But is also possible or to conceive of ethical ideals which don’t rest on notions of injustice and blame. — Joshs

I doubt it.

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.

But autonomy is not something that can be bestowed by a distribution of goods or opportunities.

But autonomy is something that can be curtailed by a lack or failure of distribution of goods or opportunities.

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

(Is this quote from Gallagher? I went to grad school with him!)

I think the criticisms in the passage are apt, particularly about Rawls and goods distribution. I'm sure you're familiar with Martha Nussbaum's critiques as well. We could do a whole thread on what's right and wrong with Rawls and the original position. The reason I don't consider myself a Rawlsian is because of his over-reliance on an abstract thought experiment to generate the idea of justice as fairness -- very far from the Habermasian idea of communicative action. That, and his apparent indifference to the role of capitalism in liberalism.

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.

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.’ — Joshs

The issue being that the supposed ethical neutrality of liberalism is itself based on a worldview, namely, that the ground of values is social or political in nature, in a world that is morally neutral or indifferent. So I'm not proselytizing specific religions, but I believe that the religious mind understands something that the secular attitude does not. In Western culture, that is plainly centred around Christian Platonism, but I'm not someone who believes that therefore Christianity has any kind of monopoly on truth.

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.”

When you consider that justice is undermined when one person is treated more harshly than another for exactly the same crime or misdemeanor or rewarded more richly than another for the same contribution, it becomes obvious that justice cannot be separated from fairness and the fact that there is no rational justification for privilege.

So, saying that

Justice (like friendship) involves fostering this plurality of autonomies

is the same as saying that one's autonomy is not unconditionally more important than another's, and this is precisely the idea of fairness—that there can be no purely rational justification for considering one's autonomy to take precedence over another's.

That there might be pragmatically conditioned contexts in which, for practical reasons, one's autonomy predominates, as authority say, is a separate issue. Such arrangements are or should be. agreements that are freely entered into by all participants, and if that is not the case that would be unfair, an injustice.

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. — Joshs

I'll make a point of reading it. I've followed his career with interest. He was quite a bit older than me -- I think he'd just left seminary -- but a really nice, smart guy,

The issue being that the supposed ethical neutrality of liberalism is itself based on a worldview, namely, that the ground of values is social or political in nature, in a world that is morally neutral or indifferent. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure that's right, though I agree with you about spirituality. Rawlsian liberalism doesn't have to say -- and indeed it usually does not -- that the world is morally neutral or indifferent. And it's not so much that the ground of values is political. Rather, it's that the only values that belong in the political sphere are process values, more or less Kantian, that emphasize impartiality and universalizability. Is this an artificial and perhaps unworkable division? Maybe. But we should try to understand it on its own terms. Liberalism, as exemplified by Rawls, believed that the job of the state was to establish, to the extent possible, a framework for coexistence among people and groups with diverging opinions and goals. And yes, as I've been discussing with @Joshs, this framework can't be neutral in respect to any values whatsoever. But it can espouse a version of neutrality that at least takes a hands-off approach to differences among religious and/or social groups -- and that's not nothing. It asks for public neutrality, regardless of what any particular member of the polis may personally believe. That is not the same thing as publicly declaring that there are no transcendental values, which the opponents of liberalism often seem to believe is the agenda.

And yes, as I've been discussing with Joshs, this framework can't be neutral in respect to any values whatsoever. — J

This is of course true—the framework cannot be neutral when it comes to fairness, or neutrality, itself. Fairness, or neutrality is a value simply because there cannot be any rational justification for rejecting it.

it can espouse a version of neutrality that at least takes a hands-off approach to differences among religious and/or social groups -- and that's not nothing. It asks for public neutrality, regardless of what any particular member of the polis may personally believe. That is not the same thing as publicly declaring that there are no transcendental values, which the opponents of liberalism often seem to believe is the agenda. — J

Thanks, that’s a fair clarification. I agree Rawlsian liberalism doesn’t explicitly deny transcendental values or claim the world is morally indifferent. But in practice, I think it tends to regard such values as if they were subjective or socially conditioned—even when it doesn’t say so outright—because of the absence of a vertical axis, so to speak.

Its framework allows only procedural values—like fairness or autonomy—into the public sphere: the horizontal axis. That may amount to a kind of neutrality, but it effectively brackets deeper conceptions of the Good—not by refuting them, but by rendering them inadmissible in public reasoning. So while liberalism doesn’t deny transcendental values, it often functions as if they were subjective—and that’s the deeper concern.

