Harmless Taboos

[Robert Tulip]

But the politics is central to his research:

Haidt’s research asks individuals to answer questionnaires regarding their core moral beliefs—what sorts of values they consider sacred, which they would compromise on, and how much it would take to get them to make those compromises. By themselves, these exercises are interesting. But Haidt’s research went one step further, asking self-identified conservatives to answer those questionnaires as if they were liberals and for liberals to do the opposite. What Haidt found is that conservatives understand liberals’ moral values better than liberals understand where conservatives are coming from. Worse yet, liberals don’t know what they don’t know; they don’t understand how limited their knowledge of conservative values is.

link

[DWill]

I hope Robert will at least check in with the discussion, even if he doesn't have time for the book. I really haven't read ahead or looked at much of Haidt's other stuff on the web (the guy's an industry), so I can't comment on how the material in the book so far relates to liberal/conservative. Haidt hasn't said that political liberals are more likely to say "okay" to the incest scenario than conservatives. That isn't what interests him. As saffron said, he only wanted to devise moral dilemmas that would show whether people answer moral questions from intuition or from moral reasoning. I do know that, according to the interview article geo posted, conservatives have championed some of Haidt's conclusions. The writer did say that Haidt admitted to coming down harder on conservatives than liberals, because liberals are his people.

JH did offer the generalization that in America and Western Europe (also Australia, I'm sure), people are more likely to have the individualistic view of private practices being okay if they're consentual or don't harm anyone. In socio-centric cultures, non-harming practices are more likely to be moralized. To a large extent, the individualism of the West provides a common ground for both liberal and conservative factions within nations.