I’ve noticed something. If you ask someone “would you like to commit suicide?” the answer will typically be “no”. There are specific unusual circumstances (terminal illness, depression, advanced age, etc.) in which people are sometimes inclined toward suicide, but for most of us, most of the time, it is an obviously undesirable proposition. But if you ask the same people “would you like to live indefinitely in your twenties with the aid of nanobots” the answer will also typically be “no”. These answers are contradictory.
Tag: Conservatism
What if God Exists?
When confronted with right wing social conservatism, the left usually adopts one of two strategies. On the one hand, it can argue for tolerance of differing viewpoints, but this argument is only persuasive for those who themselves are not so certain of what they believe as to legislate it. In other words, the tolerance argument only works for people who were already susceptible to accept social progressivism. Alternatively, the left sometimes approaches this problem by rejecting the existence of god so as to undermine the foundation of the conservative belief system, but in order for social conservatives to exist in the first place, their level of confidence in their belief in a god must be very high. These arguments, in many cases, are doomed to fail. So what else can the left argue? Well perhaps the left can seek common ground with the right by accepting, for the purposes of argument, the existence of god.
Who Deserves What?
One of the central questions of distributive justice is desert–what determines the size of one’s claim to the economic pie. The conservative right often maintains that certain inherent virtues or positive qualities justify desert. A hard working person is said to deserve more than a lazy person, a smart person is said to deserve more than a dumb person, and so on. This amounts to sort of a virtue ethic, a deontology–these things are inherently good, and consequently those who possess them deserve more. The liberal left has a different answer to this question, one grounded more in consequences and less in arbitrary virtues and vices, and I think there’s a strong case for saying that it more closely reflects reality.
Where Have the Conservatives Gone?
Conservatives are people politically who are anti-change, anti-reform, who want to preserve things as they are, or return to the way things used to be not so very long ago. Conservatives always represent the time just passed or the time being passed. In the age of the industrial revolution, the conservatives were agrarians who mourned the loss of pastoral life. When the progressive era came along, the conservatives were capitalists who pushed back against the unions and labour reform. Nowadays, however, the left no longer pushes new social programmes, new reforms, or new ideas. Today, right wing politicians like Paul Ryan and David Cameron are the ones supporting things like “welfare reform”, “NHS reform”, “social security reform”, “Medicare reform”, and other reform policies that would change the state structurally, altering elements of it that have been in place for in many cases well over half a century. There is nothing conservative about wanting to change these policies. Change is, inherently, anti-conservative. So where have the conservatives gone? That is today’s topic.
Benjamin Studebaker 