- Right, and if Simpson is right then Rawls himself admits that he has no non-subjective basis for the intuitions that ground his theory. The reasoning is very circular.

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. — Joshs

Nice.

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

We need a thread on this. Notions of blame have always intrigued me. We are so quick to judge and despise those we think have transgressed from the obvious path of "righteousness". This retributive impulse has frightened me since I was a child.

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. — Joshs

(Mimicking Socrates): Is justice, then, to be learned from dogs at play? Or shall we not rather seek to know what justice is - even if be something that no dog might comprehend?

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.

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 (and desegregation). "The market has spoken."


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?

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.

Yes, its less of an expectation. However, people of later generations do still definitely expect that extremely underfunded welfare states will continue to pay their extremely expensive benefits in old age though, which will require dramatic reductions in future investment and young people (young people who in the West will become majority minority even as they will be forced to pay for a much wealthier majority European elderly population who has also become habituated to unsustainable levels of consumption). Aside from the sustainability issues and political stability issues this brings with it, the point is that 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.

Anyhow, I would think the more obvious failure of liberalism on the topic of elder care lies more in creating a culture where people, particularly women, are derided and attacked, represented as dupes, etc. for supporting their families (generally in market terms of "unpaid labor"), rather than individual choices. The fact is, there is a stigma in directly the opposite direction. You're supposed to "lean in" to career and consumption.

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?

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

What's the comparison case here? If all economic growth stops in 1980 and neo-liberalism gets to claim responsibility for everything after, perhaps this is true. It seems far from obvious that neo-liberalism was the only, or best way to pursue this growth.

We actually have examples of extremely poor, (sometimes war torn) nations becoming developed nations since WWII in Korea, Finland, Iceland, etc. They did not follow the standard globalization play book of "become the sweatshop of the West." Nor did China, since the CCP continually intervened to push back on the forces of globalization in ways smaller states could not. There are strong arguments that, at least in many states, globalization, as pursued, has actually retarded economic and political development. And this is of course ignoring the ecological toll about to come due in the second half of the century (liberalism's focus on short term gains and essentially religious faith in "progress" to fix any apparent disasters we are subjecting future generations to).

I think the bolded part is demonstrably false, at least in its hyperbolic terms (i.e., "devastated"), but I wouldn't fault you for thinking this is true because people who certainly know better have tended to put out extremely disingenuous narratives on this front. The common thing to do is to simply look at US capital substitution rates in industry that has stayed in the US and extrapolate from there about what would have happened had other industry stayed. This is wholly inappropriate though, since the type of industry that is worth keeping in-market has been precisely that industry that is most cost-effective to automate (because then you aren't shipping technicians and expensive capital abroad just to ship the product back). There do not exist, contrary to popular opinion, magical machines that can just spit out most products. The factories that moved to abroad were specifically for those products that could most benefit from avoiding labor expenses.

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.

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.

I don't really need a "transcendent" ground for these critiques. I just need to reject liberalism's voluntarism, the idea that liberty is "doing what you currently desire."

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).

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.

↪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.

I think that's a fair way to frame it. But I would put it that: "you're free to practice any religion you want, so long as you practice it as an individual." Bans on public religious observance or clothing point in this direction for instance. This is very different from earlier forms of liberalism in the US, where religion was a prominent part of public life, and the prohibition on religion was rather than no one be coerced into it, and that the state play no role in supporting any particular faith.

It's a significant political issue. Pew just released a new study for Easter and it found that a full half of Americans are greatly concerned with the decline of religion in public life. Pace common stereotypes, this sentiment is not specific to White, rural Evangelicals (not that large of a population anyhow), but includes a majority of Hispanics as well. It's a difficult and complex issue, but I don't think I would be misrepresenting things to say that the opinion of aggressively secular folks on this issue tends to be: "so much the worse for the majority on this issue." Which is certainly a defensible position. My point would merely be that this is not neutral vis-á-vis conceptions of liberty and "democracy." It tends to put the individual above the community, and I think it's fair to say that there is a general hostility towards religion as a constraint on individual liberty precisely because it is communitarian and, even more so, because pretty much all world religions reject the liberal voluntarist conception of liberty.

Communitarian projects are famously difficult to operate in liberal legal systems as well, since the idea is generally that assets must ultimately lie with some individual (or corporate officers). I think it's interesting to note that a great many intentional communities and communes have been created based on more secular and liberal understandings of liberty and community, and the particular challenges they've faced. In general, they have collapsed quite quickly.

