社会正義に対するアメリカでの認識と科学者に対する保守派の不信について

このテキストは、ジョナサン・ハイト博士がデューク大学で行った講演の記録です。ハイト博士は、倫理的リーダーシップのトーマス・クーリー教授であり、2冊の著書があります。彼は、倫理学、人文科学、医学の歴史に関するトレントセンターのディレクター、ロス・マッキニーによって紹介されました。講演は、公共生活における倫理に関する議論の必要性を強調するために、サウル・ベヤリとローズ・ベヤリによる寛大な寄付によって実現しました。ハイト博士は、社会正義に対するアメリカでの認識と科学者に対する保守派の不信について論じています。彼は、道徳心理学の観点からこれらの問題を探求し、異なる政治的見解がどのように道徳的価値に影響を与えるかを分析しています。

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この講演では、ジョナサン・ハイト博士が、社会正義に対する異なる見解と、科学に対する政治的立場から生じる信頼の欠如について論じています。ハイトは、道徳性がグループを結束させることに部分的に基づいていると指摘し、リベラル派が犠牲者グループを聖化することで、他の道徳的基盤を犠牲にする傾向があると述べています。彼は、科学界、特に社会科学における政治的偏向が保守派の科学不信を引き起こしていると主張し、知的多様性の重要性と、社会正義の再評価の必要性を強調しています。

科学界、特に社会科学における政治的偏向が保守派の科学不信の具体的な事例を教えてください

ハイト博士は、社会科学における保守派の科学不信の具体的な事例として、社会科学者が一般にリベラルな政治的見解を持ち、これが研究の選択や結論に偏りをもたらす可能性があることを指摘しています。例えば、社会心理学の分野では、保守派へのホスタイルな環境や、保守的な視点を持つ研究候補者への差別的態度が報告されています。これらの事例は、特定の政治的立場が科学的調査や結論に影響を与え、結果的に保守派からの科学への信頼を損なう一因となっていることを示しています

this is Duke University hi my name is Ross McKinny
I’m the director of the Trent Center for bioethics humanities and history of medicine and it’s very very very much my
pleasure this afternoon to welcome you all um to the boyarski lecture this
lecture is the result of a very generous donation from um one of our favorite
people Saul bayari and Rose bayari who um are committed to the concept that we
need to have a discussion of Ethics in the public life and that we should use
these forums as a way to make the community engage in conversation so that we all can learn more about how our to
live our lives more morally um and just to live um better lives so with that
Spirit we have invited Dr Jonathan height to be the this year’s um boari
lecturer Dr height is the Thomas kulie professor of ethical leadership at the
NYU School of Business it’s in your program so you can see it um and he is
also the author of two excellent books the happiness hypothesis and Righteous
Mind why good people are divided by politics and religion I can recommend them both I have read them both they are
both good um I can also um commend you to um his TED Talks which have now been
seen by approximately 2.5 million people he has three different TED Talks that are available online but you’re going to
get to see the real thing in person and that’s far better afterwards we invite you to a reception to uh outside the uh
theater there will be two stations one sort of back towards the bookstore one
right out front they have exactly the same Foods um and beverages so that you don’t have to
crowd around just one and with that um i’ like to um introduce and welcome Dr
Jonathan height thanks so
[Applause] much okay um well thank you so much uh
Ross for that uh for that introduction uh let’s see is this maybe okay that’s off um and uh and boy what a what a
great crowd uh it’s great to see you all here um my my father used to attend the uh it was called Diller back then the uh
uh learning in retirement I know many of you are are from that and um let’s see I think is there is this a little bit loud
or how are we doing on the sound okay good all right charge in then um and uh
it’s been a wonderful day Duke has become one of the top places in America to study ethics so if uh if the goal of
these lectures is to contribute uh to a discussion of ethics and how to live a good life uh well Duke is really a place
where that conversation is is going beautifully um I received this uh this
email here we are I received this email um uh back last August inviting me uh to
give this lecture this is an email from Ross and that last line that I’ve underlined was this uh that uh the
lecturer shall Inspire the Duke University family towards even greater achievement in social justice and public
health through science now um I don’t
really um this is not my thing to inspire people to ever Greater Heights
of social justice uh but I thought there is something uh that uh there is
something that I can do um because as I see it studying moral psychology there
is so much work on social justice using science that we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation in which many Americans
don’t want social justice and they don’t trust scientists who are always preaching social justice so I thought
I can talk about that I can talk about one of the major obstacles to achieving social justice through science and some
of the things that people who would want to do that might not see uh about ways that they’re alienating many Americans
the ways in which they are committing in a sense moral sacrilege they’re they’re they’re saying things that will offend
people that they wouldn’t even uh recognize now um let’s see so to begin I’d like to
do a little projective test with you I’m going to test your moral personality to do that it’s I’m going to give you this
personality test I invented called the lvd test I’ll tell you what it stands for in a moment all you have to do is
just sit back listen to two passages of text just sort of soak them in and tell
me which one resonates with you which one just sort of makes you feel good and right and and and feel like this is yes
this is truth here’s the first uh piece of text imagine that there were no
countries it isn’t hard to do nothing to kill or die for and no
religion too imagine all the people living life in peace now you may say
that I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one I hope that someday uh you’ll join us and the world will be as one that’s
the first um just think do you like it does it seem right to you here’s the
second it is not true then that human activity can be released from all restraint man’s characteristic privilege
is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral that is social he is
governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him but by a conscience Superior to his own the
superiority of which he feels all right now um I just gave you two pieces of text which one which one
feels right which one resonates the test actually stands for uh Lenin V uh Lenin
versus durkheim um and here are the two pieces of text that I gave you the first was of course
from John Len song Imagine so first raise your hand if you vote this way if this is the one that you liked better raise your hand
High okay all of those of you who raised your hand raise your hand just those of
you raise your hand if you’d say you are liberal or on the left please raise your hand and just those who like this one
raise your hand if you’d say you’re conservative or on the right one two two okay so clearly either
everybody’s liberal here or at very least everyone who likes this is liberal
uh and now here’s the durkheim please raise your hand if you prefer this one please raise your hand High okay so clearly uh lennin was the favorite but
there’s about 10 20% of you here who prefer durkheim those of you who liked the durkheim just those of you who
raised your hand raise your hand if you are liberal or on the left okay a lot of you and raise your
hand if you are conservative or on the right okay one two three four five six seven eight n so all right so the major
so in um for both passages of text the majority of you are liberal this group is about
90 you know 90% liberal to you know 5% conservative or something uh which makes it among the most conservative groups
I’ve ever addressed in my academic life
um but we do at least see the association liberals resonate with uh uh
Lenin and conservatives are more drawn at least to to durkheim now what the I
picked these two texts because they are perfect Exemplar of what Thomas Soul The
Economist Thomas Soul calls the two visions of human nature in a wonderful book called the conflict of
