t leftists have a lower level of moral development than conservatives — Brendan Golledge

Hey Brendan, just curious. Would you extend this moral
superiority to Trump or just to his MAGA followers?

There is more in this post than most commenters are going to give it. But I can already see from the one response, people are not going to be even partially fair to an view-from-above post like this. A shame. — AmadeusD

…the left has no genuine moral beliefs; all their beliefs are only verbally espoused in order to try to win the approval of other leftists. I think MAGA is in the conventional stage of morality, which is concerned with law and order…

This study would seem to be consistent with the idea I just described that leftists have a lower level of moral development than conservatives. — Brendan Golledge

I’m just trying to wrap my head around the image of Brendan sitting in the middle of a group of MAGA supporters and saying to himself “Gee, these people are so much more morally developed than leftists!”.

State and market influences are a reflection of and response to where the community decides it wants to make use of the state and the market.

Such a sentiment could be used to justify practically anything though, right? For instance, the people picked Trump, and they picked him despite his obviously extreme authoritarian tendencies and lack of respect for the rule of law. They picked pill mill doctors and opiates. They picked mass incarceration as a solution to opiates — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why shouldn’t it justify anything? What other authority have you got to invoke to justify or condemn a society? Is there some sovereign, sideways-on or god’s-eye perspective that hovers above the fray of messy, practical political
engagement? We can’t climb outside of our contingent societal norms to sit in judgement of them. The judgements belong to the contingent normative field itself.

The dictator Nayib Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in Latin American history. Is this the result of a successful propaganda campaign, or do his many supporters recognize and endorse what he is? Should we condemn that society for not being prepared for the task of embracing a democratic political system of robust checks and balances, or might we instead recognize that they must discover for themselves , through trial and error, its advantages?

Yet if it was true that state action reflects community preferences, how exactly do you explain simultaneous rioting in most urban centers over the infamies of American police in 2020? Has the "market and people" spoken here? And is it obvious that if "the market (people) want it," it's a good thing? Have the American people also spoken in favor of the private health insurance system? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I consider BLM in many respects a ‘boutique’ movement, whose principles reflect the latest in academic theory. This in part may explain why it was embraced so rapidly by highly educated , wealthy liberals in places like Chicago’s north side and posh north shore suburbs, but may have resonated less well within the inner city black neighborhoods that were the alleged focus of the protests. For instance, most residents of the most crime-ridden communities wanted greater police presence (albeit less trigger-happy) rather than a defunding of the police.
Large urban centers like New York and Chicago are split politically in ways not dissimilar to the red-blue nationwide divide, although this is covered over to an extent by the fact that the vast majority of blacks still vote democratic.
Poorer communities and those with large concentrations of immigrants from places like Africa, Mexico and China skew socially conservative, which may explain how a Trump-supporting major like Eric Adams was elected in New York.

the liberal individual isn't actually some atomized super human shedding their need for community, they just force the state to force others to provide them what they need to be atomized individuals in a market context.

And if some people in their nation want to choose a more communitarian system? "Too bad, they still must pay for us to have the liberal system first and can use what they have left over," has been the general liberal solution.

This is why the left/right tension within liberalism tends to be about the state doing more or less to help people be atomized individuals by taking some people's property to enable others to be more atomized. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your notion of the communitarian is just the flip side of the individualist atomism you oppose. Rather than analyzing the nature of community as an additive composite of sovereign individuals, you invest the community with sovereign moral attributes derived not from actual interactions among socially shapes selves but from an already assumed set of ethical absolutes. You apply these context-independent norms to your notion of the communitarian and then force it onto the individual.
Timothy, I am not an atom, and neither is my community. Neither how I ought to act as an individual nor how the community ought to act can be ascertained in advance , but only emerges as a function of the actual ongoing reciprocal interactions of each of us with each other. The role of the State and the market reflect the needs that emerge out of these interactions, such as the need to nurture community based on intertwined interests rather rely on blood ties and the oppressive formal obligations that tend to go along with it. This historically recent changes in attitude concerning the centrality of the family is not the triumph of the ideology of the atomized individual, but the transition from absolutizing concepts of community to discursive, practice-based accounts.

As to the ‘proselytizing’ nature of liberalism, it’s not as though Timothy isnt proselytizing from his pulpit when he attacks liberalism

Whenever you complain about "Platonic" metaphysics and routinely suggest postmodern ones, is this not proselytizing? What makes it different? It seems the only difference here is that we are in disagreement about how great liberalism is. If offering a critique at all "proselytizing?"

Of course I think there is something wrong at the core of liberalism. I said it's vision on human liberty is extremely myopic. Can one not disagree with liberalism's voluntarist vision of freedom? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The difference between my defense of postmodernism and your critique of liberalism is that I would never dream of passing judgement on any political system put into practice by a society from a vantage outside of the normative
dynamics at play within that society. Attacks on liberalism in the U.S. amounts to a clash between rival communities. If I choose sides and defend liberalism, I am not telling
the community critical of liberalism that they should not be constructing their political system in the way that makes sense to them, and justifying this on some objective truth that I think they are ignoring or can’t see. Rather, I can offer them my alternative and let them determine if and how they can incorporate it into their thinking.

