Triskadecamus,
While your narrative is interesting, I am inclined to ask you to support your claims with evidence. Kings rule? Not exactly…aristocrats own, but can they sell? Changes in station are mythical? Hmm. Plagues every forty to fifty years? Hmm.
I am particularly suspicious of your claims to access of information and lack of social mobility.
And this is the system Canadians keep telling us we should switch to? Ay, carumba!
For one thing, this seems more like polemic or rhetoric than fact. Second of all, why do you assume that coalitions of welfare recipients haven’t been involved in those debates?
So are you saying it is sometimes acceptable for “well-reasoned arguments” to trump what “we know in our hearts to be right”? Or is it only acceptable for well-reasoned arguments to have that effect if the end result is a belief that you personally feel is acceptable, but it is not OK for reason to win out if the end result is a belief you do not feel is acceptable? 
I think you’re yielding the title of “best-reasoned argument” with too little fight and when there is no need. I don’t believe the libertarian argument is always or even often the superior one, as you seem to. Nor are conservatives or libertarians the heartless logical robots you seem to imply they are; many of them are quite sympathetic towards the poor, but simply “know in their hearts” (with, I’m sure, some reason-based support, but it is not as if the best way to help the poor is as clear as A=A) that other methods that will encourage the poor to help themselves will work better than the current methods, or that the best results for all people will result using their methods. Now if they are wrong, and their methods do not in fact help the poor/have optimal results for all people, you can convince them to try another method–but not, of course, if the “knowledge in their hearts” cannot be altered by reason.
The useful thing about reason is that it can reliably be used to find common ground, IME. Say you have two people, both of whom want to help alleviate starvation and abject poverty. There is Mr. C, who thinks the poor are best helped by limiting govermnent programs, endorsing private charity, and encouraging the poor to pull themselves out of poverty by learning new skills, etc. Mr. L. thinks that’s all very well, but private charity will never come close to the effectiveness and power of government programs, and thinks Mr. C is forgetting about the people who are unable to pull themselves out of poverty due to rampant discrimination or illness. Now if they both solely rely on their feelings, they are at an impasse. If they use reason to actually try to determine which ideas are most effective at achieving their goals, they have a chance to actually find out which method works better. And yes, that may mean that one person is going to have to go against what they “know in their hearts” and accept the reason-based arguments against their beliefs. But if one method works better, it should be used, barring it relying on greater suffering elsewhere!
If certain people in your government are cold, heartless bastards, I don’t think that acknowledging “knowledge in your heart” as inherently superior to reason will help much. I don’t think these people were warm and loving and were convinced by cold reason that other people were ants to be trampled on. They probably feel in their hearts that the poor are lazy and shiftless and deserve the suffering they get. And if you can’t use reason to convince them otherwise, what can you use? A moral-center-transplant? Magic? And if they aren’t cold, heartless bastards, you can use reason to convince them that their methods of helping others are not working properly.
I don’t mean to sound like the head cheerleader for Reason, here, but I think you are being a bit unfair to it. I don’t think reason has trumped morality, or that morality cannot have any basis in reason, or that conservatives and libertarians are the ultimate in Vulcan-like pure logic and lack of emotion. There will always be some people who have different morals than you, or who prefer different methods than you, or who may even be judged actively immoral by most standards, but I don’t think it can be credibly blamed an overemphasis on reason. It’s just the way things are. Sure, people who have different morals than you will use reason to support them, but you can use reason to defeat them, too. I think it’s a fair fight. 
Re-read the last two words of Hamish’s quote. Lines and waiting lists only started getting this long once the budgets started getting slashed to the bone.
What is so difficult in understanding the idea of compromise, or checks and balances? No entity as unfathomably complex as a society will ever respond properly to ideological rule, whether that ideology is the dictatorship of ethics or the dictatorship of reason. That’s why we have a public discourse. The problems of public policy are essay questions, not true/false tests.
Dammit, I could have sworn I reset the cookies last night. That last post wasn’t from Hamish, but from me.
Hamish and matt_mcl, I don’t have a lot to add here (and I know when I’m outclassed). I just wanted to say I thought recommending Voltaire’s Bastards was pretty funny under in this context.
Two true stories about that book. The person who recommended the book to me work for the same company that I did. Reading that book actually gave us some insight into how to fix some things that were profoundly broken at that company. Reason is a tool, and perhaps the most powerful one in the toolbox, but there are others that must be used (in the case or this company, a sense of history was the big missing piece).
Second, I note that the person who recommended the book was also Canadian. Is this another plot from the Great White North? We’re on to you guys, so quite trying
This is the only book I’ve read by him. Any recommendations for other works, or is it all pretty good?
Ok, Kings require the power of Barons, and armies to rule, although difference is rather unimportant to the average peasant.
They can engage in exchange of titles and holdings in the normal commerce of power and politics that aristocrats always had, at the time, so selling is really a minor quibble.
Yes, mythical. Individual cases, in single digit frequencies per generation over half a millennium qualifies as mythical for any reasonable consideration.
In the hundred years prior to 1750 you had the black plague, the decimation of the native American population by smallpox, and several outbreaks of Cholera which reached pandemic proportions. Malaria reached epidemic proportions more than once in divergent areas. Local epidemics that were never named other than “consumption” or “fever” were certainly not uncommon. That is more than once every fifty years.
Books were expensive, literacy scarce, and most writing was done by the people who were part of the power structure. The leisure to spend time reading and thinking about social issues was not the province of the lower classes.
The age of reason began the changes you seem to take for granted. It was not possible for a woman in the lower classes of even the most highly developed countries to learn to read. She could not own property in most cases, and could certainly not decide to leave and try a new life somewhere else. Bound serfdom and chattel slavery certainly qualify as “lack of social mobility.” Hmmm?
“I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.” ~ George Santayana ~
[Edited by David B on 08-23-2001 at 12:04 PM]
Geez, matt, I was teasing. Don’t be so quick to assume the worst of everyone. I do think Gaudere makes important points, though, much more eloquently than I could.
You don’t even have to go back that far. The worldwide influenza epidemic that raged from 1917-1919 killed more Americans than WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam combined. It killed an estimated 70 million worldwide. The 1916 epidemic of infantile paralysis – better known as polio --killed 7,000. Another 2,720 died in 1949, and another 3,300 in 1952. Today, flu shots are ubiquitous and polio is virtually unknown.
I’m sorry I misinterpreted you, but your post could have been easier to interpret (when did you join the Junior Anti-Smiley Brigade? ;)). Please understand it’s kind of a touchy subject for a doctor’s son in a New Democrat family and a household below the poverty line.
Perhaps you might present counterclaims more substantial than parroting back the original claims with a sarcastic tone. I’d be interested in evidence that everything I’ve ever been taught about the world prior to 1776 is wrong.
Well, when you/Hamish say “…So high, in fact, that when it’s used to rationalize our values away, we’re more likely to believe the well-reasoned argument than what we know in our hearts to be right.” …the implication is that choosing–or even simply being more likely to do choose–the well-reasoned argument over the “knowledge in [your] heart” would be a terrible wrong. But you know, it ain’t neccessarily so …some people know in their hearts stupid, cruel, thoughtless, unreasoned evil things, and a little sound trouncing at the hands of reason making them choose the reasoned argument over what they know in the hearts is a wonderful thing. I know myself that if I cannot find an adequate reason for the feelings in my heart, I have to reconsider them; and this has made me more tolerant, rather than less. Sure, some people can be swayed by glib, glossy arguments to adopt morals many of us would consider wrong. But if they can be swayed one way by reason, they can be swayed the other–and I don’t think good morals are so illogical and irrational that a reasoned discourse will always result in them coming up the loser; quite the opposite, in fact. But while I am confident in my ability to duke it out toe-to-toe in the arena of reason, I don’t see a way to fight or even question “knowledge in [your] heart,” however cruel I may judge it.
I think I can go with this. Yet I think the problems you see stemming from reason come from isolation and lack of free commerce of ideas more than reason itself. We are social creatures, and together it seems our myriad blind spots and visions and ideas work together pretty well to help us on our way to improvement for all. When reason is utterly isolated from opposing views, that is then it is the most dangerous–it in the input of others and interacton with the outside world that I see as the primary “check and balance”. And that is the danger I see in a reliance on “knowing in [your] heart”–no one can confirm or contradict the “knowledge in [your] heart” since it’s all wholly isolated. I cannot truly feel what you feel, and you cannot feel what I feel. If someone believes in their hearts that gays are an abombination, and you accept that all such beliefs are equally valid, there’s no mutal ground to argue either way. But you can use reason as a bridge between people. It’s not the rational bigots I fear–I think my arguments will win out. But the ones that reason cannot sway–well, we’ve seen enough of those here to see how it goes when the well-reasoned argument meets the “knowledge in the heart”.
I think it is isolationism and overcertainty that you fear, if I may be so bold. And I agree. Yet if you make statements that imply that “knowledge in the heart” should not be swayed by reason, I tend to question that.
I apologize. I didn’t read my tone as sarcastic, but I see now that it can be taken that way. The ‘hmm.’ was meant to be friendly and also to save time…
Frankly, I don’t have time to write about this now as I have other projects, and this is not the forum in which to expand.
Every one of the claims advanced needed a footnote or a qualifier as to location where relevant or criteria used in order to draw the conclusion.
My specialty is Continental Europe of the early modern period, particularly France.
I mention two counter-examples: French women did have considerable power and the ability to own land. Their rights to ownership of property (and to plead in court) were not on paper so much as they were in practice. Read court records and you see the women as plaintiffs and landholders. There has been little written on this as few have read the court records, but it is on its way. In France, to the best of my understanding, these rights were diminished in the seventeenth century and further diminished in the nineteenth. Not a progress with the age of reason but a decline. However, the reason for the decline is most likely a growing conformity of French law to that of ancient Rome, where women had no status.
As for social mobility, I appreciate the criteria given for the judgment call.
As for the absolute rule of kings: an exception of the seventeenth and eighteenth century in France, and not even then would I say that his rule was not contested. The Fronde in the 1650s, the contest of the Bourbon right to the throne in the 1580s, for example.
Entirely an opinion, but I associate the absolute rule of kinds with Cardinal Richilieue and Mazarin, both of whom were modernists, more along the lines of the Age of Reason than otherwise.
Hamish wanted me to tell you that he is going to be away from the boards for a day or two due to IRL pressures (his cat just miscarried) but he means to respond as soon as he can and hopes the thread will continue in his absence.
I’m back.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by pldennison *
And this is the system Canadians keep telling us we should switch to? Ay, carumba!
[quote]
Actually, it’s that way because the reverse has happened – a few well-off Canadians who don’t like to pay taxes have been pushing American-style health-care. Phase one seems to be that hospitals are being starved for cash. Phase two – which has already begun – is that we are being told that since public hospitals can’t do the job, we should bring in some private health care.
Every coalition for the poor I’ve heard comment on this have been less-than-impressed, to understate things. I’m talking about the National Coalition for the Homeless, and The Welfare Reform Coalitions of various states.
Saying “all sides agreed” because Republicans and Democrats did is disingenuous. There really isn’t a left-wing party in Congress right now. The Democrats aren’t recognizable as left-wing by any standards used anywhere else in the world.
No. You’re trying to use a reasoned argument to force me to say that I’ll accept an ethical argument if and only if I agree with it. What I’m actually arguing is a little more complex.
I’m suggesting that both reason and ethics are faculties of the human mind. Either one, carried to an extreme, becomes destructive. Reason carried too far becomes rationalization and excessivelty abstract. Ethics carried too far becomes moralizing and dogmatic. Each operates as a balancing factor for the others.
Nor are they necessarily the only faculties we possess. Since someone brought in John Ralston Saul, I’ll use his list, which seems the most exhaustive. He lists our faculties as Reason, Ethics, Imagination, Intuition, Common Sense, and Memory (both personal experience and history). Any of these qualities, without the others to check it, becomes unhealthy.
I can accept that there are places we’ve come to feel moral, even though that morality in no way benefits the human race. I’m thinking sexuality especially, here, and Reason is helpful in understanding that, for instance, being gay doesn’t harm anyone. But the ability to balance works both ways. There’s a reason refusing to listen to our conscience is called “rationalization.”
It’s not exactly that I see it as the superior one, but a superior one. That is, I don’t believe that reason is a sort of hierarchy, with purer and purer levels.
When I raise the subject of the failures of Reason, the conclusion by Reason’s most ardent supporters is usually that the failures “weren’t rational enough.” But an argument can never be purely rational. Reason is simply an equation, a computation of another fact from known facts.
But where do our facts come from? When we argue things like poverty, we’re talking mostly stastistics. Well, statistics is dubious as science at best. It generally involves a politicically-motivated group gathering numbers from a tiny percentage of whatever group is being studied, by a method that will produce results best-suited to the group’s argument. For this reason, in any debate between the left and the right, each side comes armed with reams of meticulously-gathered statistics, and then proceeds to launch them at the other. The other side questions the reliability – that is, the reasoning – of the opponent’s statistics. Of course, there’s plenty of room to question because statistics is, itself, questionable.
The problem is, all sides are more- or less-equally well-reasoned. The result is deadlock.
And each time, as a left-winger, I find myself in these debates, I wonder why I can’t blurt out the issue I feel forced to dance around – it is wrong to simply let another human being starve, especially in one of the richest countries in the world. In this thread, I brought in personal experience, which is something I don’t normally do. I feel the usual rules of rational debate are a straitjacket – the one who makes the first irrational argument loses. As if refering to anything other statistics is a sort of failure, when the reverse seems true to me! For this reason, I have prove, by the rules of the social sciences, that feeding people is rationally useful. I can’t simply say, “no human being should be left to starve.”
Why should such a huge portion of our humanity be left out of the vital questions of the day? The reliance on social science and legal language for debate is like some sort of bizarre court etiquette that must be followed.
When I was younger, and living in a middle-class family, I got to see the thousand things middle-class people say to themselves and each other when they pass someone on the street asking for change.
The person’s drunk. Or they’ll spend the money getting drunk. Or they just don’t want to work. They’re lazy.
Then, when I was the one asking for change, I got to see those people pass me, and assume the same things about me.
No, I don’t think conservatives are robots. I just think they’ve insulated themselves from the rest of the world by some apparently-solid arguments.
Reason can change a person’s ethical point of view. I’ve sen it done. My argument was not that it can’t, but the same works in reverse, as well.
As for proving arguments “right,” I find the idea a little comical. After all, there are always ways to prove oneself rationally right.
For instance, one of the remarkable failures of reason is that the religious right are getting better at using it to make their arguments. I now sometimes hear the argument that gay people are a health risk, because we have a statistically higher risk of carrying HIV. Arguing against a segment of the population on the grounds that it is more likely to carry a disease is, to my mind, ethically wrong. But it is rationally accurate.
Back to poverty, my prediction is that if, for instance, the National Coalition for the Homeless comes up with some alarming evidence that Welfare Reform has literally caused some families to starve to death, proponents of Welfare Reform will not suddenly admit they were wrong. They’ll find some other cause, some other reason.
The dance continues. And people continue to starve.
Dammit, matt_mcl, they’re on to us! :eek:
And, of course, John Ralston Saul is Canadian
The Doubter’s Companion and the Unconscious Civilization take the same ideas and run with them – develop them, update the examples, explore them in more depth. The Doubter’s Companion is mostly intended as political humour, and it is very, very funny. The Unconscious Civilization is brief and readable, mostly because it was originally a series of lectures.
Reflections of a Siamese Twin is all about Canada. If you want to find out the sources of the Canadian Conspiracy – that is, why a country sharing so long a border with you guys is so different in so many ways – it’s a good read. I especially recommend it to any Canadians on the list.
He’s got a new one coming out this year called On Equilibrium.
No one has asked you to prove that feeding starving people is “useful” here. I have never seen even the most extreme libertarian argue that we shouldn’t try to help the poor. They simply have different ways of trying to do it than liberals/socialists/whatevers do. And I have definitely seen it advanced that “no one should starve to death in our country” or similar in political arguments, so I don’t know why you think it is verbotem. Most arguments are about exactly how to prevent people from starving, and what price it is worth. Preventing starvation is a good thing, but the acceptable cost in terms of other harm is different for different people. Forced sterilization is too high a price for most, 80% taxes is too high a price for others, any taxes at all is to high a price for a few.
Both sides also have moral beliefs that are equally strong and often opposed. This is also a deadlock. I do think reason has more potential to bring about change; you can more easily convince people if a method works better or worse than the other than you can make any headway by simply saying “I feel the goverment should take care of all the poor” vs. “I feel the government should simply prevent coercion.”
Some conservative may indeed do this. And some liberals are induced by apparently-solid arguments to support programs that reduce personal liberty, raise taxes, support rampant fraud, and do not actually accomplish the goals they desire. I don’t think either side has a monopoly on myopia.
I am not entirely sure what you find comical here. Are you saying that if two programs were implemented to help poor people find jobs, and one had a success rate of 50% and the other a success rate of 5% (adjusted for different situations, etc.), it would be comical to decide to fund the 50% success rate one rather than the 5% success rate one? I suppose that would be an instance of the statistics you so scorn, but we genuinely do need some way to determine which methods are successful. How shall we judge which works better without measuring the effects in some way that allows for direct comparison? We have limited resources and must determine how to use them most effectively.
Are you surprised that people are stubborn and wish to cling to what the know in their hearts is “right”, even when reason is against it? This is just the same balance between ethics and reason that you espouse. If they were truly driven solely by reason, they would change their mind immediately upon discovery of new evidence. It’s their “knowledge in their hearts” that makes them try to ignore or twist facts that do not support them. However, as you noted, “Reason can change a person’s ethical point of view. I’ve sen [sic] it done.”
Why is this a failure? Reason is a tool; it is not some magic thing that only works if it is used to advance beliefs that you personally consider good. None of the faculties you list do this. Reason, Ethics, Imagination, Intuition, Common Sense, and Memory can all be used to support the religious right. That is not a failure on their part. I think if they are used well, predjudice against homsexuals will be shown to be wrong, but that doesn’t mean someone couldn’t use all of them to argue that homosexuality is wrong.
Reason: Homosexuality is wrong because they carry diseases and don’t reproduce
Ethics: I feel homosexuality is wrong/God said it was wrong
Imagination: Imagine the world without homosexuality: scores of frolicking hets, never having to be creeped out by watching two men kiss!
Intuition: For some unknown reason, I have a deep feeling that homosexuals are creepy and need their asses beat
Common Sense: Everyone knows homosexuals are immoral and promiscous!
Memory: Many societies have been predjudiced against homosexuals. Besides, all the homosexuals I know are bad people.
Now, of course, you can use all of these to argue the other way, too. But the fact that any of these faculties can be used to argue two different ways is not a fault of theirs.
I get the feeling from you that you think of conservatives as less ethical than you, or that their ethics guide them less. I think you are incorrect here. While individual conservatives may indeed be so, and perhaps all the conservatives in your goverment are (though I find this doubtful), the philosophy behind conservatism is not any “less” ethical then liberalism. While I may tend strongly towards liberalism myself, I do not think conservatives are less ethical; they’re just, um…“differently-ethic-ed” 
Their ethics value personal freedom and responsibility to the point that prevention of starvation by taking money from others can be too high a price. Your ethics do not weigh things that way. Yet I would not consider either philosophy neccesarily indicative of weak or ineffective ethics. This is one reason why your argument against reason has seemed strange to me, since I think making conservatives rely more on their ethics and pay less mind to reason would be likely to make them even more set in their course. I guess I have more hope that showing the effects of conservative policies versus liberal ones will induce people to change their methods (assuimg they are amenable to reason) than simply telling a person who values freedom over feeding the poor that they shouldn’t feel that way.