Something to do with growing up in Australia, I guess. The second, a general respect due to all other human beings, I think is the best covered by what you say as arising out of considerations of care and reciprocity.
Accepting epistemic authority of an expert is merely good common sense, not a moral imperative. But I won't accept any moral argument on the basis of authority, whether the authority is priest or philosopher. When my personal morality goes astray, a good teacher should be able to set me straight through forms of persuasion that are ultimately based on appeals to my own personal experience, not to their authority.
And yes, the US is a tremendously authoritarian country compared to growing up in Australia. Instances of this are unfortunately not confined to conservatives either. Konrad, it is wonderful to run into you again, however unlikely the long-distance forum!
Jo, the issue that I see as lying behind our discussion of the notion of authority is that of the Enlightenment view of human rationality. The position you present is premissed upon the claim that human beings are more or less rational beings that, given the evidence, will come to the correct conclusion.
While I wholeheartedly support the goals of the Enlightement, I do not share the view of rationality. The evidence simply isn't there for such optimism as the last few decades of psychology seem to have amply borne out. Indeed, I think that the Enlightenment's biggest mistake was to saddle human beings with a rationality that was more god-like than natural.
Need I mention Pascal's thinking reed? But this does not necessitate abandoning Enlightement values. It simply means that the road can't be a straight forward one. Allowances for the fragility of the faculty of reason we do have must be constantly made. This implies, I think, that epistemic and moral issues inevitably intersect rather than being neatly split apart unlike what my last comment might have suggested.
At times people have required any number of helps such as authorities and, dare I say it, churches to get them further along the road. In a way Haidt's article might be seen as recognising this reality. Now, there's no need to remind me of the litany of abuse of power such institutions have led to. This does not mean they have not been necessary. However, it also does not mean that the alternative offered by the Enlightenment-motivated intelligentsia isn't better.
One should see it in evolutionary terms, really. Human rationality and human culture are just as jerry-built as anything else evolution has fashioned and any progress has to build upon what went before rather than hoping to sweep it all away. Haidt's weakness, seen in these terms, is to see a clear way forward. I want to add a detailed comment when time permits, but in the meantime, a query to "thw": if you have a blog or URL with your writings, can you post a link here?
I and perhaps others would like to read more of your material. It is rare to come across nuanced philosophical opinion as opposed to the "pre-modern India revoted me" stuff in the first comment. M "Liberals, as eloquently articulated recently by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, really do hold the moral high ground. And "moral" cannot just be what you want it to be.
Like I, for instance, would find it immoral to kill my children no matter what age they are. Old, young, unborn - to me it would all be the same person that I would be harming. Some people, otoh, would rather find exceptions to make room for their lifestyle. BUT it goes without saying that those numbers are always going to be significantly lower. Therefore the lib philosophy has killed and limited it's own voting base.
And one can't cast that off on how much the "Right" must be responsible for everything in the world that does not work out the way you think it should. M "It is thanks to the much maligned liberal agenda that we got civil rights," Civil rights began with Lincoln who was not, incidentally liberal.
The abolitionists in Europe were primarily lead by christian people. See, first and foremost, William Wilberforce. Some of the original fighters for woman's rights were in fact Quakers.
And also, ideally people ought to be taught to be preventive maintenance oriented and plan ahead. Get real. Nobody in their right mind believes that. And head start is good for what exactly? To have people pay less day care, so they can get out to works earlier and spend less time with their young children?
Harvard, Oxford and on and on. Do they now represent much of anything of the original intent of the founders? No, obviously not. But that certainly does not mean that the origination of the whole concept of education, college or enlightenment began in liberal circles.
IT certainly did not. Childrearing also isn't contractual or reciprocal. We may vaguely expect that our children may one day take care of us. But every sane parent appreciates the fundamental and necessary asymmetry of caregiving. Even with mates, and certainly with friends, we expect a certain reciprocity.
The neediest of our intimates give us something in return. But every child is needier than the most intolerably demanding friend or lover. These moral intuitions have their roots in our evolutionary history. Human beings have a longer period of protected immaturity, a longer childhood, than any other species, and human children demand an exceptional amount of parental investment. As a species, we reap great benefits from this arrangement—in fact, it's the secret of our evolutionary success.
The period of protected immaturity allows us to learn flexibly about a wide range of environments, before we actually have to act on them. It depends on the especially profound and protracted commitments of human caregiving. But I'd argue that our moral intuitions about childrearing are right independently of their evolutionary origins. It really is a good thing that we care for children in the way we do. Empirically, there is sociological evidence that childrearing is especially problematic and challenging for working—class Americans, particularly in the areas that are most likely to vote Republican.