The kibbutz has been a particularly robust example though, and it's worth noting there that (aside from being grounded more in socialist thought), they have had the benefit of a friendly legal system that has enabled them, rather than one that is broadly hostile to their project.

That may amount to a kind of neutrality, but it effectively brackets deeper conceptions of the Good—not by refuting them, but by rendering them inadmissible in public reasoning. So while liberalism doesn’t deny transcendental values, it often functions as if they were subjective—and that’s the deeper concern. — Wayfarer

Yes. Minor quibble: "inadmissible" shouldn't be taken to mean "unmentionable" or "intellectually disreputable." The point is that they can't play a deliberative role, other than as a statement of what the person believes.

"It often functions as if they were subjective—and that’s the deeper concern."

But what would be the alternative? The key is "as if". Values may or may not be subjective, says the liberal state, but we must proceed as if they are -- or at any rate, as if the matter is not one for government to decide. Should we instead turn our practical deliberations into a forum about whose claim to objective value has the best argument? Or would you rather we adopted a set of transcendental values, and based the polity on them? How would that differ from theocracy? (An alternative, more critical, response here would be: The liberal state does adopt a set of transcendental values, but they are precisely the procedural values of neutrality and impartiality, as @Janus points out.)

The kibbutz has been a particularly robust example though, and it's worth noting there that (aside from being grounded more in socialist thought), they have had the benefit of a friendly legal system that has enabled them, rather than one that is broadly hostile to their project. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I most certainly don't want to start a controversy about Israel, but notice what can happen when a "friendly legal system" extends its friendship not just to the admirable concept of a kibbutz, but to the policy that other religiously based social groups should not receive that friendship -- should in fact be seen as opponents on religious/nationalist grounds. Thank goodness, there are many, many Israelis who are opposed to this kind of theocracy.

Yes. Minor quibble: "inadmissible" shouldn't be taken to mean "unmentionable" or "intellectually disreputable." The point is that they can't play a deliberative role, other than as a statement of what the person believes. — J

How does this add anything to the conversation whatsoever? Did you think Wayfarer was using "inadmissible" in some other way? That's what the word means, after all. And clearly if something cannot play a deliberative role, then it is unmentionable and intellectually disreputable within deliberative contexts, which is precisely what we are talking about.

That seems like the state putting the rights of one group over another (and also something it does quite broadly and not in any special relation to communitarian life), not a tension between the individual and communities. Slavery involved the state putting the property rights of individuals above the personal rights of individuals; it can happen in that context too.

In general, liberal states have not had too much trouble justifying segregation, colonialism, slavery, or expansion by conquest, which I don't think should be that surprising considering key early liberal theorists argued in favor of them. Israel is not really that different on that front, just behind the curve of change. The move away from these always seemed to me to involve liberalism's sublation of their socialist and nationalist opponents. At least in the US case, federal pressure to end segregation was motivated specifically on those grounds, and nationalism seemed to be a major driver of decolonization.

Edit: And note, liberalism has not fully outgrown this sort of justification of slavery. In some cases, globalization has led to conditions that might justifiably be called "wage slavery" (and it's also played a determinant role in fact that there are more slaves today than at any point in history). Sometimes, apologists do absolutely repudiate these effects, but it's not uncommon to see them minimize them or even to advocate for them as necessary positive steps in economic development in terms that very much recall Locke's admonition that savages be "liberated from indolence."

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.

I believe it can be an overwhelming, all-encompassing disposition. In any case are such matters any of our business really? Why does it matter to you? — Janus

Leaving the prior notes aside, as they were vague so we're just going to be going in circles, the above is true. It is also true of severe bi-polar, schizophrenia, true (i.e without the political baggage) body dysmorphia, chronic depression etc.. etc.. etc... These things matter to other people, and we even have provisions to detain people with these mental aberrations because of the heightened potential for harm to self and others. I am not, at least in this meager of a discussion, suggesting there's some direct parallel here, but the logic is the same.

Unfortunately, humans are male or female. That said, I see that part of this discussion isn't quite on the table and that's fine. I don't want a tense argument about htat issue right now.

Additional rights" would have been better. — Janus

then I would need to say things like "this is racist" before any decent discussion could be have about merits. We're justifying racist policies. I am not entirely perched to reject that possibility. I was for some time (and may possibly still be) for policies which afford women additionally (read: advantageous) rights in law above men. So, your points about being 'decent' are not lost on me. I hear those arguments. But 'kindness' does not solve problems. Consider:
We grant additional rgihts,and do what we can to support population X who is a minority, and was historically harmed. Great. They continue to fail and draw resources for generations without ever coming to the table in terms of reciprocity. Perhaps this is somehow morally acceptable: but it would bankrupt a nation and potentially push other demographics into poverty and diseducation, lacking in health care etc... instead of allowing all boats to rise. We need to consider these things instead of just crying and say "oh the humanity".

