4 thoughts on “West-ward, Ho!”

  1. I’m a little skeptical of some of the ingroup claims about liberals and libertarians. Good college educated liberals can be very accepting of a bonobo like culture but may blanche at a purity father-daughter dance held by religious conservatives. I’m curious how well Haidt’s work takes into account the liberal problem of tolerating everyone except the intolerant. It’s hard not to see the “ingroup” (perhaps “outgroup” is a better word) processing in Will’s gleeful description of liberal democracy destroying the radical islam. (I’m gleeful too).
    Great couple of podcasts, and I hope that you can keep mining the last questions regarding liberal culture.

  2. Indeed, awesome podcast.
    I’m curious to know more about his methodology. How does he ensure his set of questions, which he uses to determine the fundamental moral emotions, is not biased? E.g. if you ask too many questions about disgust, disgust will look overly important. What is the “right” set of moral questions to perform statistical analysis on?

  3. In other words, what does “a random sample of the set of all moral questions” look like? How does Haidt obtain this sample?
    I would guess it should be weighted by probability of occurrence; e.g. very prosaic or common moral situations should occur very frequently, and made-up or obviously contrived situations should occur very infrequently.

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