I think this is a relevant article here. Relevant to this thread and many others doing the rounds here I suspect. Not just touching on the USA election but other previous cases of identity politics fallout. It is a short easy read so I shan’t try and paraphrase it here but to give you a flavour the author refers to John Stuart Mill’s quote,
and goes on to say
Yes, this illustrates the problem with the premise in the OP. Politicians try to reduce issues to simple binary choices but it is much more complicated. Any person’s opinion of a government program may be more affected by their confidence in the government’s ability to execute than its intent.
I’m OK with being judged by what my political positions are. Being judged by what other people think my political positions are, or what they should be, perhaps not so much.
My values are going to be different, so I am going to weight different factors differently. I am a pro-choice Republican who wants Roe v. Wade overturned, because I weight the factors of limited government and my opposition to judicial activism differently than someone who weights the availability of abortion as more important than those factors. Maybe that someone will think I am a bad person because of this. :shrugs:
Don’t get me wrong, I am not much better. I think BLM is a bunch of idiots because most of their protesting is aimed at cases where I perceive racism to be almost irrelevant, and they perceive it to be vital. And therefore I am likely to assume that they are just grabbing for power, money, and publicity rather than justice.
Regards,
Shodan
I think some political views can reveal something about one’s character, but only to a degree, and only certain views. Bigotry reveals something, obviously, as does a lack of concern or empathy for disadvantaged people. I don’t mean to confine these possibilities to conservatives – many conservatives oppose social programs because they think they harm poor people in the long run rather than help them, and there do exist bigoted and callous liberals.
I think the ultimate quality/characteristic/thing that reveals the content of one’s character is how one treats others, full stop. Voting is perhaps a part of this, but only a part, and probably a very small part for most people. I served with conservatives in the Navy with (I thought) truly terrible and often horribly ignorant political views, and yet these folks were selfless and courageous, for the most part (conservative and liberal sailors alike), and generally treated people with kindness and respect. There were assholes, too, but most were decent people who treated people decently.
To go a step further, perhaps the ultimate test of one’s character is unknowable for most people’s experience – what do they do when the shit hits the fan? What if some terrible leader asks you to turn in your Muslim/Jewish/atheist neighbors, or if your neighbor asks to hide in your basement from a government or community-led ethnic pogrom? I hope I’d do the right thing, but no one can know for sure until they’re in that situation.
I remain an optimist about people in general, even as I’m terribly worried about my country after the election.
What if you vote for policies that, you believe, will ultimately do more good than harm to society as a whole, but may have some collateral damage, making things at least temporarily harder for people like your maid. And so you try to make it up to her by helping her out directly. Just suggesting this as one possible scenario where the situation you describe doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person.
If you support policies that hurt people, I think it matters whether that’s because you don’t care (or worse, enjoy) that they hurt people, or whether you think that any feasible alternatives would be worse.
In the years I have spent volunteering at a local shelter, I have found an interesting mix: many folks there are relentlessly liberal, lefty do-gooders whose hearts bleed for The Cause and who proudly carry their ACLU cards while they await the revolution.
And many others are right wing conservatives who feel their faith calls them to serve, and draw distinctions between the need to personally exercise charity and the government assistance which perpetuates dependence.
In my experience, after someone’s spent a hot summer day trying to hang a 400 pound security door with you, you appreciate the person and the contribution and worry less about the politics.
Politics can tell you some things about someone’s character, but I’m not sure you can judge a person by their politics very well. It’s like trying to judge people by what God they believe in. What people believe is often worth little more than a cup of coffee. How they act in their own lives tells the true story. People who whine about the sanctity of marriage but have had two divorces. People who find immorality in gayness but have had kids out of wedlock. It’s all fornication. People who want higher taxes but go to unusual lengths to avoid paying them. People who oppose guns but have armed bodyguards. People who oppose abortion unless it’s their child. People who want something done about climate change as long as they don’t have to make any sacrifices. People who decry racism in people who live cheek to jowl with people not like them, but who themselves live in 95% or greater white neighborhoods. People who think that everything they buy should be regulated so as it keep prices down and supply abundant, but who think that everything they sell should be laissez-faire, with the freedom to even collude to keep prices up if necessary.
I think it’s a combination of their political positions, their rationale for their beliefs and how they treat opposing viewpoints. Also taking into context how they generally act as a person.
For example, my inlaws who watch Fox News constantly, I generally view as pleasant, but also very passive people who really don’t have much to them in terms of critical thinking or exposure to diverse viewpoints. They are just sort of content to live in their conservative world out in the country and not be bothered.