Do you really believe that most liberals would condone assassination, even of those they disagree with? — Janus

They seem to. Luigi Mangione being a big example. Heck, this white kid stabbed in the heart seems to be another one. Karmelo Anthony is being praised as some kind of hero in (not insignificant) corners of the base for stabbing a kid in cold blood and admitting it. He has raised more money than the fucking victim. It is not a serious conversation if we're going to deny the utterly reprehensible moral compass of the left. It is not lost that sometmes, this is outright racist thinking (the Anthony example is one).
But, to be clear, I didn't even suggest this. It is a significant number. That's all I can say for certain. The above is just blood-boiling so I'm happy to make the point. The sheer number of people who praised the shooter at Trump would be another, including several celebrities and politicians (i'm not going to post instagram compilations on here, but you could find them if you wanted to. Threats and praising the shooter abound).

So, you would include so-called hate speech as being unnecessary to restrict? — Janus

It depends what your definition of hate speech is, and this is always the problem. I am 100% against any kind of hate speech legislation because (even taking the underlying loadedness of your question as legitimate) no one has that authority. We cannot rely on 'perceived hate' because that's utter bollocks, and so we need an objective measure. If that's just slap-dash written up in a Bill, it's going to be insane. And it always is, as the UK has shown over the last few years https://mythdetector.com/en/free-expression-on-the-internet/ This last link because its actually pretending to be counter, but you get lines like this:

"The law also penalizes the deliberate spread of false information intended to cause annoyance or anxiety."

Are you kidding?

Aside from this, I want to know who the racists are. Don't stop anyone from showing their true self. Otherwise they'll do it in the dark.

The point is that they (i.e. religious beliefs) can't play a deliberative role, other than as a statement of what the person believes. — J

Right - that is the point I’m labouring. It’s the inevitable subjectivism that now must apply in such matters - a consequence of the individual conscience as the final arbiter of value. Everything becomes a preference, and preferences are more or less sacrosanct in liberalism (within legal limits.) 'Whatever floats your boat'.

I might seem to be advocating for religion, but it’s not my intention to evangelise. It’s my conviction that the higher religious cultures embody a cosmic philosophy, a vision of humanity’s role in the cosmos, which is lacking in the naturalism which nowadays underwrites liberalism, which is fundamentally neo-darwinian in orientation ('justice evolves') and the belief that existence lacks intrinsic purpose or virtue. It is, as Nietszche foresaw, basically nihilist in outlook (bearing in mind that nihilism is often not dramatic or outwardly obvious.)

Or would you rather we adopted a set of transcendental values, and based the polity on them? How would that differ from theocracy? (An alternative, more critical, response here would be: The liberal state does adopt a set of transcendental values, but they are precisely the procedural values of neutrality and impartiality, as Janus points out. — J

I agree that it's not the role of the state to impose values. That's why I'm trying to focus on a philosophy rather than politics. Where I think liberalism oversteps, is the kind of proselytizing secularism that believes that scientific method provides the sole criterion for truth, and the forcible rejection of any idea of there being a higher truth in the sense conveyed in the religions. ('Where's the evidence?' :brow: )

One of the better books I've read is Paul Tyson, De-fragmenting Modernity (2017):

Modernity did not usher in the long-promised utopia. There are many things wrong with culture and many instances of people being wronged in culture. There are problems to be solved: the problem of meaning, the problem of value, the problem of rights and duty, and so on. But these problems can’t be solved because of a deeper systemic—or better, philosophical—problem with modernity. The root problem of modern society, according to Paul Tyson in his book De-Fragmenting Modernity, is that “Modern Western knowledge is blind to truths of being and belief” (p. 5). To moderns, only objective facts, shorn of value judgments, are knowable. When it comes to “being” or questions of ultimate reality, modernity delivers scientifically discoverable atomic truths understood within the immanent frame (Charles Taylor’s term) of a causally-closed physical universe, a universe devoid of meaning, purpose, or value. Tyson argues for abandoning of this shallow modern life-world picture and a turning back to a more ancient and Platonic way of conceiving things. Fundamentally, this change involves the adoption of the ontological priority of being and an openness to transcendence.