Visions he says that um there’s a a vision of human nature a vision of
humanity that’s common on the left um unconstrained Vision which human nature is malleable and can be perfected if
social conditions are improved anything is possible if we can just release release people free them we’ll have uh
things will be better in contrast uh the constrained Vision uh people believe that order to behave well to cooperate
and Thrive human beings need external structures constraints such as laws institutions Customs Etc uh so
throughout intellectual history you see the combat of these two ideas now um I
was a sort of a standard academic liberal my whole life until just a couple years ago in writing the in
writing the Righteous Mind and doing a lot of research and thinking about what does each side right about what ises each side trying to do um I came to
believe that as a straight descriptive as just a description of human nature I
I think the constrainted vision is actually more accurate and because of that I I’m no longer a liberal I’m a
Centrist and that will be important in in what comes um uh now let me make clear I have nothing good to say about
today’s Republican party especially at the presidential level um they have purged their moderates they have uh
become so extreme that they are I think they find it it’s difficult for them to think about policy questions with any
subtlety or Nuance uh that’s what intents more moralism does as I’ll say later so please do not do what I say is
going to appear to be uh a criticism of social just of the social justice movement and please understand um it is
a constructive criticism I am not praising the Republican party I I think they are off the deep end I think the
Democratic party is the party that is concerned about what I think is possibly
the preeminent moral issue of our time um we’ve all seen versions of this graph which is rising inequality it’s
happening all over the world part of it is due to globalization much of it is due to globalization much of it cannot
be stopped much of it is a sense of natural undoing of some temporary conditions after the second world war
but part of it is Extreme in the United States I think it can be reversed uh as this graph shows almost all of the gains
in productivity have gone to increasing wealth uh for the top not just 5% which
is the yellow line but really the top 1% has basically garnered all the gains which I think is terrible not not just
from a point of view of basic fairness but because of something I care even more about than basic uh fairness um is
um equality of opportunity and the American dream uh just in the last year or two we’ve begun to read a lot of
sociological studies pointing out that America is no longer the land of the American dream uh that if you look at
the possibility for Mobility rising from the bottom fifth to the top fifth for example uh in America that’s getting
harder and harder to do we are now way below many European societies on that and that I think is a disaster uh for
this country um the uh Pew Foundation recently released this report on
economic mobility and they defined it they had this nice phrase they said the ideal that all Americans have equality
of opportunity regardless of their economic status at Birth is the Crux of the American dream and a defining
element of our national psyche uh now I’m Jewish my four Grandparents were all born in Russia and
Poland uh they came over very much in situations like this uh at LS Island uh
so I was raised very much on the idea that America is the greatest nation on Earth because it welcomed the Jews uh it
didn’t go out of its way to help them but it just it didn’t get in their way um it just said welcome do what you want
um you’re free to succeed here uh and uh Jews are not of course the only ones who have uh who have capitalized on
America’s promise uh this is the idea of all uh of all immigrant groups this is a deeply American idea so if we’re losing
this it is a national catastrophe and I think the left is correct to be raising the alarm the right is wrong to be
denying it and saying it’s not a problem so again I’m this is all by way of preface of saying there are some very
serious social problems uh that I think are part of social justice that I very much support um now on to the rest of
the talk which as I said will seem like a CR critique but it’s intended as a helpful critique uh because in much of the
country social justice is code is code uh for far-left
uh radical politics this is Glenn Beck had a radio show a number of years ago in which he said I beg you look for the
word social justice on your Church website if you find it run as fast as you can uh now then he backed this up on
his TV show with an in-depth analysis featuring lots of lines and arrows and photographs um don’t look too long you
will not figure it out um uh but this I think is interesting he
says here’s my definition of social justice forced redistribution of wealth
with a hostility toward individual property rights under the guise of Charity Andor Justice uh and I think
it’s a definition at least worth worth examining and worth keeping in mind as we go through uh the differences between
the morals of the moral foundations of left and right so um my talk today is an attempt to answer two puzzles which I
raised in the title of my talk uh why would anyone not want social justice I mean Justice is good
um social justice must be good why would anyone oppose that and the standard
ansers on the left are well the people who oppose it are just guarding their privilege their white privilege their
Rich privilege whatever it is which means also that we can dismiss the opposition as racism uh so if you’re
opposed to Social Justice You’re simply a bad person we don’t have to listen to you but another possibility is that there are actual legitimate moral
objections and that’s what I’ll be talking about today I don’t deny that the first that A1 and A2 are part of the answer but I’m going to argue that A3 is
a big part and one that everyone on the left needs to understand second question
uh why do conservatives distrust scientists and especially social scientists and the easy answer is
because they are dumb and anti-science it’s an answer it’s an explanation I hear a lot for why there are so few conservatives in in my field in social
psychology uh but once again um I think part of the answer uh is that there are moral objections because basically uh
scientists especially social scientists are largely partisan liberals and so it makes sense that conservatives would
distrust them I’m going to answer these two puzzles in four steps my talk has
these four parts uh so let’s start with the first morality is partly about binding groups together around sacred
objects leaders and principles so this is the way that I approach morality there are many ways to approach it uh
but this is a way that I think we find in sociology from long ago we don’t find it in Psychology in recent times I’m
trying to resurrect it my starting point is this so sociality is a very very common strategy
in the natural world there are many advantages to being social to living in a herd to staying near uh your near
members of your species uh and some animals such as these these smart animals here can actually coordinate a
little bit um but they live in relatively small groups that are generally kin there are only a few
animals that are Ultra social ultrasocial means they live in large groups up to Millions with an extensive
