Jonathan Haidt is a #fail again — now on bin Laden

Once again, the conservative flak man of academic sociology blows it.

A month or so ago, he was criticizing academia for alleged bias against conservatives, as I blogged about, rather than looking at conservatives' possible (no, not possible, actual and huge) bias against academia.

Now?

As Massimo Pigliucci points out, he's saying it's a good thing to have celebrated Osama bin Laden's death — and making a hash of moral philosophy at the same time.

Per Massimo, his biggest failures are claiming you cannot "ramp up" moral interactions between individuals to a large-scale level and claiming nationalism and patriotism are two different things. On the former:

You can’t just scale up your ideas about morality at the individual level and apply them to groups and nations. If you do, you’ll miss all that was good, healthy and even altruistic about last week’s celebrations.

Empirical warrant offered for this statement in the first sentence? Zip.

So, he's a conservative moral relativist who, being a good conservative, would deny he's a moral relativist.