It is true that that is a much more religiously-oriented way of being, but it doesn't necessarily have to be imposed on the political level. So, ironically, it *is* up to the individual, not in reliance on some institutional framework, to see through and beyond it. Which is a very difficult thing to do.

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.

So you cannot critique the Islamic State because you don't live in a Muslim nation? You cannot call out the abhorrent practice of American chattel slavery unless you live in the ante-bellum South? My take would be: "any ethics that requires withholding judgement in that way is a ludicrously deficient ethics."

And in the many posts of yours I have read have never seen you actually try to argue for the claims that seem to lead to this position, e.g. that all intelligibility must be situated in/emerge from a specific language game/metaphysics. Obviously, most philosophy disagrees on this point, which of course doesn't make the majority right, but it does make simply asserting the opposite insufficient. One might suppose that if assumptions like that lead one to an ethics that cannot condemn ISIS or slavery, or forces one to reject "razor sharp hunting knives are not good toys for babies because of what they are," as an overly dogmatic judgement, it's a good indication that something is seriously wrong with it.

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:

What is this supposed to be, some sort of guilt by association argument? "The evil boogiemen said it so it must be false!" You know who else made this argument? Unions, all through the Clinton years. Only later shifts in the Democratic coalition led to them abandoning this messaging. Union leaders met with Clinton at the border as he stated his commitment to do more than Bush re immigration.

Opinions differ on the aggregate effects of migration on unions. It's hard to pull out the effects from everything else, particularly because there are likely strong interaction effects between disparate concurrent forces. But the idea is mainstream in economics. Aside from increasing the labor supply, immigration also tends to make it more difficult to unionize due to intercultural friction and labor/culture barriers.

And employers agree. For instance, leaked documents from Amazon show they explicitly sought to diversify their workforce at the jobsite level to combat unionization risks. That employers pursued this tactic in the first Gilded Age is also well-documented.

I might seem to be advocating for religion, but it’s not my intention to evangelise. — Wayfarer

No, I don't take you to be doing that at all. Your approach is fair-minded, and I share your view of the importance of spirituality, if not religion per se.

inevitable subjectivism . . . — Wayfarer

the individual conscience as the final arbiter of value. . . — Wayfarer

preferences are more or less sacrosanct in liberalism (within legal limits.) — Wayfarer

I think this is wrong, but the distinction that needs to be made is a subtle one. And what you say here may help make sense of it:

That's why I'm trying to focus on a philosophy rather than politics. — Wayfarer

In what I'm saying about liberalism, I am focusing on it as a political structure. It's been slow to dawn on me that others on TPF, including yourself to an extent, view "liberalism" as an entire panoply of philosophical and ethical attitudes, intent on various levels of proselytizing. I'm sure this is the sort of "overstepping" you're thinking about. I have almost no interest in this feature of contemporary life, and know little about it. I avoid that level of "political" non-conversation whenever I can. My political convictions are far to the left of all that (I should have been born Swedish!). So I can hardly say you're wrong. No doubt there are many out there who wear the "liberal" hat and who do all that you fear they do. But all I can speak about is what I know of the Rawlsian liberal tradition in political theory, which is a very different matter.

So, from that perspective . . . there really isn't any inevitable subjectivism, nor is the individual conscience consulted about value, nor is anyone's preference sacrosanct. To the extent that a government could espouse such things (by law?!), Rawls would say it did not understand liberalism. The sort of government Rawls envisaged, I think, would have no opinions whatsoever about subjectivism vs. objectivism in personal philosophy, or about how reliable one's conscience might be. Nor would a preference be sacrosanct in the sense of being philosophically unquestionable.

On all these matters, the state is neutral, agnostic. Its attitude is: "You might be right. And you have the right to be wrong. You may do as your conscience dictates, and that may or may not result in ethical truth. It's none of our business. It's not that we think "subjectivism is correct"; it's that we insist that the government must not say the opposite. We are concerned that no one, speaking for the state, attempts to impose their version of objective values other than the procedural values of liberalism itself. That is not because we "don't believe in objective values"; some of us do, some of us don't; it's because the heterogeneity of the polis demands neutrality on the question, just as a matter of tolerance and getting along. The alternative, we think, must inevitably tend toward authoritarianism."

Is this complex and full of flaws? You bet. It isn't even my preferred political structure. I only insist that it's not the same thing as taking a position on subjectivism, or trying to get people to adopt it.

