A hard beating

Sabrina Rubin Ederly followed by Michael LaCour and now Alice Goffman.

The progressive social sciences have taken a hard beating in the past few months. If you don’t want to click through to the background in each case, the summary is that each person has produced research/journalism of a very compelling nature which has entered the knowledge domain in their respective areas (campus sexual violence, gay marriage, and police predation on the underclass). And in each case it now appears that the work, after initial enthusiastic reception, has had to be withdrawn because the stories were made up. Goffman is not yet quite as completely discredited as the first two but the fact that she has destroyed all her field notes does not augur well.

It raises an interesting question. Is there a counterpart on the conservative side of things? Hard to tell. Conservative academics are a relatively rare breed. Conservative academics in the social sciences even rarer. Plus, being a hated minority likely makes them even more cautious in their research.

So is there something about the ethos of the social progressive that predisposes them to fraud, are they simply more gullible, interpreting everything as being consistent with their pre-existing beliefs, or is there something else going on.

Is the issue not so much progressive politics as perhaps it might be that advocacy journalism has its own set of risks? In other words, in seeking to make a story engaging and gripping, that so much factual validity has to be sacrificed that at the end of the process, what might initially have been a fact based case has now become simply a work of fiction?

Perhaps it is a function, not of the advocacy but of the foundational moral principles. Building on an interpretation of Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, perhaps the issue might be something along these lines: Progressives have a narrower and more relativistic view of morals (Care/harm and Fairness/cheating) and have a comfort with the idea that there can be an acceptable trade-off between ends and means. In other words, perhaps academic progressives are more comfortable with the Faustian bargain that the ends justify the means and therefore, from that accepting construct, end up accepting that bargain more often than they should.

In contrast, Haidt’s research seems to suggest that conservatives and libertarians have a more complex and extended values system (Care/harm, Fairness (equality)/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation), which forces more complex moral decision-making. Because they weight more factors, the argument might be that they are then less prone to simple Faustian bargains.

In other words, perhaps conservatives and libertarians are equally prone to committing fraud but because of their more complex and less relativistic moral structures are less likely to slip into fraud.

No answers. Just mulling.