division of labor so the hopter are the masters of it uh but termites are actually ultrasocial cockroaches um and
the naked mole rats so these are these this strategy was discovered multiple times in evolutionary history in all
cases the trick is the same uh that is you suppress breeding so that everybody is a sister or sister and brother uh
they cannot reproduce on their own they’re all children of the same Queen the queen is the ovary she is not the
brain she is the ovary uh and the group is like an organism so that’s the way ultrasociality is always done with one
exception there is one species on this planet that found a different way of doing
ultrasociality and that is us um how do we do it why are we so
group is why are we so able to work together towards common ends and this is
tied up with what I think is is one of the most significant events I mean you know the origin of life is is probably
the most significant and then there’s going from UK bacteria to ukar those are some really important major transitions
but the transition that happened around 10,000 years ago when humans went from hunter gatherers to in the blink of an
eye just a few thousand years we go from hunter gatherers to Babylon and ten titon and other other cities this is
almost instantaneous how did that happen and it’s transformed the world it’s transformed the biosphere the climate
everything uh how did it happen well as you see in these pictures you you do not
get early civilization without temples just doesn’t happen you always have temples um
this is um an image of Muslims at prayer in Mecca and so what I’m arguing here is
that a really important part of our evolutionary history this great trick that we developed to use Dan Dan’s
phrase um is the ability to forge a team by circling around sacred things so in
this case it’s a rock in Mecca um and when we circle around it’s it’s as
though it’s as though you’re taking a wire through a magnetic field you’re generating a current I I find um
metaphors of electricity really helpful for thinking about social life durkheim said this too um as we circle around
it’s like a current is generated which binds people together and allows them to do some some real work some social work
um so um all religions do this to some extent but it doesn’t have to be religion um nationalism is really a form
of religion psychologically speaking uh you have you sacralize an object and as you circle around it then you can trust
each other you can you can throw in your lot and work together for you can take great risks for for great Glory um we
wouldn’t have politics if we didn’t have this ability either now um an
unfortunate side effect of doing this uh is that when you circle around you create this current it it it separates
good from evil or rather we see the world that way we our vision is polarized we look out at the world our
side is good their side is evil and once you do that there can no longer be nuanced thinking there can no longer be
be well they’re right about this and wrong about that you can’t say that anymore if you do you’re a traitor they
are wrong they are completely wrong they are wrong about everything um and just as a bit of foreshadowing as you can see
this kind of thinking is radically incompatible with scientific thinking now um sacred objects on the
right and left on the right we tend to get the Bible and the flag but on the left uh civil rights leaders um issues
of of well social justice uh the environment um each side will sacralize certain principles and then they lose
the ability to think critically about them so that’s part one of the lecture just go with me there are many ways to
approach morality but the way I’m inviting you to approach it is think about this amazing human ability it’s a good thing to circle around sacred
objects and then trust each other now what do liberals do what is liberal morality based on um in my book
The Righteous Mind um I I go through uh what is known about the differences between left and right and my own Theory
with my colleagues at yourmorals.org uh this is the the hard the the original
hard cover this is the hard cover in the UK uh I think it uh and then this is the
paperback which just just came out uh now uh so in the book I present moral
foundations Theory um uh in graduate school I had these two epiphanies one was that evolutionary psychology is true
our minds evolved um just like our bodies and the other is that cultural psychology is true that we’re cultural
creatures and that we are our culture shapes our minds shapes the worlds we live in and we come out different so
both are true at the same time and moral foundations theory is an attempt to say what are the best candidates for bridging anthropology and
evolution uh so the six I believe are first care and harm we are mammals if
you’re a mammal that means your brain and body are finally tuned for caring
for offspring that are vulnerable for a long time it’s not just female brains and bodies in most species it is but in
in in human beings males also uh can do that very very well um so we’re specialized for this and this is clearly
a foundation of human morality everybody in Psychology talks about this as a foundation of morality um it’s huge on
the left these are photos I took at Occupy Wall Street when it first uh broke out uh compassion is our new currency uh free empathy I can’t hurt
another without hurting myself so any sort of uh leftwing or liberal social
event you’ll find evidence of of Compassion Care those sorts of things um
um go ahead you want to answer that okay um um and uh you simply never see signs
like this at at a tea party rally um now here’s a here’s a photograph I took in
Charlottesville stop the genocide Humane eating save darur any guesses whether
this person voted for Obama or Romney um this is a One Foundation car one moral
Foundation is all the decorations uh this is a coffee shop in New PS New York again uh One Foundation uh well actually
two foundations in this case but basically uh victims and oppression uh care uh so social justice as I see it
practiced um social justice at least in academic circles is a I think an effort
to basically circle around specific identified victim groups fight for justice for them uh demonize the
powerful so in this case this is an American flag and uh this isn’t working
but at any rate American flag with the Stars replaced with corporate logos so America is bad corporations are bad the
rich are bad power is bad um here’s some data my uh at our website yourmorals.org uh you can go
there you can register at the site you can take we’ve got dozens of studies uh so what we find is that here’s one item
from our moral foundations questionnaire compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue um people who register when they
register if they say that they are liberal on the left those people as you can see score fairly high on that on
that it and as people get more conservative they endorse it less so and we find this over
and over again care compassion every everyone left right and Center endorses it but liberals endorse it
more I’ll skip that data um the um uh there’s a lot in philosophical and
political science circles there’s a lot of talk about uh what is morality and it seems as though there’s a prize I I
don’t know who gave this prize but it seems that there’s a prize out there for whoever can explain morality with a single principle and lots of
philosophers in particular try to VI for it uh well George LOF a cognitive psychi cognitive scientist says that behind
