TED Talk on Moral Values: Liberals and Conservatives

21 Oct

Over at TED, there’s a talk by Jonathan Haidt on “The real difference between liberals and conservatives.”  It’s well worth watching, especially with the election-heightened tensions between the two groups.  Haidt examines five “moral values” that define humans and explains which ones each group tends to favor.  But more than just explaining how liberals and conservatives think, he also examines why each side is necessary and encourages us to step outside of the “moral matrix” and, at least for a moment, be neither for or against either side.

I found the talk intriguing, and similar to my own views.  Part of what makes America amazing is that we have been able to do just that.  As I wrote to a friend this week:

It’s probable that I will never be able to give any reason that some people will think is good enough to justify voting for Obama.  If this is the case, let’s at least agree to respect each others views; to recognize that their is intelligence, wisdom, patriotism, and goodness on both sides of the aisle; and refuse to demonize the other party as insane baby-killers or torture-happy maniacs.  This country has come through two hundred and fifty years with people having deep disagreements over issues, and it is better for that.  But that is only because we have always been able to recognize that we are all Americans and we all bring something to the table.

So watch Haidt’s talk over at TED and think, briefly, outside of the traditional liberal-conservative framework.

Advertisement

Tags: , , ,

One Response to “TED Talk on Moral Values: Liberals and Conservatives”

  1. Eugene 22 October 2008 at 02:28 #

    looking forward for more information about this. thanks for sharing. Eugene

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

Please log in to WordPress.com to post a comment to your blog.

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.