Political Philosophy Podcast

Is there any intellectually serious case that forcing sex workers, drug dealers /users, shoplifters etc into v THIS v environment constitutes a reasonable and proportional social policy?https://twitter.com/RaceBaitR/status/985900537576067078 …

"men do not know how to be either perfectly good or entirely bad; because great evil has a certain majesty in its own way, they do not know how, or do not dare, to attempt it." -- Machiavelli

12. Boom! From Cogito Ergo Sum to the welfare state!

- OR – you must show an independent source of value that is as epistemically confident as 1-3 and explain why it overrides it. The former is dubious at best and I have never seen anything credible for the latter.

11.Any claims to ‘rights’, or first principles, that would contradict 9 or 10, must justify itself. If one is to assert a purist conception of property in response to 10 you must either show how this conception is a better rule for maximizing the good that 10

(and no, does not really reduce the incentive effects of capitalism)

10. Likewise, we can identify areas where a great deal of harm can be prevented, with almost no harm to anyone else. For instance, taking resources (both wealth and income) from billionaires causes them very little harm and, more properly used, could do great good

9. While there is a lot we don’t know, we do know that there are some actions that cause very bad consequences for very trivial benefits. We can start by creating legal and social prohibitions on these. This provides our justification for some of the basic human rights

8. Not only then is ‘the good; prior to ‘the right’ but the right, on closer inspection, is simply a loose framework for pursing the good, one that can be modified in light of new information.

(It makes sense to follow these rules generally even if local instances may cause more harm than good (the magistrate and the mob) otherwise we should be reduced to attempting to calculate outcomes for ever decision which is not feasible.)

7. Given this uncertainty it doesn’t make much sense to try to maximize the good in every individual instance. Rather we should aim to describe a set of general rules, institutions, and personal morals that over all will do this.

(Again, again, again, acknowledging this uncertainty is not a weakness of this account, rather it is an epistemic fact about the world which any intellectually serious account of morality will have to deal with.)

6. There is a great deal of uncertainty is how we get the best outcome in a global sense (hereafter called ‘the good’) both in terms of what is desirable for us, and in the practicalities of how to get it.

(In this case the burden of proof is on the deist/ theist /deontologist to evidence either of these claims. My view is that this burden has not been met in any intellectually satisfying way.)

(It is not a mark against this account to acknowledge this. To say that this account ‘fails’ to answer why we (individually) should be good (globally) is to say either that these are the same or that there is a source of goodness independent of experience.)

5. What is best for us individually and what is best globally are separate questions. Sometimes the answer will be the same, often it will be different.

That this account does not provide ultimate justification is not a mark against it: No such justification exists. Theories that claim to have such justification have to introduce elements that have no intelligible epistemic justification whatsoever (god or gods most notably)

‘Best’ here simply means how we have most of the most desirable experiences and the minimum of the least desirable. Again, there is nothing outside of this that makes it ‘best’ in any ultimate sense.

4. Given 1,2, & 3 we can ask two questions: What is best for us, and what is best of all conscious creatures?