every Progressive policy so at least for liberals um there’s a single moral value which is empathy um this is not
something you will ever hear uh in from a religious leader religious Traditions are very different with one exception
the Dal Lama says an ethical Act is one which does not harm others experience or expectation of Happiness so the Dal Lama
has I think basically One Foundation liberal morality which explains why he is the only uh kosher religious leader
in left leaning circles um so that’s I’m just an
overview that if you look at at uh liberal political movements they tend they have multiple foundations but the
main one is care Compassion Care harm it’s those sorts of issues uh and that
often leads them as they circle around if you have a morality based on compassion what are you fighting for
what what unites you it’s identifying victim groups that you are fighting for it could be it could be girls in
Afghanistan it could be uh sex workers forced in you know could victims around
the world and at home and and the left fights for them and again I’m not at all critical I mean this somebody needs to
speak for these people and and they and and uh uh liberal social movements have done enormous social good so I’m not
criticizing I’m just pointing out this is the Crux now the core of my talk is this
section here if you sacralize victim groups to to to make something sacred
means no tradeoffs so what are you going to do if care conflicts at times with fairness
Liberty loyalty Authority sanctity what are you going to do well you’ll go with
care and you’ll violate those others if you need to and this I think is what got the left into a lot of trouble in the
60s 7 and 70s Reagan took advantage of it really articulated the case against the left liberalism became a dirty word
it’s recovering now that the Republicans have gone so far off the deep then that they are cold heartless lacking
compassion um uh uh so the left has another opening uh but I think the left blew it last time and it’s be for these
reasons so um let’s look at the second moral Foundation fairness uh the key to thinking about
fairness is that it’s not a quality not even quality of outcomes it’s really proportionality um we’ve evolved to be
very good at cooperation which means we’re really sensitive to Who’s Cheating who’s who’s a free rider who’s not
pulling their weight and we hate those people we gossip a lot about about those people um now at Occupy Wall Street you
do find a lot of talk about fairness but it’s fairness as a quality of outcomes mixed with compassion so on the right
tax the wealthy fair and square Well everybody’s in favor of fair taxes right and left everybody wants Fair taxes uh
but on the left um it says on the bottom how can they let us go hungry every day
so if there are hungry people then taxes aren’t Fair they should be higher on the rich to pay for food for the poor that’s
what Fair would be you see that also here in this uh Cartoon created by U um
Craig Craig frol uh equality to a conservative is everybody has the same
size box to stand on and if you’re too short to see over the fence tough luck but to a liberal equality means you take
the box from the guy who doesn’t need it he doesn’t need all that extra box take it out of his box account and put it
into that kid’s box account and now everybody can see over the fence that is a quality uh now on the right this this is
uh this is deeply unfair on the right uh these are uh signs from tea party rally
spread my work ethic not my wealth and stop punishing success uh on the right
they often see the graduated income tax the progressive income tax means the more successful you are the more we tax
you the more you have to pay that’s a pun that’s a punishment for Success uh stop rewarding failure bailouts and
Welfare programs are ways to bail out those who otherwise should suffer the consequences of their failure
um and if the government protects people from that then they simply won’t learn and we get more and more of the bad
behavior uh it’s not just an American thing this is a uh campaign photo from the UK elections a few years ago guess
whether it’s labor or conservative um a couple years ago I I
tried to synthesize these ideas in the early days of the Tea Party into an essay uh uh published in the Wall Street
Journal about what the tea parters really want and my argument was very simple even though the tea parters are a diverse group grp libertarian and social
conservative um the social conservative element of it I think we can really summarize with a single word which is
karma the Indian notion of karma so I I love this cartoon I found it on the internet um so you know this is karma if
you knock over a Domino um it will end up coming back to you the Indian notion
of karma says it’s just a law of the universe if I throw a rock up in the air it will come down God didn’t do it you
don’t need God it’s just a law of the universe similarly if I cheat you if I do something bad or sleazy something bad
will happen to me not necessarily from you just the universe will arrange it so that bad things will happen to me and if
I do something good good will happen to me that’s that’s the key idea of the law of Karma and as the right sees it
basically since the time of Roosevelt the left has been in the business of repealing the law of karma
um if you are lazy don’t worry about it we got a program for you uh if you fail
uh if uh um whatever you know whatever the problem is the government will be there to take care of you uh and they
believe uh this will lead to just more and more bad behavior uh so you see that this is the
rant that launched the tea party this was the single line that launched it uh Rick Santelli on CNBC the government is
promoting bad behavior how many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and
can’t pay their bills so as they saw it um all these homeowners who lied on their mortgage applications and now are
going bankrupt don’t bail them out Let Them Suffer let them go bankrupt it’s
their fault now obviously this is oversimplification because they were the mortgage companies tricked a lot of them
or you know encouraged them to lie so I think this is too simple an analysis but you see the point uh the right sees the
left as forever bailing out people from the the risk of from the consequences of their own mistakes uh so you see this here this is
data from your morals uh the blue line is the question a fair society would be
one in which everyone’s needs were met to the same degree and as you see people on the left endorse it strongly but as
you get more conservative less so um there’s just not that much concern for quality of outcome
and for again this sort of compassion oh and people’s needs should be satisfied um this green item is employees who work
the hardest should be paid the most uh everyone endorses that but conservatives endorse it more so that’s straight
proportional if you work harder you should get more uh and if that means that some people’s needs aren’t met
equally because they weren’t working as hard tough luck uh you also find conservatives
endorsing negative proportionality in other words if you do something bad you should be punished that’s not a
sentiment that uh liberals tend to endorse uh well Liberals are uncomfortable about punishment typically
so this item a criminal should be made to suffer in the same way that his victim suffered now that’s a re we’ made
that item a really ey for an eye tooth for a tooth sort of item liberals really reject that item and conservatives
slightly endorse it uh so there you see in summary liberals value equality any sort of
