Anti-Climacus

LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM:

Liberalism. Norm Geras:

But if we understand 'the equal dignity of all citizens' in a way compatible with what political liberalism is thought to entail, that is not a framework neutral as between the various metaphysical and social doctrines, religious and secular, that rub shoulders in the public domain. It harmonizes with some better than with others, and with yet others - for example, those encompassing the unequal dignity of different types of people - it harmonizes hardly at all. Liberalism is better as a political framework, not because it is neutral (as between competing outlooks), but because it is better. It needs to be argued and fought for on that basis.

Rawls is certainly wrong to think that political liberalism can be neutral in this way, if that neutrality is a pre-condition of political deliberation (as it is). Norm points out that a freestanding overlapping consensus is only possible after, not before, you know the all-things-considered comprehensive conceptions of the people constituting a political society. And, also certainly, liberalism will require some exclusions (a point made well in John Tomasi's book Liberalism Beyond Justice). However, to the extent it needs to be argued from a specific position, liberalism has to give way in its claim to be the way of approaching the world to which all people (in the right kind of state) can agree. The Law of Peoples suggests that Rawls is more interested in creating a workable universal consensus than in defending liberalism per se (James will perhaps disagree), so, while I think Norm's interpretation is correct, the implication is that Rawls is of limited use to liberal political theory.


Conservatism. Put me down in qualified agreement with John Holbo on the question of conservatism and segregation:

Douthat rejects this, suggesting the right thing to say is that conservatism in 1958 was in favor of segregation. That is, conservatism was wrong. There is an important point to be made here, which goes a bit beyond the generic one that humility is a virtue, and bullet-bitting takes a little fortitude. Political philosophies – conservatism, liberalism, so forth – are not the sort of thing you would expect to be infallibly right. They are going to be heuristics, insofar as they are styles of governing. In some ways, they are heuristic approaches to morality itself. Obviously you should feel free to improve your philosophy, looking forward. But, looking backwards, you shouldn’t gerrymander to avoid embarrassment.

Now, I have a little sympathy with the view expressed by Helen, that the view of conservatism as hegemonically in favor of segregation requires one to overlook the conservative sources that might've led one to oppose it. I worry that this devalues 'conservative' as a term of reference: if one may be conservative and oppose segregation, and one may be conservative and support it, what on earth could it possibly mean to be conservative? The answer is, of course, that they're conserving different things (or believe themselves to be conserving different things, or mis-identifying which things ought to be conserved).

The confounding factor, as Ross identifies, is Christianity:

I should also note that my views on how to define conservatism are colored by my allegiance to Christianity, which unless you expand the Kirkian definition to the breaking point only tends to be a conservative force in societies that are already deeply permeated by Christian beliefs - and even then not necessarily. This means that I take it as a given that I wouldn't have been able to self-define as a conservative in second-century Rome, or sixteenth-century Japan, and I don't have all that much trouble saying that I wouldn't have self-defined as a conservative in 1950s Alabama either - which was one of those Christianity-permeated societies, I might add, where the Christian religion turned out to be something other than a conservative force.

I presume the conservative argument against segregation in 1958 would rely heavily on a Christian conception of identity. Ross puts his finger on the important point: I may sometimes believe there's a natural fit between my religion and my political beliefs because they have at least one thing in common--me--but they can, and do, push in different directions. Where there is a conflict, the Christianity wins out, but that belief--logically, metaphysically and otherwise--is prior to my conservatism. I don't think there's too much shame in being wrong here: shame in being caught in the morally wrong position, to the extent that that would be applicable to an individual, but people of all stripes make misguided policy decisions all the time. If, as Holbo suggests, one doesn't cling too much to the idea that one's ideology is never mistaken, then the proper response to past failure is to learn, and try to not make the same mistake again.