in our case, the political domain. Thus, by the very design of MFT,
moral attitudes are being tested for their causal impact on political attitudes, but
never vice versa. The possibility of the reverse direction showing even more
significant empirical results, however, is exactly what is at stake here: Do moral
beliefs determine political beliefs, do political beliefs determine moral beliefs, or
is it a reciprocal relationship?
MFT thus presupposes (rather than proves) that moral beliefs determine po-
litical beliefs. This is of course problematic on its own, but also and especially, say
HSC, before the background of traditional studies on moral reasoning, such as
Kohlberg’s (1969) and the infamous Milgram experiment (1974), which suggest that
‘moral judgments are made in order to justify pre-existing social and political
beliefs’ (HCS 2019, 769), and hence that social and political attitudes are in some
sense prior to moral judgements.
Traditional studies indicate that there is a causal path running from political
to moral attitudes. In Milgram’s behaviorism, for instance, political attitudes
and ideology have greater influence on individual and group moral attitudes
than moral attitudes have on political attitudes—situational attributes replace
presumed dispositional attributes. Milgram’s core thesis in his Obedience to
Authority—which rests on Milgram’s controversial electroshock experiments and
was supposed to disprove the ‘Germans-are-different’ hypothesis13—is supported
by decades of research on authoritarian values and group identity. Those studies
posit that ideological values largely guide our moral attitudes.14
In order not to presuppose what is being argued for, any trustworthy study
on the causal relation between moral and political beliefs must precede from a

13 The Germans-are-different hypothesis states that German’s have a basic character flaw, a
disposition, which accounts for a certain cruelty and a readiness to blindly obey authority. Despite
its undeniable intuitive appeal, this hypothesis was never proven and in fact discredited several
times over, as for instance by Milgram and Adorno.
14 We are talking here about the acceptability of coercion (Jost, Banaji, and Nosek 2004), the
creation of (morally grounded, not politically determined) in- and out-groups (Mullen, Brown, and
Smith 1992), and general demands of loyalty and fairness (Sidanius and Pratto 2001). See also,
Gross (1999).
146 A. Kreutz

level-playing field, one that includes not only a sample set of normative moral
attitudes codified into psychological modules, the so-called moral foundations,
but also a sample set of normative political attitudes codified into psychological
modules, which we can call political foundations. To presuppose that there are no
political foundations that could possibly influence our moral attitudes is to beg
the question.15

4 Political Foundations
Hatami, Crabtree, and Smith (2019) add a sample set of normative political atti-
tudes codified into psychological modules—political foundations—to their study
of the causal links between political and moral attitudes.16 They rely on several
external datasets arguing that political attitudes can, just like moral traits, be
‘anchored in rapid, implicit evaluations that spring from deep psychological and
dispositional mechanisms’ (790). In other words, if there is such a thing as moral
foundations, for which there has been no prior argument, why not also presuppose
the existence of political foundations so as to create a level-playing field?
Since political attitudes are multifaceted, HCS break them down into three
discrete ‘ideologies’: social ideology, defence ideology, and economic ideology.17 The
first has a 7-item measure, the second a 3-item measure, and the third a 4-item
measure. HCS are (again replicating the MFT setup) using a self-reported 7-point
liberal–conservative scale (from 1 = extremely liberal to 7 = extremely conservative to
avoid ‘cheap political agnosticism’, that is a middle position such as 5 on a 1–10 scale)

15 What is more, some significant political positions, particularly conservatism, have been
conceptualized as foundational psychological traits which guide moral attitudes and decision
making. Jost et al. (2003) argue that conservative psychological traits, much more so than a
broadly liberal stance, ‘provide moral and intellectual support’ for inegalitarian policy and a
greater likelihood to accept unwanted, harmful spill-over effects into political decision-making.
16 With respect to ‘political foundations’, HCS’s models are continuous with the ‘third pillar’ of
MFT. As argued above, the social intuition model defines moral intuitions, which serve as the MF
theorist’s access point to an individual’s moral matrix, as ‘the sudden appearance in conscious-
ness, or at the fringe of consciousness, of an evaluative feeling (like–dislike, good–bad) about the
character or action of a person, without any conscious awareness of having gone through steps of
search, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion’ (Haidt 2001, 818; see also Haidt and Bjor-
klund 2008). Moral reasoning is the post-hoc rationalisation of those quick moral intuitions and is
therefore possibly distorted. Studies in political psychology may thus only be based on those ad
hoc moral intuitions. HCS simply turns this ‘third pillar’ around and considers ad hoc reaction as
the access point to an individual’s political matrix.
17 These are predetermined factors, drawn from the extant literature.
 Moral and Political Foundations 147

