I expect you're pretty much done with this conversation.
On the edge, but your honest request to continue it kept me here a bit longer.
But if not, I'd love it if you could tell me why your certainty is any more valid than anybody's who is certain you're wrong.
To some extent, this is fundamentally unanswerable on a philosophical level. How do I know genocide is wrong? I know I don’t like it, but how do I know that matters, that it’s a valid basis for action? I know the people who see it as possibly happening to them don’t like it, but how do I know that in some abstract, non-subjective way, their feelings matter? I know that, if we lived in a world where genocide were more routine than it is now, people would on average be less happy than they are now, but so what? Maybe people’s desire to commit genocide is more important, according to somebody else’s moral lights, than people’s desire not to have genocide perpetrated against them. If you don’t accept my moral intuition that genocide is to be avoided (and if you don’t accept some God whose word you think you need to obey — and I will note that throughout history gods’ opinions of genocide have been a bit mixed), then there’s nothing I can do to convince you.
On the other hand, you and I may agree that genocide is a bad thing, and disagree factually about how to avoid it. In the ’30s, there was sincere debate in the West about whether confrontation or conciliation with Hitler was likely to have the best outcome for the people whose lives he affected. In the ’50s and ’60s, there was similar debate in the US over what policy towards the Soviet Union would be best, in the long and the short term for Soviet citizens (including the Jews and other minorities brutally persecuted by Stalin). People with very similar goals argued radically different courses of action. And since you can’t go back and repeat the experiment the other way, it’s kind of tricky to collect data from history. But it’s not impossible.
I think you want (or think you want) to maximize human freedom. I also want to maximize human freedom. I think you think that if you got to be the architect of the Utopian society, designing its rules, you could be the perfect watchmaker and construct a machine that would produce maximal freedom. And I look at the machine you want and its starting state (including the watchmakers) and it’s obvious to me that that would be a machine for producing human misery on a grand scale, that would turn on many of the people who had put it in place in the first place and destroy them (somewhat like the French Revolution).
So here I’m basing my decisions about what to fight for and what to fight against on two basic things I trust about myself: My moral intuition (which tells me that letting people live their lives as freely as possible consistent with other people also living their lives equally freely is desirable), and my ability to predict consequences.
If you want Ron Paul to be president, and you want him to be able to put into practice his articulated policies, you are advocating for a the most radical sudden change this country has seen since the Civil War. (And in fact, when you make the arguments you are making for state sovereignty over the Federal constitution and Bill of Rights that you are making, you are essentially advocating going back to the condition of the US prior to the Civil War, modulo the fact that the country’s a lot more urban now and slavery has lost a lot of popularity in the intervening century and a half.) Even if I didn’t think Ron Paul was a racist, misogynist, homophobic lunatic who would be happy seeing Dominionists in power, even if I agreed with everything he said and thought he was a wise and foresightful person, I wouldn’t want to make such a huge restructuring in one jump. I would want to make smaller changes as experiments and see how they go.
OK, that’s maybe one third of the first point of three or four, and probably not the most important or the most interesting point, but I can’t let this discussion take over my life. (And LJ won’t let me post comments that long, anyway.)
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Re: PS — a couple more articles
On the other hand, you and I may agree that genocide is a bad thing, and disagree factually about how to avoid it. In the ’30s, there was sincere debate in the West about whether confrontation or conciliation with Hitler was likely to have the best outcome for the people whose lives he affected. In the ’50s and ’60s, there was similar debate in the US over what policy towards the Soviet Union would be best, in the long and the short term for Soviet citizens (including the Jews and other minorities brutally persecuted by Stalin). People with very similar goals argued radically different courses of action. And since you can’t go back and repeat the experiment the other way, it’s kind of tricky to collect data from history. But it’s not impossible.
I think you want (or think you want) to maximize human freedom. I also want to maximize human freedom. I think you think that if you got to be the architect of the Utopian society, designing its rules, you could be the perfect watchmaker and construct a machine that would produce maximal freedom. And I look at the machine you want and its starting state (including the watchmakers) and it’s obvious to me that that would be a machine for producing human misery on a grand scale, that would turn on many of the people who had put it in place in the first place and destroy them (somewhat like the French Revolution).
So here I’m basing my decisions about what to fight for and what to fight against on two basic things I trust about myself: My moral intuition (which tells me that letting people live their lives as freely as possible consistent with other people also living their lives equally freely is desirable), and my ability to predict consequences.
If you want Ron Paul to be president, and you want him to be able to put into practice his articulated policies, you are advocating for a the most radical sudden change this country has seen since the Civil War. (And in fact, when you make the arguments you are making for state sovereignty over the Federal constitution and Bill of Rights that you are making, you are essentially advocating going back to the condition of the US prior to the Civil War, modulo the fact that the country’s a lot more urban now and slavery has lost a lot of popularity in the intervening century and a half.) Even if I didn’t think Ron Paul was a racist, misogynist, homophobic lunatic who would be happy seeing Dominionists in power, even if I agreed with everything he said and thought he was a wise and foresightful person, I wouldn’t want to make such a huge restructuring in one jump. I would want to make smaller changes as experiments and see how they go.
OK, that’s maybe one third of the first point of three or four, and probably not the most important or the most interesting point, but I can’t let this discussion take over my life. (And LJ won’t let me post comments that long, anyway.)