Jonathan Haidt: why social justice and truth are incompatible values for academia

[Jolly_Penguin]

I like Haidt. His book "Righteous Mind" is one of the best I have read in a while. It helped me as a liberal to break free of tribal mindset and to stop seeing conservatives as just plain dumb or evil.

Instead, now you see the "regressive left" that way. Progress.

Not quite. No more than religious people anyway. The regressive left are not evil or dumb. They are just misguided and let their sense of holy and righteousness get in the way of rational thinking. Their religion is victimhood and they seek it out wherever they can, in micro-aggressions so tiny that only they can see it. Haidt covers it well in the vid above.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

If we want equal access to healthcare, without regard to economic or social status, is that demanding equal treatment, or demanding equal outcome?

That would be equal treatment and equal access. Equal outcome would be if you caught a cold and insisted everybody else must catch it too, or if you lost a limb, and insisted everybody else have a limb amputated.

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ALL of your posts? No matter what they area bout? That is down right abusive and the personification of adhominem.

So long as it is related to race, even as a tangent, I was told to put it in this forum. I expect it will last until I agree with the conclusions of the admins on the scientific topics.

Well now, so long as they don't pretend to be about Freethought then eh? Imagine the hoopla if a mod did that to the regressives here. Every race based thread Athena or laughing dog etc opens must be in pseudoscience. There would be blood. lmao

 

[blastula]

Instead, now you see the "regressive left" that way. Progress.

Not quite. No more than religious people anyway. The regressive left are not evil or dumb. They are just misguided and let their sense of holy and righteousness get in the way of rational thinking. Their religion is victimhood and they seek it out wherever they can, in micro-aggressions so tiny that only they can see it. Haidt covers it well in the vid above.

Is there anybody you think is dumb or evil now? Present company excepted.

 

[Bronzeage]

That would be equal treatment and equal access. Equal outcome would be if you caught a cold and insisted everybody else must catch it too, or if you lost a limb, and insisted everybody else have a limb amputated.

Would this include treatment for allergies to straw?

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Not quite. No more than religious people anyway. The regressive left are not evil or dumb. They are just misguided and let their sense of holy and righteousness get in the way of rational thinking. Their religion is victimhood and they seek it out wherever they can, in micro-aggressions so tiny that only they can see it. Haidt covers it well in the vid above.

Is there anybody you think is dumb or evil now? Present company excepted.

Donald Trump qualifies.

 

[ronburgundy]

Seems to me that under the normal understandings of social justice and truth, that real social justice requires truth.

Social justice requires no more truth than striving for injustice. Whether an outcome is social justice or injustice is purely a matter of subjective emotion and feeling, and not a matter of objective truth. If a personal preference for how things should be is met, then its "justice", if not, then its "injustice".
Social justice is no more related to truth than a goal like making as much money as possible. While there are truths about what methods will best achieve the goal, the best methods often entail telling and spreading untruths about various things to get people to act in ways that achieve the desire goal.

Achieving social justice means getting people (and the systems they control) to act in a particular way that produces particular "just" outcomes. Very often, telling lies is more effective than telling truths at getting people to act is those ways. Thus, social justice goals, no matter what ideological values are the basis for determining those goals, will almost never be best served by sticking to truths. Rather, some truths will serve the goal, some truths will be neutral, and some truths will impede the goal. Note that none of this means that the goals are wrong in a moral sense because moral wrongs have little to do with factual truths.

Take any "social justice" goal of any political camp and there will be countless ways in which bending, hiding, or denying various truths makes achieving that goal more likely. There is only one goal for which this is not the case, and that is the goal of only supporting the objective rational truth about everything.

So, any academic that is striving for any political, social, or justice goal will necessarily have motive to violate the principles of rational thought and discourse that are the foundation of any respectable academic discipline.

Basically, it is the same reason why profit motive is not generally compatible with basic science. Objective truths and those truth being known to all is only occasionally going to be the best path to the most profit.

 

[blastula]

It's ironic that in a talk where he lauds the value/telos of truth above all, he cites the false "trigger warning for Hofstra presidential debate" story. "Motivated reasoning," indeed. Which is problematic since he made a lot of unsourced claims about the rate of pc problems in universities. It is a problem where students and faculty go overboard in blocking and chilling free speech, but I don't know how much of a problem it is. If it is worse now than 10 years ago, by how much? Or is it a case of we hear more stories because of more accessible media today?