This also ignores that sectoral shift is far less damaging when it happens slowly or that neo-liberal policy also allowed a massive influx of immigration to further drive down wages paired with the shock of off-shoring. New immigration was unpopular and couldn't be passed as a law, so they just stopped enforcing the rule of law on this issue, leading to a substantial share of the population lacking legal status so that they could also serve as a more easily exploitable underclass. The results of globalization and migration absolutely hammered unions, which is why unionization collapsed instead of spreading into the service sector — Count Timothy von Icarus

Blaming immigration for the dissolution of labor unions is a common meme on the right, and especially by the Trumpists. I’m more persuaded by arguments like this:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/immigrants-didnt-kill-your-union/

I do find your opinions interesting though, because you're statements, particularly on a permanent underclass, have often reminded me a lot of Charles Murray, but obviously the underlying philosophical assumptions are quite different. The judgements on the fate of the underclass seem very much in the vein that celebrates to "exceptional individual" one finds in liberal theorist like Mill (On the topic of Mill, he, like Locke, is another liberal who justified enslaving people who were not economically productive enough to liberate them from low consumption). — Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s not exceptional individuals, like Musk’s technocratic elite, that drives prosperity. It’s collective, coordinated, large -scale production drawing on strengths and weakness of diverse working communities. Inequities that result need to be addressed by slowing down the pace of change to minimize the disruptive consequences of layoffs, investing in job training and education, using tariffs selectively in combination with reinvestment in plants, strengthening the safety net for those struggling to adapt to these changes (healthcare, child care, addiction and suicide counseling , possibly a universal guaranteed income). Are these not approaches that the progressive end of liberalism has supported? Is there some alternative outside of progressivism that has better ideas? Bernie Sanders-style
socialism?

Anyhow, I don't see how one could possibly separate equality from reflexive freedom, or freedom as self-governance. For instance, you cannot have a equal society with a recalcitrant, morally bankrupt leadership class. They will tend to destroy what they rule over, in part because they are unhappy. Donald Trump, for instance, strikes me as a man ruled over by his passions and appetites, a vice addled man who cannot even follow through on the (very few) good intuitions he has because of a lack of self-discipline. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In his later years, Foucault wrote a lot about self-governance, going back to Romans like Seneca and his practices of the self. Of course, what Foucault was after was the idea of self as a work of art, and practices of the self directed toward the aim of continual self’s
re-invention.
Trump’s idea of freedom is the freedom of the self from accommodating the needs of others, from having to encounter dissent of any kind. This manifests itself as an impulse of destruction, the limiting of any outside impediment to the exercise of the will. But the power of the will emanates not from some inner reserve but from its connection to the social milieu which feeds it and replenishes it. Cutting the will off from its wellspring reduces it to idiocy, which is what we’re witnessing now.

But . . . flawed as it is, the Rawlsian viewpoint is about fairness, understood as neutrality or impartiality. It would be ludicrously wrong to say that Rawls "wasn't trying to be neutral" or "didn't care about fairness." If we could somehow, per impossibile, generate a re-deal of human affairs based on his original position, it would almost certainly be fairer than what we have now -- and more neutral, too — J

Yep, the quote is from Gallagher’s recent book, Action and Interaction. His notion of justice departs from Rawls in not being grounded in neutrality or fairness. For him, the sense of justice is prior to that of fairness. Given that Gallagher’s perspective is a cognitive enactivism informed by phenomenological hermeneutics, he sees justice more in terms of openness to the autonomy of the other than elimination of bias. He traces the sense of justice back to playful interactions among other animals.

If in a friendly playful interaction one player gets hurt, becomes uncomfortable, or is pushed beyond her affective limits, this can generate an immediate feeling of distrust for the other. That would constitute a disruption of the friendship, a break in this very basic sense that is prior to measures of fairness, exchange, or retribution…

Justice, like autonomy, is relational. I cannot be just or unjust on my own. So an action is just or unjust only in the way it fits into the arrangements of intersubjective and social interactions.” “Justice consists in those arrangements that maximize compound, relational autonomy in our practices.” The autonomy of the interaction itself depends on maintaining the autonomy of both individuals. Justice (like friendship) involves fostering this plurality of autonomies (this compound autonomy); it is a positive arrangement that instantiates or maintains some degree of compound relational autonomy.”“Accordingly, although one can still talk of individuals who engage in the interaction, a full account of such interaction is not reducible to mechanisms at work in the individuals qua individuals.”

The ‘neutral’ is never divorced from some stance or other arising from the messy business of assessing competing claims to validity within a diverse community.
— Joshs

Yes, so all the more reason not to saddle Rawlsians with a version of "neutrality" they never claimed to exemplify. Their neutrality is associated with a stance, as is yours, as is Rorty's, as is mine. — J

What do you make of the version of neutrality that Axel Honneth and Shaun Gallagher are saddling Rawls with?

