I Know this Poll has been taken, but. . .

[angus]

'Good' and 'bad' are entirely subjective.

and that distinguishes these terms from everything else??


Yes/neither.

[angus]

It is interesting that, according to these poll results, the philosophy that supports personal freedom more is also the philosophy that is less trusting in the goodness of people.

That was the intent of this was to find out.  I expected the opposite results.

alright then, I'll vote Yes/Libertarian, since among the four choices I suppose that's my closest match.  That, and I'm curious now to see the results as well.  Happy polling. 

[angus]

damn.  now that I've seen it I must admit I'm a tad surprised too.

I asume you'd have expected the rightists/small govt types to be overwhelmingly YES and the leftists/large govt types to be mostly NO.  Shows how little we know.  Anyway, don't get discouraged, Vorlon can tell you a lot of this has to do with your wording (And the odd choices.)  Let folks forget about it, wait a few months, then ask something like, "I believe in the innate benevolence of mankind"

YES/D
YES/R
YES/Other
NO/D
NO/R
NO/Other

[angus]

Preston, I have to say, I'm with True Independent and Gabu here.  I would have guessed Rightists/small government types have a basic faith (However misguided or misplaced!!) in the benevolence of mankind.  And Leftists/large government types do not fall into that category.  Not that they think mankind is innately malevolent.  Just not benevolent.  And this would explain a great deal.  Apparently, it would.

But then, obviously, given the poll results, we were mistaken.  (Though I suspect that this result depends more on the experimental conditions, the wording, the sampling, etc., than on the fact that we were wrong.  After all, you know I'm never really wrong in the greater universal aesthetic sense.)