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When I was in college, I minored in philosophy. I took a bunch of philosophy classes, including Ethics, which introduced a variety of moral systems like utilitarianism or Kantianism with its categorical imperative.

We'd go over each of these systems, and each time I'd think, "You know, I can see a kernel of truth in this system, and I can see how they've tried to take that kernel and then strive to build a single unified morality with it." But inevitably, we'd find that every time you tried to formalize things and make an objective morality out of a certain philosophy, it had problems.

With utilitarianism, for instance, it is concerned with net utility or happiness for society, but includes no provisions for the individual or for the method to achieve this; thus under basic utilitarian principles we might say that if a healthy man walks into a hospital where 5 people need organ transplants or else they'll die, the moral action is to kill the man and give his organs to the 5 sick people, because they'll have more net utility than the single guy living. It should go without saying that if that is the logical endpoint, we've clearly gone down the wrong path for morality.

But you can see how it started; "we should try to increase everybody's utility/happiness" sounds like a reasonable proposition. It's just that when you try to universalize it and have it be the single arbiter of morality, it produces cases which are clearly wrong, and collapses under the weight of itself.

I view libertarianism similarly; the idea that every person should enjoy freedom sounds reasonable. But then you start defining things and trying to formalize it and universalize it, and you start running into problems. If one man's freedom depends upon another man being a pauper, do you maintain freedom at all costs, up to and including starvation? If nobody has the right to use aggression on anyone, who enforces the laws? (please, spare me ideas about voluntarily self-binding court decisions.) If the current system is rigged to favor certain groups, but changing it requires governmental action, must we live under a rigged system forever? If there are public goods that are better for everyone but that naturally will not be built absent taxation, but taxation is theft, how do we solve that? Perhaps most importantly, why is the Non-Aggression Principle defined primarily in the form of Non-Aggression against property, which primarily benefits the rich who have the most property?

Ultimately, libertarianism is something that sounds good, if you're relatively well-off and don't face a ton of structural barriers to success. But in reality, it's mostly about (or is mostly used for) defending the rich and their property, and defending the status quo which enriched them in the first place, keeping a rigged system in place rather than allowing for the kinds of government changes necessary to promote true meritocracy.

Thus, I see Libertarians as misguided accidental defenders of the elites, of the special interests, of big business. Perhaps the best example of this is Libertarian Economist Tyler Cowen, who recently released a book literally entitled, "Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-hero."

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Edit: P.S.--Before modern times, wealth was primarily accrued in the form of land; thus Georgism was basically a wealth tax aimed at redistributing wealth. Given that wealth is now held in a variety of ways, it's also a kind of outdated philosophy that no longer is targeted at the things it's supposed to be targeting.

Hey, I'm glad to hear that! It's a topic of some interest for me.

I think too much of discussion about God today gets wrapped up in politics, especially in the United States. That's certainly something new, and can be found back even to the start of Christianity, or even human civilization. It tends to be rightly shunned and mocked.

However, the idea of God is something more central and serious than that. Sure, most people are idiots, so when they talk about something they don't study up on or look at different viewpoints, which is really really common for religion, they end up saying stupid stuff.

That's why it's worth distinguishing from theologians and philosophers who actually do that stuff, and many of them walk away from it with a clear and respectable, and even persuasive, ideas.

If you want to read up more, I can recommend a few works.

• God and Other Minds by Alvin Plantinga - One of the best respected books today on theism, and sparked a lot of discussion on God's existence in philosophy today. Plantinga argues that ultimately neither the arguments for theism or atheism hold, but that one can still rationally believe in God in a way similar to how you believe in the existence of other minds, despite having no way to directly perceive or prove the thoughts of others.
  
  
• Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes - This book is most people's jumping on point to philosophy, since it's pretty standard in philosophy 101 classes, since he's extremely important in the history of philosophy, and explains things without much jargon and works from the ground up. Descartes tries to ground his beliefs in pure reason, showing that through the knowledge of his own existence and God's existence, we can be certain of the existence of everything around us.
  
  
• The Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo by Plato - Dialogues leading up to the death of Socrates, and fairly easy to read. Plato is arguably the most influential philosopher in history, and his dialogues are all aimed at teaching you to ask philosophical question and get a sense of what philosophical answers look like.
  
  
• The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - An excellent podcast which is exactly what it says on the tin. Works from Pre-Socratics, and has made it up to the Renaissance, with a few other podcasts also started to cover Indian and Africana philosophy. Most philosophers will have something to say on God, and these 20 minute introductions and explanations help shape that understanding.
  