in addition to the experimentally examined attitudinal measures concerning the

discrete ideologies.
The three discrete ideologies have subfactors: social ideology comprises
opinions on homosexual marriage, stem cell experiments, evolutionary theory,
euthanasia, the legalization of marijuana, pre-marriage sexual contact, and at-
titudes on X-rated movies. Defence ideology is measured on the basis of opinions
on the war in Afghanistan, military spending, and the Iraq War. The factors of
economic ideology correspond to opinions on Medicare for all, the need for
labour unions, and education spending.18
For the set of moral foundations, HCS chose the orthodox MFT’s set of harm
avoidance, fairness, loyalty, obedience, and purity. The study evaluates them by
asking, first, about the relevance of each item to the participant’s perception of his
or her own moral compass, and second, about how much the participants agree
with the relevance of a certain item in the context of a given moral domain (e.g. ‘Is
purity relevant when choosing how to distribute exclusive resources?’).
HCS test the causal relationship between political attitudes and moral atti-
tudes by using a cross-lagged panel (CLP). A CLP consists of two variables, X and
Y, which are measured at two difference time stamps. From that panel we get four
measurements: X1, X2, and Y1, Y2. X1 is a political attitude at time one, X2 the
same political attitude at time two; Y1 is a moral attitude at time one, Y2 is the
same moral attitude at time two. From those four measurements six correlations
can be determined. Most significant for the point in case are the stability relations
between X1 and X2, and Y1 and Y2, which answer the question, ‘Do political and
moral attitudes remain stable over time?’ as well as the cross-lagged correlations
between X1 and Y1, and X2 and Y2, which answer the question, ‘If political
attitudes justify (i.e. cause) moral attitudes at time 1, do they also have the same
causal effect at time 2?’. The evaluation follows multiple regressions. If the co-
efficient on Y1 or X1 is statistically sufficient, not only is that evidence for
covariation (i.e. evidence that X causes Y), but also for temporal precedence. This
is an appropriate CLP. We can not only see if there is an immediate causal path,
but also test on long-term causal effects, for what is measured is the impact of
variable X1 on variables X2, Y1, and Y2, as well as the impact of variable Y1 on Y2,
X1, and X2.
The findings of HCS’s cross-lagged panel suggest that ‘ideology, no matter
how measured, was more stable than any moral foundations’ measure within
each study’ (HCS 2019, 795). The correlations for political attitudes causing moral
attitudes are 0.71 for social ideology, 0.41 for defence ideology, and 0.58 for
economic ideology. This is a significant difference compared to the impact of the

18 See HCS (2019, 793).

148 A. Kreutz

moral categories (1) individual morality = 0.35 and (2) group morality = 0.38.19
This implies that, first, political attitudes are more stable (over time) than moral
attitudes and second, that moral foundations have (almost) no causal impact on
political attitudes.
Do political attitudes determine moral attitudes? In four out of seven models
(those concerning authority, loyalty, purity, and obedience) the parameter ‘po-
litical attitude at time 1’ had a statistically significant impact on the parameter
‘moral attitude at time 1’. In contrast, only in two models has the ‘moral attitude at
time 1’ been statistically significant for political attitudes at time 1 (see HCS 2019,
Figure 5). The models of HCS’s study suggest that political attitudes determine
moral attitudes.20