Rawls would say it did not understand liberalism — J

Perhaps he needs another cultural moment. Certain seems like this sort of thing is trying to be brought into legislative styles. The recent UK court ruling seems to reverse this, somewhat ( in terms of a cultural picture - not that one ruling changes the Western conception of gender per se).

It's been slow to dawn on me that others on TPF, including yourself to an extent, view "liberalism" as an entire panoply of philosophical and ethical attitudes, intent on various levels of proselytizing — J

That's fair. It might be that my criticism is more of modern culture. For instance that provided in 'The Blind Spot of Science, by Thompson, Frank and Gleiser. It's not as if liberalism 'proselytizes' so much as embodies an assumed consensus that puts the burden of proof on those who question it.

I'll try and explain what I meant by subjectivism. It's not as if it's a doctrine or school of thought; only that, for deep questions of value and meaning, as these are not necessarily adjuticable by science, then whatever is held about them, is said to be a personal matter, or a matter for individual judgement.

I agree with your depiction of an ideal liberalism, and I'm inclined to support liberalism as a political philosophy, but modern liberalism is typically missing a dimension of existence, one that used to be supplied by religion(s). (Nevertheless if I were a US voter, I'd vote Democrat, but I think more of the 'Christian democratic' ilk - politically conservative but socially progressive, if that makes sense.)

I'll try and explain what I meant by subjectivism. It's not as if it's a doctrine or school of thought; only that, for deep questions of value and meaning, as these are not necessarily adjudicable by science, then whatever is held about them, is said to be a personal matter, or a matter for individual judgement. — Wayfarer

Let's make it a little clearer. Deep questions of value and meaning are matters for individual judgment; how could they be otherwise? You can't look them up in a textbook. What you mean, I think, is that subjectivism believes that human judgment has no further court of appeal, where it might receive an answer as to whether the judgment is correct or not. In that sense, these judgments are either based on subjective considerations that don't necessarily hold from one person to the next, or they are unfounded by a first principle of rationality.

Liberalism as I understand it stops with the first statement: From the state's point of view, your individual judgment is just that, and we will not interfere or tell you you are right or wrong. But I certainly see what you mean about a "subjective attitude," if we can call it that, which wants to say all sorts of things about what value judgments are "really" based on. Most of these things, I disagree with, as do you. The ideal liberal state will have none of this.

Liberalism as I understand it stops with the first statement: From the state's point of view, your individual judgment is just that, and we will not interfere or tell you you are right or wrong. — J

But that's just nonsense. I don't understand the naivete which claims that the liberal state does not interfere with value judgments. Do you actually believe yourself when you say things like that?

A state which makes no value judgments cannot govern at all. Politics is no less bound up with values than morality. The fact that liberalism has brainwashed us to think otherwise is remarkable, and even impressive. :lol:

And in the many posts of yours I have read have never seen you actually try to argue for the claims that seem to lead to this position, e.g. that all intelligibility must be situated in/emerge from a specific language game/metaphysics — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here ya go:

I don't think we can distinguish between prescriptive and descriptive orientations, or between an anormative characterization of how things are and the normative significance of them. Elsewhere, I reject that distinction as a more encompassing Fourth Dogma of Empiricism, which encompasses the dogmas of analyticity, reductionism, and
conceptual scheming that Quine and Davidson identified. Recognizing that we always belong amid a conceptual field is not a separate determination from
understanding our situation within that field. It is an aspect OF the latter recognition, although one we are often not attentive to, and that aspect is common to different normative orientations within that more-or-less shared
conceptual field.

Remember that we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances, toward what I described above as their "end," as Aristotelian energeia. Through discursive niche construction, human beings have built up patterns of mutually responsive activity. These patterns make possible newly intelligible ways of living and understanding ourselves within this discursively articulated "niche.""

"Brandom's talk of "norms" is then misleading: norms are not already determinate standards to which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

"This understanding of conceptually articulated practices as subpatterns within the human lineage belongs to the Davidsonian-Sellarsian tradition that emphasizes the "objectivity" of conceptual understanding. Yet the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration. People always do have some at least implicit conception of what is at issue in their various performances and what is at stake in the resolution of those issues. They understand their situation in a particular way that takes the form of an ability to live a life within it, a practical grasp of what it makes sense to do, of how to do that, and of what would amount to success or failure in those terms. Such an understanding governs all efforts to work out that understanding by living our lives in particular ways. (Joseph Rouse)

Here’s a recent paper of mine on the subject.

https://www.academia.edu/124753599/Whos_to_Blame_for_Injustice_Joseph_Rouses_Poststructuralist_Critique_of_Enactivist_Ethics