  
• Gregory Sadler - A philosophy professor who puts his lectures for free on Youtube. Plenty on most philosophers you can list off, and takes a special interest in Anselm.
  
  
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are sites dedicated to thoroughly explaining the arguments of different people in philosophy. Incredibly useful.
  
  You should especially look at the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plotinus, Origen, Pseudo-Dionysus, Augustine, Anselm, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, Maimonides, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard.
  
  If you want to look more at the stuff I was arguing, you can also consider looking specifically at Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, posted for free here, although Aquinas is fairly jargon heavy, and expects familiarity with Aristotle, Averroes, and other points in Christian theological history.
  
  Edit: As a small aside, on the point of how atheism is defined, a moderator of /r/askphilosophy wrote a pretty good summary for what the term means in academic disciplines a while back. Worth checking out.

Before I get to your question, let's be clear about the historical record on affirmative action.

For nearly the first 200 years of U.S. history, affirmative action was white. In every facet of American life -- jobs, access to housing, access to political power, et cetera -- white people received incredibly preferential treatment. One legacy of this is reflected in the current amount of wealth controlled by the median white family vs. the medium black family White affirmative action accounts for these differences, especially considering that white people not only received preferential treatment, but black people got purposefully ruinous treatment from every level of government. Review for a book about this idea

A family's wealth is created over generations. My family for example - my white grandpa and family were bean pickers during the Depression. After WWII, he got a middle class job in a steel mill with only an 8th grade education at a time when it was perfectly legal for blacks to be the last to be hired and first to be fired. With that job he bought a house in suburban Baltimore. He did it with a government insured mortgage thanks to the GI Bill. Keep in mind, due to perfectly legal housing discrimination, i.e. redlining, blacks were shut out from suburbs and mortgage loans when my grandpa bought. With his income and home equity, he sent 2 out of his 3 children to college, and helped them with home down payments. His home was purchased for $30k in the 1960s and sold in 2010 for $300k. That money helped finance my college education. Did my grandpa work hard? Absolutely. Was he advantaged over black people every step of the way because of his skin color? Absolutely. Did his skin color also advantage me? Absolutely. Historic white affirmative action directly affects me in a positive way.

Regarding your question: What we typically think of as "affirmative action" for black people started during the 1960s, and it only applied to federal government hiring and federal contractors, not the private sector. Racial/gender quotas were declared unconstitutional in Regents of University of California vs. Bakke in 1978. And nowadays the only sort of affirmative action that exists is really marginal. In fact in [Gratz V. Bollinger (2003)] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger) university admissions that gave some small benefit in the admission process points systems to minorities were declared unconstitutional. So in reality affirmative action never happened on a large scale and was mostly scaled back in 1978 and then eviscerated in 2003. Affirmative action was never done vigorously across hiring. So to answer your question, affirmative action wasn't effective because it happened to a vanishingly narrow extent.

Regarding university admissions, legacy preferences, which give an advantage to children of graduates, are still perfectly legal and widespread. Legacy preferences obviously also advantage white people.

> Because, to me, it seems like black people have not improved intellectually

I'm curious as to why you think this. Do you mean this with regards to the racial achievement gap in schools, or wealth disparities, or some other quality? I heard an interview with a historian for this book he wrote. He made a really interesting point. Regarding lower outcomes (wealth, incarceration) generally for African Americans there are only two possible explanations: (1) There is something wrong with black people or (2) Discrimination (housing, employment, justice system) and intentional roadblocks to black success created the current situation of racial inequality.

Which explanation do you think is right? And why do you believe black people have not improved intellectually? Do you think it is bigoted to make a statement like the one you made?

> An approach that places high value on personal responsibility is a more hands off approach that leaves people to take responsibility for solving their problems themselves without pushing them towards any particular choice.

Agreed... what's toxic is a policy which interferes with incentives to encourage negative behaviors... a highly likely moral hazard of any welfare program and one Democrats have not been careful to avoid.

> The sugar tax is an example that's been shown to work.

I'm not an advocate of a sugar tax for a lot of the reasons you mentioned above. I was just pointing out that at least it attempts to align incentives with the policy goal. A lot of welfare programs do the opposite.

> I think government changing incentives takes away from the individual responsibility of the person whose incentives are changed.

I basically agree with that. And for that reason I am NOT in favor of a sin tax on sugar. After all this back and forth I think I've figured out our disconnect:

You think government should paternalistically create positive incentives to encourage positive behaviors. The kind of policies advocated by Cass Sunstein n Nudge

I disagree, I think that's a paternalistic view of government's role, even a soft form of authoritarianism which is ultimately harmful to a spirit of self-reliance which I think is both right and just for it's own sake, and which is necessary for social health over the longer haul. Outside of actual criminality people should be free to make their own decisions AND potentially to suffer the consequences of the decisions they make.

