Democracy and Moral Issues
Is there a mismatch?
Democracy was never meant to settle moral questions. On the contrary, it rests on the shared understanding that determining moral truth is not the project we are engaged in. It gives us a way to act collectively—pass laws, enforce borders, build institutions—without resolving questions that human beings have never resolved, like: What do we owe strangers? How should we weigh the needs of citizens against those who want to become citizens? What does justice require when outcomes are unequal?
Politics is less inflammatory if issues are not heavily morally freighted. The design and enforcement of traffic laws can be discussed at low temperature, for example.
Actually, most issues have at least some moral content. So instead of saying that “democracy was never meant to settle moral questions,” I would say that democracy works best when people are not confronting irreconcilable moral absolutes.
For example, people with different religions can live together if we agree to allow freedom of religion. A religion that does not allow for tolerance of other religions is going to cause trouble for democracy.
Redstone argues that things started to go wrong in the 1960s.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the left stopped treating a particular disputed moral question as open. Not through argument—through institutions. Through legal doctrines that assumed the answer. Through policies and social norms that made disagreement socially costly. Through a slow redefinition of what it meant to be a decent person, until holding the wrong view became evidence of bigotry rather than evidence of reasoning. It started with: Is inequality unjust? (the answer was determined to be yes) and became a template.
…When you treat contestable positions as settled and opposition as morally disqualifying, you don’t resolve their disputed nature. You just stop discussing them. And the people you’ve excluded don’t vanish. They wait.
…Democracy has always required a category: “good person who disagrees with me.” The left emptied that category when they turned disagreement into diagnosis. The right keeps it empty.
She worries about the divisions over the issue of illegal immigration. David Friedman proposes a solution.
federalism. For the current conflict, that means deporting illegal immigrants from Florida, where the state government supports doing so, ignoring them in Minnesota and California, where the state government and, I suspect, a substantial majority of the population, do not. If illegal immigrants are mostly criminals and welfare scammers, as one side’s rhetoric implies, the blue states will bear most, although not all, of the cost. If they are mostly hard working and, immigration law aside, law abiding, blue states will prosper.
It is not a perfect solution. The US has open borders between states; an illegal immigrant tolerated in Minnesota can winter in Florida and commit crimes there. But if state and federal authorities are actively hunting down illegal immigrants in Florida and deporting them he mostly won’t
Note that this approach is morally agnostic about whether aggressive deportation is good or bad. It is aimed at providing political peace. If we were willing to live with one another, it could work. But I think people are too far gone for that.
I fear that humans desire the moral license to hate other groups of humans. Society works better when we overcome that desire. For much of our history, Americans have succeeded in suppressing large-scale hatred of other Americans. That is no longer the case, and the polarization regarding mass deportation reflects that.
Please do not use the comments section to discuss the Minneapolis situation. There are plenty of other places where the Current Thing gets hashed over.
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Friedman's proposal is unworkable on several levels, as well as a basic misunderstanding of what federalism is. Federalism is not allowing states to pick and choose which Federal laws are enforced within their borders, it is the right of states to not have obligations beyond those specified to the Federal government in the Constitution imposed on them. Border control has been determined to be a Federal responsibility outside of state review. No state can voluntarily identify and turn over illegal aliens for deportation. So if the Federal government decides to stop deportations, or simply allow an order of magnitude more 'asylum seekers' in than are deported, any state polity that wishes to have less immigration is simply screwed. It also completely ignores that multitude of programs that are Federally funded but administered by the states. In order for his proposal to work, all of those programs must be ended immediately, otherwise you simply have a situation where the states with productive populations, of whatever composition, are subsidizing the other states. Lastly, apportionment of Federal offices does not depend on citizenship so there is an enormous incentive for states to import as many people as possible to maximize their power at the Federal level.
Redstone's observation that "Democracy has always required a category: 'good person who disagrees with me,'" is at the heart of what enables dialog and deliberation. It requires an assumption of good faith, mutual respect, and a willingness to see a situation from other points of view. You have to be able to come to an agreement on the core facts, on what has happened. You may not agree on the impact of different possible approaches and may evaluate potential outcomes using different metrics. Many seem to have lost the willingness, or perhaps even the ability, to engage in dialog and deliberation.
Arnold Kling's fear that "humans desire the moral license to hate other groups of humans," is certainly true for at least some humans and reminds me of Immanuel Kant's belief, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." We are all flawed and need to work against our shortcomings and weaknesses as best we can.