What does morality entail? This question has been answered with a rather narrow outlook in psychological literature for years that is not harming and being fair. With the advance of research on recent decades, the understanding of morality has been quite expanded. Advances in different fields enabled a more comprehensive outlook to morality. Specifically, moral foundations theory (MFT) claimed the existence of other additional moral principles, such as loyalty, authority, and sanctity. The current research inquires lay understanding of morality with two qualitative studies. In the first study, we used MFT’s specific moral foundation definitions to understand how they are perceived by participants. In the second study, we used a more unstructured way and tried to understand how they describe morality, moral person, and immoral person. Results confirmed the pluralistic outlook for the morality, along with some suggestions for the modifications and more concise operational definitions of moral foundations. Liberty, as a late addition was supported as a moral foundation along with broader aspects. The results extend MFT outlook with individual, societal and universal level moral principles and offers new research avenues such as moral emotions, virtues, and vices.
Keywords: Morality, moral foundations, lay perception of morality, liberty, hierarchy