19 See HCS (2019). While the data supports prediction and, to a more limited degree, causal
relations, it does so only partially. At best a variation in political attitudes can predict <16% of the
variation in morality. The overwhelming majority of the variation on morality is thus not
accounted for in political attitudes. While this doesn’t undermine the main conclusion to be drawn
from HCS’s study, it points toward a more general issue which is mirrored in the metanormative
debate that I am going to discuss below: it is far from clear where normative valence originates and
where it can exercise its force. It is also unclear where in the other 84% of cases moral normativity
(or the moral attitudes, in HCS case) originate. Perhaps, in those other 84% of cases there is no non-
moral prior. Morality itself is the fundamental attitude or source of normativity. Or else some of
those priors may be aesthetic attitudes/normativity, or prudential attitudes/normativity. This line
of inquiry will again come to a point where how to delineate attitudes or sources of normativity
other than by mere stipulation remains a mystery. I would like to thank Pete Hatemi for pressing
me on this point.
20 A contextualist might comment the following: HCS’s data is based on the salience of items
today, in liberal and relatively stable Western democracies. In a period of less political organi-
zation but increased moral and religious organisation clinical research like the above might find
that religious attitudes predict moral attitudes, which predict political attitudes. In fact, the
innateness of foundations – be they moral, political, or other – is highly controversial, as Iurino
and Saucier (2020) have demonstrated. A reviewer for this journal suggested an undiscussed
alternative to both the moral and the political foundations theory: the possibility that people form
their moral and political judgments in response to ‘real-world conditions’, such as the decline of
the industrial economy, which has a geographical as well as sectoral dimension. Many denizens of
hard-hit communities have moved to the political right in the belief that traditional left programs
have failed to stem their decline. This shift in ‘real-world conditions’, in turn, spawns a moral shift.
I am sympathetic to this line of thought, and it would seem possible that a myriad of other belief-
formations also work in this way. I am nonetheless sceptical of the chances of some empirical
scheme capturing this plethora of possible ‘foundations’ (geographical, sectoral, class-based,
gender-based, etc.) in a comprehensive framework. There is a limit to how much ‘intersectionality’
a comprehensive empirical framework can capture. That said, I agree that the truth is most likely to
be found in a more intersectional setting.
 Moral and Political Foundations 149

5 Moral and Political Normativity

HCS’s study supplies evidence principally for the political realist approach in
normative political theory. I want to suggest that HCS’s findings may replace
established ways of validating the realist approach.
According to political realists, most anglophone political philosophy from
Rawls, to Dworkin, to Cohen have misconstrued the political domain as being
under the guidance of morality. Realism is the counter-project. The political is
considered an autonomous domain with its own distinctive concepts and its own
distinctive source of normativity. The ‘ethics-first approach’ must be abandoned,
says the realist, and politics properly theorized through the concept of political
legitimacy.21 This—the rejection of the universal priority of the moral over the
political in political theory—I consider the core thesis of political realism, as
espoused in the work of prominent realists like Bernard Williams (2005) and
Raymond Geuss (2005, 2010).22
About a decade ago, a heated debate erupted, taking its cue from Bernard
Williams’ theory of legitimacy. Williams claims that his theory of legitimacy does
not contain a morality that is external to politics.23 This is what makes a theory of
legitimacy a realist theory. The ongoing dispute between realists and moralists
about the standing of political normativity vis-à-vis moral normativity has its
origins in Williams’ rather elusive notion of ‘making sense’. It plays a vital role in
the evaluation of claims to legitimacy. Let me explain.
The legitimation story, a narrative on the grounds of which a political actor
demands legitimacy, must make sense to those subject to its power in order for that
political actor’s authority to count as properly legitimate. The notion of ‘making
sense’ is unique in that it is ‘evaluative when applied to other [political] contexts

21 See Baderin (2021) for a detailed discussion of those claims.

22 Other aspects of the realist agenda concern feasibility constraints, see Finlayson (2017), Prinz
(2016), Prinz and Rossi (2017), Duff (2017), Raekstad (2018), and fact-sensitivity, see Hall (2012,
2015), Jubb (2015), Rossi (2012), Erman and Möller (2020). Some realists have argued that while
fact-sensitivity is important to the realist programme, feasibility constraints are not (see Rossi
2019). Their scepticism towards feasibility constraints stems from its acquaintance with non-ideal
theory. Realists hold that non-ideal theory bears a special relation to feasibility. It is concerned
with the implementation, approximation, or balancing of the ideal described in a given ideal
theory. For Rossi (2019, 643), ‘nonideal theory is a criterion or a set of criteria for the ranking of
politically feasible states of affairs.’ Realism, on the other hand, says Rossi (2019, 3), is charac-
terized by a ‘fidelity to an appropriately specified class of facts, but those need not be facts about
feasibility’. Feasibility restrictions are essential to non-ideal theory, but ‘orthogonal’ to political
realism (see Rossi and Sleat 2014, 690).
23 See Hall’s (2015) defence of the basic legitimation demand (BLD) as well as Sleat’s (2021)
discussion of the matter.
150 A. Kreutz