Economic insecurity, divorce, the mobility that puts grandmothers and aunts on the other side of the country, all make it difficult for families to thrive. That itself is a reason why "family values" loom so large for these voters. But middle and upper-class blue state voters also share the intuition that childrearing is special, although they can afford to treat the morality of caregiving as a private matter separate from politics.
Of course, subsidies to new parents, family leave, good early childhood education, fewer working hours with higher pay and more flexibility, are much more likely to actually help parents than abstinence education, abortion restrictions, or gay marriage bans.
Some politicians have started to realize this—red states like Georgia and Arkansas have been leaders in creating early childhood programs. It's particularly ironic that contraception and abortion which look inimical to childrearing, may empirically actually allow for more thriving, caring and intimate families, and that the drive for gay marriage is motivated in part by the desire of many gay couples to raise children.
But politics is about articulating ideals as much as about formulating policies. The philosophical framework of liberalism makes it hard for Democrats to articulate the intuitions that most people share. Caring for a particular, individual baby, even a "special needs" baby, and being part of a particular, individual family, even a complex, messy family, are intrinsic human goods. Politics should help people achieve them successfully. All human babies are specially needy and all human families are complex and messy, and nobody could ever make a good argument that you love your kids and your relatives because they maximize your utilities.
Democrats use the language of universal entitlement, when they talk about state-supported preschool or childcare, or the language of individual autonomy, when they talk about choice or contraception, or the language of investment, when they talk about the long-term benefits of healthy and well-educated children.
But none of these ways of talking about children really capture our everyday intuitions. Of course, there isn't a good alternative conservative language for these intuitions either. The Republican language of traditional religion also doesn't get it, which is why the celebration of Sarah Palin's unwed daughter's pregnancy seemed so paradoxical. One way we might try to bridge this gap between intuition, philosophy and policy is by appealing to the fact that human childrearing extends far beyond biological mothers.
Psychologically, there is strong evidence that we love the children we care for, not just the ones we bear. As the ethologist Sarah Hrdy points out, when animals make big parental investments they spread the load. In socially monogamous species, including many birds and a few mammals, fathers as well as mothers invest in caregiving, and fathers make this investment even when babies aren't their genetic offspring.
In other species, including lemurs, dolphins and elephants, there are alloparents—animals who help take care of the babies of others. Humans make particularly great parental investments, they are socially though not sexually monagamous no species is sexually monogamous, not even swans , and they rely on alloparents.
Sarah Palin quite literally presented a picture of a group of committed caregivers, husbands, siblings, boyfriends and grandmothers—a group larger than a mother but smaller than a state.
Philosophers and political thinkers could try to articulate an ethics of childrearing that takes off from this sense of a widening circle of parental responsibility and care—an ethics that would capture the particularity of mother love, but extend it to include an entire community or even a country. The articulation of moral intuitions in liberal Enlightenment philosophy was one of the greatest human intellectual achievements.
Not all everyday moral intuitions survive that sort of philosophical scrutiny. I'll bet that if we just counted up the most frequent moral intuition across cultures and historical periods the winner would be that the way other people have sex is wrong closely followed by the intuition that the way we have sex ourselves is wrong.
In the case of the moral intuitions of disgust that Haidt studies, the best philosophical policy would be to just persuade people to get rid of them. I'd say the same about lots of intuitions about hierarchy and purity. But raising children really is one of the most morally profound human activities, and it would benefit us all, Democrat and Republican, if we could find a philosophical and political way to talk about it.
As a political scientist, I see the question "Why do people vote Republican? Haidt and other commenters have focused on the choice between a Republican and a Democrat. But this choice misses half the question. When someone votes Republican, the first question they must ask themselves is "Should I vote at all? And it is that choice to vote or not that says something deep about political competition and group behavior. The choice to vote or not hinges in part on our perception of the effectiveness of the activity.
Will voting matter? To know this, we need to imagine what happens in a world where we vote and what happens in a world where we do not, and then compare those two worlds. Thinking about the world this way may seem like an impossible task because there are so many possible outcomes.
Obama could beat McCain by 3 million votes. Or he could beat him by 2,, or he could lose to McCain by 1,, Or… there are literally millions of possible outcomes. Of course, there is actually only one circumstance in which an individual vote matters. And that is when we expect an exact tie. To see why this is true, ask yourself what would you do if you could look into a crystal ball and see that Obama would win the election by 3 million votes.
