I spent about an hour this Saturday night arguing about welfare reform with a very informed, though bleeding-heart liberal girl named Jess, who spent a few years analyzing that very subject at a policy think tank. I channeled Ahren in order to make the argument a little more interesting, and to make Jess expose the true basis of her positions. An hour later our friends made us switch seats at dinner in order to interrupt the argument, which had at this point devolved to a "moral dilemma", which naturally involves raised voices, etc.

the details of the argument are not tremendously important - it centered on one particular stipulation of welfare reform that my new friend disagreed with - setting a limit on how long someone can remain on welfare. the crux of her argument was welfare of the children, and that we as a society are "morally obligated" to do what is best for the children, and, consequently, for the parent, yet we also, as a society, or government, or whatever, can in no way restrict someone "moral right" to create said children.

what i realized is that both the left and the right suffer from the same major issue, preventing me from identifying with their core, and are not making an effort to appeal to me and my kind. they defer to moral authority as the ultimate arbiter, and as the underpinning of their position. that is stupid because if you are not willing to question or justify your morals, then you simply come to an impasse in attempting to convince someone of your point. plus most of their morals are sort of stupid.

all they need to do is say this. the goal of society is to provide a relatively stable, secure environment for individuals to pursue their own goals, in as open a way as possible, for them, their kids, etc. then different sides can argue how to best accomplish this goal - devoting more or less resources to particular programs, providing certain social services and not others, etc. i think this is still the core idea behind the founding of this country, and it is basically a good one. it is a macroscopic version of the same problem which each of us experiences as a consequence of living - balancing out short-term goals with long ones, figuring out how to earn a living, and how to distribute the resources that our work gets us. and it does seem like a good number of people are doing exactly this.

so why is deferring to morality as the criteria for governing a problem? because it distracts from approaching government just like other aspects of life - come up with a hypothesis and a method for verification, run the test, determine if the result is what was expected/desired, and keep or remove the policy. this would also make the legislators and their constituents expose their true goals, and thus the policy could be fairly assessed by the public as a whole, not only as to whether it works, but also as to whether people agree that the goal is a worthy one to pursue and that it is in line with the fundamental goal stated above.

i recognize that what i state as the goal for society represents a statement of my own moral conception. obviously when goals are at stake, there is no away around biasing things in your own direction. i would be thrilled to hear a cogent argument against using these goals as a baseline though. take your best shot, idol worshippers.

-Friedrich

p.s. until this weekend i also forgot how fun it is to argue with individuals who claim that people do things for reasons other than self-interest. it's just not possible to lose when your interpretation of reality is so much more lucid than theirs.