aninescapablebias

The fundamental ideological bias is ideology itself --the notion that believing the correct principles will lead to the correct conclusions. It's not unlike the basic function of scientific thinking --that knowing the underlying workings of nature will make one better able to understand and predict the specifics of the natural world. Also, easy comfort is found in one's perceived ability to impugn other's ideas by appeal to their specific failures on other issues. If the other guy's value system leads him to conclude that orphans should be loaded into giant hamster-wheel generators or all bridges should be one-way roads like God intended, it's tempting to think his entire value system is discredited by that conclusion. Just as tempting, but even shakier as a useful judgement, is taking one's incomplete strawman idea of what the other guy's value system is or must be, and trying to construct a thoroughly horrid conclusion from it in order to accomplish the above.

The opposite to the fundamental bias of ideology would be that no social or political questions are connected at all, that no underlying principle could possibly lead to better conclusions across multiple issues. I'm not convinced humans can actually think like this. I suspect anyone who might claim to be guided by such pragmatism would be simply unaware of their underlying ideological framework.