though it is normative when applied to our own [political context]’, says Sleat
(2010, 488). The question later generations of realists have been grappling with is,
‘What is this mysterious political normativity, and where does it come from?’ In
their attempts to answer this question, some realists went so far as to posit that
Williams’ theory of legitimacy is ‘morality-free’.24 Whereas Williams claimed not to
be working with a ‘morality external to politics’, subsequent realist scholars
framed their position, in one way or other, as void of all moral import. Note that
these are two completely different claims.
The transition from ‘external to’ to ‘free from’ was realisms’ first sleight of
hand. The second followed shortly thereafter. Thinking about ways to amplify the
notion of ‘morality-free’ into something like a substantial claim for realism,
subsequent commentators asserted the existence of a genuine political source of
normativity.25 The demands of legitimacy, some realists argued, are generated
within the real practice of politics, and so is politics’ own normativity.26 A
pertinent example of this metanormative realist position is Rossi and Sleat
(2014, 1).27 Political realism, they say, is defined ‘on the basis of its attempt to give
varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large
part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the
political’. Jubb and Rossi (2015, 1) argue that ‘a non-moral distinction between
politics and sheer domination can give us a distinctively political normativity’.
Ever since that metanormative turn in the literature, realists themselves have
been introducing metanormative terms without ever going down the rabbit hole of
actual metanormative inquiry to show what must be shown, namely, first, that
political normativity exists, and second, that it has precedence over moral nor-
mativity. As Leader-Maynard and Worsnip (2018, 764) correctly identified, the

24 Sleat (2021) nicely points out how this has been a gross misinterpretation of Williams. He
accuses realists (Jubb and Rossi 2015) of this misinterpretation but is very adamant on pointing out
that non-realists have had a significant role to play in propagating this confusion (e.g., Leader-
Maynard and Worsnip 2018).
25 Particularly upfront about this position are, amongst others, Rossi and Sleat (2014), who are,
one might argue, (at least partly) responsible for the metanormative turn in the realism debate. See
also Jubb (2019), Leader-Maynard and Worsnip (2018), Erman and Möller (2021), and most recently
Burelli and Destri (2021). The term ‘source of normativity’ comes from Koorsgard (1992) but is used
differently there, as I will stress below.
26 For a sceptical argument, see Sleat (2010) who suggests that the basic legitimation demand is
premised on the pre-political notion of equal moral worth. If legitimacy is what keeps up the
distinction between politics and tyranny, we may suspect that it is, after all, in some sense
inevitably prior to politics. Without a concept prior to that of legitimacy we would not know what
legitimacy entails and hence could not tell apart politics from tyranny.
27 Recent advocates of (metanormatively defined) moralism—the mirror image, if you will—are
Erman and Möller (2015), Leader-Maynard and Worsnip (2018), Thomas (2017), Wendt (2016).
 Moral and Political Foundations 151