OTOH, an old fraternity brother who constantly posts right-wing Tea Party bullshit on Facebook and attacks anyone with an opposing viewpoint as “Liberal idiots”, I think is a piece of shit. But I also thought he was a piece of shit in college before I knew his political views. He was a bizarre racist jerk then and seems like he just found an ideology that accepts his jerkiness.
Sure.
Do I give the guy by my office a ten spot or not? He needs money, after all.
The short term view is yes: it’s a charitable thing to do. He’s obviously in dire straits.
But what will he do with that ten bucks in cash? Will it really help help, or will it finance the same kinds of things that led him to be standing in the median with his sign?
Does it make more sense to give the money to my local shelter? Or even better: to give some hours as well to that shelter, since they can often use labor and money, and how about NOT just showing up Thanksgiving weekend, when everyone in the world decides to be charitable.
Which choice truly exhibits caring?
Is it possible to be truly caring and still ignore the man and his sign, not out of a hardness of heart but from the knowledge that the money you hand him is really not the help it might appear to be?
No.
The decision to tax or not to tax and who gets the money is definitely a question on the application of violence.
I am confused. Are you saying they voted against the Green Party? Other than that, what far left liberals were there to vote against in the general election?
Post snipped.
There is something very wrong with this. The underlying idea that the only two reasons someone could be a republican is either a good person who is misinformed or a bad person is the root of most of the political crap we have going on these days. (This goes both ways, republicans do it to)
You bring up Head Start. You apparently assume that anyone who thinks it is not a good program is either misinformed or is suffering a moral failing.
However, the evidence isn’t all that clear. The Head Start programs aren’t all the same. They vary throughout the country. The teacher quality varies, some are full day and some are half. The studies also vary on the effectiveness.
For example, there is this. Warning, pdf. A quote from that study:
and
Note, this study was run by the HHS.
So it is possible to be informed and come to the conclusion that Head Start isn’t that good of a program. Hereis the executive summary of the 2015 U.S. Department of Education report on Head Start and on the very first page under Effectiveness it says:
Note, I have no idea how much Head Start helps and I am agnostic on the program itself. The point is that for a lot of these things the data isn’t clear. I am sure that there are other studies on how wonderful Head Start is and how valuable it is*.
Since the data isn’t clear, and the Department of Education for the U.S. states it isn’t clear, to assume that anyone who thinks the program isn’t good is either misinformed or has a moral failing is a bit over the top.
Slee
All politics is local. When you judge someone all you’re really doing is committing the fundamental attribution error over and over. You don’t know why they hold that belief, or how strongly they hold it. Maybe it creates a comfortable space for you, where you “know” person A is a good and just person, and person B is a bigot, and person C is a misinformed fool. But the reality is that all three people are all of those things at different times and about different things. It’s your own insistence that the labels you’ve put on people are both appropriate and accurate that trips you up. This is reinforced by the social media echo chambers people put themselves in today, and the big sort we’ve done to ourselves as a nation which keep us from having to re-examine our opinions or even encounter someone different from ourselves.
If you have trouble understanding the humans around you and how they could possibly believe what the believe and behave the way they behave… Well, the problem is you. You’ve tried to put people into boxes, and it’s not working out so well for you. Humans are creatures of heuristics and biases. Your short-hand way of thinking about the world is encountering reality in a un-clutched paradigm shift. You have my sympathies, I’ve been there myself, but it didn’t get better until I started engaging with people as people and not as a collection of labels.
Enjoy,
Steven
If you believe that women should be forced to act as incubators for their rapists baby, or that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, or that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married and I judge you for it, I’m not committing any error, I’m judging you for holding beliefs that I disagree with and that are extremely dangerous and dehumanizing to people close to me. That seems to be the recurring problem in these threads; people seem to think that it’s just plain wrong to judge other people for holding a belief that amounts to ‘the people close to you aren’t really human and I want to hurt them, badly’, even though the judgement is extremely sensible.
If you believe that babies should be killed because one of their biological parents committed crimes, or that Palestinian residents of Israel should be allowed to vote on policies just like the Jewish residents do, or that Churches should be forced to violate their religious doctrines due to secular laws then judging you for it isn’t committing an error…
Again, it’s elevating your perspective to “right” and anything different to “wrong” that is causing the conflict here. Why are you so sure you’re right? Why is someone coming to a different conclusion than you wrong? This whole line of thinking is very familiar to me although some of the participants in the conversation may not appreciate the parallel.
