Just what is Prime Minister Stephen Harper thinking?
The federal Conservatives' unyielding drive to shut down Insite, Vancouver's supervised drug-injection site, has prompted critics to call them heartless and blind to its harm-reduction benefits.
But popular author and University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says critics of social conservatives should shelve the contempt and try to better understand what might seem like a bizarre approach to public policy.
Prof. Haidt, a self-described liberal atheist, isn't campaigning for the conservative cause and says it's hard to find a practical justification for the Tories' opposition to the Vancouver injection facility.
But he says insight into how conservatives and liberals differ in moral thinking would help social-justice activists and researchers trying to reason with conservative policy makers.
For people who consider themselves social liberals, giving addicts a place to shoot up where nurses can intervene if they overdose makes sense.
But for conservatives, legalized hard-drug use is a cancer on the body politic - deviance that if not checked could undercut the social order and moral fibre that underpins democracy and free markets.
"It's not an accommodating view. It's one that says if you don't take a hard line it's going to spread," Prof. Haidt says.
Try to imagine how the defence of Insite sounds to conservatives, he suggests.
"You have liberals saying, 'Oh, but just this one tumour on the West Coast, this tumour has all these good effects. Why don't we let it work?' And it freaks [conservatives] out."
"They say, 'If we don't stamp this out it's going to spread,' and liberals would say, 'Well, that's great, it will reduce harm everywhere.' "
Prof. Haidt, who authored the critically well received The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, says conservatives and liberals approach moral problems quite differently.
But he says frequently tension between these rival approaches can help balance public policy, something Prof. Haidt believes is more evident in the multiculturalism and immigration debate, where conservative concerns about the dangers of a breakdown of social cohesion have been validated by empirical research.
His own research has concluded there are five foundations, or systems, that people use to construct their morality.
These foundations can be compared to five colours on a palette. Liberals tend to rely only on two, while conservatives tend to use all five.
The first two, favoured by liberals are:
Harm: whether someone is harmed or harm is reduced.
Reciprocity: whether something is fair and treats people fairly and justly.
The rest, which only conservatives give weight to, include:
In-group: whether something betrays the group.
Hierarchy: whether something is respectful of authority and superiors.
Purity: whether or not something is disgusting.
In a sense, liberals are colour blind to conservative concerns because they tend to paint problems in terms of only the first two daubs on the palette: whether things decrease harm and increase justice, fairness or autonomy.
Conversely, because conservatives evaluate issues in all five colours, they tend to put less emphasis on the first two.
"It's as though there are five wavelengths and liberals only perceive two of them," says Prof. Haidt, who is writing a book on morality called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
He says Insite, which has operated since 2003 when Jean Chrétien's federal Liberal government granted it a legal exemption, is a classic clash. Anything about drug use, Prof. Haidt says, pits "harm reduction moralities" of liberals against "moral-degradation, drugs-are-desecration-of-the- temple-of-the-body morality of social conservatives."
He says activists defending Insite should speak to the Harper Tories in their own language, stressing how it can keep disorder off the streets and help addicts clean themselves up. "Arguments that are exclusively in terms of harm and fairness are going to fall on deaf ears," he says.
"Don't just say you're reducing diseases and death ... show that [addicts] were living lives of depravity before, and now through Insite they are able to clean themselves up ... [and become] more productive and responsible."
Prof. Haidt also suggests playing to conservatives' preference for local control and local autonomy instead of centralized decision making. Ottawa shouldn't intervene from thousands of kilometres away, he would argue, but instead let B.C. decide the future of Insite.
*****
The argument in quotes
"Insite is part of the solution; it's not part of the problem. Why would the federal government spend all of this time and money to fight a battle they're going to lose anyway?" - NDP MP Libby Davies, July 2, 2008
"A more apt analogy of what Insite, Vancouver's safe-injection facility, does would be a doctor holding a cigarette to make sure a smoker doesn't burn his lips, or watching a woman with cardiac problems eat fatty French fries to ensure she swallows them properly." - Federal Conservative Health Minister Tony Clement, June 5, 2008
"When the Minister of Health decides that his own belief overrides science, overrides what physicians say that they should do to treat a disease, then he is interfering in science. - Liberal MP Hedy Fry, May 29, 2008
"We don't consider it the best health outcome to keep people in a position where they continue to use the illicit drugs, to inject the illicit drugs." - Mr. Clement, May 28, 2008
"It's reprehensible for a government to be putting partisan politics ahead of saving lives." - Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh, Oct. 2, 2007
