Which of these principles of moral conduct is most important for you?

When any two of these principles are in conflict, which do you give primacy to?

feeling all warm fuzzy about the slogans of the Nazi Party in 1936 was a big mistake, that is what the fundies are doing, following their hearts.. that is madness..

Heart is community and equality and shared responsibility & sacrifice to make a good country. Heart is empathy and not about tax cuts or the like.

You think * or any of his regime have one?

I should make that clear in the original post, in case anyone doesn't get it.

I was thinking of the Kantian principle of "universality" in ethics. That is, for a given course of action to be morally right or wrong, that course of action should be universally so and not just for us or for others. (My apologies in advance to the philosophy majors out there for my vulgar bastardization\bowdlerization of this principle.)

For example, if we define "terrorism" as killing "innocent civilians to achieve political ends" but, in the course of declaring a "war on terrorism" kill innocent civilians to achieve political ends, we are not adhering to the principle of universality. If terrorism as defined is morally wrong, it is universally morally wrong and not just when people we don't like engage in it.

I guess this would fall under ideological consistency, but had a hard time choosing.

and the rest will follow. Ideology is fine as far as it goes, but when it gets off track you've got to have enough contact with reality to recognize it. Results matter, we can't confuse a love of where we'd like to end up with flawed method of getting there. Lose respect for the truth and the rest fails right behind it.

The truth shall set you free...

Just like Trust, Under Control, Firm, Resolve, Leader, Natural Law, Pay the Price, the ever-popular Confident, Strong, Positive, Optimist, Character and a host of other words which they have seized on for their affective potential and now litter their conversation and even their thinking with in an attempt to maintain a euphoric buzz of hearty conservative cheer within themselves and amongst the rest of us - as usual they think that if you only get it up enough, then everything else will fall into place, and you will succeed by perseverance, fortitude and strength.

There are two problems with this:

1. all the good intentions and moral fortitude in the world cannot change physical reality. Like, too much fossil fuel consumption creates greenhouse gases which cause global warming which are making the planet unlivable for higher lifeforms currently occupying it including us. This sort of thing will not change just because we are moral Christians. This MO is the conservatives' favorite, with parallels in the neocons' assertion that policy content doesn't matter nearly as much as policy presentation, and other vaguely Nietzschian notions about will working miracles. Proof by vigorous assertion was one of the first things that a good math professor demonstrated to his students was not a useful technique, but rather that logical reasoning based on objective fact was the only way to go. This applies here as well.

2. on the darker side, the conservative propensity for the circular reasoning that a. the righteous are strong, b. strength is evidence of righteousness and therefore c. taking a and b together implies that the strong are righteous makes the above not just Nietzschian but Hitlerian, with its emphasis on will having a magical i.e. nonrational power to change physical reality.

In short, the conservatives feed themselves their own opiate of the masses, or in fact more precisely Jonestown Kool-Aid, with this reduction of language to simplistic triggers for conditioned responses, and want to spread their disease to the rest of us as well. What "heart" with a small 'h' and no (TM) following it can actually be taken to mean is that accurate perception of objective fact as described above means that we have discerned the truth, which will be true whether any human believes it or not, the protestation of relativists and others whose agendas are too defective to advance honestly aside, and that once we have done that we can rely on its power over untruth to convince our fellows of its correctness as well. Battles remain to be fought with those whose self-interest dictates that they deny the truth, but that is a tactical issue as opposed to a fundamental one. So that in fact the survey result is affirmed.

:-)