recent discussion is reminiscent of metaethical ruminations about whether pru-

dential normativity is a kind of moral normativity, or whether epistemic norma-
tivity is a kind of instrumental normativity’. The question of realism has become a
disagreement about the ontology of the normative sphere, a Quinean controversy
about existential quantifiers. It used to be a question of logical priority.28
We can read this metanormative thesis in a number of ways. On a strong
reading there is absolute discontinuity between the moral and political sources of
normativity.29 I call this, the discontinuity thesis: there is a genuine and auton-
omous political source of normativity. On this strong reading of the discontinuity
thesis, the moral and the political sources of normativity are diametrically
opposed, exhaustive, and exclusive. In a debate concerning the normative pre-
dominance of either the political or the moral source of normativity in political
theory, an argument for either side is ipso facto an argument against the other. 30
For the ‘strongish’ realist, on the other hand, there may not be a genuine
political source of normativity distinct from the moral source of normativity. All
that matters is that politics (or political theory, for that matter) is guided by a non-
moral source of normativity. ‘Most contemporary theorists of normativity accept
that not all normativity is moral normativity. Other candidate kinds of norma-
tivity include epistemic normativity, prudential normativity, “aim-given” nor-
mativity, and aesthetic normativity,’ say Leader-Maynard and Worsnip (2018,
756).31 Rossi (2019), to mention just one example, advocates an epistemic (and
therefore non-moral) realist programme that he calls radical realism. Still, there
is an assumed discontinuity between the realist’s preferred source of normativity
(epistemic normativity, in the case of Rossi) and the moral source of normativity.
On a weak reading, ‘morality may have a role to play in providing a source of
political normativity, yet it remains important to appreciate the manner in which
politics remains a distinct sphere of human activity’ (Rossi 2014, 2).32 Note that this
doesn’t suggest any distinct metanormative position whatsoever.33 Establishing
‘continuity’ or ‘coexistence’, rather than ‘priority’ or ‘autonomy’, might, after all,
be the realist’s most sensible and promising objective. Baderin (2021), for instance,

28 I would like to thank Amia Srinivasan for pushing me to get this point across with more
panache. See also, Cross (2020).
29 See Baderin (2021) for an overview of the various ways in which the idea of ‘discontinuity’ can
be spelled out.
30 See Leader-Maynard and Worsnip (2018) for a strong reading of the discontinuity thesis.
31 That’s not to associate Leader-Maynard and Worsnip with the strongish thesis. Leader-
Maynard and Worsnip advocate the strong reading.
32 See also, Philp (2007), Newey (2013), Sleat (2013, 2014), Waldron (1999).
33 On yet another reading, the weak realist merely seeks to give ‘greater autonomy to distinctive
political thought’ (Williams 2005, 3), but is agnostic with respect to the metanormative sphere.
152 A. Kreutz

argues for a continuity approach to the study of ethics and political theory. She says
a continuity approach better realises the realist’s own aspiration for greater
sensitivity to empirical detail in normative political theory.34
It is, however, and regrettably so, the strong reading of the realist position
which has assumed an (almost) hegemonial position in the literature. A partial
reason for the strong view’s dominance over, say, a continuity approach, might be
that advocates of moralism tend to target the strong reading. Perhaps inevitably,
realists tend to defend the strong thesis in turn, digging a rabbit hole. Take Leader-
Maynard and Worsnip (2018), self-proclaimed moralists, who consider themselves
in opposition to a ‘slew of recent theorists contending that political normativity is
its own distinctive kind of normativity, independent of moral normativity’
(2018, 756). Leader-Maynard and Worsnip take turns against strong realism.
By comparing Williams’ realism with, for instance, Leader-Maynard and
Worsnip’s rendition of the realist approach, we notice that the debate has tran-
sitioned from describing realist theories as void of a morality external to politics
to framing them as normatively autonomous and prior to moral normativity.
These are two completely different claims. As mentioned above, what used to be a
question of logical priority has been refashioned as an ontological dispute. If
Sleat and Hall are right in their interpretation of Williams, which suggests that he
thought his theory of legitimacy works without moral principles external or prior
to politics, then it would seem that the chief realist, or liberal-realist, source of
inspiration—namely Williams—is a proponent only of the weak understanding of
the autonomy of the two realms. The fact that the strong understanding is still
(broadly) dominant in the debate35 can thus be accused of breaking with its own
heritage. The strong realist’s talk about the metanormative autonomy of politics
is a misreading. Williams’ central objective was to avoid moral principles that are
not already internal to politics, not to over-inflate realism into a metanormative
proposition.36

34 In some ways, this is similar to the view that political theory can benefit from an ‘ethnographic
sensibility’ which prompts us to start the process of normative theorizing from the situated
experience of ordinary agents, as proposed in Longo and Zacka (2019) and further discussed in
Baderin (2021, 1744), who reemphasis ‘the value of grounding normative theory in close
engagement with everyday lived experience’.
35 Where it is not, it is either strongish realism—as in the radical realist camp—or certain forms of
realism that eschew any other overtly metanormative claim (see Hall 2015; Jubb 2017; McQueen
2018; Sleat 2014). ‘Realism on this reading does not set politics against ethics per se; instead it is an
attempt to philosophise about politics without relying on understandings of morality which we
have little reason to endorse,’ say Hall and Sleat (2017, 280).
36 I’d like to thank a reviewer of this journal for encouraging me to strengthen this point.
 Moral and Political Foundations 153

