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James_Miller comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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Yes, but I don't believe it. As a test, imagine someone offers to give $1 billion to a city if it makes one public water fountain white's only. I bet most liberals would be horrified at the idea of the city accepting the offer.
I imagine that most people in the US would find such a transaction rather unnerving, regardless of political leanings, so this is not a good test of liberal views. Do you have a better example of a correlation between valuing political correctness and liberal views?
Hate speech. The liberal response to what Larry Summers said about women and math seems motivated by disgust.
Haidt acknowledges that liberals feel disgust at racism and that this falls under purity/sacredness (explicitly listing it in a somewhat older article on Table 1, pg 59). His claim is that liberals rely on the purity/sacredness scale relatively more often, not that they never engage it. Still, in your example, I'd expect the typical reaction to be anger at a fairness violation rather than disgust.
But since the harm is trivial, no one is being treated unfairly absent disgust considerations.
You're familiar with the idea of anthropomorphization, right? Well, by analogy to that, I would call what you did here "rationalistomorphization," a word I wish was added to LessWrong jargon.
This reaction needs only scope insensitivity to explain, you don't need to invoke purity. Though I actually agree with you that liberals have a disgust moral center.
How so?
If you are told a billion dollars hasn't been taxed from people in a city, how many people getting to keep a thousand dollars (say) do you imagine? Probably not a million of them. How many hours not worked, or small things that they buy do you imagine? Probably not any.
But now that I think about it, I'd rather have an extra thousand dollars than be able to drink at a particular drinking fountain.
But I don't think fairness the morality center is necessarily fairness over differing amounts of harm. It could be differing over social status. You could have an inflated sense of fairness, so that you cared much more than the underlying difference in what people get.
I don't think it matters of it's racial. The general principle of having someone try to buy out a government's espoused moral principles sounds Very Bad. The reasoning is that if the government can be bought once, it can be bought twice, and thus it can be bought in general and is in the control of moneyed donors rather than the voting populace, proof by induction on the naturals -- so to speak.
Lobbyists and their money already have massive influence over governments. Plus, whether it's a good or bad idea, my claim is that most liberals would find the idea disgusting.
Economics being what it is, this is evidence that your hypothetical segregationist throwback is expecting to get more than a billion dollars of value out of the deal. That doesn't quite establish that someone's trying to screw the city, but it does gesture pretty emphatically in that direction; actual political sentiments hardly enter into it, except insofar as they provide exploitable tensions.
(If I were the mayor, I'd take the money and then build the fountain as part of a practical exhibit in a civil rights museum.)