Determinants of Moral Attitudes

Abstract

Contemporary controversies over abortion, pornography, homosexual rights, family relations, and prayer in school pit traditional moral conservatives against modern liberal relativists. Prior analyses, especially status politics interpretations, are regularly biased by presuming liberal relativist attitudes and treating moral conservatism alone as warranting explanation. In fact, the spectrum of moral attitudes, from liberal relativist to conservative absolutist, is normally distributed in the urban research site reported on here. A causal model for the determinants of moral attitudes is proposed and tested with data from a city-wide survey in Raleigh, North Carolina, as a specific alternative to status politics explanations. Among the exogenous variables, age and education have significant effects throughout, while sex and race are significant only in the early stages of the model. Church membership and type, worship frequency, religious program listening, and political selfidentification are endogenous variables which directly affect moral attitudes as well. The proposed model explains over 47% of the variation in moral attitudes.