Justice is, accordingly, equated with just distribution. As Honneth indicates, however, what counts as just distribution is, according to such theories, to be determined by some procedural schema. One can easily think of Rawls’ notion of the original position as such a procedure through which a group of seemingly autonomous individuals come to determine the principles of distribution through a voting procedure. Here we start to see that, from the perspective of someone like Rawls, the idea of embodied, enactive interactions that characterize our everyday primary and secondary intersubjective encounters with others are seemingly part of the problem rather than a source of a solution. In the original position, precisely the details of embodied engagement and situated social contexts are to be bracketed by dropping a veil of ignorance around the participants. To arrive at a completely neutral judgment about distribution we need to hide all details, not only about who our neighbors are, but also about who we are—what our embodiment is like.

Are we tall or short? Strong or weak? Are we white or black or some other color? Are we male or female? Are we fully abled? Can we stand up and gesture? Do we believe X or Y or Z? Do we have any special social status? Do we engage in religious practice? Do we belong to specific institutions? All of these details that may shape our real intersubjective interactions are set aside, neutralized, in order to guarantee fairness. The principles of justice that emerge from this arrangement would seemingly be perfectly appropriate for disembodied, non-social beings.
Honneth points to another issue. The idea that we are looking for a distribution schema at all presupposes that we have a conception of which aims and goods are
worth pursuing, and such goods are likely to include not just material things, but other kinds of arrangements about which we will have learned only through intersubjective, social interactions. To suggest that distribution some­how captures all aspects of value is similar to the reduction of a good life to economic utility. More basically, Honneth suggests, the idea that we are able to pursue worthy ends already presupposes the idea of autonomy. But autonomy is not something that can be bestowed by a distribution of goods or opportunities.

In this way, all understanding is normative, defining its own limits of the acceptable and intelligible.
— Joshs

That's true, but this normativity isn't ethical in nature. As you say, it's a matter of expectations. — frank

That depends on how broadly one defines the ethical. Most of us think of ethics in relation to the expectations we have of each other’s conduct. Specifically, ethical situations are defined in proximity to social engagements where blame and anger can be triggered. We find the other morally culpable when they violate our expectations and fail to live up to our standards of engagement. We believe they knew better than to do what they did, that they fell under the sway of nefarious motives. But is also possible or to conceive of ethical ideals which don’t rest on notions of injustice and blame.

↪Joshs
He's expressing Schopenhauer's pessimism. He's saying consciousness itself is dependent on dissatisfaction. The only place where wholeness and perfection exist is in oblivion. — frank

Except that Nietzsche is no pessimist. I was being lazy in throwing that quote out there. I should have explained metaphysical oughts myself. A metaphysical, theoretical or
perceptual interpretation about an aspect of the world commits itself to certain expectations about the way things should be. What lies outside of the range of convenience of that interpretive understanding may not be seen all, it may be seen as confused or non-sensical, or it may be construed in social terms as an ethical violation of accepted standards. In this way, all understanding is normative, defining its own limits of the acceptable and intelligible. The ‘neutral’ is never divorced from some stance or other arising from the messy business of assessing competing claims to validity within a diverse community. It is my notion of the neutral or your notion of the neutral or their notion of the neutral, but there is no sideways on viewpoint to retreat to.

I recognize very well the juxtaposition you point out, and so does the tradition -- I simply don't find it scandalous in the way that you do… It's you, not Rawls, who claims that this carries with it the idea that "such notions of the objective, the equal, the neutral, are secular offshoots of religious thought." If that is indeed true, then perhaps the liberal project was always incoherent. — J

It’s not scandalous, it’s not incorrect and it’s not incoherent. But it is amenable to a deconstructive analysis laying bare hidden presuppositions. Whether you think the Rawlian approach is a secular offshoot of religious thinking depends on how narrowly you want to define religion. If you take Heidegger’s broader vantage, the platonism of Rawlian liberalism qualifies it as Ontotheology. But then of course he thinks the entire Western philosophical tradition up through Hegel and Nietzsche is ontotheology, the metaphysics of presence.

What is a metaphysical ought? — frank

Something like this:

To determine what is, what it's like, appears unutterably higher and more serious than any 'It ought to be so': because the latter, as human criticism and presumption, seems condemned from the start to be ridiculous. It expresses a need which demands that the disposition of the world should accord with our human well-being, and the will to do as much as possible towards this task. On the other hand, it was only this demand 'It ought to be so' which called forth that other demand, the demand for what is. Our knowledge of what is, was only the outcome of our asking: 'How? Is it possible? Why precisely like that?' Our wonder at the discrepancy between our wishes and the course of the world has led to our becoming acquainted with the course of the world. Perhaps it's different again: perhaps that 'It ought to be so', our wish to overwhelm the world, is - - -“
… the standpoint of desirability, of unwarrantedly playing the judge, is part of the character of the course of things, as is every injustice and imperfection - it's only our concept of 'perfection' which loses out. Every drive that wants to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things - what? Might the whole be composed entirely of dissatisfied parts, all of which have their heads full of what's desirable? Might the 'course of things' be precisely the 'Away from here! Away from reality!', be eternal discontent itself? Might desirability itself be the driving force? Might it be - deus.( Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

. Liberalism or secularism as a structure of politics ought to be neutral as to whether following a religion is better than not doing so — J

I love the juxtaposition of ‘ought’ and ‘neutral’ here. It illustrates , without recognizing it , that built into the assumption of norms of neutrality, objectivity and non-bias (like Rawls’ veil of ignorance) is a metaphysical ought. Secularisms and liberalisms which clothe themselves in the garb of neutrality share with religious points of view a grounding in an ethical ought. Such notions of the objective, the equal, the neutral are secular offshoots of religious thought, repackaging Godly platonism as humanist platonism.

