Moral and Value Issues

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

Another driver of intractable conflicts are moral or value issues. One group's most fundamental assumptions about the best way to live may differ radically from the values held by another group. Parties may have different standards of rightness and goodness and give fundamentally different answers to serious moral questions. When groups have different ideas about the good life, they often stress the importance of different things, and may develop radically different or incompatible goals. This can lead to lasting conflict. People fight long and hard for what they believe in and they fight against people and things they see as evil; they don't compromise.

As we wrote in the 2017 "current implications" section of the BI essay on Moral and Value Conflict,

The 2016 Presidential election in the United States was a "wake up call" for many people. Many of us were not aware of the depth of the distributional--and moral--divide in this country. While there are undoubtedly many reasons why the election came out as it did, some observers believe that the past political successes of the left in forcing their moral views on the entire country was at least in part (perhaps in large part) responsible for the backlash that put Donald Trump in power. Fundamentalist Christians chaffed at being told that they had to issue marriage licenses for gay couples (and at least one, who made the news, refused to do so). Christian bakers didn't want to bake "gay cakes." And Christian hospitals and businesses didn't want to be forced to provide abortions or birth control pills.
The left, meanwhile, assumed that they were "right" (meaning correct) and that the rest of the country was "coming around." This election shows, we think, that the country didn't "come around" as much as we thought it did.

And this notion is reinforced by the outcome of the 2024 election, about which I might have written the exact same words, although I likely would have added something about DEI and trans-rights, two topics that have arisen since 2016. Morals, as we wrote before, are very strong and very stable. And when a conflict involves such issues, it tends to become intractable.