Guest Post by Scott Adams
An interesting article in The Atlantic talks about studies showing that liberals think in terms of fairness while conservatives think in terms of morality. So if you want to persuade someone on the other team, you need to speak in their language. We almost never do that. That’s why you rarely see people change their opinions.
As I often say, fairness is a concept invented so children and idiots can participate in debates. Fairness is a subjective illusion. It isn’t a rule of physics, and it isn’t an objective quality of the universe. We just think it is.
On the conservative side, morality is usually seen as coming from God. I’m not a believer, so I see morality as a set of rationalizations for our biological impulses. Luckily, we evolved with some instincts for taking care of each other.
The Persuasion Filter says that both fairness and morality are different forms of magical thinking. And according to that filter on reality, you can’t change the mind of a liberal or a conservative with your logic and your reason. Magical thinking is immune to both.
If your aim is to persuade, you have to speak the language of the other. Talking about fairness to a conservative, or morality to a liberal, fails at the starting gate. The other side just can’t hear what you are saying.
Let me run through some examples. These haven’t been A/B tested, so don’t assume they are persuasive. But they do follow proper form.
Bad argument from a conservative to a liberal:
Abortion is wrong because it takes a human life. (morality)
Good argument from a conservative to a liberal:
Is it fair that you got to grow from a fetus to a full life while so many others do not? Who gets to choose who lives and who dies? (fairness)
I’m not saying the “good” argument would necessarily work. I’m just saying it follows form.
Flipping it around…
Bad argument from a liberal to a conservative:
Climate change is enriching the energy companies at the expense of everyone else. (fairness)
Good argument from a liberal to a conservative:
God created this world and asked us to look after it. We will be judged in the afterlife if we accidentally ruin it for the sake of temporary profit. (morality)
I realize my examples are not strong, but they help explain the concept. The only way you can judge the power of the arguments is by testing them.
Logic, morality, and fairness are three different approaches to persuasion. But there is a fourth way to persuade that involves ignoring both fairness and morality without giving up logic. You can take most debates out of the weeds of fairness and morality to what I call the High Ground, where everyone already agrees.
For example, on the topic of abortion rights there is no way to reach agreement if we are squabbling about morality and fairness. But we might agree that the Federal government should stay out of the abortion business – both pro or con – and leave those types of decisions to the individual and the states.
In the olden days of Roe Vs. Wade, states could ban abortion and get away with it. In 2017 it would be economic suicide. Big employers would stay away because it would be hard to attract talent. Tourists would stay away in protest. Social media would turn the state into a wasteland. No governor can survive a drop in employment that is both state-specific and caused by government action.
Liberals can argue that it is only fair for women to have control over their own bodies. Conservatives can argue that morality means protecting every “life” as they define it. There is no room for compromise with that framing. But both sides might agree on three High Ground concepts:
1. The Federal government (and their Supreme Court puppets) should get out of the business of deciding on women’s reproductive rights. It is neither fair nor moral for them to be involved.
2. It would be economic suicide for a state to ban abortion in 2017.
3. The question of who pays for what is a separate issue.
For new readers of this blog, my view on abortion is that the most credible laws in that area are the ones that have the support of the most women. I choose to delegate my opinion on this topic to women because they have the most skin in the game and I have no special insight to improve the quality of the decisions. I also respect the principle that the people who contribute the most should get some extra rights. (The question of who pays for what is separate.)
“I choose to delegate my opinion on this topic to women because they have the most skin in the game”
Brilliant Scott – this means you would have supported Hitler. He and the German people wanted the Sudetenland returned to Germany’s fold. The German people had the ‘most skin in the game’.
You can rationalize anything:
Women = “it’s my body”.
Hitler = ‘Lebensraum’.
So, liberals may think in terms of “fairness” but I’ve yet to have one explain to me how it is fair to take money I worked hard to earn away from me and give it to someone who didn’t bother to work at all.
Along with a whole lot of other stuff.
Magical or not, I see it as conservatives thinking and liberals emoting.
A conservatives emotions stem from his thinking, a liberals thinking stems from his emotions.
That is the real difference between them.
It’s fair because they are unwilling to live on what they can make in a free society where they can’t get forced money in the form of welfare, tenured jobs teaching victims studies, talk shows, government jobs, front running the fed, etc. They want and therefore deserve more.
