|
|
Post by Jorji Costava on Sept 30, 2015 19:19:58 GMT -6
If you're seriously interested in this topic, there are a few places you should go. One obvious place would be Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Here's a TED talk that gives you a quick overview of the book). There's a lot in the book so I can't possibly summarize it here, but very briefly: Conservatives and liberals have different moral foundations. Liberals tend to recognize harm and fairness as legitimate moral concerns, while conservatives in addition recognize obedience to authority, in-group loyalty and purity as fundamental moral values. For example, liberals tend to advocate for the rights of LGBT individuals, while conservatives are less enthusiastic about this: This is because liberals are very concerned with fairness, and generally unconcerned with issues of bodily purity. Another example: Conservatives take flag burning more seriously than liberals because in-group loyalty (in this case, to one's country) is an important area of moral concern for them. As to why conservatives and liberals have these different moral foundations, there are complex evolutionary and historical reasons for this that I can't possibly get into here. Other places that might be worth looking at: Michael Huemer's paper " Why People Are Irrational About Politics" and Dan Kahan's Cultural Cognition Project. Briefly: People use their political beliefs to construct their social identity; for instance, if I see myself as a tough-minded realist, then I will tend to form beliefs that support this self-image; that could mean supporting increased military spending, supporting a reduction of the social safety net, etc. Thus, in order to preserve that identity, it becomes necessary for me to preserve the beliefs, even in the face of contrary evidence. This makes us all (and we all do it, even me) vulnerable to motivated reasoning: For example, if you are politically conservative, the probability that you will deny the reality of the human contribution to climate change actually increases with your level of education. This is because the more you know, the more ways you can think of to rationalize away evidence that contradicts your beliefs (BTW, science denialism is not limited to the right: 88% of astronomers and physicists support an expansion of nuclear power plants, but liberals tend to be skeptical of this). |
|