equality more than conservatives but conservatives value Equity or proportionality including retribution
more than liberals so now here’s the point once we understand these differences in how people think about
fairness now we can see ways in which liberals do things that conservatives believe to be deeply unfair so if you
start by sacred izing victim groups that’s what binds your group your team together then you’re going to Define
fairness as the pursuit of group-based equality you’re going to want government programs to create more equality of
outcomes by ethnic group for example race-based affirmative action is the
preeminent one uh you’re going to ignore the Protestant work ethic uh and you’re going to want to channel benefits to the
poor um uh unconditionally you’re not going to want to do you know uh prove that you’ve been trying to get a job
just if you’re poor you should get you should get some sort of government support basically if you know the Ant
and the grasshopper story from asap’s fables um uh the left seems to want to tax the ants to bail out the
Grasshoppers that’s the way conservatives see it on crime and punishment uh liberals tend to side with
the accused focus on them as victims and favor leniency they want to repeal the law of Karma and I think Bill Clinton
did a lot of work to bring the Democrats away from that uh you know he you know allowed capital punishment even in some
questionable cases I mean he really tried to be uh um uh you know to to sort of end the Democrats focus on on on
criminals as victims uh but I really want to really just call attention to this this is I
think the most important case of our time this is a graph that shows the uh
the achievement Gap in students in high school students um the Blue Line shows the gap between uh High income kids from
a high- income home and a low-income home so this is the achievement Gap by class and as you see it’s been rising
rapidly from the 1940s through the year 2000 it’s risen rapidly rich and poor didn’t used to be so far apart but now
they’re really far apart the Orange Line shows the gap between black and white um if you go back to the 1940s and 50s
before Brown versus bord ofed it was big uh and we’ve made a lot of progress and as you see around 1965 the two lines
crossed so the achievement Gap by class is now much bigger than the achievement
Gap by race but what does affirmative action do affirmative action is aimed at people
like this uh now if the Obamas had never gone into politics if you simply have two married lawyers and they have kids
who are smart and go to a good school that they are the kids that every top school is desperate to get they get all
kinds of lures and benefits they’re guaranteed admission this is what affirmative action aims at the children of black professionals above
all uh these kids are out of luck they’re born to a white single mother affirmative action will not help them
because they are not in a preferred victim class so I was on a conference call back about five six years ago
remember there were a bunch of ballot initiatives where states were Banning affirmative action based on race on this
conference call um with a democratic pollster and members of civil rights groups trying to Workshop the language
to defend race-based affirmative action I finally had to say you know the reason why nobody has found that language you
know you’ve got a lot of smart people and all the uh political operative shops the reason why nobody has found the
language is because it can’t be found you cannot defend race-based affirmative action as a matter of fairness in
America in this day and age um um to the extent that social justice persists in
focusing on Race rather than class and class is the big issue of our time um they’re out of touch and frankly I think
it’s unethical uh so the left had a chance Obama had a chance to get the
Democrats out ahead on this remember in the campaign his first campaign he said when my girls go to college I don’t think they’ll need special help that was
a wildly popular view unfortunately he didn’t follow through on that and my
guess is that the Democrats will have their heads handed to them by Anthony Kennedy uh when the Supreme Court rules
on rules on this again um all right on to the third Foundation uh Liberty and oppression um
you might think that liberal means Liberty liberals favor Liberty my body my choice if you’re against abortion don’t have one uh but conservatives see
liberals as a threat to Liberty uh now how can this be the answer is that there are two different kinds of Liberty um
negative Liberty this comes from isaah Berlin negative Liberty is the standard this is what we you know if somebody’s
restraining you constraining you telling you you can’t do something uh that’s negative Liberty this leads to a feeling
of Rage of reactance it’s called um but there’s another concept called positive Liberty this is a more cerebral concept
uh developed by philosophers in Europe uh and then in the United States that what good is having negative Liberty if
you don’t have the education to take advantage of you don’t have the health care you’re not healthy because you’re poor in a country that leaves you
starving in the gutter and you have no chance to make the most of your negative Liberty so government needs to take an
active role in bringing people up to get at least the basic minimum so they can participate in society so a very
important Concept in European welfare states um articulated clearly by uh President Johnson in his famous
commencement speech at Howard University so these are two very different Notions of Liberty uh the right is entirely
about negative Liberty that’s the tea party’s motto don’t shred on me the left is about positive Liberty um that’s what
this is really about this is this coffee shop is all about positive Liberty which is another name I think for uh well for
social justice but it but but it’s it’s focused on categories of people so again you focus on uh certain victim groups
and then the powerful as the demons who oppress the the victim groups that’s why there’s such that’s why there’s such um
controversy about the role of government on the on the right government is the oppressor on the left corporations and
the rich are the oppressors the only force that can stand up to them is
government now uh we’ve asked a bunch of questions about different types of Liberty I’ll just show you a couple items everyone should be free to do as
they choose if they don’t infringe as long as they don’t infringe on the equal freedom of others notice that that line is pretty flat everybody left right and
Center that’s the American Credo is Liberty um it slopes slightly down any
item that suggests sexual Liberty or gay rights then you get this downward slip because right now the left is really
focused on gay rights um but everybody endorses that however people who are successful in business have a right to
enjoy their wealth as they see fit uh the left is ex is slightly negative uh 2.5 is the midpoint of the scale so the
left slightly rejects that uh but on the right they strongly endorse it um I want my nation to stay clear of treaties that
would limit our freedom to act in our own interest that sort of uh indiv National Liberty again the left rejects
that the right endorses it uh so again we see this difference that everybody
favors fairness and Liberty but left and right mean different things by them and that leads the left to do things that
the right considers to be sacr again if you start by sacralizing victim groups
