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Eugine_Nier comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong
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How do you reduce autonomy to sacredness? I think of sacredness as something that inheres in some single object of veneration towards which a group of people can genuflect, such as a family shrine, a flag, a saint, or (for the left) "the environment". I would also extend the notion of a "single object" to slightly more abstract things, such as a single holy text (which might exist in multiple copies) or a single ritual way of eating (which might be enacted on multiple occasions).
In other words, sacredness should have some close connection to group cohesion. While I haven't read any of Haidt's books, I've listened to a couple of interviews with him, and he seemed to be very interested in the "groupish" qualities of the values in his system. In his BloggingHeads.tv interview, he even seemed to go so far as to suggest that group selection explained how some of these values evolved.
Autonomy doesn't seem like it would fit into such a notion of sacredness. "Individual autonomy" is a "single thing" at only a very abstract level. Every individual has his or her own autonomy. Unlike a shrine or a holy text, there is no one autonomy that we all can worship at once.
In principle, we could all gather together as a community to worship the one idea that we are each autonomous — the Platonic form of autonomy, if you will. But I don't get the sense that most people have a sufficiently concrete notion of the general idea of autonomy to be able to hold it sacred. For example, they would lack the confidence that everyone else is thinking of precisely the same idea of autonomy. Something can't serve as an object of community worship if the community members aren't sure that they're all worshiping the same thing.
People might have a sufficiently concrete conception of "my autonomy" or "your autonomy" or "her autonomy". These are things that we can easily latch onto as values. But then we're talking about a bunch of different "autonomies", which lack the unity that a sacred object seems to require.
I don't think sacredness/purity is just about group cohesion. Some purity rituals (from an evolutionary point of view) are clearly about avoiding contagious diseases. Other sacredness taboos are about not doing things that have short term benefits but cause long term problems, especially when the short term benefit of the action is much more obvious than the long term harm.
Right, group cohesion isn't the only reason for these rituals, but they can still serve that function (eg, kosher diets).
Can valuing autonomy be explained by valuing purity? That doesn't seem plausible to me, since people so often want to use their autonomy to violate other people's purity norms (eg, sex 'n' drugs).
To me it seems that valuing autonomy is an example of avoid things that may have short term benefits but cause long term problems.
That sounds more like a concern about harm ("long term problems") than about purity, at least if you are trying to describe the thought-process of someone justifying their valuing of autonomy.
If, instead, you are trying to describe the causal origin of the value, then wouldn't Haidt ascribe all of his foundational values to that cause? Doesn't he give ev-psych explanations (with a group-selectionist bent) for the origins of all of his foundational values? If I'm right about that, then he would probably argue that each of his foundational values persisted because, in the long run, it served the reproductive interests of the individual or the group. That is, the value led people to avoid short-term benefits that would cause long-term problems. Otherwise, this value would not have survived in the long run.
I wouldn't know, I haven't actually read his books. What bothers me is that unlike the other values, I can't even give a definition of what constitutes purity/sacredness without appealing to a black box in my brain.