Toward the end of the last post, I indicated that the need for Ockham's Razor becomes larger as the audience for the proposition grows. If one believes that there are any tenable connections between politics and philosophy, this assertion inherently supports a live-and-let-live form of (classical) liberalism or libertarianism. Ockham's Razor requires a natural skepticism of claims that are not subject to public validation by common access to the experience justifying the proposition.
Applied to propositions commonly found in political philosophy, Ockham's Razor would probably only leave negative liberties intact (if they truly approach natural rights in terms of their universal assimilability), given that the justifications for many positive liberties or values (e.g., welfare, social security, education, etc.) are much more contentious and contingent. Rawls might like to have claimed that he solved the problem of justifying positive liberties through the veil of ignorance, but the artificial lack of context and presumed preference for a liberal society with what might be called "social insurance" is intentionally ignorant of psychology.
A population's contingent and idiosyncratic makeup often creates a temperament that becomes determinative of the population's willingness to accept certain propositions. Madison called these populations factions. Thus, the American experiment gambled that when a democracy's people's interests are diverse and atomized enough, they wouldn't be able to collude to form a majority power capable of imposing positive values on the rest of the population. Conversely, smaller constituencies (on down to the individual level) are capable of accepting more sophisticated and uniquely fitting propositions. This is the concept of federalism.
As such, it is unsurprising that Pragmatism grew up in America. Nothing embodies America more than an attitude of experimental existentialism fueled by the passions: Pragmatism, in short.
2 comments:
Even if Rawls is purposefully ignorant of psychology, so is most of America. There are millions of people who take pride in their ignorance of complicated subjects, and yet these people are also the swing votes in most elections. The desire (in everyone) to learn has not caught up to the political or philosophical constraints of the ruling class of society--I am not sure if it ever will...
That is precisely the point. Rawls believes that individuals could hypothetically suspend their unique perspectives in order to organize society on mutually beneficial and protective terms. My argument was that the contingent and contextual aspects of individual psychology render the concept of a mind divorced from context (and therefore capable of carrying out Rawls' thought experiment) a nullity.
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