[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by rubecube

To be fair, I think both you and CHL don't acknowledge your own biases when dealing with these topics. You both appear to rest your beliefs in the supremacy of liberal values and don't acknowledge the possibility that perhaps the "new left" are consciously rejecting some of these values or replacing them with what they believe are more considerate, compassionate, and cooperative alternatives.

I don't think this is a matter of failure to identify biases, it's a matter of taking the view that certain principles lead to better results in general, and so should be adopted as a matter of general policy. I am open to being convinced that those principles should be replaced as you suggest (I think it'd be easier to persuade me in an individual case than as a general proposition but I won't rule it out).

I do think that the only thing I'm absolutist about (and maybe not wholly absolutist but for all practical purposes we might as well assume so) is the necessity of freedom of expression of ideas. It seems to me that in the absence of our ability to resolve disputes on any issue by talking them through, we're going to end up resolving disputes on that issue through violence. There isn't a third option. So to the extent the discussion makes someone uncomfortable, well, the alternative is uniformly worse.

That's not to say I necessarily agree with the tactics or ideologies of the so-called "new left," just that evaluating them under the liberal framework is inherently biased, and often misses the point of the debate.

I don't know that I'd call it biased; I think there's a self-awareness to the application of these principles that you're operating on the premise that they're applicable in the current context. I guess you could say I'm biased in that I'm probably going to fall back on classical liberal principles as a default, so if that's what you mean, sure, I'd have to agree.

In what way does it miss the point of the debate?

I do agree that evidence-based decision making is usually the best approach, and that the anti-science nuts on both sides create their own issues. However, when it comes to values, objective parameters are a lot more difficult to come by. For instance, weighing rights-based doctrine vs. responsibilities-based doctrine.

Well, it seems to me that if there is an instance where rights-based doctrine produces conclusions that make practical sense, then let's use rights-based doctrine; if there are reasons for looking through a different prism in a particular context that are convincing let's go that way.

Obviously though, this stuff has a broader context because however we want to deal with problems needs to be to some extent universalizable solely for reasons of pragmatism. A lot of our conclusions on how we should deal with issue X are going to be consequentialist because consequentialism is practical, notwithstanding the many, many abstract philosophical reasons for rejecting utilitarian moral analyses.