Born in Hawaii—a crossroads of culture between Far East and Far West—of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya and raised partially in Indonesia by a Muslim stepfather, an African-American man with an unlikely background and an even more unlikely name, Barack Hussein Obama, arose to become President of the United States. Does that globalized pedigree, along with a prodigious intellect, give him a unique moral authority?

Here is how they describe it:

Moral Foundations Theory was created to understand why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. In brief, the theory proposes that five innate and universally available psychological systems are the foundations of “intuitive ethics.” Each culture then constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, thereby creating the unique moralities we see around the world, and conflicting within nations too. The foundations are: