The 5 basic moral attitudes are:
harm/care
fairness/justice
ingroup/loyalty
authority/respect
purity/sanctity
Not everyone has the innate sense of respect for authority and the sanctity of purity. Conservatives tend to be born with
these. There are genetic reasons for the differences. I can’t find the best articles for this research, but here is one http://edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07/haidt07_index.html
A google on “genetic basis for morality” comes up with articles that mention that there could be no ultimate moral stance, from an evolutionary or game playing theory point of view. It’s a game of rock-paper-scissors. If your society has police, but no artists, it will get beat by the society who has rocks and papers and scissors to fight you with.
Another link for the genetic basis of timidity is http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8337
So it seems germany’s war against the commie-Jews (it was widely believed at the time that Jews were all part of a global communist conspiracy. And many indeed were.) may have been more than just a socialist versus darwinian-conservative war. But a genetic battle of dispositions. You see, the Nazis were swept into power largely as a reaction against the socialist uprising that was frightened many at the time. Many of the leaders of the socialists were Jewish – hence being anti-socialist, meant to many at the time, also being anti-Jewish. The pro-business wanted to sweep out the socialists – same as happened in the Macarthy era in the US, and same as tends to happen from time to time anywhere – socialist versus darwinist social theories come to fight.
They say that if you aren’t a bit socialist when you are you you are young, you have no heart, and that if you aren’t a bit conservative when you are old, you have no brain. I like to put it that if you do not want to change the world when you are 20, you are not paying attention. If you do want to change the wolrd when you are 40, you are not paying attention. In other words, humans can behave co-operatively, at times, but can never be forced to. Otherwise it’s not co-operation, is it? We’ll never agree on what to co-operate on.
And from this articel in the NY Times
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres.