" It’s a very strange phenomenon—you don’t see Democrats, for example, employing provably fallacious reasoning to argue for social security from first principles."
Academics on the left use Rawls' Difference Principle to justify redistributionist policies. I think that qualifies.
My sense, from talking to more reasonable Rawlsians, is that they generally think that the difference principle is not a universally applicable rule of morality but instead a good heuristic for organizing society.
No serious argument for it has ever been offered, so far as I know, and it is routinely treated as a great philosophical accomplishment. Your "good heuristic" amounts to the expression of an egalitarian preference with no argument behind it, unlike the utilitarian alternative that Rawls rejected — and that had been pointed out to be the implication of his argument twenty years before he made it. And it's a bad heuristic even for an egalitarian, since it implies an infinite ratio between the value of improvements to the least well off person and to anyone else.
That was my assumption for a while, though I remember about a year ago speaking to a reasonable-sounding Rawlsian who made his views sound much more sane. I'm afraid I've forgotten the contents of what he said.
"For me to talk, I don’t have to think I have rights, and I certainly don’t need to think anyone else has like. All I have to believe, to avoid hypocrisy, is that my talking is worthwhile."
You don't even have to believe that. After all, a teleological nihilist and fatalist would say that nothing is worthwhile, and her talking now could no more be "hypocritical" than her having brown eyes now.
Regarding the footnote: If anything you were *too nice* to Fabian in your debate. this guy deserves to be ridiculed
I love the title so much
I can see where they were coming from with their first point—right/wrong doesn’t precede human consciousness. But boy, do they lose me after that.
" It’s a very strange phenomenon—you don’t see Democrats, for example, employing provably fallacious reasoning to argue for social security from first principles."
Academics on the left use Rawls' Difference Principle to justify redistributionist policies. I think that qualifies.
My sense, from talking to more reasonable Rawlsians, is that they generally think that the difference principle is not a universally applicable rule of morality but instead a good heuristic for organizing society.
No serious argument for it has ever been offered, so far as I know, and it is routinely treated as a great philosophical accomplishment. Your "good heuristic" amounts to the expression of an egalitarian preference with no argument behind it, unlike the utilitarian alternative that Rawls rejected — and that had been pointed out to be the implication of his argument twenty years before he made it. And it's a bad heuristic even for an egalitarian, since it implies an infinite ratio between the value of improvements to the least well off person and to anyone else.
That was my assumption for a while, though I remember about a year ago speaking to a reasonable-sounding Rawlsian who made his views sound much more sane. I'm afraid I've forgotten the contents of what he said.
So you're saying that the secret to defeating an argumentation ethicist is to put them in a room with communists?
"For me to talk, I don’t have to think I have rights, and I certainly don’t need to think anyone else has like. All I have to believe, to avoid hypocrisy, is that my talking is worthwhile."
You don't even have to believe that. After all, a teleological nihilist and fatalist would say that nothing is worthwhile, and her talking now could no more be "hypocritical" than her having brown eyes now.
That is unbelievably hilarious.