↪J Secular culture provides a framework within which you can follow any religion or none. But the proselytizing liberalism that Timothy is referring to goes a step further in saying that none is better than any. — Wayfarer

If ‘Secular culture’ amounts to a philosophical framework, then it has specific implications for religion. That is to say, even if it includes within itself the possibility of a religious viewpoint, it will entail its own implicit preferences with regards to religion. You, for instance, have decided that we are better off with religion than without it, so of course you’re going to prefer the secular vantage to what you call ‘proselytizing liberalism.’. But is there room in the secular tent for fundamentalist religions that are anti-Enlightenment and openly hostile to democracy?

As to the ‘proselytizing’ nature of liberalism, it’s not as though Timothy isnt proselytizing from his pulpit when he attacks liberalism. At least I’m self-aware about it when I try and sell postmodernism. I don’t go around claiming some fatal pathology or irrationalism in the political and philosophical perspectives I don’t agree with. He is right to see such accusations being leveled against religion from certain quarters of liberal thought, which is why I see his tussle with proselytizing liberalism as a bitch-slapping contest between sister schools of platonic metaphysics.

↪Joshs Yep, he and Rorty never saw eye to eye. My sympathies are almost entirely with Habermas, who seems to me a much more careful and interesting thinker than Rorty, though the latter's historical importance is unquestionable. Habermas is also at a disadvantage here, because his writing is often turgid, while Rorty was a sparkling stylist.

I suppose the most trenchant criticism one could offer of Rorty is that, despite his sincere efforts, philosophy has not come to end. — J

I prefer Rorty to Habermas. Rorty was able to glimpse a world beyond modernism. He understood, albeit in a shaky fashion, what writers from Sartre, Gadamer and Wittgenstein to Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida were up to. Reading Rorty allows entrance into the most important thinking of our era , not only through his conversations with Continental thinkers, but also in the way he took up American writers like Davidson, Kuhn, Brandom, Dewey and Dennett. I think Habermas misses the boat on most of these writers, and falls back on a metaphysics that each of them was trying to escape from.

I would say that while philosophy of the sort that Habermas was up to has indeed come to an end (or should do so), I think Rorty’s lack of sure-footedness in the terrain of post-Cartesianism led him to become too suspicious of philosophy, not recognizing the validity of philosophical concepts pointing beyond metaphysical skyhooks of the sort that Habermas remained wedded to.

He really wants liberal societies to be troubled by the "cosmic demands," and take religious perspectives on values more seriously. — J

Not surprising from someone who Rorty relentlessly critiqued for his need of Kantian transcendental underpinnings, or ‘skyhooks’ as Rorty called them.

Liberalism is just "what happens when you remove the old forms of constraint."

Except it isn't. The atomized liberal consumer doesn't cease needing what they previously needed community to provide them, new (often mandatory) voluntarist versions of this same infrastructure need to be created, resulting in the hyperbolic growth of the state and market influence spreading into every area of life — Count Timothy von Icarus

You make this sound like it’s a bad thing. State and market influences are a reflection of and response to where the community decides it wants to make use of the state and the market.

For instance, without community, there is no one to care for the injured or sick. People are left isolated and without resources after disasters. Older citizens cannot expect to rely on community in their decline — Count Timothy von Icarus

My mother expected to rely on the community in her decline. Specifically, she assumed she would move in with one of my brothers and their families. But that was no-go. Both of my sisters-in-law refused to allow that. It was a matter of a generational change in attitude toward the responsibility of grown children for aging family members. I don’t know anyone in my age group who expects or wants to be taken care of by a family member when they become unable to care for themselves. Perhaps we’re not as ethically enlightened as you are.

Aside from this, the reliance on markets to fulfill the former functions of community also has the effect of making the effects of economic inequality more global and all-encompassing. This was made particularly obvious during the pandemic, as the wealthy could comfortably "shelter in place," relying on a legion of anonymous low wage workers to bear the supposed risks for them — Count Timothy von Icarus

Somehow you don’t convince me that this is all about sensible economics for you. I think you’re using inequality as a rationalization for your real agenda, which is about advocating for a certain religiously inspired ethic of social responsibility. How convenient it is that going back to the days of living with Grandma and Grandpa until they croaked happens to save money too!
I want you to keep something in mind. None of my preferred philosophical touchstones accept the concept of the solipsistically autonomous individual. On the contrary, they see the self a more radically intertwined with and inseparable from the normative attributes of the larger society than you do. So my objections to your arguments are not about choosing the individual over the community, but rejecting your model of how the self and the social relate to each other, and especially your need for a transcendent ground for community ethics.

For others who aren’t prepared to thrive in such a world, it has been a damaging change.

