Steve Stewart-Williams's post at Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche links to a paper by Jake Womick and colleagues about different definitions of victimhood between liberals and conservatives.
In general, liberals see vulnerability as group-based, dividing the moral world into groups of vulnerable victims and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives downplay group-based differences, seeing vulnerability as more individual and evenly distributed.
Womick thinks this division makes more sense than Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations and fits the experimental data better. That is encouraging to me, as I very much liked Haidt's research at first despite some flaws I noted, and was disappointed when its predictive value was not holding up as well as expected.
3 comments:
Using the victim label seems more infantilizing than anything else.
The graph suggests that the liberal heuristic, though a terrible idea, does lead them to a greater accuracy even on the question of which individuals are likely to be victims. Illegal immigrants are highly likely to be victimized compared with state troopers, for example; and this is true even if you allow an expansive definition of 'victimized,' rather than a restrictive one (e.g. 'victims of violent crime' or 'victims of physical violence').
Meanwhile, bibles and flags aren't really capable of being victims in the same sense at all. Burn them, and they don't suffer; cut them, and they don't bleed.
Nor do Korans, but here we are...
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