The debate now hinges on whether the metanormative disagreement can

be rendered substantive, or non-verbal, or indeed intelligible to begin with. What
does it mean for two sources of normativity to be distinct in the relevant meta-
normative sense? The answer to this ontological question posed by realists, even
how to go about answering it, is far from clear.37 As long as there is no clear
assessment of metanormative reality, I suggest realists are better advised to turn
to alternative ways of making their case. One avenue for doing this may be to
explore HCS’s clinical studies on the causal paths between moral and political
beliefs.

6 Attitudes and Normativity

Priority is a polymorphous concept.38 The notion of priority at play in Williams’
realist approach is logical priority. Later generation realists have attempted to
make their case for ontological priority. Logical priority means that in deductive
reasoning, you can’t get from your first principles to your conclusion without
moving through some other proposition. The concept of ‘student’ is prior to the
concept ‘undergraduate’ because you cannot answer ‘What is an undergraduate?’
without resource to the concept ‘student’. For Williams, the concept ‘politics’ is
prior to the concept ‘morality’ because of his definition of politics. He thinks that
moral issues, like issues of justice, cannot be addressed unless the question of
whether the political actor is justified in addressing issues of justice has been
resolved successfully. HCS’s study confirmed the directionality of reasoning from
political to moral attitudes. I therefore suggest realists replace their established
(logical, metaphysical) notions of priority with the causal sense of priority of
political over moral attitudes.
One might think that there’s an objection to my proposal in the manner of an
open-question argument, that it would be a fallacy to think that because political
attitudes proportionately influence moral attitudes, political values should deter-
mine moral values. But what is the objection to a theory like realism—itself adept at
producing normative verdicts—having its motivational or definitional grounds in

37 Erman and Möller share my diagnosis. They say, ‘realists have had a hard time clarifying what
this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters’ (2021, 1). The
authors claim to be taking further steps in answering these questions. The paper however leaves
undiscussed what it would mean to make a metanormative case in the first place. An answer to
how to address this question is most likely to be found in the metaethics literature.
38 I’d like to thank Amia Srinivasan for asking me to elaborate on the various senses of priority at
play in the realist debate. More work needs to be done on this, I think, before the literature finally
loses track of the many ways in which the conceptual set-up of realism is being characterised.
154 A. Kreutz

factual statements? Realism is a normative theory (or at least it wants to be)39 but
it’s definitional or motivational grounds themselves are not necessarily normative
and can be factual. My proposal is not to ‘link’ the empirical to the normative, and
thus try to bridge the is–ought gap. Rather, I take it that as long as there is no robust
metanormative definitional ground for realism, realists would do better building
their normative theories on an empirical footing.40
The theoretical commitments of the position I sketch here are certainly not
unheard of in metaethics. Consider metaethical subjectivism as an example. It is a
function of metaethical subjectivism that moral statements are factual statements
about the attitudes that normal human beings hold on particular moral issues. If
metaethical subjectivism is not being accused of unwarrantedly trying to bridge
the is–ought gap, why would we want to accuse a realism based on HCS’s political
foundations of committing such a fallacy?
I want to encourage those realists (and moralists, for that matter) unconvinced
of my proposal and intent on making their case for metanormative priority to ask
themselves whether the metanormative debate is really going anywhere. What
should concern these metanormativists is that the recent literature on meta-
normative realism bypasses the established literature on metanormativity almost
entirely.41 Korsgaard’s famous text on the Sources of Normativity (1992), to take a
prominent example, doesn’t concern ‘sources’ in a sense relevant to the debate
between moralists and realists. Metanormative discussion usually starts from a
point where a source of normativity—as in something that makes a normative force
political, ethical, moral, etc.—is accepted as existing, ontologically speaking, but
the origins of this very normative force are unclear or opaque. Korsgaard asks, ‘In
virtue of what is a certain value, be it moral, ethical, aesthetic, or political,
genuinely reason-giving?’. That’s not what the realists are after.
As Baderin says, realists face the desideratum of ‘nondistortion’ and ‘non-
triviality’ (2021, 1736). In other words, realism must ‘succeed in distinguishing po-
litical theory from ethics, without relying on a distorted picture of the latter [and]
assert/embody something about the practice of political theory that many contem-
porary political theorists, at least implicitly, deny’. No such nondistortive and
nontrivial account of realism has hitherto been defended. This suggests that there is
at least a pro tanto reason for the realist to abandon the current metanormative
agenda. If the priority of contextualist political attitudes over universalist moral

