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Reading Time: 12 minutes Disclaimer: I, like many of you, am an agnostic-atheist and so the answer is neither. Or is it? Because this question can be applied to me, too. Let me elucidate… In general terms, for religious people, what is the direction of causality? A few things to note first here; firstly, politics is a subset of […]
Jonathan Haidt
Posted inEducation, Ethics and Morality, Politics
Jonathan Haidt: The Conflict Between Truth and Social Justice at Universities
Reading Time: 5 minutes Jonathan Haidt is a moral and political psychologist of great note. ATP’s Alan Duval has spent a lot of time in part agreeing and in part critiquing aspects of Haidt’s systems of thought. Universities have become a hotbed of “social justice warriors” slogging it out with “free speech advocates”. I scare quote them because each […]
Posted inClimate Crisis, Education, Environment, Ethics and Morality, Health, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Science, The Secular
Critique of “Understanding Conservatives and Liberals”
Reading Time: 10 minutes I’m taking the bait that Jonathan laid out for me, and critiquing “The Righteous Mind” – Understanding Conservatives and Liberals by R.B.A. Di Muccio. For the following to make sense, you should read the article in question. It’s not long, but it manages to cram an awful lot of wrong in. (All quotation in this […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Politics, Psychology
Haidt’s Five Flavours as defined by Schwartz Values
Reading Time: 6 minutes In my previous post I suggested that it was Authority, and the exercising of Authority through demanding Obedience, primarily through punitive learning environments, that defined the difference between Libertarians, Liberals, and Conservatives, and particularly between naturally conservative individuals, and people nurtured (actually inculcated) into it. So let’s look at the Schwartz-Duval model with Haidt’s Five […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Politics, Psychology
The Natural Conservative vs. the Nurtured Conservative
Reading Time: 11 minutes Over the past several posts I have hinted at a very important distinction that must be made: the natural conservative versus the nurtured conservative. The natural conservative being an individual born with traits that see them tend towards Conservatism, the nurtured conservative being an individual raised in a punitive environment with diminished access to diverse […]
Posted inPolitics, Psychology
Agreeing with The independent Whig
Reading Time: < 1 minute So, those who have seen my (Alan’s) “debates” in the comments sections of some of my posts, will no doubt be aware of The Independent Whig, a person with whom I often have profound disagreements. I think that these disagreements are mostly because he wants to paint me as wrong, because I’m a liberal who […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Politics, Psychology
Duval on Moral Epistemology, pt. 3.2: Conservatives and Corporal Punishment
Reading Time: 9 minutes Following on from my last post, wherein I noted the demographics of American Conservatism’s core, and picking up on a thread that was introduced with attachment and religious affiliation, I will now look at the seemingly close, yet indirect relationship between Evangelicalism and corporal punishment. Most Born-Again Christians (predominantly Evangelicals) agree that spanking is an […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Psychology
Duval on Moral Epistemology, pt. 1: learning from the environment
Reading Time: 19 minutes Following on from the internal logic of human morality, a claim about internal consistency, I want to use the framework to discuss how and why we value what we value (and thus how and why we consider moral what we consider moral, aka moral epistemology). Epistemology is a notoriously tricky field in philosophy (see for […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Psychology
Duval vs. Haidt – Curious Correlations
Reading Time: 2 minutes I hope to have the next full instalment of my series up by next week, but in the meantime, I thought this might be of interest (would be helpful to have read part one in this series for this post to make sense: I’m currently learning how to use R/RStudio (open-source statistical packages), so I’ve […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Psychology
The Internal Logic of Human Morality – Duval’s Model of Moral Psychology
Reading Time: 23 minutes Duval & Schwartz – The Internal Logic of Human Morality: Picking up from where I left off last time, I will take nibbles at the radial nature of the model, whilst explaining its make-up, and what I see as the logical relations between the values, thereby hoping to make the implicit moral systems that it […]