- Oct 2024
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rudykahsar.substack.com rudykahsar.substack.com
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A levelized morality that is rational, global, and actively meliorist fits almost perfectly with this new-age liberalism. This levelized morality can be calculated and outsourced just the same as a manufacturing job. If, for example, it’s more efficient to make an air conditioner in Mexico than in Ohio, then you gut the town in Ohio and ship the parts from Mexico. With EA’s levelized morality, if your money is most effective fighting malaria in Africa, then you stop caring about your neighbors and outsource your moral caring there.
I see the comparison here, and think that there is merit to it. The "outsourcing" point is particularly strong--i.e. it is tempting to outsource moral actions to simplified optimization functions, which entice us to jump to conclusions about what is good. The question, though, is whether or not Singer encourages this. That is a tougher case. My sense is that Singer would NOT explicitly endorse that kind of behavior, even if he DOES implicitly endorse it, as a way to nudge people to become "more moral than they might otherwise be" according to his tastes.
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All humans lean on moral frameworks to make daily decisions, structure their lives, decide what to do with their time, and determine how to act in the world, including elites.
Important point. People, especially those who are not philosophers, outsource their moral decision-making and opinion-forming to their "cave" of opinion, and moral habits formed therein.
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What I want to convince you of is that the values of neoliberalism don’t just dictate our economic lives but also influence our moral and spiritual lives, and that neoliberalism does so by asserting values that directly conflict with what it is to be human. Fortunately, there is a convenient way to investigate this influence. Gray’s list (“individualist, egalitarian, universalist, and meliorist”), is essentially the philosophy of Peter Singer.
Calling this out as the thrust of the piece. Is Rudy able to defend this point? (FWIW seems like it's still an interesting argument, even if the neolib/lib distinction is not make perfectly clear.)
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Neoliberalism also focuses on wealth generation.
Again, Locke SToG 5, On Private Property, would indicate that liberalism also focuses on wealth generation.
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A big focus of neoliberalism is on the individual.
It'll be a heavy lift to differentiate neolib from lib on the basis of individualism, i.e., to say that liberalism does NOT focus on the individual.
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But perhaps the most interesting claim of Gray’s list is that liberalism is “meliorism.” If you think about it, it is quite odd that a political philosophy founded on freedoms could evolve to the point where its defenders believe its purpose is to make the world better.
This doesn't strike me as a conflict. In Second Treatise Ch 5, doesn't Locke more or less explicitly call for the conquering of nature/wilderness for the sake of improving the world? Improving in the sense of "making more productive."
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