What effect would your vote have on the outcome? Absolutely none. You could either change the margin to 2,, or to 3,,, but either way Obama still wins. Notice that the same reasoning is true even for very close elections. No doubt some citizens of Florida felt regret about not voting in when they learned that George W.
Bush had won the state and therefore the whole election by votes. But even here, the best a single voter could do would be to change the margin to or to , neither of which would have changed the outcome. So what is the probability of an exact tie? One way of looking at this is to assume that any outcome is equally possible. Suppose million people vote for Obama or McCain. McCain could win million to 0.
Or he could win 99,, to 1. Or he could win 99,, to 2…. You get the point. Counting all these up, there are million different outcomes, and only one of these is an exact tie. So the probability of an exact tie for a given number of voters is just one divided by the number of voters. Since roughly million people vote in US Presidential elections, that would mean that the probability was about 1 in million. Just to give a sense of scale, the odds of being struck by lightning in the United States are about one in a million, which would make getting struck by lightning times more likely than one person determining the outcome of an election because of an exact tie in the popular vote!
The exact probability is obviously much more complicated than this, since it is unlikely that Obama or McCain would win every single vote. Close elections are probably more likely than landslides. So instead of theorizing about the probability of a tie, we could study lots and lots of real elections to see how often it happens. In one survey of 16, U.
The closest was an election in for the Representative for New York's 36th congressional district, when the Democratic candidate won by a single vote, 20, to 20, However, a subsequent recount in that election found a mathematical error that greatly increased the margin, so there are actually no examples of winning by a single vote, either. Thus, a rational analysis of voting suggests that the core act of modern democratic government makes absolutely no sense.
Economists would literally call voting "irrational" because it violates the preferences of the people who engage in it. For some reason, people decide to vote even though they would not buy a lottery ticket with identical odds, cost, and payoff. Economists typically think that people who vote are making a mistake, or there are other benefits to voting that we have not considered. For example, early scholars noted that people might vote in order to fulfill a sense of civic duty or to preserve the right to vote.
Later scholars have also pointed out that people might vote because they enjoy expressing themselves in the same way they enjoy expressing themselves when they cheer for their favorite team at a ballgame. But these explanations beg the question, "Why? In my collaboration with Nicholas Christakis, we have thought about the effect of social networks on voting and several other important phenomena like obesity, smoking, and even happiness.
And as it turns out, the rational analysis of voting overlooks important psychological features of human social networks that we have known about for some time. The earliest research on the social spread of political behavior came in the classic voting studies of Paul Lazarsfeld and Bernard Berelson that took place in the s in the towns of Erie, Pennsylvania, and Elmira, New York. These giants in social science helped invent the survey method and bullied their colleagues into starting the long march towards making the study of politics a science.
Their classic election studies eventually became the American National Election Studies that are still conducted every two years. Although Lazarsfeld and Berelson did not collect information about the whole network that interconnected all their subjects, they did ask people to discuss who influenced them and how, and this gave us the very first picture of how important networks can be.
One of the key findings from these studies was that the media does not reach the masses directly. Instead, a group of "opinion leaders"—a coinage they may have invented—usually acts as intermediary, filtering and interpreting the media for their friends and family who pay less attention to politics.
In other words, the media appeared to work by getting its message to those who are most central in the social network. Politicians themselves follow a similar strategy, targeting frequent voters who have already made up their minds, rather than trying to persuade those at the periphery of the network who may or may not participate.
It's efficient to do this, of course, but it is also, as we will see, unavoidable, and this kind of process arises from the fundamental nature of social networks. Later research by Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague in the s and s would innovate on these earlier designs. Louis, Missouri, would use a "snowball" design, asking people to talk about friends who influenced them and to give the researchers their friends' contact information so they could be in the study, too. Huckfeldt and Sprague found that when it comes to politics, birds of a feather flock together.
Democrats tend to be friends with other Democrats and Republicans tend to be friends with other Republicans. In fact, about 2 out of every 3 friends had the same ideology as the respondent. We can even see this on a large scale in recent U. In other words, people appear to be clustered together politically, acting and believing in concord with the people who surround them.
Nicholas Christakis and I wondered whether this insight could shed light on why people vote at all. We also wondered whether strong similarity in people's local networks could arise from a spread of political behaviors and ideas. Did people choose to associate with those who resembled them or did they induce a resemblance by influencing their peers? Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague showed us the person-to-person effect, but now we wanted to know how and whether it might spread to other people in the network.
