morality

"Since morality is concerned with well-being, whether one's own or that of another, fundamental experiences concerning well-being give rise to conceptual metaphors for morality. People are better off in general if they are strong not weak; if they can stand upright rather than having to crawl; if they eat pure, not rotten, food; and so on. These correlations give rise to metaphors of morality as strength and immorality as weakness, morality as uprightness and immorality as being low, morality as purity and immorality as rot, and so on. Since you are better off if you have the things you need rather than if you don't, there is a correlation of well-being with wealth. Hence, there is a widespread metaphor in which moral action is conceptualized as increasing another's well-being, which is metaphorically understood as increasing their wealth. Immoral action, therefore, is conceptualized as decreasing another's wealth. Thus, if someone does you a favor, you are in her debt and seek to repay the favor. This is the basis of the metaphor of Moral Accounting, in which morality prescribes a balancing of the moral books." (#60 4084)

"The deep analysis of morality has important implications for politics, as shown by Lakoff's analysis of liberal and conservative worldviews on morality and politics. This analysis is based on two opposing models of the family, the nurturant parent and the strict father families (Lakoff 1996). Under the metaphor of The Nation as a Family, these opposing family models are transformed into moral and political worldviews that are fundamentally at odds. Such worldview metaphors tend to be so deeply pervasive that they organize other metaphors into moral and political conceptual systems." (#60 4092)