Comment by luuuzeta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luuuzeta | Hacker News Reader

>The constant hurling of these claims also causes people to adopt distorted views about the nature of human disagreement itself. Most disagreement — or most interesting disagreement — can’t be explained solely by the fact that one side is better or smarter or more accurately informed than the other.

After reading _The Righteous Mind_, this is something Jonathan Haidt's book drilled down on me. The book focuses on the political and religious divide in the US primarily, and his Moral Foundation Theory shines some light on the issue: In the case of conservatives vs liberals, their moral matrices are vastly different and that's a recipe for disagreement.

In Moral Foundation Theory [1], Haidt and a group of social psychologists seek to understand the variability of morality across cultures. Despite this variability, they find there are similarities and recurrent themes. They think there at least are six foundations: 1) Harm/care, 2) Fairness/cheating, 3) Loyalty/betraying, 4) Authority/subversion, 5) Sanctity/degradation, and 6) Liberty/oppression.

According to Haidt, liberals (aka leftists, Haidt uses "libertarians" for "classical liberals") respond extremely to the harm/care and liberty/opression foundations, however conservatives do not respond to these foundations as well. In fact, conservatives respond to all the foundations by the same degree while liberals respond to only two foundations. Both liberals and conservatives respond to liberty/oppression but they approach it differently.

[1]: https://moralfoundations.org/

I think, a decisive factor in this may be whether you believe in ethics arising from human nature or in an external source of truth and morality.

In the latter case, loyalty, authority and sanctity become important factors for a community, which gathers around preserving and promoting this essential message, while, if you believe in the former, these very "virtues of aggregation" may become a threat of twisting and perverting the very truths that lie in all of us (as we may have seen it exploited in fascism). Even more so, as ethics arise from synthetic judgements a priori, proper thinking and the legitimacy of propositions become important in itself. While, if truth and morality are external, someone who is in the wrong is just someone not yet touched by truth, here, wrongness becomes a state of both intellectual and moral corruption that endangers the very principles of society.

>... if you believe in the former, these very "virtues of aggregation" may become a threat of twisting and perverting the very truths that lie in all of us (as we may have seen it exploited in fascism).

This is a great point, and Haidt does acknowledge these "virtues of aggregation" can be and have been hijacked. Case in point, facism which labels as "hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights." It's undeniable that dictators, cult leaders, etc. have exploited what he terms the "hive switch" but is that reason enough to completely do away with it, especially given its innateness as a groupish especies and its main function as a social adhesive?

Personally, I think this is the great hiatus in moral philosophy, which is hard to bridge, maybe even impossible to mend. It's pretty much what divides the factions of Platonists and Aristotelians: is there a hierarchy to principles and virtues, and, if there's any, what is it? Like the divide over credo ut intelligam ("I believe so that I can understand/reason") or intelligo ut credam ("I reason so that I can believe") in the middle ages. (Abaelard's generally accepted formula of credo et intelligam was more an appeasement than a solution to this.) – Are there higher principles to keep those, which are really ancillary, in check? E.g., if we stick to the "virtues of aggregation" and an external origin of truth, is there a too much of individualism, of intellectual reasoning, which will inevitably spoil the only truth, which has come upon us as that most precious message, in what must end in utter heresy? Or, conversely, have we to keep in check any messages of faith and any claims arising from this by a critique of judgement, as this is our only anchor?

(The current discussion about woke and anti-woke is really pretty much the same it had been in 1100 AD. It's just that we seem to have forgotten the virtues and necessity of what may be called "Abaelard's great appeasement".)

Sounds like work that should be built upon, but also, the "both sides" bs it plays to is morally and intellectually weak.

I'm pretty moderate (in the sense of having a weird basket of views, some quite "left", some rather "right"). I would vote for a center-right party, if we had one.

I can somewhat see where the moral intuitions of both sides of the standard political divide arise from, but it's also pretty clear to me that the American political right is now marked by an almost pathological lack of empathy and compassion, as well as a blatant hatred for truth, fact, intellect, and basic good character. Morally, it's become totally inconsistent with the traditional values I believe in. While liberals definitely over-index on empathy and compassion, it's pretty clear they are more balanced overall. And at the very least, I find them incorrect in a more mundane and acceptable way. They haven't succumbed to evil.

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