You act like this is a minor issue. As far as I can see, it's one that dominates electoral politics and is tearing apart the liberal order in the world's economy and greatest military power. That's not an isolated small scale issue, it's quite possibly the begining of the historical failure of liberalism.

Plus, it presupposes the liberal notion of freedom as: "freedom to do as one currently pleases." — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, it’s a very major issue. It’s just not an issue whose causes are interpreted the same way by all parties in the U.S. , no matter how badly you want to convince yourself that this is a sign of the “historical failure of liberalism”. In case you haven’t noticed , the country is profoundly divided over this any many other issues.

But this of course radically ignores the ways in which massive state intervention and diplomatic efforts were made to secure the vast (and helpfully unregulated and desperate) labor pool of the developing world so as move the economic engines of now "distressed areas" across oceans at great ecological cost to future generations in order to secure greater profit margins and lower prices in the short term (and so higher consumption), with both profits and consumption gains skewing heavily to elites. Globalization isn't an accident though, it's occured with heavy state intervention according to an explicit ideology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Globalization lifted many more people out of poverty worldwide that it put into poverty. mEven without offshoring, automation alone would have decimated the industrial heartland. This wasn’t strictly a failure of liberalism. It was a failure on everyone’s part to anticipate how rapidly technological change would destroy communities. Having this fore-knowledge wouldn’t have prevented the loss of jobs , but it may have allowed for a less traumatic transition. Populists considered this a failure of both liberalism and conservative. After Brexit, and fairly soon in the economic wake of the current trade debacle , populism will also be considered a failure. My guess is once the dust settles, while it didnt come out smelling like a rose, liberalism will emerge as the least disastrous of the various political avenues which have been explored.

I want to add that I think the idea that mining the causes of globalism reveals a predominance of motives of greed and narrow self-interest is a kind of conspiracy theory. There have always been those who are fundamentally suspicious of human enterprise, those who are quick to jump on the mistakes we make when we try to venture in new directions in order to better ourselves and our world. Rather than chalking up those mistakes as the price we pay for the audacity of human inventiveness, their suspiciousness makes them look for hubris and an abdication of ethical responsibility. Climbing too high, pushing too far gets us into trouble, they say, because we dare to become god-like when instead we need to be humble in the face of our mortal sinfulness. The damage globalism has done to those unprepared to adapt is God’s punishment for the hubris of humanity, our distancing ourselves from the ethical source, which we must always remember is not to be found in the immanence to itself of thought.

You sound like David Brooks. Both of you argue for a return to a community and family-centered life, claiming that societal drift away from such traditional anchoring has led to an epidemic of isolation , loneliness and despair. I think that’s true, for those who think in traditionalistic terms. A do-it-yourself culture of intentional community only works for those who are capable of a more complex and dynamic style of interaction with the world. I believe more and more people have evolved psychologically in that direction, so for them the shedding of the old bonds of social, religious and institutional obligation is a choice rather than an imposition. For others who aren’t prepared to thrive in such a world, it has been a damaging change. You can do good work by finding those people in your community who are not ready to take that step. They will be grateful to be led to a ready-made social structure they can fit themselves into.

For the many others like myself, who have worked hard to break way from the strictures of what to then are repressive and conformist social and family bonds, it is your preferred form of social organization that leads to alienation and unhappiness, and we will fight tooth and nail to remain free of it.

This is particularly true because liberalism has been extremely evangelical, spreading itself through hard economic coercion, military funding, supporting coups, and even invading foreign countries to set up liberal states by force, while also generally refusing to recognize the legitimacy of any competitor systems. This is particularly true in the era of globalization, but it's been there from the beginning when revolutionary France was invading its neighbors and setting up "sister republics" by force, or sending the "Infernal Columns" to genocide devout Catholics loyal to elements of the ancien regime (i.e., their own local clergy, nobility, and customs). And even then it had its tendency for totalizing automation. When they couldn't behead priests fast enough with the guillotine they built barges with removable planks so they could fill them with chained prisoners and sink them all at once. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Would you describe the spread of a scientific theory or a philosophical worldview in these terms? Did it ever occur to you that human beings might have decided through processes of reasoning that liberalism actually made sense as way to guide their interactions with others?

. The idea that it must instead belong to some separate, "private sphere of religion and spirituality," is itself a positively indoctrinated dogma of liberalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The fact that the philosophical orientation you follow disagrees with the cartoonishly defined category you are passing off as liberalism doesn’t make the latter a ‘positively indoctrinated dogma’. It just means that it relies on different metaphysical assumptions , and you don’t like those assumptions. I suspect I wouldn’t care much for whatever alternative you have in mind, but I’m not threatened enough by it to go around accusing it of being an indoctrinated dogma, unless of course those that adhere to it want to think of it as a dogma. You do seem to be on some sort of anti-liberal crusade. Perhaps that’s because of its dominating hold on academia?

