Haidt’s Moral Intuition (vs ethical reasoning)

This is part two in my series about Jonathan Haidt’s most recent book, The Righteous Mind. To read the first in the series, click on the link here. To see some of the discussion inspiring this post, check out the comment sections of the Amazon reviews of Haidt’s book. * * * I had a [...]

Is Psychological Research Liberally Biased?

http://www.polipsych.com/2011/02/10/liberal-academics-study-conservative-ideology/ I don’t know if reality has a liberal bias, but I can think of one factor that relates to liberalism and the ability to assess reality. One study I’ve seen showed that liberals were on average less susceptible to confirmation bias than conservatives. Maybe it is unsurprising that conservatives wouldn’t be attracted to a [...]

Conservatism & Liberalism: What is their relationship? What do they mean?

I have a basic question that connects to many related questions. Anyone who has an answer(s), please share. Does being illiberal or even anti-liberal inevitably mean being conservative? Or to reverse it: Does being conservative mean being illiberal or anti-liberal? Basically, the question is: Are liberal and conservative completely opposite categories, inherently oppositional even? Are they [...]

Jonathan Haidt’s Liberal-Minded Anti-Liberalism

Jonathan Haidt wrote a new book, The Righteous Mind. I haven’t seen the book, but I listened to an interview by Bill Moyers. I recommend checking it out. Haidt does have an insightful view, although I think his view would be even more insightful if he synthesized his own research with other psychological research about [...]

The Monstrous, the Impure, & the Imaginal

This interview about the ‘monstrous’ made me think of a related idea. The monstrous is a more extreme version of the ‘impure’, whether impure in terms of the physical, psychological, social, religious, etc. The monstrous and the impure are both in some way ‘wrong’ at a gut level. They just feel wrong causing an instinctual [...]

Conservative Ideology & Economics

This is an interesting video, but not because I agree with this person’s views, especially not on economics (that is, to the extent I understand economics). I have a different worldview. I’ve always been a liberal in a general sense. I’ve found insights from many social, religious and political systems of thought (anarchism, socialism and [...]

Bankrupt Liberalism & Disappointed Idealism

I’ve heard a number of interviews with Chris Hedges (and am now in the middle of reading his book, Death of the Liberal Class). In the above video, he said (from transcript): And when you, within a society, have a bankrupt liberalism—it’s something Dostoevsky wrote about in Demons and Notes from the Underground at the end of [...]

MSNBC Suspends Olbermann (compared to Fox News)

Here is the type of news that gets a lot of attention because the media loves to report on the media. I don’t generally care about such things to any great extent, but I thought this might be an example of a difference between liberals and conservatives. I’ll share my commentary below the video. Of [...]

Reagan: From Liberal to Neocon

Here is an early speech given when Ronald Reagan was still a liberal Democrat. What he says in this speech still applies today. The odd part is that the gist of his criticisms apply equally to the results of his own trickle-down economics and union-busting. How did Reagan go from being a union leader who [...]

Responsibility: Choice vs Obligation

I was thinking about my own sense of morality. There is one particular aspect that probably fits into liberalism in general but for certain it fits into my own version of liberalism. The aspect is about responsibility which, of course, relates to some of my past writing: http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/social-indebtedness-strict-father-morality-hierarchical-authority/ http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/conservative-liberal-families-observations-comparison/ http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/sense-of-place-of-home-of-community-or-lack-thereof/ However, I wasn’t specifically thinking [...]