Liberal neutrality

By -
"Sure, liberalism claims and even aims to be neutral, but that doesn't entail that it really is or ever could be. To think that the mere existence of one's intention to be neutral guarantees that one really is neutral is not only a fallacy, but an especially dangerous one -- it makes the one beholden to it blind to his own biases." -- Edward Feser

Comments

  1. Daniel McCarthy8:07 PM

    This is true, but the more important question about liberalism, to my mind, isn't whether it's neutral or whether neutrality is desirable, but whether liberal non-neutrality is more conducive to peace---at least in our time and place---than other kinds of commitment are. A liberalism that stops sects from killing one another, if even it's not neutral about their metaphysical claims, is still a liberalism that's doing what it's supposed to do.

    Assuming it actually does reduce violence, of course.

    I've encountered Christian conservatives who want a Christian politics that can do roughly what liberalism is supposed to do. The problem is that as they articulate it, it tends to look a lot like liberalism (in its broadest, or perhaps earliest, outlines). Except no abortion, no gay marriage. There's something spurious about the whole exercise, as if liberal Christians can't admit how liberal they really are. I'm not saying this of Feser, by the way, it's just a tangent to the question of liberalism's job and whether there's really much demand for a substitute.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah11:15 AM

      Dan, there is no plausible alternative to liberalism on the table at present, I agree.

      I am a MacIntyrean in this regard: we have to hunker down and found the modern equivalent of monasteries, cause the dark ages they's a comin'!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

St. Paul and I Agree...

By -
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Read more

Libertarianism and Violence, II

By -
I decided to move some discussion from this post up to the top level here. Specifically, Watoosh wrote: "Well, if violence is defined as initiation of force (which, of course, presupposes certain property rights), then I think Rockwell is correct..." Well, if we define cats as elephants, then many people keep elephants in their house. More seriously, firstly, violence is not usually defined that way. It's defined as, you know, violence, so that, say, someone may respond violently or non-violently to someone who aggresses against them. Otherwise, it would make no sense to say, for instance, "He punched me, but I did not stoop to violence in response." And, secondly, the libertarian usage of "initiation of force" is very offbeat. If I wander onto someone's meadow, most people would not say I had "initiated force" -- I mean, sure, I used "force" against the earth to push off walking, but that's not force directed against...
Read more