But of course you are right, we can and should exercise rational discernment in such matters. Whether we always do is another matter. A lot of this stuff is habit so overcoming pathology means intentional training. The problem is that the disease can also involve efforts at intentional training (e.g., some tolerance and DEI trainings have been shown to have the opposite of the results they are intended to have, or to be supported by pseudoscience, and yet they remain common practices because to challenge them is seen as being against "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and who would want to be against — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, it seems to be a contradiction in terms to indoctrinate for ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. But the urge to yoke aspirational goals to a sovereign principle is a secularized holdover from the long-held belief in a divinely-anchored sovereign material and ethical nature, which the use here of ‘pathological’ and ‘unscientific’ depends on.

But it is a well documented fact that people have particularly strong reactions to cheaters and norm violations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps because the correlation amounts to a circular argument. The choice of words like ‘cheater’ and ‘violator’ has already decided on condemnation and blame, which emerge out of the affectivity of anger. One could say, then, that it is a well documented fact that people have particularly strong reactions to people who make them
angry.

There is no such thing as a life without purposes, however humble those purposes may be. All purposes are geared towards either sustaining life, or fulfilling desires, even if only, in extremis, one's own life and desires. — Janus

Emotional crises such as grief and depression involve the loss of a sense of purpose. In these states we are plunged into the fog of confusion and chaos. Purpose is bound up with the sense of agency, of being able to act coherently by making sense of events in a consistent way, and this is taken from us in such moods. We lose our compass for action. Even though we are still alive, life loses its salience, relevance and meaning. The specter of physical death pales in comparison to this psychical death of meaning.

This isn't a debate or an opinion piece, it's me explaining my axiomatic framework — James Dean Conroy

We’re not here to test out your axiomatic system. We’re here to debate philosophy. That’s why it’s called a philosophy forum.

The idea is not to have AI step in and judge, but to use it as an intellectual aid. It’s about breaking down complex concepts, asking questions to explore further, and helping clarify difficult points. It’s there to enhance understanding, not to control or decide the course of the conversation. — James Dean Conroy

Tell you what. You use it to help you do that, and then when you’re ready you can engage directly with us in discussion.

↪Joshs

Josh, try the steps in my post above. That will then sit there all day and explain ay gaps for you.

Humour me, please.

If you do that, I'll happily sit here and go through everything.

Let me know what it says. — James Dean Conroy

I’m not a mod here, but I tend to think that encouraging the use of Chatbots as interlocutors in our philosophical discussions is not a direction in the Philosophy Forum wants to go.

Antinatalism can’t sustain itself. It relies on the infrastructure and surplus created by life-affirming systems while denying their value. It’s parasitic on order. — James Dean Conroy

What is the motive for anti-natalism? What is the motive for suicide? With respect to the latter, most psychologists would tell you that suicide is ‘life-affirming’ in that it is an attempt to preserve a self-affirming value. So rather than being ‘parasitic’ on order, anti-natalism celebrates and attempts to maintain a positive value, the avoidance of pain and suffering. Desire is always desire for the order of value and meaning, even when it involves the literal destruction of life.

Are you going to say you don't primarily want to survive, you wouldn't care if you knew you were to die tomorrow? — Janus

I’m not afraid of death, I’m concerned about quality of life. Survival for survival’s sake carries no appeal for me. I would rather not be alive than live a life with no purpose. I won’t know when I’m dead so it has no relevance for me.

. Do you think if murderers really believed that they would suffer in hell for acts of violence, that they would commit them — Wayfarer

Do you think that all murderers necessarily think of themselves as murderers rather than, for instance, as committing acts that according to their moral compass was justified? By the same token, are not lawful forms of punitive justice acts of violence? Do you think the enforcers of such acts can be convinced they will suffer in hell for them?

And how are people to know or trust that what they want is what will lead to happy good lives, when liberalism teaches that only gray or illusory or socially imposed lines are all that can define anything we might want or pursue? Liberalism is a good method to achieve a goal, but useless as a goal in itself. — Fire Ologist

Whoever claimed that liberalism was a goal in itself? Certainly not those people of faith who cherish the
ethical goals their Judaism, Christianity or Buddhism imparts within the umbrella of the liberalism they espouse. Scratch beneath the surface of this thread on liberal ‘myopia’ and it’s just another debate concerning which underlying philosophical worldview one prefers. Myopia isn’t unique to liberalism. It built into the normative commitments any political or philosophical view expresses. So you’re unhappy with liberalism? Name some alternative political thinkers and approaches you prefer.

So the critique here is a bit of a strawman...

This thread is really to talk about this framework. In particular I was looking for logical analysis. — James Dean Conroy

Were you also looking for a critique of your framework? I don’t understand how my comments on what you call an ‘evolutionary systems model’ don’t have any application to the framework you want to discuss in this thread.

You have to admit, though, that survival, that is life, is the ultimate—without it there are no other goals, which makes other goals secondary insofar as they depend absolutely on survival.

And I'm not just talking about human survival, human life, but all life — Janus

But no part of organism survives in a literal sense over time. It is a unified pattern of functioning that survives, and this ‘survival’ is only an abstraction. What we call ‘this’ living thing is not a thing, it is a system of interactions with a material and social environment. This whole ecology is the unit of ‘survival’, not a ready-made thing thrown into a world like a rock. The whole ecological system ‘preserves’ itself by changing itself in a self-consistent manner. One could say, then, that it doesnt survive so much as transform itself in an ordered way.