Where I'm talking about government policy ignoring incentives it's where government programs, usually those intended to alleviate suffering, create negative incentives which promote negative behaviors.

> A focus on individual responsibility sounds to me like letting people have full agency over their lives and not interfering at all.

For the most part... yes.

> If the incentives are such that they make bad choices then so be it.

I'm ALL for removing externalities which create bad incentives. I'm all for education of the young which seeks to promote and reinforce, and even enforce moral behavior within the schools.

I'm NOT for holding the hand of a grown-ass man and telling him he shouldn't drink so much soda. If you want to create positive incentives to produce positive social outcomes I'd submit that the best social outcomes can ONLY come from people who are self-reliant and do not NEED or WANT a nanny holding their hand to nudge them into making good decisions for them. This kind of paternalistic nannying can only produce a culture of reliance and dependency which in the long run cannot produce positive results.

As I said before... this does NOT preclude any and all policies that provide a helping hand for people in need. What id does say is that such a helping hand is always at risk of creating moral hazards promoting the underlying social pathologies which created the need in the first place by removing the painful consequences of them. There's a balance there and one we've gotten badly wrong in the past with dire consequences we see in the underclass both black and white today.

If you're interested in an eastern philosophy perspective but have a western cultural background there's no one better than Alan Watts to start with. He's an expert at translating difficult concepts into a frame of reference that's far more digestible.

I'd start here with The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Alternatively you can listen to many of his talks on YouTube for free. I highly recommend this as his character is half the joy of his work. Here's a relevant talk that covers some of the same material as The Book, just in less depth obviously.

If you enjoy his work, then you can move on to more difficult material. I'm a huge fan of Nagarjuna and his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or "The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way". It's an incredible work but you can't just start there or you won't have the necessary conceptual vocabulary.

Yes, good threads. Was away taking son to a pre collage event, and only had a chance to respond now.

Agree with you that there are perhaps degrees of socialism. Some favor strict definitions in which the government owns or controls the means of production. I like a more operative definition in which need is the basis for reward. A society for which from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs largely holds is intrinsically Marxist. So say we have Sweden with a 70% tax rate, in which your government controls a greater share of your earnings than you do, and has program after program that falls under from ability to needs, that society would be more Socialist/Marxist than capitalist. A society in which you, the individual, control the bulk of what you earn is capitalist. Progressive taxation throws a huge monkey wrench into the mix, because it applies a Marxist standard to the rich, and a capitalist standard to the poor.

You rightfully point to the intrinsic difficulty in testing out approaches, when you question how relevant is comparing the US to Germany. One can see trends, and study those trends over many societies over time, and my personal experience is the trend of socialism is to impoverish nations.

The answer to the Scandinavian people question is to contrast prosperity prior to socialism to that after, and I think we do see a decline in standard of living, which indicates for that population set the people are worse off. What socialists like to do is highlight the central abuses prior to socialism and gloss over the comparison of before and after. The essays I have read on this topic have convinced me that things got worse. This NR piece, and the book that goes into greater depth on the subject considers how socialism impacted Scandinavians. I heard the author on the radio going into this at length and it was well documented.

There has been some quality scientific literature on this. The Sport's Gene is where I first saw this issue raised. Epstein does a great job of synthesizing the scientific findings with anecdotal sports references. Apparently it's a huge advantage. It's not just hormonal differences. There's differences in bone density, differences in height, bone structure, hip function, fat to muscle ratio just to name a few, which translate to huge advantages in endurance and strength across a variety of sports. I cannot recall any sport where it was advantageous to be a women over a man, but it's been a few years since I read the book and the trans/man/woman comparison wasn't a major portion of the book.

E: Found a list online of the characteristics Epstein discussed if anyone is curious.

Among the key physical differences between the sexes. Men are / possess

• heavier and taller
  
  
• longer arms and legs relative to their height
  
  
• biggest hearts and lungs, thus able to absorb and process more oxygen
  
  
• twice as likely to be left-handed (high physical combat societies have more numbers of lefties – this arose due to natural selection as lefties have an advantage in combat)
  
  
• less fat
  
  
• denser bones, and a heavier skeleton that can support more muscle
  
  
• more oxygen-carrying red blood cells
  
  
• narrower hips which makes running more efficient and decreases the chances of ACL tears (epidemic in female athletes) while running and jumping
  
  
• 80% more muscle mass in upper body and 50% more in lower body

Read the book 'democracy in chains', it goes into the philosophical underpinning of the modern GOP.

