The moral roots of Liberals and Conservatives

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Conservatives value the individual over a group (collective).

1. So, they would not complain like you are that "a minority of individuals are upsetting the majority".

2. They would value individual expression over BORG suppression (as you appear to suggest). "This is the BORG. You must conform".

3. LGBTQI or say technology enhanced humans (cybernetic implants) would be appreciated as unique humans, not shunned as "not consistent with group thought".

"Central to modern conservative values is the idea of individualism. Individualism stresses independence, self-reliance, and the will of the individual over collective action"
https://rampages.us/refugeesandconserva ... vidualism/

This is the greatest aspect of conservatism, you look at others, and see their potential as an individual.

And yet conservatives do look at LGBTQ people and see them as aberrations that mess up the natural order. If conservatives are the ones who fight for the right of the individual to do what they want and be recognised as an individual, then why are they the political side that attacks minorities for being different?

As it stands, liberal refers to one who believes that freedom trumps, but I would not even argue that is something of the Left since you will find in many countries, such as my own, the conservative party is called liberal. And what that liberalism generally works out through a conservative lens is is the freedom for bosses to exploit their workers, to ignore protections put in place to protect vulnerable people, and the freedoms for people to forgo those protections so that they can gamble and make themselves a little better off. Although generally people will fall and those who were already in power will win more.

Generally the freedom of the conservative is the freedom to discriminate against people who are different. It is freedom for the individual, only if that individual is part of the majority. There should be freedom of religion, but only Christianity should be taught in school and used in political decisions. Christians should be allowed to say that they don't like Muslims, but if a Muslim says anything about Christianity then they are a terrorist.

A children's movie can say that you should be true to who you love to show your individuality, but if it is not a boy/girl relationship, then conservative mummies come out to say that it is sick.

There is a lot of phoniness and inconsistency.

Phony conservative:
- I hate Socialism, but don't touch all my government services and benefits.
- I support freedom, but don't touch all my government services and benefits.
- Reduce government, cut taxes, reduce spending, but don't touch all my government services and benefits.'

Inconsistent conservative:
1. Freedom for me, but not for you.
2. Government services for me, but not for you.
3. Tax others more, and me less.

Been a while, I don't actually know how long. A few comments

I won't watch the video, as I detest video presentations and have read the entirety of Johnathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, and will assume that qualifies me to comment on this thread.

First, Johnathan's Haidt's methods are scientifically rigorous. They represent careful observations and testing of a variety of cultures around the world. Haidt is also quite transparent. He has an entire chapter on "what I got wrong." He claims allegiance to liberalism, whereas his research tends to in my view put liberals in a less flattering light. As such I have no reason to doubt his findings.

Two, one of the important observations in the righteous mind is that the US polarization is a case of a yin and two yangs. That is on one side is liberalism with its emphasis on 2 values. On the other side is conservatism with its emphasis on 5 values, and allied with conservatism with libertarianism with its emphasis on 1 value. The observation is that while conservatives and libertarians are politically allied they have less in common relative to liberals and libertarians.

I think this second point explains a disconnect in the "right" faction between the individualism of libertarians and the authoritarianism of more traditional conservatives.

@TheRobotLives
It is fair to say that there is inconsistencies in what a lot of conservatives say they believe in regards to freedom, but it is playing into a no true Scotsman fallacy to say that they are all phony conservatives and thus not representative of their political aisle. But I think that it is consistent with what that page you linked earlier on individualism warns about only acting in one's self interest, it is game theory where the individuals left to their own devices will act out of self interest even if everyone worked together there could be a more positive result.

What are things like churches and organised religion if not group think? Despite what conservatives say, I don't think that they actually dislike groupthink, they just prefer the type of groupthink that aligns to their individual majority beliefs, especially in regards to ideas of purity, authority and support for their ingroup. Conservatives are super willing to group up and attack things outside of those things, and super quick to act persecuted if they start to think that their ideas may no longer be a majority. That there is a war on traditional femininity and masculinity because people act outside of it. That there is a broad conspiracy against Trump because the media does not just agree with every lie he says. And Christians are getting prosecuted because a business might decide to say "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas" in recognition of other religions.

It is why Conservatives also love the phrase "the silent majority", especially in regards to where general public opinion might be shifting, conservatives need to believe that almost everyone believes the same thing they do, they are just more quiet about it. They have to also frame the Left as simply loud and not knowing what they are talking about, even if what they are talking about it their own experience and they are sick of people their point of view for the one that has been built in the heads of people.

Interesting.
Imagine building a road. A road is for everyone but each needs to give a bit of his land or his money so it can be built.
Are conservatives anti-road, as it supresses individual interests for a common goal?

I think the difference would be that conservatives would assist on their own account (donation\volunteer), whereas liberals would try to force\coerce assistance ("taxation"\regulation).

In an ideal world, probably yes.

It's even possible that this ideal world concept does have some relation to the real world, exactly because of what is discussed in the OP - that the majority of Conservatives, with their wider concept of morality, would have found it a moral obligation to volunteer.

The question is, what do we do with those who don't conform to the common goal?
I see several possible options:
1. State enforcement - allegedly prefered by "the left";
2. Moral and social condemnation by local society - allegedly preferred by some of "the right", probably working quite well in small communities;
3. Leave them alone, it's their right - apparently preferred by some of "the right";
4. Some other ideas?...

That gives me another idea:
It is well known that in the US, Conservatives live mainly in tightly-knit communities, while Liberals are more common in diverse and anonymous urban environments.

The survey does not open in the EU, so I can't check if it asks for it but the road building example made me think of morality as an adaptation to local environment. In a village where everyone knows each other, pressure on cooperativeness as a moral obligation can be very successful.
In a several million city where you don't know even your next door neighbours and people want to keep that anonymity, pressure on moral obligations is often impossible to apply.
If the city is additionally culturally diverse, it becomes even harder to make people cooperative by appealing to their moral sense.

So, my suggestion is - shifts in moral sense may be adaptations to local environments.

My suspicion would be that the conservatives would only want their donation and volunteering to be done in way that would benefit their immediate community, their roads. So the rich areas and places with lots of people would have great roads, while the poor areas and very few people would barely have leveled ground or be safe.

We can barely convince conservatives to practice social distancing and wearing masks for the safety of people during a pandemic. And we think that they could be convinced to donate or volunteer to help people that might not be them? It would only work if you could convince the conservatives that god said everyone needs roads, and that you are going to hell if you don't give, which is kind of a grosser concept than a democratically elected government that looked into and decided it would be beneficial use of taxpayer money.

Conservatives thinking is there's no "common good" , just "individual good".

If individuals don't agree to it, then it shouldn't get done.

The morality of forcefully taking money and land from people for a supposed "common good"?

Last edited by TheRobotLives on 19 Sep 2020, 8:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

So, in our example, whose individual good is the road, once built?
After all, even the most conservative areas do have public roads. If they are not common goods, whose goods are they?

The individuals that built the road.

They built the road because it benefited them.

Should every road have a toll on it for everyone who was not personally a part of making it?

But in this example, there's no individual who built it. Everyone contributed something and everyone plus more benefit from the result. That's exactly what "common good" means.