I suspect that almost all of us would behave uniformly when encountering face-to-face with another person’s misfortune—we would all feel instant sympathy. We are born with ‘sympathetic vibrations’–we automatically tear-up in all the same situations. However there seems to be two broad categories of moral behavior in many social-political situations.
We commonly perceive the ‘bleeding heart liberal’ and the ‘hard hearted conservative’. The ‘idealistic but foolish liberal’ and the ‘practical but reasonable conservative’. The individual who was a liberal when young and idealistic becomes the conservative, as s/he grows older and more realistic. The ‘nurturing mother’ attitude versus the ‘strict father’ attitude.
In “A Theory of Justice†John Rawls seeks the principles of ‘justice as fairness’. Rawls assumes that we inherently agree on what constitutes moral behavior. He claims that if we all considered what to be the principles of justice while under a ‘veil of ignorance’ we would all agree. The ‘veil of ignorance’ constituted willful ignorance of our own specific social setting while considering what is fair. Willful ignorance means we ‘forget’ our status of wealth or ‘born-with gifts’ or social standing.
Liberals take the stance that to agree on the fact means to agree on the morality of the situation. Any deviation is indefensible and reflects only selfish rationalization. Liberals find it almost impossible to respect the moral position of conservatives and conservatives find it impossible to judge that liberals are the intellectual equals of conservatives.
The apparent reason for this disjunction is the fact that liberals and conservatives seem to have “their own kind of morality†according to the analysis in â€The Morality of Politics†by W. H. Walsh.
“What we need to observe is that conservatives and liberals are working within different traditions of morality. The morality of the conservative is closed morality; it is the morality of a particular community. The morality of the liberal is an open morality; it is a morality which has nothing to do with any particular human groups, but applies to all men whatever their local affiliations.â€
