We are used to thinking of beliefs as biased. And usually we see the greatest sources of bias coming from unconscious psychological processes or from the willful refusal to admit what we know in our hearts or in our minds.
However, it is not only conclusions that are biased. In fact, I would bet that most bias is rooted in other places. An incomplete list:
- Categorization schemas that define identity and impute agency.
- Relevance criteria that systematically focus attention on some empirical data while neglecting other data.
- Normative logics that invest various phenomena with moral meaning.
- Epistemic methods for producing what ought to be regarded as universal and binding truths.
Until we grasp these dynamics and stop behaving as if we have settled matters when we have used our own subjective categories, relevance criteria, normative logics and epistemic methods to come to objective conclusions whose self-evident truth is a litmus test for justice — we remain illiberal and are unfit for intellectual and political leadership in liberal-democratic institutions.
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Arguments based on unconscious psychological bias are as effective and impossible to argue against as arguments based on insidious demonic influences.
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Liberalism is the most radical practice of the golden rule. It recognizes that what we would have done unto ourselves is respect for our sense of reality — our own finite piece of infinite knowledge of the world — our own personal everything amidst myriad everythings. It recognizes that our most reliable source of the infinite beyondness is the alternative everything of our neighbors. Infinite beyondness induces dread.
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What we hate in our neighbor is God’s own inherent dread.
Good is understanding that the two highest commandments — love god with your entirety and love your neighbor as yourself — are as discrete and inseparable as the persons of the trinity.
Evil justifies itself by systematically interpreting dread as detection of evil, and the suppression of dread as righteousness.
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Hell is the confusion of dread and evil.
Hell is the belief that hell is other people.