Could one vote really spur thousands of others to the polls in a "voting cascade"? In order to find out just how far we could push the idea that voting might spread from person to person to person, we decided to create a computer model to answer the question, "If I vote, how many other people are likely to vote as well? In some cases one person's vote spread like wildfire, setting off a cascade of up to other people voting. In our world of artificial voters we saw some people tell their friends to vote, who then told their friends to vote, and so on, and so on and so on.
Moreover, since liberals and conservatives tend to associate more with like-minded individuals, these cascades would yield sizable increases in the number of people voting the way their friends wanted them to. One interesting implication here is that the more polarized we become by befriending only people with similar ideologies, the greater incentive we have to participate in politics. This certainly creates a dilemma for people who think polarization is bad and voter turnout is good!
We were also able to use this experiment to see what factors increase the size of a voter cascade. Not surprisingly, these cascades got bigger when we increased the number of friends each person has, the number of interactions they have with each other, and the probability that that one will influence the other.
But we also discovered a complex relationship between the cascades and the degree to which people were socially clustered in tightly-knit groups. When we move from a low to high probability that one's acquaintances know one another, the number of paths between individuals in the group increases dramatically.
This increases the number of ways a single decision to vote can be transmitted to other people in the population. However, as the group gradually gets even more clustered, people tend to cut ties to the outside world and focus only on members of their own group. This means there is a sweet spot in the amount of social interconnection that maximizes the likelihood that people will participate in politics. Thus, contrary to Robert Putnam's advice, sometimes more social interaction is not always better.
Interestingly, the number of people voting had virtually no effect on how far the cascades would spread in our computer model.
Nicholas Christakis and I originally believed that the size of voter cascades would be bigger in larger populations because of the increased number of people who might be influenced by a cascade. However, instead we discovered that voter cascades are primarily local phenomena, occurring in a smaller part of the population closely connected to an individual.
As it turns out, this is exactly what we have been finding in our other studies of the spread of obesity, smoking, and happiness. These phenomena can spread to our friends 1 degree of separation , our friends' friends 2 degrees , and our friends' friends' friends 3 degrees , but not much further. This "3 Degree Rule" suggests that the power of one individual to influence many is limited by the effect of competing waves of influence that emanate from everyone else in the network.
Our computer model provided some of the first indirect evidence that voter cascades are real, but direct evidence was not far behind. In , Notre Dame political scientist David Nickerson traveled to neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado and Minneapolis, Minnesota to conduct a novel experimental study of voter turnout.
In this study, experimenters walked door-to-door to contact people who lived in two-person households. Each of these households was randomly assigned to receive one of two treatments.
In one treatment, the experimenter encouraged the person who answered the door to vote at an upcoming election. In the other treatment, the experimenter encouraged the practice of recycling. Nickerson noted who came to the door to speak to the experimenter, and then waited until after the election to look up who voted and who did not.
Voter contact studies are very common, and it is well-established that get-out-the-vote campaigns actually work. The big surprise, however, was the behavior of the people who did not answer the door. Consider for a moment how these indirect effects might flow through a whole network. Nickerson's creative study showed that a single plea to vote can change political behavior and spread from the experimenter to the person who heard the get-out-the-vote message to a person who neither heard the message nor met the experimenter.
But why would it stop there? The person who didn't answer the door might pass the effect on to his or her other friends and family, as well. The effect probably won't be as strong when it gets passed along—like the game of telephone when kids whisper a message from friend to friend to friend, the get-out-the-vote message might get lost along the way as it passes from person to person to person. That may not seem like much change, but remember that while the size of the contagious effect decreases at each step, the number of people affected increases exponentially.
Thus the decision to vote appears to be an inherently social phenomenon that scholars are only recently coming to terms with. So where do these results leave us on the question "Why do people vote?
Instead of each of us having only one vote, we effectively have several and we are therefore much more likely to have an influence on the outcome of the election. The fact that one person can influence so many others may help to explain why some people have such strong feelings of civic duty. Establishing a norm of voting with one's acquaintances is one way to influence them to go to the polls. People who do not assert such a duty miss a chance to influence people who share similar views, and this tends to lead to worse outcomes for their favorite candidates.
