Examining the Moderation Effect of Political Trust on the Linkage between Civic Morality and Support for Environmental Taxation

Climate change and pollution are threatening sustainable environments and human life. To mitigate and adapt to the effects of such threats, governments around the world need significant financial resources. Accordingly, this study focuses on which factors are associated with individuals’ support for taxation to protect the environment and pays special attention to the direct effects of civic morality and political trust, as well as their joint effects on support for environmental taxation. Ordered probit results with a sample size of 760 demonstrate that civic morality is positively associated with individuals’ support for environmental taxation; political trust works in the same way. More importantly, political trust moderates and enhances the linkage between civic morality and support for environmental taxation, demonstrating that it can serve as a powerful tool in a government’s efforts to protect the environment.

The Context of Michael Polanyi’s “What to Believe”

This essay contextualizes Polanyi’s 1947 talk, “What to Believe.” After reviewing connections that probably led to Polanyi’s invitation to make this presentation at the Student Christian Movement conference in Manchester, I comment on Polanyi’s effort to compare the connection between understanding, believing and belonging in science, Christianity and “civic morality.” The main ideas in this talk should be viewed in relation to other writing from the mid-forties to the early fifties when Polanyi begins to develop his “fiduciary” philosophy as an alternative to what he views as the excessively skeptical disposition of the modern mind.

What to Believe

“What to Believe” is a brief, hitherto unpublished talk that Michael Polanyi gave at a spring 1947 conference of the Student Christian Movement in Manchester, UK. Polanyi criticizes the way in which modern skepticism undercuts Christianity and what he calls “civic morality” and also promotes a misleading account of modern science. Polanyi outlines and compares the ways in which believing and belonging underlie understanding in science, Christianity and “civic morality.”