For context, this was something that was born from an evolutionary systems model, not philosophical musing about morals then retro fitting. — James Dean Conroy

As an evolutionary systems model, it’s taking too reductive a stance to grasp the site of evolutionary selective pressures and order creation. The unit of evolutionary survival is not a lifeless static slab of meat, nor is it the ‘gene’. There is no such thing as a gene in isolation. A living thing is a self-organizing system whose goal is not simply static survival , but the ongoing maintenance of a particular patten of interaction with its environment. To this end, all living things are cognitive sense-makers. That is, their interactions with their world is characterized as a normative set of purposes and intentional aims. What constitutes a threat to these purposes is defined by the nature of these purposes. In other words, the organism seeks to maintain the nature of its functioning in the face of changing conditions. What is good is what is constant with the ongoing maintenance of its patten of activity, what is bad is what interrupts its activity. Human beings do t drive to maintain a body, we strive to maintain a way of life, a system of anticipatory understanding that allows us to make sense of events.

Translated into human psychological terms, we consider what is good in terms of what is consistent and compatible with our normative ways of making sense of our world, and what is bad as those events we are unable to effectively assimilate into our schemes of understanding. To say that all this is in service of the survival of the gene is to miss the fact that the ‘gene’ is only an arbitrarily abstracted element of an integrated unity of functioning, the organism as a whole in its normative sense-making. Furthermore, the organism doesn’t simply adapt itself to its environment , it modifies and defines its environment on the basis of its functioning. Adaptivity and evolutionary selective pressures move in both directions , not just from world to organism but also on the basis of the organism’s effect on its environment.

Understanding evolutionary drives this way unites our psychological desires ( what good and bad mean to us) and the aims of living things in general. Your approach, by contrast, disconnects what is good from an evolutionary standpoint (surviving and becoming more ordered) from what is good from a psychological perspective. In your model, there is no reason to assume that persons are motivated in the direction of survival, order, or anything else for that matter. Some may want to live, some may want to die, some may crave order, some may be drawn to chaos.

Nobody read it then? — Jake Tarragon

I’m guessing people are probably more interested in his book ‘On Tyranny’ right now.

↪Joshs
I remember when I first discovered that one of the things the 1% does with their money is control the public conversation to reinforce their position. I was so shocked I was ready for the revolution then. I remember wanting to be part of a firing squad.

Give me a revolution and I'll salute it. — frank

I’m not interested in a revolution. I’m interested in protecting people in my community that I care about. And you didn’t answer my question:

What would you do if you were a university president threatened with loss of grant money, or a news service or law firm threatened with loss of access? Would you fight back or acquiesce?

My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country. Go Joshs. Do that protest! Quote some Hegel to them. That'll leave them befuddled. — frank

And what do you plan on doing? Anything? What would
you do if you were a university president threatened with loss of grant money, or a news service or law firm threatened with loss of access? Would you fight back or acquiesce?

In my opinion, the time for action is already here. Trump has gone too far so many times that he should be dragged out of office and the nation initiates a re-election. It's better to do that now rather than — Christoffer

Have you been attending the 50501 protests? There’s another one planned for next Saturday. I think you’ll find that they will grow significantly in size over the course of the year. https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

This is what we need to do here:

https://theweek.com/speedreads/854197/1-million-people-could-take-part-puerto-rico-protests

In this case I think the effectiveness would be in the legacy of the protests. Trump has already shown a penchant for using for force against protestors. Some people would likely die in the clash — frank

I wonder how many died of the 1 million who demonstrated in Puerto Rico? I’ll bet some would have thought it was worth it.

That's what's unusual about this situation. People watched Trump try to derail an election and elected him again. This is what a lot of Americans want. — frank

I watched him try and derail an election, too. And yet I wasn’t convinced that he is a full-blown dictator until a few months ago. If it took me that long to figure it out, you can imagine that it will take even longer for those non -authoritarian types who voted for him reluctantly to come to that conclusion. We just had no precedent in this country for an all-out authoritarian takeover of the highest office. We haven’t learned how to read the signs. I would even give the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn’t want an Orban or Putin-like figure running our country. But he only sees scattered pieces of the puzzle and they don’t add up to tyranny for him. Instead, they can be brushed off as the aggressive power-plays of politics as usual.

Thom Hartmann is certainly afraid:

But why are you afraid? — NOS4A2

I don’t know you, and haven’t followed most of your previous comments on politics, so I dont know what your political perspective is in general. There has been much written about the New Right, which is a big tent including Peter Thiel, J.D.Vance, Curtis Yarvin, Blake Masters, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. Some of them, like Musk, Thiel and Mark Andreesen, are enamored of the ‘technocracy’ movement which believes in government by a technocratic elite. Others (Yarvin) are in favor of something more like a monarchical leadership. A. inner of them have high respect for Victor Orban? What do you think of him, and where you do stand with respect to these figures and this movement? Is there one among them who is a kind of guiding light for you? You certainly don’t sound like someone who considers the Reagan or Bush neo-liberal free market vision to be an inspiration for you.

