“Climate change is not primarily a moral issue; it is a scientific issue with moral implications, writes Peter Foster.
Foster writes in the first of a two-part column in the Financial Post:
To put the moral issues first is to risk corrupting the science, since moralism tends to crowd out objectivity and lead to a closing of ranks. The potentially corrupting influence of moralism on science is itself a critically important area of scientific study. Ironically, however, it is one that may be neglected because of the strong left-liberal bias of the academic community.
Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychologist who specializes in the moral foundations of politics, created an ideological uproar earlier this year when he suggested that his own field might have become “broken” because of left-liberal bias.
Dr. Haidt’s call for attempts to understand conservative moral perspectives and for a truce in the “culture wars” was admirable, but he also claimed that “climate-change denialism” was an example of conservative moral bias, of a “moral-tribal community … protecting their sacralized free markets.”
But was that suggestion itself left-liberal bias?