If I might be allowed an overly broad generalization, it often seems like political action is locked between two main views. In the past I\u2019ve often called it the Kantian versus the Utilitarian.[1] That\u2019s not entirely fair. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that we have a tension between promoting values versus honoring them.<\/p>\n
Consider abortion. Many people think it wrong. Some people might go to protests over the issue and do things to signal their opposition to abortion. But some of the same people might oppose actions that would actually reduce the rate of abortion (say free contraceptives) for other reasons. They may not even focus on policies that actually reduce the rate of abortion.[2] Likewise someone might want peace but consider honoring that value so important that they wouldn\u2019t condone war even if it brought peace.[3] On the other side people might get into the situation of the ends justifying the means so killing is fine if it leads to an end to killing. <\/p>\n
These issues, despite how they appear, are harder to adjudicate than they sometimes seem. If murder is wrong and you had a time machine should you kill Hitler? (Ignoring all the time travel paradoxes) If murder is inherently wrong then it would be just as wrong to kill Hitler as it would to kill anyone else.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those whose intuitions tend towards the Kantian or honoring style of treating values tend to see them as inherently important regardless of consequences. Those who think in terms of consequences tend to view ethics and values through a lens of promoting those values as best they can. Of course few people are fully tied to one style of ethical reasoning.<\/p>\n
You can see these tensions with how those on the religious right have viewed Trump.[4] The first wave of reaction was extremely opposed to Trump. Those loosely associated with religion (i.e. irregular Church attenders) were far more positive to Trump. The reasons for this tended to be tied to his breaking of most important rules religious people held to.[5] That is there was a focus on honoring rules. Once it became clear Trump was going to win the primaries this shifted. People started asking themselves what the consequences<\/em>\u00a0of a Clinton versus a Trump Presidency would be. While hardly universal (Trump did very poorly in Utah compared to other red states) most religious conservatives embraced Trump because they thought an immoral bully protecting them was better than a bully attacking them.[6] The shift is thus from honoring values to promoting values. Even if few think Trump honors important social values they think he\u2019ll do a better job promoting them relative to the alternatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Note how much of Trump\u2019s opposition from the right through the left take a similar view. Many attack him because of his rule violations. Yet just as often we see fear about the consequences of breaking social norms. That is the focus is often on how violation of rules leads to people not following those rules leading to bad outcomes. It\u2019s a very utilitarian type argument. \u00a0<\/p>\n We we look at how (thus far) the actual opposition to Trump has gone (instead of why they oppose him) it\u2019s different. It\u2019s been primarily about virtue signaling. Going to marches, no matter how large, doesn\u2019t usually lead to change. It hasn\u2019t for abortion opponents despite years of protests often with large numbers.[7] That\u2019s not to say protests don\u2019t serve a purpose. Often they unify a base which has a utilitarian aim. But by and large they are tied to views about honoring rules rather than promoting rules. That\u2019s why talking to someone who thinks protests are helpful is so confusing to someone who thinks in terms of promoting values rather than honoring them. There\u2019s a fundamentally different way of thinking about ethics. Neither side understands one an other.\u00a0<\/p>\n I don\u2019t have any big conclusions to draw from this. However I suspect you, like me, won\u2019t look at things the same way once you see this fundamental divide in human thinking about politics and ethics. It\u2019s very helpful when analyzing the news to understand these very different ways of thinking. Now for those of us who don\u2019t tend to think of ethics in terms of either honoring nor promoting things get a bit more complicated. But it\u2019s very interesting how much these two categories do explain. Most importantly they clarify why we so often talk past one an other when discussing ethics or politics.<\/p>\n [1] Kant founded what is called deontological<\/a> ethics. Your actions are determined by rules. Ultimately your ethics are your duty or obligation to these rules. Utilitarianism<\/a> is the idea that what you should do is what brings about the greatest happiness for the most people. John Stewart Mill<\/a> popularized the notion and it led to many reforms like women\u2019s suffrage. It was the standard view for political thinking up through the late 60\u2019s and 70\u2019s in the west. (Ignoring Marxism) Since then modified Kantian views have tended to be very dominant, especially in the left. John Rawls<\/a> is a great example of someone who adopts a more Kantian like approach.<\/p>\n [2] Opposition to birth control among pro-life Evangelicals is an example of this tension. Evangelicals don\u2019t have the theological background of say Catholics on birth control issues. Catholics fit a little better into the honoring tension I\u2019m discussing though. Contraception might reduce abortion, and abortion is arguably a greater evil than people using birth control. Yet because what matters is honoring the rules and not achieving better ends that\u2019s what gets focused on. Evangelicals are a bit trickier since many oppose more liberal birth control dispersal because they think it\u2019d increase the amount of pre-marital sex. So in part this is a more consequentialist view. One can debate the actual type of thinking of course. Few people fit fully in one category or the other.<\/p>\n [3] Pacifists in World War II are a great example of this type of thinking, although you often see it even in contemporary debates. Again in the weeds things get more complicated. For instance a common attack on military intervention is that it radicalizes more people – a more utilitarian type of argument.<\/p>\n [4] I\u2019m here including most Mormons as members of the religious right. There are of course lots of politically liberal Mormons. Indeed they\u2019re probably overrepresented in the main LDS oriented blogs. Yet among American Mormons polls show most are Republican oriented.<\/p>\n [5] I hopefully don\u2019t have to list the rules he broke including vulgar talk, sexual harassment, serial adultery, dishonest business practices, and potentially even abortion.\u00a0<\/p>\n [6] I\u2019m not saying these views are fair or correct. However it seems they are pretty widespread.\u00a0<\/p>\n [7] Civil rights protests are usually held up as the classic example of successful protests. But they were extremely focused in a way that many other protests were not. They also had an important role of demonstrating<\/em> to the masses of America how especially southern police & laws were victimizing the innocent. Most protests since then haven\u2019t had that demonstrative function. In recent decades most protests have also been far more inchoate to the degree they often seem a grab bag of goals and frustrations of a wide swath of a movement. To the degree protests since the civil rights protests of the 60\u2019s have been successful it\u2019s been primarily by raising the cost of a particular action. (The recent successful protests of an oil pipeline are an example of that) My point is less about \u2018success\u2019 though than to merely note the difference between a protest with an utilitarian focus versus a protest focused on demonstrating honoring a law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If I might be allowed an overly broad generalization, it often seems like political action is locked between two main views. In the past I\u2019ve often called it the Kantian versus the Utilitarian.[1] That\u2019s not entirely fair. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that we have a tension between promoting values versus honoring them. Consider abortion. Many people think it wrong. Some people might go to protests over the issue and do things to signal their opposition to abortion. But some of the same people might oppose actions that would actually reduce the rate of abortion (say free contraceptives) for other reasons. They may not even focus on policies that actually reduce the rate of abortion.[2] Likewise someone might want peace but consider honoring that value so important that they wouldn\u2019t condone war even if it brought peace.[3] On the other side people might get into the situation of the ends justifying the means so killing is fine if it leads to an end to killing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36186"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36192,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36186\/revisions\/36192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}