39 See Sleat’s discussion of ‘making sense’ above.

40 There is also a sceptical position with regards to the is–ought gap. What is an ought statement
if not the expression of one’s moral, political or other attitudes, after all?
41 See Kowalik (2020) for an ontological–transcendental defence of metanormative realism, or
Pittard and Worsnip (2016) for a defence of metanormative contextualism.
 Moral and Political Foundations 155

principles is the most central aspect of political realism, then realists can afford to
make their case without raising an issue about sources of normativity. That is to say,
HCS’s findings need not map onto the debate about sources of normativity (through
bridging the is–ought gap) in order for me to justifiably recommend an amendment
of the realist programme. HCS’s findings can be the starting point of a realist pro-
gramme that avoids the metanormative mystery.

7 Conclusion
HCS’s paper supports the claim that political attitudes determine moral attitudes. I
argue that the realist might wish to consider HCS’s study as inspiration to,
first, discard any metanormative bickering—it simply doesn’t do the realist any
service—and second, to revise her realist agenda accordingly. If political realism
wants to go beyond a disagreement about existential quantifiers—which it should,
because there is some potentially transformative work to be done in the realist vein
—it needs to depart from the metanormative case, be less concerned with the
realism, and more concerned with the politics in political realism. I suggest taking
the idea of political foundations seriously.42 These political foundations can be the
non-metanormative underpinnings of realist theory.43 Hatemi, Crabtree, and

42 For which there need not be an ontological proof. They are a purely methodological device,
despite some moral foundations theorist’s claims to the opposite, as discussed above. I think the
‘innateness’ issue has not been addressed carefully enough by HCS. If HCS’s political foundations
are simply supposed to mirror moral foundations in MFT in both their genesis and methodological
workings, that would suggest that political foundations would have to be based on the same pillars
of pluralism, nativism, cultural learning, and intuitive means. Nativism being one of the pillars
which suggests a certain ontological status. I see no objection to both MFT’s foundations and HCS’s
version of political foundations being purely methodological devices carrying no ontological
baggage whatsoever. Further studies will have to challenge the nativist underpinning of the
relevant political psychology literature, HCS included.
43 A reviewer of this journal challenged the alleged methodological individualism of relying on
an individual’s ad hoc political reactions as a challenge to my proposal for a restructuring of the
realist approach. Let’s consider Newey to aid my response. Newey (2010) objected to methodo-
logical individualism in realist political theory on the basis of a ‘doubt on an assumption often
tacitly mobilized in support of Kantian reductivism, namely that the norms which justify an
individual in acting in a certain way carry over to the sphere of collective action’ and had a related
concern with ‘the attempt to reduce collective to individual rationality’ (2010, 450). Newey then
sketched ‘a view [of] politics as an irreducibly collective enterprise’ (2010, 449). In what sense are
the political foundations individualist and therefore unfit for the study of politics in a realist key?
Newey is principally concerned with justifications and duties, and those that apply to individuals
not straightforwardly being translatable to the duties and justifications that apply to the (political)
collective. The political foundations I was sketching have no normative import whatsoever, so they
156 A. Kreutz

Smith’s study supports the realist hypothesis that politics is in some relevant sense
‘prior’ to morality. On the basis of political foundations, realists can make their
case with confidence, at last.

Acknowledgments: I would like to express my gratitude to Ugur Aytac, Sam Bagg,

Charles Crabtree, Oliver Curry, Gideon Elford, Elizabeth Frazer, Robert Freeman,
Pete Hatemi, David Leopold, Enzo Rossi, Matt Sleat, and Amia Srinivasan for
helping me improve this essay. I also want to use this opportunity to thank two
excellent reviewers for their constructive criticism.

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