To me, it's about a response to the way that people end up being nothing more than machines in a liberal world. There's something deathly about liberalism. The Left is about finding a way back from that, while hopefully keeping some of the awesomeness that liberalism created.

As for conservatism, did you see the people carrying signs saying "Hands Off"? That is the very essence of conservatism: to maintain the status quo, to hold on to what we know works. Our species is alive and well in this moment because of our conservative side, that preserves traditions and hands them on to the next generation. — frank

Tell me , Frank. Why does this sound like it could have come directly out of a New Right manifesto? Have you been dipping into Yarvin and Land?

↪ssu

I remember you predicting that of all the wars that Trump is lusting to have, a war with Panama was the second likeliest one. Given that the US and Panama recently partnered to secure the canal and deter China, with a special nod to Panama’s sovereignty, I’m curious if your fears abated or if they still remain — NOS4A2

How about your fears? Do you fear that we now have our first dictator as president? Do you not find this EO terrifying:

Addressing Risks Associated with an Egregious Leaker and Disseminator of Falsehoods Presidential Memoranda
April 9, 2025

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addressing-risks-associated-with-an-egregious-leaker-and-disseminator-of-falsehoods/

Thom Hartmann is certainly afraid:

The highest form of freedom in a democracy isn’t just the right to vote or protest—it’s the right to speak truth to power. To call out corruption. To challenge lies. To stand firm when the powerful demand silence. This is the freedom that sustains all others.
And it’s the one Donald Trump tried to crush Wednesday with the stroke of a pen.

When he signed an Executive Order (EO) directing the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor—two public servants whose only crime was telling the truth—Trump didn’t just abuse his office. He weaponized the government against honesty itself.
This wasn’t law enforcement: It was political vengeance. This wasn’t democracy: It was a warning shot from the edge of autocracy. And if we let this slide—if we treat it as just another Trump headline—we are inviting the next strongman to do the same, only worse.
The freedom to speak truth to power is either sacred, or it’s gone.

Thus, Donald Trump just moved America miles down the road toward our becoming a police state. There’s no other way to describe it.
​His EO demanding criminal investigations into Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor—and his public statement that Taylor is a “traitor” guilty of “treason”—are nothing short of a blatant assault on the rule of law and a perilous step toward turning America into a dictatorship.
This isn’t just about settling personal scores; it’s a calculated move to instill fear, silence dissent, and dismantle the very foundations of our democratic institutions.​

Can you imagine yourself being called a traitor by the president of the United States and thus potentially facing prison? Having to hire expensive attorneys that may well force you to sell your home to pay for defending yourself? Not to mention having to protect yourself and your family from the rightwing enforcers who are probably at this moment doxxing and threatening Krebs and Taylor?
This echoes tactics used by autocrats throughout history: Stalin’s purges, Nixon’s enemies list (though less successfully executed), and more recently, Orbán in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, or Putin in Russia. If normalized, it risks further turning the U.S. into an illiberal democracy or autocracy, where elections occur but power is retained through fear, manipulation, and coercion. Or worse, a violent kleptocracy like Russia.

Of all the many outrages that Trump is visiting on the nation, this must be among the worst. — Wayfarer

Absolutely. And one of the most chilling things I’ve ever heard are these comments from Miles Taylor, who , along with Krebs , was singled out by Trump for investigation, in his case for writing a book about his experience serving in Trump’s first administration. In this short interview before the election, he warns the American public that the second Trump administration would be structured like Germany’s third reich. I’m horrified to admit that, while I have always despised Trump, a year ago I would have considered that forecast a bit over the top. Now I know that Taylor’s prediction was spot on.

↪Joshs
Would you say leftism is closer to Hegel than to labor unions? — frank

You’d have to talk to the individuals in the unions, but in general I’d say that blue-collar unions will be dominated by social conservatives. Probably a bit different for teachers’ unions.

Has anyone considered that all of this is Stephen Miran's plan to devalue the dollar? His Mar-a-Lago accord spells out both increased tariffs and threatening to leave military collaborations, precisely what Trump has done — Christoffer

This idea has been discussed. Most conclude
that Trump isn’t following the plan.

No one outside of Trump’s inner circle considers Miran’s ideas and plans to be coherent, credible, or realistic.
Even more damning to the narrative that Miran is the strategic genius guiding Trump’s actions is the fact that Trump himself isn’t following Miran’s roadmap. Instead of targeting specific trade imbalances or building pressure toward a coordinated currency adjustment, the administration’s tariff strategy in 2025 has been indiscriminate and poorly sequenced. Allies like Canada and Mexico have been hit just as hard as rivals, undermining any hope of building a coalition for the mythical Mar-a-Lago Accord.

The rollout has been chaotic, with inconsistent exemptions and retaliations flying in every direction. If Miran truly intended for tariffs to be a form of surgical economic leverage, Trump is wielding them like a sledgehammer in a glassware shop. It’s yet another contradiction in a portfolio full of them: Miran provides the blueprint of a modern Taj Mahal, Trump builds a treehouse with a blowtorch, and Republicans and their cheerleaders pretend it’s an architectural masterpiece. (Michael Barnard)