In large electorates, the net impact on the result might be too marginal to create a dynamic that would favor people who assert a duty to vote. However, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted almost years ago, the civic duty to vote originated in much smaller political settings like town meetings where changing the participation behavior of a few people might make a big difference.
And this norm has taken such a strong hold, that many people are actually dishonest when they talk to pollsters. How do we know this? The ballot in America is secret, but whether or not you showed up to cast a ballot is a matter of public record, so we have very good third-party official information about who voted and who did not.
The problem of over-reporting voter turnout is very well-known among political scientists and a common subject in college classrooms. One of our favorite moments in Poli Sci occurs when we ask our students to raise their hands really high if they did not vote. Typically only about a quarter raise their hand, but realistically it should usually be more than half the class. So why do people lie about this?
One possibility is that they fear social sanctions. Another is that people believe that others are influenced by their political actions. Consider what happens if you tell everyone you are voting, but then you stay home instead. On average your actions will increase turnout even though you didn't vote yourself.
Moreover, since most of the people who decide to vote are likely to share your beliefs, you can increase the vote margin for your favorite candidates without going to the polls. Hence, one explanation for why people vote is that they are connected and that it is rational for them to vote—as a result of this connection. In fact, one begins to wonder why anyone would ever say that they do not vote. Christopher Dawes and I have also tackled voting from a brand new point of view.
Unbeknownst to most political scientists, behavior geneticists began using twin studies in the s to study variation in social attitudes, and these studies suggested that both genes and environment played a role. However, behavior geneticists did not specifically pursue the question of whether or not political attitudes were heritable, and political scientists remained largely unaware of the heritability of social attitudes until In that year, the American Political Science Review published a reanalysis of political questions on a social attitude survey of twins that suggested liberal and conservative ideology is heritable.
Follow-up studies showed that genes did not play much of a role in the choice of a political party, supporting a core finding in the study of American politics that the choice to be a Democrat or a Republican is largely shaped by parental socialization. In other words, one very important reason why people vote Republican is because their parents did.
All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they're supposed to be doing, are where they're supposed to be. But then, given the way of the world, things change. We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal.
Some of you might recognize this as the '60s. But the '60s inevitably gives way to the '70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more. Of course, Bosch called this hell. So this triptych, these three panels, portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay. The truth of social entropy. So it's a nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we're asking people to make a sacrifice and they don't really benefit from their own sacrifice.
You really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to free ride. What happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative. This is all played anonymously.
On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. But they quickly see other people aren't doing so much. I won't cooperate. New rule. If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren't contributing, you can do that. It shoots up and it keeps going up. Lots of research shows that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. It's not enough to appeal to people's good motives. It helps to have some sort of punishment. Even if it's just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they're in large groups, to cooperate.
There's even some recent research suggesting that religion — priming God, making people think about God — often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior. Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other and being more effective at competing with other groups. That's probably right, although this is a controversial issue.
But I'm particularly interested in religion and the origin of religion and in what it does to us and for us, because I think the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is really simple — a lot of rock and a lot of water and wind and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon. It's not that complicated. This is what's complicated: that people lived in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa or the frozen shores of Alaska.
And some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon and Rome and Tenochtitlan. How did this happen?
It's an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon. The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. Yes, you need to be concerned about harm, you need a psychology of justice. But it helps to organize a group if you have subgroups, and if those subgroups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality — to pursue higher, nobler ends.
Now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives: liberals reject three of these foundations. They say, "Let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership," and, "Let's question authority," and, "Keep your laws off my body. Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. Traditional authority and morality can be quite repressive and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people who don't fit in.
Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. This shirt says, "Stop bitching, start a revolution.
Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost, to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve.
It's precious, and it's really easy to lose. So as Edmund Burke said, "The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. Once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability, then I think the way is open to step outside the moral Matrix.
This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. Unreasonable and needless voting restrictions are dishonorable. They're shameless , disgraceful, a poor loser's move.
It's changing the rules of the game instead of putting in the work to win it as-is or accepting victory isn't possible. We have a bad habit in American politics — especially but not exclusively on the right — of dismissing pleas for fairness when they're inconvenient. It's not faaaaaaair , we answer in a mocking, playground whine. Buck up, sonny, life's not fair.
That's certainly true, but it's also true that fairness, so closely linked as it is to justice, order, and generosity, is something to which we should aspire, not least in rule of law. Skip to header Skip to main content Skip to footer Opinion. Fairness is not solely a liberal virtue, and undermining it is not conservative. More From Bonnie Kristian. Read All.
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