Endgame is to restrict democracy as much as possible (they would prefer to go back to a time when only property owning white men could vote) since their ideas are very unpopular and then to turn the US into a corporate oligarchy. Remove as many taxes and regulations on the rich/powerful as possible while also removing the entire social safety net, while also keeping a lot of laws and restrictions limiting people's ability to fight back against their agenda (gerrymandering, stacked courts, voter suppression, anti-union laws, anti free speech laws, corporate media).

The end game is to turn the US into Chile under Pinochet. Remove all laws and taxes on the rich, and create very draconian laws governing everyone else so they can't rebel in any meaningful way (taking away their voting rights, their ability to protest, their ability to organize into unions, their ability to share ideas etc). The modern GOP doesn't believe in small government, they want a very powerful and influential government to suppress and neutralize the riff raff so they can't fight back against corporate oligarchy.

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966

I don't really know. My guess would be something described by Charles Murray in his new book (https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X): essentially, there is a segment of the country who is practicing stable, traditional paths of structuring their life like long term stable marriages, raising children in two parent households, etc, and there is a segment of the country which is not, and the former group is building a virtuous cycle, while the latter group is stuck in a vicious cycle.

This phenomenon likely has many many causes, but I suspect some of which are the decline of religion and the lack of alternative value systems to replace it in certain smaller communities, the prevalence and ease of escapes from socially-bonding activities like video games and drugs, the dramatic restructuring of economic activity away from traditional jobs to more dynamic creative type jobs.

The US is a much bigger place than the European countries, with a smaller social safety tradition, so these differences are probably more exaggerated in the US.

My answer to this is a bit complicated, but the short version is: it's important to try to keep an ear open for the the best arguments made by reasonable conservatives, but one shouldn't expect to hear any of those arguments being made by the mainstream of American conservatism, who have essentially expelled reasonableness from their ranks.
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For a longer version, I'd say, watch CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry", read David Roberts on NYT conservatism, and read Jon Haidt's "Righteous Mind", maybe also Yglesias on "The Hack Gap".
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/15/17113176/new-york-times-opinion-page-conservatism
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/23/18004478/hack-gap-explained
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777
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I'd explain more but that's probably a whole essay of stuff. But yes, you shouldn't be at all surprised that your efforts to engage in good faith with the best arguments your "local republicans" have to offer end in frustration.

The GOP isn't fascist you're right. Mussolini and fascists won more than 65 percent of the vote. There is no popular reform ongoing for which the large populous to support. The Reichstag elections saw the NSDAP win through coalitions, something the GOP hasn't done either.

You don't see the GOP trying to pass old age insurance, rent supplements, unemployment and disability benefits, old-age homes and interest-free loans for married couples, along with healthcare insurance like the NSV did, do you?

Anyway, might I suggest reading Three New Deals by Wolfgang Schivelbusch a German scholar of cultural studies, historian and The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy by
Jacob Leib Talmon, a Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. If you're unfamiliar with their work, I recommend it.

First I gotta say John McCain, he was actually the first political rally I ever attended in 2000 (during his early Republican Primary bid). However there was a few items that sorta pushed me to Barack Obama in the 2008 election, such as his vote against elevating MLK Day to a state holiday in Arizona (https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/08/moveon/mccain-changed-position-on-mlk-day/) and the appointment of Sarah Palin as his running mate in that election cycle.

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Additionally, I've always been a big fan of Ike Eisenhower; I think he really pushed America to continue investing in its infrastructure, and not rest on the successes America achieved in WWII.

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And of course Lincoln is an interesting figure, sometime (sooner rather than later) I want to read the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, Team of Rivals, which was about Lincoln's cabinet. (https://www.amazon.com/Team-Rivals-Political-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/0743270754)

There was a Pulitzer prize winning book last year that was centrally concerned with this issue. https://www.amazon.com/Locking-Up-Our-Own-Punishment/dp/0374189978

There are plenty of other books, and news, and media that reflect this issue too.

I don't think it's correct to say that this doesn't receive publicity, or that it's a provocative position. I think (or hope) that it's a well understood and accepted thing. It's definitely an important part of how I understand the complicated history of race, crime and punishment in our country.

I've was reading The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (free link) and Three New Deals Amazon. Both kind of trace the genealogy of fascism. The latter providers the direct link to the US, Germany and Italy in the 1930s while the former is a kind of framework which describes the battle between two schools of Democracy, liberal and totalitarian.

Both schools affirms the supreme value of liberty. But whereas one finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose.

Some might argue that totalitarian democracy is the only path to a "mega welfare state".