In my view liberals and conservatives care equally about equality. The difference between them is that they have differing conceptions of what “equality” means. I think liberals see equality, roughly speaking, as equality of opportunity which may require some amount of compensatory laws, rules, or implementation to level out perceived inequalities. I believe conservatives see equality as equality under the law, meaning that there is one set of laws or rules that is applied the same to everyone.

The same goes for “justice” and “fairness;” liberals and conservatives have different understandings of what those mean too.

Therefore, any survey questions that contain the words “justice,” “fairness,” or “equality” that are asked of conservatives AND liberals run the risk of meaning different things to whoever is answering them. Which in turn means that the results may be difficult to accurately interpret.

Conversely, any question that does not use any of those words but instead uses a phrase that relates to the liberal interpretation of one of those words but not the conservative interpretation may produce misleading results. Possibly even the conclusion that liberals do care more about equality and need than conservatives.

On what bases do people deserve things? Most would agree on hard work as a criterion, but even that is not unalloyed; hard work on fraud does not deserve reward.

My intuition is that Democrats attribute success to luck much more than Republicans.

I’m trying to think how analysis of the yourmorals data could tease out answers to this conundrum.