Sunday, January 13, 2008

Why do we disagree on policy?

From Sunday's NY Times:

Steven Pinker identifies five "spheres" of morality: harm, fairness, community, authority, purity.

Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

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