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None of the major political ideologies are particularly consequentialist in the way they approach policy. Progressives by and large see the world through the following lens: There are some people who are oppressed and others who oppress them. Government policy ought to focus on emancipating the oppressed and punishing/overthrowing the oppressors. Criminal Justice: white people oppressing brown people. Abortion: Christian men oppressing women. Foreign policy: America oppressing the rest of the world (unless it's America saving some oppressed foreigners from an oppressor). Housing policy: landlords oppressing tenants. Labor: captital oppressing unions. Taxes: the one percent oppressing the 99%. Marriage equality: straight Christians oppressing LGBT people. Progressives aren't generally concerned about utility: they're concerned about justice. Even the Animal Rights movement, essentially founded by arch-Utilitarian Peter Singer is focused on the class relations between animals and the humans who oppress them.
In this case, the oppressors are wealthy business owners who are exploiting the labor of the poor and helpless AND exploiting the rest of us by placing the burden for care on taxpayers.
I know this summary of liberal thought probably sounds strawman-like. I don't mean it to be taken as a summary of progressive arguments on these issues. There are good arguments for progressive positions, many of which I agree with. Rather, this oppressed-oppressor lens is just the initial conceptual frame most progressives have in response to any political issue.
I'm not saying there can't be real instances of oppression or that ending oppression doesn't increase utility. But when all you have is a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail etc. Conservatives and libertarians have similar non-consequentialist frames through which they view every issue. See "The Three Languages of Politics.
The extent to which any ideology can be "true" is mostly just the extent to which their central heuristic is useful and actually describes the world. There is a minority of libertarians and an even smaller minority of progressives that actually appear to mainly care about the consequentialist effects of policy. They happen to over-represented here, but they're pretty unusual in the rest of the world.
BIG + no other welfare state and no minimum wage is probably preferable to what America has now. I sort of worry about how hard it would be to hire someone if the BIG got too large but it probably couldn't be worse than trying to hire someone in an environment where they could lose their house, health coverage and disability check if they begin making too much.
I like your whole comment, but disagree with the first sentence.
Apart from reading about it explicitly on LW, I was also able to approach politics as less of a mind-killer once I realized that different ideologies approach issues believing different outcomes would be ideal. But neither side realizes that (or how very different "ideal" is to each), so one just says, "ABC will work! XYZ is crazy!!" and the other says, "What?! ABC will never work! History shows XYZ is clearly the best policy!" Each side means something different by "work", and so spiralling mind-kill ensues...
Actually, I've found my best friends, with whom I end up discussing politics with, are very consequentalist, and care very much about what ends up "working best". Those who disagree with me simply don't define "working" or "best" in the same way I do, and so we really ending up talking past each other and giving each other funny, mind-killed looks.
For instance, as a liberal, I concede de-regulation is better for maximizing economic growth and so I concede that right-wing fiscal policy is "better" to that end. But I'm admittedly more interested in anti-oppressionizing the world (a la your strawman progressive) and providing the basis for relatively economic equality than I am in max growth, so I am for more regulation and wealth redistribution to that end. We each believe the best possible world looks differently, and so we are asking different questions when we ask the same question. But we are approaching the issue from a consequentialist standpoint.
And so my righty friends still think I'm a bleeding-heart weirdo and I think they are greedy and heartless ;) ...but at least we've moved our discussion passed arguing over definitions without realizing that's what we were doing.
The other half of this is that you and your friends presumably don't assume that those with opposing political views have the (real or hypothesized) ill effects of their preferred policies as primary goals.
What do you mean by this? Would you support policies that make everyone worse of if the resulting distribution is more equal?
It would depend on what you mean by "worse off". I wouldn't define it as less wealth, per se. Though even if I did define it in strictly economic terms, I'm not sure any policy or redistribution could "make everyone worse off", since a large portion of the world has zero wealth.
In economic terms, with wealth defined more or less as "stuff people want," I find it hard to see how that could be the case, since it should follow that there's nothing that you could take away from them which would leave them worse off. Do you think that's accurate?
Look beyond the short term.
Okay. Please help me understand a scenario where everyone was worse off in the long term because of the redistribution of wealth.
Take a simple scenario of two cities -- one is high-tech and one is a big stone-age village in the hills of New Guinea. The high-tech city is much richer.
You take half of the city's technological bounty and bring it over to New Guinea -- you redistributed wealth.
Fairly quickly the technology becomes completely useless in New Guinea, but the villagers liked it for the short period that it worked -- so they abandon working in the fields and build something resembling air strips with mock airplanes sitting on them...
I must be misunderstanding. I can imagine many hypothetical scenarios where redistribution of wealth would have a net negative effect, in terms of technological advancement, economic growth, etc.
In the globe we currently inhabit, there exists some huge chunk of people who live in utter poverty and, therefore, have no wealth. In strictly economic terms, they cannot being doing any worse than they are right now. Therefore, any redistribution of wealth will either (a) not affect them or (b) benefit them. This seems to me to be true in the short term, as well as the long term.
That is not true. A small value does not equal zero. The number of people who literally have nothing is vanishingly small. Almost everyone who lives in utter poverty has some wealth, just little.