and you try to increase positive Liberty you’re going to pass laws and do things for example uh Nanny State um Health
rules gun control these are all issues where yes from a utilitarian analysis they’re really really good ideas but the
right is deeply sensitized to the left’s tendency to use government to advance its projects and they resist you’re
going to want to use government to restrict economic Liberty uh to regulate to tax uh to tell small businessmen how
to hire and fire uh to regulate how they throw out their trash all sorts of things um you’re going to have trouble
with private property uh if you want to sacralize uh social justice sorts of Liberty rather than economic Liberty um
remember Glenn Beck’s definition he says uh Force redistribution of wealth with hostility toward private property we
have this item um on your morals if a person really needed to visit a friend in the hospital and so he borrowed a
stranger’s bicycle for an hour and the owner never found out I would say this was okay liberals tend to endorce that
conservatives strongly reject it so there is some truth to the notion as Beck says that the left just doesn’t
really value private property it’s an obstacle if you value a quality of outcome you don’t want to have strong
property rights you want the ability to redistribute so again he’s not you know Beck is his definition is not crazy it’s
it’s the most negative way to describe it but it’s not crazy all right so those are the first
three foundations those are the ones that everybody has everybody Builds on the next three I’ll go through much more
quickly um these are the ones that the right tends to build on the left tends not to endorse so loyalty and betrayal
there are some animals as I said that can work in groups but only humans can work in very large groups I believe that
we evolved for Intergroup Conflict for war of a certain kind um uh and we love
we have psychological preparations for Intergroup conflict so so much so that we invented sports because what are you
going to do if there’s not a good war on well have a fake War um and we love fake War so much that
we invented super fandom uh because it’s in our minds we love it it’s we just love to root for our team uh now there’s
a big Left Right difference here the left is ambivalent about group loyalty
this is a um political ad that appeared in a lot of leading newspapers uh month before
Obama faced devastating losses in two 2010 Obama lost the the House of Representative lost the majority lost
his ability to govern effectively in 2010 and uh just before that that
contest many leading leftist intellectuals put this ad in saying crimes are crimes no matter who does
them the idea is Obama had not ended the war in Iraq and so American forces were
still drone strikes were still killing children and if the American government is still killing children and you have a
one Foundation morality which is compassion for victims then Obama is a war criminal
he’s no better than Bush now whatever you think about the logic of that is this really the best time to
be arguing this just before your team is facing crushing losses that will totally impair its ability to govern contrast
that with the Republicans who are just much better at Hanging together when times are tough um now this is not this
is an anarchist rally this is not representative of most liberals but this is the extreme this is where if you take
it to the Absurd extreme uh you get [ __ ] the troops you get the
most direct kind of national sacr you can imagine uh and even if this rally
only happened once and this sign only appeared once boy it was all over right-wing web pages it’s this sort of
thing that lets people like an col to write books like treason liberal treachery from the Cold War to the war
on terrorism um so again the left does things in pursuit of helping victims
being generally anti an imilitary military is bad killing people is bad the soldiers are bad because they kill
people uh and that leads the left to commit sacr basically in the eyes of the right so I’ll just the I’ll do these
three foundations together um so the blue line is the line I showed you before about care now let’s look at the
other three lines the green line uh this is an item on our loyalty scale it is more important to be a team player than
to express oneself the left uh rejects that the right endorses it uh the Gold Line the
yeah the goldish line respect for authority is something all children need to learn the left rejects it the right
endorses it uh people should not do things that are disgusting even if no one is harmed the left strongly rejects
that the right endorses it so um on these three foundations what we find is
that liberals endorse one primarily care and they reject loyalty Authority and
sanctity those are not part of morality on the left and that leads them to commit again
sacrilege in the eyes of the right uh so if you sacralize victim groups then you’re going to blame America for
harming those groups American history is taught as a series of terrible things that dead white men did to non-ad white
men or whatever however you explain that um um you’re going to want policies that
interfere with the central Miracle of American political life which is urbis UNAM from many one that’s our unofficial
national motto but you’re going to want to celebrate pluris not Unum you’re going to want diversity and
multiculturalism you’re going to want to block efforts to increase Unum such as having English as the national language
you’re gonna say that’s racist no we should have uh Spanish should be an equal language for for example um and
you’re going to become universalists who often seem unpatriotic you’re going to treat the flag not as sacred but as just
a piece of cloth uh and you’re going to be a univer now this is a general tendency Liberals are universalists not parochial ists and
there’s much good to be said about that but there’s also some bad for example Le here’s one of our items um I identify
more closely with the people of the World At Large than with the people in my own country liberals say yes
conservatives say no um fifth Foundation Authority and subversion uh so here we are built for
hierarchy we evolved as primates to show submission to Authority not that it’s
the same in humans and chimpanzees but the ethology is the same some of the same evolutionary roots are are are in
play here um this is an advertisement for the liberal magazine The Nation
uh you can get a coffee mug that says insubordination why because on the left
Authority is bad and so by definition insubordination is good if there’s an
authority go in go be insubordinate because Authority is bad it’s oppressive whereas on the right um this
is a church in Charlottesville God’s in charge so shut up okay so I guarantee you I guarantee
you this is not a Unitarian Church it’s just is not going to be a left leaning
Church um okay here we okay uh so that leads to a variety of
kinds of sacr again if you start by sacralizing victim groups uh then you’re going to demonize powerful groups
basically any symbol of authority you’re going to try to undercut them you’re going to side with the underdogs um
you’re going to like several liberal groups they they go out into the Arizona desert and they try to bring water to Mexicans who are crossing illegally
they’re helping them break the law yes it’s compassionate but uh on the right the reaction is that they’re traitor
they’re helping people to break the law of the United States um you’re going to Heap contempt
