Politics: Individual Rights vs Rule of the Majority

[TheBlackCat]

Specifically, #1: enforcing equal access to education inherently involves removing choice. If one demographic group naturally makes various lifestyle choices that result in high educational outcomes and a different demographic makes lifestyle choices that result in low educational outcomes, those choices need to be neutralized to yield roughly equal educational opportunity.

So in other words, children should be denied opportunities if their parents made bad choices, or rather if sometime in the past one of their ancestors made bad choices?

[DanLamb]

So in other words, children should be denied opportunities if their parents made bad choices, or rather if sometime in the past one of their ancestors made bad choices?

You are taking my logic a step further and suggesting a social policy strategy. I was intending to merely argue more basic assumptions. But if we are going to go further into preferred policy then:

Yes, absolutely! Some children should have more opportunity and advantage than others based on the actions of their parents and ancestors. The alternative is that the actions of parents and families should have no significant effect on children, and logical people should not invest any effort into children or family if their actions or lack of actions shouldn't have any significant outcomes.

I support completely voluntary charity arrangements where one group willingly helps people from another group and are free to set the terms and specifics of how they provide that help. I don't support mandatory government charity, where government seizes from some people and gives to others, with minimal involvement, engagement, or agreement of the people affected.

[Luke_Wolf]

I appologize for not explaining myself properly in my last post. I'd made it seem more antagonistic that I'd intended. Instead of saying that such a discussion couldn't work, I should have said they lead to confusion for some. You may wish to clarify what region you are speaking of. I stand by what I said about the 1 dimentional political spectrum being too simplistic. For instance, according to it, fascism and communism are at opposite ends of the spectrum (at least in America) even though they are so similar. In the nolan char for instance, they both fall in the extreme corner of the authoritarian quadrant.

Ah yes the Fascism misconception, The only reason Fascism is seen as a rightwing thing is because of Stalin saying it was. Which relative to communism (which is separate from communalism) is true, but in terms of the overall actual scale no it's got nothing to do with the political right. The actual left/right line has to do with the question of what is the role of government. The extreme left believes that the government should be deeply involved in our day to day lives, doing things like enforcing equality whereas the extreme right believes that at best government is a necessary evil and at worst that it shouldn't exist period.

From there you have Classical Conservatism vs Classical Liberalism (note the classical modifier is very important) which is all about conserving the status quo (whatever that status quo may be) versus allowing people to do whatever they want.

Further from there you have the Equality vs Freedom of Consequence sides, the extreme of the former is Extreme collectivism where any nail that sticks up is hammered down, the extreme of the other end is extreme Individualism which is naturally chaotic (note that freedom of Consequence doesn't disallow helping people it just means that it's up to the individual not the community to help their common man).

You can argue for additional scales but I think these 3 are the core ones. What's interesting though is while the scales continue to the end of the left side of the left-right bar, they stop short of the right end, because after a certain point all of the opinions converge into one as to how government should be run in spite of the individuals personal views. (A person on the extreme right may see smoking, same sex marriage, or insert other issue here as evil incarnate but they also think that that's not the role of the government and in the furthest extreme case they don't believe in law, and as a result there's only one option for them)

Just to give a good walkthrough though let's just take the whole same-sex marriage debate:

if you're to the extreme of the right, then regardless of your personal views on whether it's right or not you believe it isn't the role of the government to decide that issue, and instead that it is up to the individual and their own religious views to decide if they want to marry someone of the same sex, their dog, or even themselves. In short getting down to the idea of what separation of Church and State is really about. It's not about removing the ten commandments from a courthouse, or any other such nonsense it's all about scoping the power of the law down to what can be termed secular law, in total exclusion of moral law, and leaving the question of morality up to the individual and their religion. Secular law being defined as protections of Life, Liberty, and Property.

If you're to the extreme of the left and classically conservative then you're going to have laws in place establishing the moral law of whatever the status quo is, if you're an individualist then you're probably just going to ban same-sex marriage, if you're a collectivist then you're going to ban sodomy and criminalize being gay. Alternatively if the status quo is it's okay and the individualist would enforce it being okay (In other words political correctness and such) and the collectivist would enforce everyone being bi, churches to marry people despite it being against their doctrines, etc.

If you're extreme left, and classically liberal and an individualist, you're going to be creating a white list of activities that are okay as opposed to creating a blacklist of activities that aren't, and you're writing moral law. if you're a collectivist then it's the same as the left conservative collectivist with a status quo of it being okay as then you're going to enforce it being okay.

This of course only describes the extremes, obviously most people are actually moderates and lay somewhere in between these, including the ever popular if hypocritical: Everyone is equal but some people are more equal than others. In short the people who are all about freedom and equality for their particular minority but want to limit the rights of other minorities, a perfect example being homosexuals who want to ban zoophilia in places where animals are considered property instead of people, or Feminists who want to curtail the rights of men. (Note before you flame I'm not making a value judgement on any of those I'm simply pointing out the hypocrisy)

[DanLamb]

Just to give a good walkthrough though let's just take the whole same-sex marriage debate:

Two clarifications:

- The "right" label usually emcompasses libertarians who you seem to be referencing as well as others such as the Christian Right and various provincially minded people which have completely different ideology on social issues such as gay marriage.

- Many libertarians would argue that social issues like marriage should not be decided not by individuals in isolation but by communities of individuals that people voluntarily choose to associate within. Those communities should have the collective power to set rules on acceptable behaviors surrounding issues such as marriage and family.

[Luke_Wolf]

Two clarifications:

- The "right" label usually emcompasses libertarians who you seem to be referencing as well as others such as the Christian Right and various provincially minded people which have completely different ideology on social issues such as gay marriage.

While that is a fair statement, the Christian Right is really not the extreme right despite people's misconceptions to that end. They're moderates on the right side of the scale (Wanting the Church to provide most things instead of government, and not wanting government sticking it's hands into their day to day lives), however they're classically conservative (in wanting to maintain the status quo of their religion across the entire community) and mildly collectivist in that they want a moral law for the community that represents their own moral system.

note: I'm not saying with this that Christians can't be to the extreme right but that what is typically referred to as the Christian Right isn't really to the extreme right.

Two clarifications:
- Many libertarians would argue that social issues like marriage should not be decided not by individuals in isolation but by communities of individuals that people voluntarily choose to associate within. Those communities should have the collective power to set rules on acceptable behaviors surrounding issues such as marriage and family.

Oh absolutely I guess I didn't make that properly clear, but my point was that even if they view it as something to be made as a community decision, they don't believe it should be a decision made by the government and applied to everyone, but instead up to non-governmental organizations (such as their church or local neighborhood) that the individual chooses to involve themselves with.

[DanLamb]

...

I completely agree with your clarified points.