This is not true either. Consider a country like Haiti where a large chunk of population is very very poor. A few years ago they had a large earthquake. Beyond the loss of life, you are arguing that the poor did not become worse off in the aftermath of the earthquake. I don't think this is so.
Since you are talking about a large number of people, presumably you have in mind somebody like Chinese and Indian peasants. Do you really believe they "cannot being doing any worse than they are right now"?
From my Wikipedia research, there were 923 million undernourished people in the world in 2008... where undernourishment is (roughly) a cumulative or average situation where the average person is not consuming enough nutrients to remain in good health while performing light physical activity.
Of course, I can dream up a "worse" situation. (Like they are malnourished and in a deep hole.) But I think that is beside the point. You have ~12-15% of the global population that is progressively dying via malnutrition. Any way which you define "wealth" in which these people 923 million people have non-zero wealth values is fine. I guess I'd technically agree. But practically, these people seem to have maxed out the possibilities of "worst", short of being in a deep hole. Or being in a natural disaster.
My view of wealth has something to do with abundance beyond the minimum requirements for living. If I have a ham sandwich, it's just hard for me to count that as wealth. And I guess a hungry guy with one ham sandwich could be doing worse in your view, correct?
Lumifer's point is that if you do an extreme enough redistribution, what will happen is that the whole technological system will just collapse.
Well, my point was more limited -- in the example the rich high-tech city lost wealth (which they will replenish eventually) and the poor village didn't gain anything.
You can get into a deeper analysis which would involve e.g. motivations and incentives (what happens to people who get used to living on free handouts?), necessary concentration of capital (a semiconductor fab costs a few billions of dollars, who will build it?), etc. but it's a large topic.
Easy. Kill everyone. Perfect equality has been achieved, so the egalitarians are happy, and everyone is worse off.
Or if you think some people's lives are currently worse than death, instead go for the (slightly more logistically challenging) option of torturing everyone equally.
Yeah, on reflection 'consequentialist' is probably too broad.
Political ideologies are big squishy categories that contain more consequentialist and less consequentialist strains. So I think that's the wrong way of looking at it.
E.g. amont libertarians, there are those who focus on supposed good consequences of libertarian policies, and those who focus on arguing coercion is always wrong even if it leads to good consequences. And among progressives there are people who are basically as you describe, and people like Matt Yglesias and myself and I think Yvain (I think it's fair to call Yvain progressive).
I mentioned those strains. But they're a very small minority-- over-represented among wonks, bloggers and people smart enough to be in your social circles-- but still small. Yglesias drives people to his left nuts with his stuff. And you and Yvain are not representative progressives for what I think are obvious reasons, right?
You can put me in that category of progressive too (though I like left-libertarian or liberaltarian as well). We should also be skeptical that we are actually progressives for consequentialist reasons and not merely coming up with consequentialist rationalizations for our progressive intuitions. Disagreeing with non-consequentialist liberals seems like a nice start, though.
How small that group is, sort of isn't the point though. The point is that one dimension along which you differ from many other progressives is whether you look at policy chiefly through a lens of consequences or a lens of oppressor-oppressed. As such it is unsurprising that you find yourself disagreeing with progressive talking points from time to time.
Fair enough. It is true that most people, regardless of their politial ideology, are not consequentialists. But this looks like a case where failing to look at the consequences leads people to say silly things.
I think you're rather generalizing Social Justice Movement mentality to progressives as a whole. They're a vocal subset, but I think a lot more people would identify as "progressive" given an explanation of the options than would ascribe to the oppressed/oppressor lens.
If you have to explain the options to them, they're not ideological. I'm talking about the people setting agendas and writing talking points.
I'd also second what Eugine said.
Most "progressives" do not self describe in terms a reactionary would use, and in particular members of the Social Justice movement are far more likely to self identify as "liberal" than "progressive."
I also think most people who would self identify as "progressive" without an explanation of the terms would not frame political matters with the same lens as members of the Social Justice movement, but I don't think that identification with the terms we're using is a good way of isolating the ideologically active segment of the population, unless we choose to define it in not-very-useful ways.
??? "Progressive" re-entered our political vocabulary as a term of self-identification for the anti-war left in 2003. It existed to both distinguish them from pro-war democrats and as a re-branding of what had/has become an incredibly unpopular label: "liberal". I know because I was part of that group. Because it has so many more positive connotations it is increasingly used by high-information left-of-center Americans to describe themselves. And that's why the senate and house don't have "liberal" caucuses-- they have "progressive caucuses."
So
I'm not using terms a reactionary would use and while "progressive" is maybe slightly less common than liberal still I'm quite sure self-identified progressives are disproportionately part of the Social Justice movement.
In that case I apologize for the misunderstanding (when I encounter the term in Less Wrong circles, it's generally being used in Reactionary terms, which are to the best of my understanding rather broader,) but I would say that this is still overgeneralizing the outlook of a minority of liberals.
My understanding --I'm quite confident but a reactionary might correct me-- is that they use the term "progressive" because that is probably the most popular term among the left's in crowd (certainly 5-6 years ago it was, people seem to care less about branding after winning the White House).
