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Gemma Mason's avatar

This is a lovely discussion — properly adversarial without becoming overly rancorous, and very fun to read.

Damir makes a distinction between metaphysics and politics. I am wondering about how best to place this (hypothetical) distinction. We might be able to break things down, roughly, into three sets of questions:

(1) What do values consist of? What is the correct way to understand what it is to value something? What makes values meaningful, or not, on a personal or social or ultimate level?

(2) What are the correct values to have? Or, if you don’t believe this question to be meaningful, then, more narrowly, what are your values? Or, what values do you hope people will have?

(3) What power do values have, as a practical matter, in the observable world? What values do people actually hold, if any? How can human actions or observable events change the way people perceive or act on values?

Damir, I think, wants in part to stop (3) from being infected by (2) and (1). He is certainly not wrong that people’s views on (2) and (1) can sometimes distort their understanding of (3), like for example when someone expects that their values will be politically compelling because they are “correct,” and refuses to see that this may not be the case.

Sam, by contrast, thinks that we cannot fully wall these questions off from each other — and possibly that some amount of equivocation or obfuscation is the inevitable result of trying to. For example, Damir’s claim that “any positive claims to meaning are ultimately going to be private and unprovable” has serious consequences for (1). It is not just a claim about (3), no matter how much Damir might want to build that wall.

Perhaps the easiest way to make Sam’s point would be to make a plausible claim that contradicts Damir’s, but that is clearly in the realm of (1). For example, Charles Taylor makes a lovely claim in “A Secular Age” that false ideologies of value are generally compelling because they contain some truth. I call this “lovely” because, despite not sharing Taylor’s Catholicism, I share his intuition.

Taylor’s claim is clearly based on the idea that there are “true” values; it has a strong component of (1). But it is also deeply relevant to (3). It asks us to pose further questions that can be illuminating in themselves. For example, we might consider that the Nazis had a positive vision of a pure and honourable Germany, full of respectable, excellent people. This vision was central to their appeal. Taylor’s theory suggests that Nazism may have been compelling because there was genuinely something good that they were pointing at, albeit in a distorted and ultimately disastrous way.

Would it be better to exclude theories like “false but compelling ideologies generally contain some truthful value claims” from our analysis? What about the competing claim that humans are congenitally inclined to evil, even the ones we like, and that true goodness is but a rare flicker in every society known to mankind? It seems to me that political analysis would be deeply impoverished by the lack of either of these theories. But if that’s true, then we cannot simply exclude (1) and (2) from all discussion of (3).

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Dana Van Ostrand's avatar

Thanks for hashing this out. I understand Damir’s position a more clearly now, though I resonate more with Sam’s approach.

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