Is There a Robin Hood in Each of Us?

That's a stupid question. We all have Buddha, Robin Hood, Hitler, Max et al in each of us. But we don't always show all these traits and what we selective show is what morality is about.

This article on the new Robin Hood movie states "We may be predisposed to be Robin Hood." We are predisposed to everything (and being Robin Hood is not panacea) but they do talk about Jonathan Haidt's research on morality:

"Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has studied our political beliefs via surveys conducted at YourMorals.org. "Everybody wants fairness," he explains, "but fairness is such a tricky concept because there are many versions." Liberals prefer equality, when everyone has the same number of dollars. Conservatives prefer equity, when the ratio of what a person puts in to what he gets is the same for everyone—basically, that everyone gets what he or she deserves.

Fowler, on the other hand, believes that on the subject of redistribution, liberals and conservatives are more similar than we think. In one version of the public goods games mentioned earlier, he and his colleagues found that people who are in a political party of any kind—Democrat or Republican—are more likely to redistribute incomes than people who are not party members. "Everyone agrees that there should be some redistribution, but we disagree on how it should be done," Fowler says. "Republicans trust the market more. Democrats trust the government a little bit more."

Anyways about the movie - I cannot imagine Russell Crowe as Robin Hood, I cannot get rid of the imagine of Kevin Coster as Robin Hood. And I cannot even think of a Robin Hood without this song by Bryan Adams.