This isn't really in the form of evidence I can incorporate. I am/was pretty strongly embedded in left of center political culture, so single instances of disagreement don't really tip the scales at all. If you want to analyze mainstream left-wing political discourse in a way that distinguishes it from what you call the Social Justice movement-- that might help me see where you're coming from.
I don't think there's a single, easily expressed lens that sums up either mainstream liberalism or conservatism, so I don't think it's easy to draw a contrast between the social justice movement and mainstream liberalism which holds across every issue. But I think that on many issues where a person involved in the Social Justice Movement would see a case of oppression by one group against another as a moral wrong to address, a more mainstream liberal might see as a case of harms caused by self perpetuating forces which should be corrected by deliberate intervention. In the specific case of racial inequality, for example, where a Social Justice Movement advocate might see a case of wrongful oppression of black people by white people, the view I understand as being more mainstream would be something like "historical circumstances put black people in a disadvantaged position, and the Matthew Effect ensures that things will continue to stay shitty for black people unless society makes a concerted effort to rectify this."
I can't say with any confidence that I have representative enough experience to describe the ideological demographics of progressives in general, but most people under the broad "liberal" umbrella aren't involved in the social justice movement, and while some people certainly have more ideological investment in certain political issues than others, most people have a substantial cluster of political values that they care strongly enough about that, whether or not it has much bearing on their daily activities, they can still get mindkilled over them when matters touching on them are raised. So I think in a meaningful sense very few people are "not ideological."
I don"t think it"s a complete strawman. Marx basically says that every social conflict is about the struggle between oppressor and oppressed.
Not everyone who's political left subscribes to that ideology but it's certainly something that real people believe. It deeply buried in the core assumptions of socialist thought.
Marx was a liberal?!
"Liberal" is a funny word, it had quite different meanings through the history and even now tends to mean different things on different sides of the Atlantic ocean.
Quite true, but can you identify any reasonable interpretation of "liberal" that fits Marx nicely? As far as I can see, none of the usual meanings of liberalism I can think of (classical liberalism; neoliberalism; squishy, mainstream, contemporary welfare state left-liberalism) sum up his ideology well.
It shouldn't be particularly difficult to establish a path from Marx to "contemporary welfare state left-liberalism". It would focus on hostility to capital and the need to help the oppressed.
Marx, of course, would barf at contemporary welfare state, but he's dead so we can conveniently ignore all that :-/
Sure. But the path from Marx to contemporary welfare state left-liberalism is sufficiently long (and with enough branches!) that using one as a representative of the other is dubious at best. As you say, Marx himself would probably take a dim view of CWSLL, if he were around to witness it.
Yeah, I agree. People calling contemporary progressives "Marxists" are usually just looking for a derogatory adjective.
However there are certain similarities and the connection between Marx and CWSLL can be made -- it will be twisting and turning, and will require a fair amount of bending and averting eyes -- but it will probably pass the laugh test. I don't think that this connection is important or that pointing it out is useful, still, it's not quite the young-earth theory.
You could probably do it cladistically too. Sorel blasts Jaures as a social democrat (which AFAICT he was) in Reflections on Violence, but Jaures read and was influenced by Marx.
On the other hand, Social Security was explicitly inspired by Bismarck's successful attempt to buy off the socialists... but on the other other hand, many political figures at the time, including some in high places in FDR's administration were, well, not entirely unsympathetic to the Soviets.
Marx certainly wasn't a liberal, but many liberals have been influenced by people and movements far to the left of them; it could be argued (though I'm not good enough at history to argue it well) that the oppressor/oppressed mindset is one such influence.
American often equate liberal as being left. If I read someone on the internet writing liberal, than I usually don't think they mean the word in it's traditional meaning.
Just think of "The Communist Manifesto" as being a horrible warning, like Orwell's 1984, rather than a how-to guide. ;)
Marx made no bones with categories of "oppressor" or "oppressed" whatsoever. He dealt in economic classes defined by their relation to the means of production: worker and capitalist. He actually despised the criminal lumpenproletariat.
According to Marx capitalists do oppress their workers.
That may be. Mainly, I just didn't want to argue with any progressives that might be offended.
You have to distinguish between what they say and what they do. The major ideologies are considerably more consequential in what they do than in what they say.
You'll have to explain what that means.
My interpretation:
Politicians try to say things that appeal to as many people as possible to maximize votes. Once they're elected, they can be more specific and thus more consequentalist about what they do, since for the average voter, verifying what they do is more laborious than listening to what they say.
There is no hidden meaning here.
In politics there is a major difference between what politicians say and what they do. This is a rather straightforward consequence of the set of incentives they have to deal with. There are, of course, limits to the divergence of the words and the deeds, but these limits are pretty lax.
Are you implying that what happens is generally what was intended (by someone) or that policy out comes are due to wrongly anticipating consequences, rather than simply neglecting to?
Both look fine to me and are not mutually exclusive. Many policies are compromises between different parties so they might not look like especially consequentialist. Consider also that the more media visibility a policy can be expected to get, the less consequentialist it will look, extrapolating from my other comment.