You are lucky they leave you anything as since you are a non-statist, you are only left around because someone capable has to be around to do the work that actually matters not that they would admit that. When a leftist calls for and uses an affirmative action surgeon or plumber, then I will listen to them.
Libtards don’t give a wit about fairness. You cannot persuade a Marxist to abandon his goals with reason nor logic.
You cannot reason with Obama, Ashley Jude, nor Gruber.
You’d have a better chance playing chess with a junkyard dog.
You can’t say that loud enough or often enough. The left has no direct skin in the game, so it’s easy for them to protest, cry, and virtue signal. The consequences are falling on everyone else.
I was going through my facebook (all my relatives use it) and I think the newest trend is going to be sanctimonious lecturing on “Unity”. If we don’t sit and coddle them now, we’re being divisive and unreasonable. I say fuck that. I am almost as tired of the word togetherness as I am about diversity, racism, misogyny, or gender. Fuck togetherness, fuck compromise, and fuck understanding. These people have been grandstanding and pontificating for years. I used to hope Trump was a decent president; now what I really want to see is him become a modern day Martin Luther and hammer his 95 thesis to Chuck Schemer’s skull on live television. Hell, I’m fine with him crashing us into a tree as long as the fucking marxists are in the front seat.
Women do NOT have the most skin in the game – the fetus does. If the fetus is aborted, you take away all he or she has or will ever have.
Women have turned abortion into a convenient form of birth control. I think it’s disgusting and abhorrent.
The only argument I ever saw hope in getting through happened during the discussion of Iran’s pursuing nuclear weapon capability in 10 years. The only way I got through was when I reminded my mother that we were guaranteeing her granddaughters a terrible life as they entered adulthood. I saw a flicker of understanding for a moment, before I was accused of presenting an unfair outlook in bringing our family into the picture. Sad but true. As far as the article goes, I see more evidence of a hardening of opinions as opposed to any glimmer of hope in rational discussion that can defuse an already tense world we live in.
I have a better idea of persuasion . Pinochet kills all the communists. What’s the 1 country you don’t hear talk about emigration from in South America?
Similarly , Hugo Chevez . Take all the property of essentially white aristocracy . What’s the country where people are trying to emmigrate from in South America?
It really is a question of might makes right. Or rather not what rules but rather who rules that counts.
Said another way. Your not talking or persuading yourself out of this one. Freedom isn’t free if that’s what you believe. Similarly , fairness will have to be imposed if that’s what you believe.
Nothing much to see here. Scott is simply describing a tactic known for many decades known as “political crossdressing.” It simply means using arguments familiar to leftists to promote conservative ideas and vice versa.
Moron faux-libertarians can’t understand the existential emergency of being occupied by a bodily parasite imposed upon a free individual, often by force.
This discussion seems always to be presided over by Males.
Hey, Male.. d’you think that your one little crappy spermbot—a single cell—which has hi-jacked a woman’s entire sentient and formerly-autonomous organism made of trillions and quadrillions of cells that she made herself with money from her waitressing job (most likely no thanks to you, mister)—should reign supreme? And she has to put together 6-8 pounds of surplus meat she might well ill afford? For what? To glorify your one little spurt of jism, which is now supposed to control her life for the next eighteen years?
No thanks.
If the tables were turned, you might get it. You might figure out what is wrong with this picture.
I’d love to see every fun-fuck for you meatheads turn into a potential health risk and a 20-year life sentence.
Comment was turbid. C-
I’m in full agreement that this fate should never, never befall you, not so much for your sake as for that of the “surplus meat” that would suffer the life sentence of having had you as a mother.
Perhaps it’s a shame your mother didn’t feel that way about you.
>User name is “Chubby Bubbles”
>Worried about needing an abortion
Hey Fatty, you’d need to be able to find your cooter before you can get knocked up.
If a lib tells me Trump is Hitler, I’ll tell them that it’s not fair to prohibit NAZIs from being president.
Life’s not fair.
A baseball bat comes to mind as a “persuader”. It will come to that in the end to avoid becoming North Korea or Venezuela redux.
Chubby Bubbles….please seek sterilization.