on tradition on Authority on structure on bajis virtues and that’s why I think the image of Obama as the Joker got a
lot of play on the right uh because it is believable not again Obama is such a ordinary family man responsible family
man so he personally it doesn’t fit uh but the the charge that the left is is
Libertines I know for Clinton it might have fit uh better but anyway last
Foundation sanctity degradations this is an image it’s called the allegory of Chastity it shows the Virgin Mary in
basically a rock chastity belt with pure water flowing a stream flowing beneath
her legs and two lions guarding that stream and not only are there Lions
they’ve got gold shields on them I mean the imagery the the iconography about purity and Chastity is just totally over
the top um but that’s a view that you find on on the religious right about fale sexuality um on the secular left
there’s a very very different view of female sexuality this is from Madonna’s album sex from the 1980s uh you know as
as opposite as can be and good her name is Madonna but it’s again it’s subvert you know subvert uh that
sacredness uh this is a photo I took in Charlottesville your body may be a temple but mine’s an amusement park you
stupid Puritans um this is a photo I took at Occupy Wall
Street nothing is sacred I have noidea idea what it means but you could not find that at a tea party rally which
just never it just couldn’t appear at a tea party rally so again there’s just a general rejection of group loyalty
respect for authority and sort of typical or traditional forms of sanctity or pure impurity so again sacrilege if
you start by sacralizing certain victim groups you’re then going to support practices so again if you if you so you
know if aliens came here from Mars and said which group based on we read
Height’s book uh on moral foundations Theory which group do we suppose is opposed to abortion well must be
liberals because they’re so sensitive to care and harm they must be the ones who care about a four five-month old or
six-month old fetus must be liberals who want to protect fetuses right um but
it’s there’s not a direct path from a foundation to a policy you have to know that the left sacralized women’s rights
for many good reasons but once you sacralize women as a victims group that commits you to certain policies about
abortion that offend most Americans and now that ultrasounds are high definition boy it’s really hard to support abortion
in the fourth fifth and sixth month for a lot of Americans um so uh um again I’ve said a
lot of this before Oh a special relevance to this audience uh the talk is sponsored by a group in the medical
school raise your hand if you’re in medicine in any way please raise your hand okay so a lot of you are at the hospital in medicine some way all the
bioethical controversies all of them not but almost all of them so cloning stem cells right to die um um you know
abortion all of them what we find is that when we want to predict people’s attitudes on that obviously whether
you’re liberal or conservative is a great predictor but above and beyond that it’s your scores on the sanctity
Foundation that predict because if you’re a liberal a secular liberal you say all that matters is whether
someone’s suffering so if a fetus cannot feel pain then there is no moral issue
but of course as soon as it feels pain then it’s wrong obviously yes yes yes but if it’s just a clump of cells there’s no moral issue but on the right
or at least and here the religious left sometimes is is is is goes with the right on this um so I think I think you
cannot understand these bioethical controversies until you understand the sanctity foundation so that’s the third and
longest part of the talk um uh so I’ve argued that morality is about binding
groups together that liberals focus on victims as that’s their stake in the ground they circle around it doing that
uh leads them to trade off all of the other five foundations in ways that often offend non-
liberals and now if that’s a correct characterization of left and right um
this I think helps explain what’s going on with science and the rejection of science these days let me explain
that uh recently there was a book out uh the Republican brain the science of why
they don’t believe in science sort of in yourf face uh it’s obvious what his partisan ship is and it’s obvious that
there’s something wrong with those Republicans and it’s not just that they were beaten as children it’s that their brains are actually different and
defective uh so that’s Chris Mooney’s uh thesis this is his attempt to provide a
convincing answer that question why they are they simply wrong um but there are a lot of problems for that thesis um last
year an article came out a major review article in the American sociological uh review um um by Gordon goosa this is a
survey data on how much people trust uh science I think it’s science trust in
science in the institution of Science and what you see here I guess my laser pointer isn’t working but um what you
see here well here I can do it this way um is that from 1974 when the question
was first asked all the way through 1992 or so uh see the black diamonds on top
that those are the Liberals the white squares just below are the conservatives and as you see back in 1974 no
difference whatsoever you get little dips but you don’t get big differences until the 90s and then the two groups
split apart until now uh liberals have have very high trust in science and
conservatives are down much lower they they don’t trust science so much so it
can’t be just that conservative brains all got defective just beginning in the
90s so conservatives Trust science until suddenly I don’t know you know maybe uh
they started using you know some conservative product some conservative hair gel advertised in Glen Beck or
something and it R I don’t know um more interesting than that or rather
related to that is the fact that this dip in which conservatives have now begun to reject science is unique to the
United States uh goosa says in an interview he says well public opinion on science in Europe and Japan exus
differently there skeptic iism about the scientific Community usually comes from
the left the reason may be that issues on the scientific Forefront in Europe such as genetically modified food and
nuclear power tend to push liberals buttons while those in the United States such as climate change and stem cell
research tend to bother conservatives so it’s not that there’s a necessary association between being conservative
and distrusting science there’s a necessary association between scientists pissing you off and not trusting
scientists uh Jonathan mine a liberal philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a book about the
battles over science that’s his conclusion too he says conservative Protestant religious groups in the US do
not reject science per se rather they are opposed to scientists influence in
public affairs the problem is not mistrust of science so much as it is mistrust of
scientists whenever a scientific body weighs in on a social issue it’s going to be on the liberal side that’s 100%
true in Psychology the psy the American so the Psychological Association has never supported a conservative position
and it has always supported liberal positions even on such psychologically Central topics as the nuclear
freeze so if you get scientists always weighing in on the liberal side and increasingly since the 80s it stands to
reason that American conservatives have begun to distrust science because they distrust scientists now is it true that
