Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

LIBERTARIAN MORAL-SPECTRUM BLINDNESS

You can’t reason with a libertarian who relies upon moral intuition any more than you can reason with a progressive who relies upon moral intuition.

So, it’s pretty clear to me today, that libertarians are as morally blind (or in Haidt’s terms ‘tasteless’) as progressives are (albeit at a different part of the spectrum), and that the only conservatives can carry on a rational moral discussion – because only conservatives are not affected by large moral blind spots. The data says it. But I just experienced it first hand. And I hate what it means. It means that libertarians are just as irrational and impenetrable as progressives.

That doesn’t mean that libertarians haven’t solved the problem of formal institutions. They have. (Hoppe has.) But it means that except as a sort of minority conducting intellectual experiments, libertarians are useless for the purpose of discussing political solutions. They’re by definition ‘immoral’. Or perhaps a form of moral color-blindness in which the majority of the spectrum is invisible to them.

I’m a conservative libertarian. I place a premium on liberty and discount all the other moral values. That’s the definition of the moral intuitions of a libertarian. But that PERSONAL intuition and personal objective, is different from my understanding of POLITICS as a set of institutions that allow heterogeneous peoples to cooperate on means even if they possess competing ends. (Give the citizenry a circus and let their actions sort them out.)

ANALOGY:

1) RED : PROGRESSIVISM – Sees only red. (Harm/Care : the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children.)

2) BLUE : CONSERVATISM – Sees red, blue and yellow (Harm/Care, Proportionality, Authority/Hierarchy/Duty, Loyalty, Purity/Sanctity, Liberty/Oppression)

3) GREEN : LIBERTARIANISM – Sees only green (Liberty/Oppression : )

– Libertarians are “Red/Blue color blind.”

– Progressives are “Green/Blue color blind.”

– Conservatives are not color blind at all.

Just how it is.

YOU CAN”T REASON WITH A LIBERTARIAN EITHER

You can’t actually reason with a libertarian who relies upon moral intuition. It’s as irrational as trying to reason with a progressive who relies upon moral intuition. Both just justify their positions.

You can reason to a conservative, or conservative libertarian, *EVEN IF* they rely on moral intuition. Because they aren’t morally blind to any part of the spectrum.

And here I keep thinking (stupidly) that because I am not morally blind, even though I place a premium on liberty, and because I understand the RESULT of libertarian moral blindness: the reduction of all rights to property rights – that other libertarians will of course be as rational as I am.

But that’s not true. I am literally talking to people who are for all intents and purposes, physically incapable of moral discourse, just as a color blind person is physically incapable of aesthetic discourse on colors that he cannot see. (Or the disability called “Ageusia” which prohibits taste.)

THE INTELLECTUAL LIMIT

There is some point at which individuals abandon intuitionism (feelings) and resort to either rationalism (rules), or ratio-empirical science ( outcomes) for their epistemic judgements. The only libertarians that one can speak to rationally about morality are those that have abandoned intuitionism. And since it APPEARS to me that rationalism is just a form of justification, then further it appears that only those who adopt the ratio-scientific level of thought, abandon both intuition and justification, are capable of discourse.

That means that we are very limited in the number those people who possess the capacity for rational discourse on ethics and politics. And that since only conservatives are not morally spectrum blind, that it is only conservatives who can rationally discuss these issues EVEN IF they are relegated only to intuition.

THE TRIANGLE IS INVERTED

Conservatives form the base of an inverted pyramid.

Progressives and Libertarians are specialized variants of human.

Progressives are ‘excessively female’ and libertarians ‘excessively male’.

(I think some conservatives specialize in being ‘warriors’ but they’re indistinguishable because they have identical moral intuitions.)

Where progressive, conservative and libertarian refer to moral intuitions.

BUGS

The more I work on this problem the more I see humans of different moral persuasions just like specialized forms of ants. ‘Cause pretty much, that’s what we are.