We humans have a real tendency to believe what is intellectually, psychologically or morally satisfying and to think that we can make things true by believing them. eg, Why don't you believe in God? Don't you want good people to be rewarded and bad people to be punished?
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"I am no longer an atheist because I don't agree with the values of certain prominent atheists.' Therefore God exists? "I want men and women to be equal. Therefore gender differences don't exist.'
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This is the danger of the pragmatic approach to truth which seems to come so naturally to us - something is true if it helps to achieve my goals.
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It's why we need to distinguish very clearly between narratives that feel meaningful & things that have been established provisionally to be true by evidence. Often what is true is counterintuitive because we did not evolve cognitively primarily to discover what is true.
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Jonathan Haidt shows that we work primarily on intuition and then use our reasoning capabilities to justify this because it was likely that it was more beneficial to our survival to maintain good relationships with other humans than to get things right.
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He describes this as our having, not an inner scientist but an inner lawyer. It is unlikely that any human can overcome this. The best we can do is be aware of it, keep in mind that we are probably wrong about many things, try to minimise it & work with ppl with different views
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Oof. That's quite a dichotomy you've thrown up there. Surely (a) many/most moral judgements are based on evidence (b) some moral positions are inherently justifiable, eg. do not murder.
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It's the basis of the hostility between the SocJus skeptics and the 'new atheist' skeptics, not an analysis of humanity or a claim that most skeptics belong to one or the other. .
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I’d characterize SocJus Skeptics as being more aware and accepting of how ideological bias informs our interpretation of evidence, and the “new atheist” skeptics mistakenly believing that they have achieved true bias-free living. I would say that though, wouldn’t I! :)
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It’s possible to set your compunctions aside, make a limited number of pliable assumptions & rely on epistemologically sound methodologies to navigate from 1st principles. Not a matter of eliminating biases but having a different one, in favour of what is more likely to be true.
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Based on Helen's characterisation, I'd say I align myself more closely with the SJ side. The NA side seems more naive, more human-as-machine. Since, as I say, moral motivation does not exist in an evidence-free vacuum.
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Not evidence free but there is more often than not a noticeable tethering to a parochial set of compunctions. The orbit around a political ideology is quite apparent in SJ atheists, a necessity to return to their Cartesian origin within the confines of a conversation. That’s bias
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Maybe he quit atheism to avoid getting fired from atheism.
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