scientists are getting more liberal yes uh this is data from Rothman and lter they have uh collected data or analyz
data um from uh this is uh all all faculty including schools of engineering
and nursing all of them uh and what they find is that back in the 60s so the blue line is liberals red line is
conservatives so you always have liberals being the majority but it didn’t become a a huge majority until
the 90s basically um the Baby Boomers a lot of
them go into PHD programs both to avoid the draft and to fight for social
justice my field of social psychology had a huge influx of people wanting to fight racism so you get this huge influx
of of left-leaning people in the 70s coming to the academy getting phds they begin to take positions of power in the
90s uh the greatest Generation where you had conservative professors the greatest
Generation retires in the 90s and that’s what this graph shows uh that um it’s
only in the 90s that conservatives disappear from the academy and liberals come to predominate as Rothman lior say
in conjunction with other recent studies our findings suggest strongly that a leftward shift has occurred on college
campuses in recent years to the extent that political conservatives have become an endangered species in some departments that is certainly the case
in my field in social psychology um I gave a talk uh where I argued that this was a problem for us that there were
essentially no conservatives in my field and that this was a a problem for our science and two social psychologists
tested whether what I said was true they surveyed uh the biggest mailing list in our field and they found that only 4% of
social psychologists would identify as as conservative on social issues almost everybody is liberal on social issues in
a second study uh they asked whether people perceived that there was a hostile climate for conservatives liberals said no there’s no hostile
climate there’s no what are you talking about um there were a few percent there were some graduate students there were
some people who were conservatives and they almost always reported experiencing hostile climate this is the most amazing
thing when uh they asked a bunch of survey questions suppose you were evaluating a candidate for a job or a
grant or other things um would it negatively influence your decision if a job applicant took a politically
conservative perspective 37% of them said yes to a moderate or high degree uh
only about a quarter said no not at all now this is astonishing that in the
field which is the most focused on discrimination Prejudice and hostile climate the majority admitted that they
were discriminate against conservatives because they don’t see it as discrimination many of them see it as
Justified conservatives you see are racists and stupid so this is not discrimination this is really a good
thing we don’t want them in our field um so as I said if you sacralize
your your political ideologies Heroes you cannot think straight and this is where we are in The Sciences it’s
obvious that if you’re if you’re a
um social conservative uh uh uh Evangelical young earther
creationist you probably shouldn’t be going into a PhD program in biology or geology okay it’s just going to be
really hard for you to deal with reality If you deny Evolution and the age of the
Earth okay you shouldn’t go into American history if you say America is the greatest country on Earth and it simply cannot have committed war crimes
we just don’t do that I mean that’s that should be a disqualification but what about on the
left um suppose you uh suppose you had students coming in who deny that IQ
matters not anymore but for decades it’s just very uncomfortable because there are race differences in IQ the general
view is IQ is a bad test it doesn’t measure it doesn’t matter we can’t allow that IQ matters uh because IQ is
heritable we can’t allow that heritability matters environment has to be everything the left has always
believed that environment can overcome everything else so uh can you do social science If you deny heritability you
think everything is environment when it isn’t the left is full of sex difference deniers hormones are fine for other
animals hormones affect behavior in other animals but how sexist of you to
suggest that male and female differences could in any way be due to the fact that they exposed to different hormones
prenatally that just is ruled out of bounds now it’s not that the left denies Evolution that’s fine for other animals
but evolutionary psychology well that’s almost sexist and racist no Evolution didn’t shape human beings um and last
the biggest area in my field is the study of stereotypes and Prejudice um and we’re trying it’s an important
social problem but we try to solve it while not allowing anybody to even mention the largest cause of stereotypes
and Prejudice there is a small research literature showing that the reason why
people hold stereotypes is because they’re accurate most stereotypes do correspond to some measurable observable
fact about the environment now there are often misinterpretations The Stereotype often lingers long be after the reality
changes so I’m not saying the stereotypes are perfectly accurate but I’m saying a big part of the story is that people are really good at detecting
differences between groups we’re intuitive basian we pick up frequencies we you can’t stop the brain from doing this so suppose you had a whole group of
people coming into social psychology who were the equivalent of young Earth creationists who say I’m going to study
stereotyping and Prejudice but I’m going to just rule in advance that there are no differences between groups and now
I’m going to study what’s left that’s where we are so my point
is that all groups value the truth okay every ideological group believes it values the truth all groups
hold something sacred and if you hold something sacred then as I’ve said no trade-offs no Nuance that means that
your sacred values are going to conflict with the truth and when that happens all groups are the same they throw truth
under the bus and they go with their sacred values and that’s where we are so I hope I’ve shown you uh that iCal
homogeneity now that we no longer have conservatives in some academic Fields it’s a problem it’s bad for our science
we need to clean up our act uh we talk a lot about the value of diversity intellectual diversity is the most
important kind of diversity there could be and I hope finally I’ve answered for you why it is that social justice has a
bad name in much of the country um so how could anyone not want social justice I’m not denying that selfishness and
racism are part of it but I’m saying that there are some valid moral objections why do conservatives distrust
scientists and especially social soci scientists uh well there are some slight differences in Need for cognition there are some reasons why liberals will
predominate uh but a lot of the distrust as I’ve shown you is because their objections to the politicization of
science especially the social sciences um so um I hope then that I have
inspired the Duke University family uh towards ever greater achievements in social justice uh which I hope will mean
it’s time for reexamination the 60s are over and done with we have a new set of challenges much more about class than
race let’s think about what it means what what does Justice really mean in this day and age um uh and let’s think
really carefully before we claim to enlist science as being on our side uh
thank you very
much produced by Duke University online at duke.edu