Enjoy,
Steven
I agree with the OP, and I’d extend it to religion as well.
But in order to do so (both for politics and for religion) it is important to distinguish between “what team you root for and vote for” and “the entirety of what you believe and try to act upon as your sense of righteous personal and social conduct”.
[QUOTE=Ravenman]
I’m a liberal who thinks that the government has a strong obligation to a social safety net, including things like early education programs like Head Start.
I know conservatives who think Head Start is a wasteful program that has little lasting impact, and think it ought to be ended. I can name a couple of people with these views who have also done far more than I have to help underprivileged children, including things like spending lunch breaks reading to local kids from bad schools.
[/quote]
(using Ravenman as an early example from the thread; this isn’t really a reply to Ravenman per se)
Pro or anti Head Start (or for that matter Pro or Anti Democratic Party based on their position on funding Head Start) is the sort of thing I regard as “what team you root for”. It’s a tertiary or quaternary-level organizational structure-and-behavior that is an implementation of a general policy that is a general proposed problem-definition analysis… way way off the original ground.
Believing that the situation of underprivileged children is to be deplored and ameliorated if possible is more the core-values stuff that gets closer to “right versus wrong”.
Thinking or not thinking that people should have the unimpeded right to engage in Behavior X is not the same thing as having a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the National Society for the Promotion of Behavior-X Liberties. Or of the politician who runs on a platform of supporting them. Or of the organized political party that receives funding from their lobbyists and has a history of proposing and supporting some bills that their leadership council has recommended.
If you really, genuinely believe that abortion is killing babies (and the ‘baby killing’ line is not just an excuse for punishing ‘sluts’ for having sex) then you should judge me as an evil person since I advocate straight up murder. The error is in your classification of destroying a fetus as murdering a baby, not in the judgement itself; if someone went all Abraham and stabbed their Isaac, I would certainly judge them as a bad person. My objection is only to what you are classifying as right and wrong, not to your judging someone on the basis of right and wrong.
One thing that contributes to this problem is that most anti-abortion types don’t actually act as though they think abortion is murder, but do act consistently with wanting to prohibit abortion as a way to punish ‘sluts’ for having sex. For anyone who doesn’t really see abortion as actual murder, it’s a lot harder to justify a negative judgement of someone for being pro-abortion. Side note: anti-abortion types also shouldn’t try to bang women who are pro-abortion, though oddly a lot of anti-abortion types seem to get pissed when they encounter women who won’t sleep with a guy who’s against it. (I’ve watched a friend provoke some funny reactions by shooting down hookup attempts from openly anti-abortion guys on OKC.)
No, the conflict is that you want to have your cake and eat it too, by adopting a position that I consider ‘wrong’ but insisting that I am ‘wrong’ for judging you for your position.
The whole line of thinking that you’re engaging in says that you can’t judge someone even if they’re an outright Nazi, because why are you so sure that shoving Jews into a gas chamber is wrong? Why is someone coming to the conclusion that we need the Final Solution wrong? If you assert that there are no morally wrong political positions, you’re stuck unable to judge someone for those things, and I think that’s an obviously broken position to take.
Does it really offend you that I don’t hang out anymore with the guy who said “wouldn’t it be great if we owned a few niggers to help us move these boxes?” Or that I don’t want to invite a guy who thinks my friends should have their marriage annulled because gays are icky to my party? Or that most of my female friends will avoid any kind of sex with a guy (or girl, though anti-abortion bi/lesbian women are pretty rare) who thinks she should be forced to carry to term in the case of an accidental pregnancy?
There are no morally wrong positions. There are no morally wrong actions. “Morally wrong” simply means the person who considers the positions/actions morally wrong may condemn them and oppose them, sometimes with their own actions.
Human morality is as much of a fiction as the compass rose on a map. A useful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.
Enjoy,
Steven
Human civilization and society are pretty much just fictions as well. Morality is one of those fictions that keeps the other fictions working.
That’s one theory.
I don’t agree with it.
I do believe it is impossible for me to demonstrate that my notion of moral righteousness is correct, to prove that it is, or to be sure within myself that I’m not wrong. But that’s a different thing than asserting that there doesn’t exist a moral right or a moral wrong in the first place.
I think there are natural laws about what benefits the species as a whole, or even the entirety of everything as a whole; some courses of action, some philosophies or sets of priorities, etc, are of benefit and some are detrimental overall.