Great article. I disagree with the proposed outcomes of it, but I totally agree that arguing facts is compeltely pointless.
Let me make a few observations though first.
You should have linked to this site, so your readers can get on the same page: https://moralfoundations.org/
Ok, now to some of the parts. Here is my first disagreement:
"Progressives are more willing to reject authority, social norms and traditions, to ensure the wellbeing of individuals and equality; whereas Conservatives are more willing to prioritise group integrity over the concern of the individual"
The wellbeing of individuals is not the purview of progressives, in fact, quite the opposite. They are concerned about collective rights and wellbeing, while conservatives are far more concerns about the rights of the individual being maintained. Progressive will talk about "minorities" or "immigrants" or "the victims of the patriarchy", but NOT the rights of an individual regardless of what groups they belong to.
"notion of a universal moral truth"
Aside from the religious who think God hands down morality and thus it is objective, who claims a universal moral truth?
"A passionate Progressive defence of, say, minority group rights (individualised Care/Harm foundation)"
Maybe you and I have a different definition of what "individual" means? This sentence sounds like an oxymoron to me.
"through the Progressive values of Care, Fairness and Liberty)."
Once again you have attributes qualities to progressive that you originally did NOT grant (it was just care and fairness), and the only Progressive tendency towards liberty is one in which the group can somehow be free of economic contraint. Which is NOT liberty and is implemented by control, the exact opposite. you can look at any progressive agenda and find the same "Gay people should be free to marry" (they should they are right), so the laws should force people who do not think gays should be married to accept it, and forced to supply services to people who who go through life in ways that they find immoral. The married part is fine. The force people to accept it, is not. This is not liberty.
"This is because when political groups form, there will be Conservative and Progressives within each side, moderating and adapting the extremes at either end"
This model, the one we have, unfortunately breaks down with the widening political divide we are currently experiincing in the US, as you lucidly noted.
OK, now to the crux.
"To begin, political debate should use Moral Foundations Theory as a framework for interrogating the emotional drivers of divisive and polarising rhetoric"
After reading that site, I can't agree. At all. the reason being is that all this has done was present itself as an authority on moralization, lays down "what are disparate pairs of morality", and then expects everyone to follow along by those terms and rules.
One of the problems is that you are thinking of political outlook in a very limited way: left to right. You have left out up and down. Left to right is really about collective rights vs individual rights (more on that in a second), but the up and down is about how to acheive the left to right spectrum: namely authoritarian (up) vs libertarian, or free market of ideas (down)
The healthiest place on this chart is lower right. Liberty and no authoritarianism. More authoritarianism = less rights.
And this is the second place where I think you go wrong. Morals and ethics should be formed around first principles and not handed down from an authority. The most basic first principle is simple: I have all the rights over my body. That is it.
From this its clear that my property is a function of the natural resources my body has converted into something useful. There are huge tomes that extend this outward to dive into rights and morals that get imbued into society, and we form groups (even governments) to protect those rights.
What your list of morals are, are simply social desires and not morals, rights or ethics, and should not be conflated with any of those. Morals and ethics should be derived from fundamental rights, and not opinions or observations about collectives of people.
It would be much better to discuss and solve social, economic and political problems if we could all see that rights come from first principles, and not agreed to terms (because people will not agree to the terms, nor agree that they fit in some category that uses those terms as descriptors. No one fits a stereotype, but stereotypes exist for a reason.
