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In my lifetime, in my cultural environs, I have seen certain political issues shift from "negotiable" to "nonnegotiable." I guess the most famous example is gay marriage. This used to be something high schoolers could pick sides on in debate club; now, the very idea of being opposed to gay rights is appalling. Gay marriage is not an issue that reasonable people will disagree about, because we have come to recognize as a society that being gay is just not wrong in any objective sense.
Of course, many people work very hard to couch all of their political beliefs in this kind of absolutist language. "If you oppose free school lunches, it's because you're racist" and stuff. Indeed, this is a very tempting rhetorical move. If you admit that reasonable people may disagree about your political beliefs, then you are essentially admitting that your favoring one side is just a matter of preference, not something grounded in firm and eternal principles like justice and fairness. By asserting that your view is the only reasonable view, you excuse yourself from having to defend it in the first place.
There are hidden dangers in chaining too many of your beliefs to universal moral axioms. For one thing, you have to keep your axioms straight: It is easy for a critic to come along and use your own principles against you, or show that your axioms, taken to a logical extreme, would produce some horrible injustice. For another, if you spend too much time grabbing onto beliefs based on their proximity to your basic moral axioms, you might start to get sloppy, and forget how the actual derivation of the belief follows from the principles. In other words, you have beliefs that are ostensibly grounded in basic principles, but in actuality, the basic principles are merely phantoms and your so-called beliefs are actually just strident guesses.
My question is, do you have any political beliefs that you are both very firm in, but also acknowledge that there is room for disagreement? What are they? If you believe in something firmly but do not have an inviolable moral principle at the root of it, what makes you so sure that you have the right answer?
Of course, many people work very hard to couch all of their political beliefs in this kind of absolutist language. "If you oppose free school lunches, it's because you're racist" and stuff. Indeed, this is a very tempting rhetorical move. If you admit that reasonable people may disagree about your political beliefs, then you are essentially admitting that your favoring one side is just a matter of preference, not something grounded in firm and eternal principles like justice and fairness. By asserting that your view is the only reasonable view, you excuse yourself from having to defend it in the first place.
There are hidden dangers in chaining too many of your beliefs to universal moral axioms. For one thing, you have to keep your axioms straight: It is easy for a critic to come along and use your own principles against you, or show that your axioms, taken to a logical extreme, would produce some horrible injustice. For another, if you spend too much time grabbing onto beliefs based on their proximity to your basic moral axioms, you might start to get sloppy, and forget how the actual derivation of the belief follows from the principles. In other words, you have beliefs that are ostensibly grounded in basic principles, but in actuality, the basic principles are merely phantoms and your so-called beliefs are actually just strident guesses.
My question is, do you have any political beliefs that you are both very firm in, but also acknowledge that there is room for disagreement? What are they? If you believe in something firmly but do not have an inviolable moral principle at the root of it, what makes you so sure that you have the right answer?
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