Often historical figures are accused of having a “might makes right” attitude. The idea being that the one with superior military might is the one who is morally right. The Romans used the line “vae victus”, or “woe to the vanquished”. In moral philosophy, this is usually deemed a fallacy. Just because one is the stronger does not necessarily mean that one has ethical truth on one’s side. The strong have, throughout history, done many terrible things. However, I have begun to see a modern form of the same argument used in today’s society, and this I find very troubling.
Tag: Democracy
Groupthink: How Democracy Maintains Evil and Injustice
This morning an entirely new line of attack on democracy occurred to me, and I feel an intense pressure to share it with all my readers. In the past, I have argued that democracy has a tendency to result in the political preferences of the median voter being realised. There is, however, a related implication that did not occur to me at the time of writing and which has such spectacular implications so as to deserve a post unto itself for explication.
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A Reaction to Peter Hitchens: Democracy, Drugs, and Free Will
Yesterday evening the university was visited by Peter Hitchens, columnist for the Daily Mail, ardent conservative, and brother to the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. You can read his blog here. Peter Hitchens exceeded my intellectual expectations and impressed me. He was thoughtful, clever, articulate, and even admitted to not always being thoroughly pleased with the content of the paper for which he writes. I even found myself agreeing with Hitchens in one quite notable, and though I disagree with many of his other positions, the nature of our disagreement was not quite what I expected either. Today I would like to discuss to views and opinions of Peter Hitchens, where I agree with him, where I disagree, and the reasoning behind each.
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The Foreign Policy Borg
One of the most common criticisms of Obama from the left is that his foreign policy is not discernibly all that different from that of late period George W. Bush–Guantanamo was never closed, Obama employed a surge strategy in Afghanistan, drone attacks were used, troop numbers continued to decline in Iraq, it all felt, and perhaps it all feels, as though nothing has changed. At the same time, many on the left like to argue that, were Kerry or Gore elected, things would have been quite different, that Bush was discernibly distinct from Clinton. The historical record shows this to be false–Bush’s foreign policy amounted to a mere evolution of Clinton’s military interventionism and embrace of the democratic peace theory, the notion that democracies promote peace and prosperity and that, consequently, democracy should be spread to foreign lands. It’s not as if the interventions in Somalia and Yugoslavia during the nineties were motived in any way significantly differently from the reasoning eventually supplied for the occupation of Iraq–spreading freedom, ending tyranny, and so on down the line. Of course, when these people were running for office, they talked a different game. They tried to draw distinction from their predecessors and purported to offer a serious foreign policy alternative–Mitt Romney as we recall attempted this very line of argument. So why is it that our presidents get assimilated into the foreign policy borg and adopt policies that are, for the most part, quite similar to those adopted by their predecessors? That’s today’s topic of investigation.
Judges and Juries
One of the popular arguments for democracy as opposed to expert-driven, sophiarchist government is the notion that democracy is good for the same reasons that juries are good as opposed to judges. David Estlund makes just such an argument in Democratic Authority on the basis that all reasonable people can accept the jury model but not a system of judges due to uncertainty regarding the knowledge of the judges and that, by extension, all reasonable people can accept democracy but not government by experts. Today I aim to challenge this line of argument with a more critical examination of judges and juries and how we use them.
