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Building on a comment:
I think I remember Milton Friedman saying in Capitalism and Freedom that it was a lucky coincidence that the path of freedom was also the path of greatest prosperity, but that he would advocate freedom even if it wasn't most prosperous. (This in 1963, when lots of people still worried about the competitive powers of Communism.) I was impressed by this statement of principle, back when I was 14.
These days, with more age and cynicism, I note it's cheap to make a stand on principle when you think it pays off the best anyway, and that very few people actually advocate a system they think makes things worse off in a way they care about. (E.g. some liberals might grant that social justice measures slow GDP growth, but not think that's very important.) Almost everyone's an implicit consequentialist, invoking good consequences as fall-back to defend a system they primarily defend for reasons of deontology (morality) or tradition or authority or self-interest or something. Perhaps out of instinct, perhaps because it's the only way to reach someone who doesn't share one's deontology, tradition, etc.
Of course, that opens the door to intellectual dishonesty and corruption, if it turns out the consequences of something one is already committed to believing in aren't in fact optimal. Easier to deny the evidence than to actually admit inferiority but believe anyway or to admit error and change one's mind.
Which suggests to me that the people who are have the least amount of principles or axioms, and the most commitment to consequentialism for its own sake, are most likely to have an accurate view of consequences.
And these days I think that's what the US calls liberals, or at least a subset of them. Libertarians have the non-aggression principle (deontology); some conservatives at their best have reverence for tradition as a living and gradually evolving thing; other conservatives have straight religious authority deference, or deference to the rich, or the self-interest of the rich; the far lefts [sic plural] I don't know well enough to talk about much really, but it seems like a mix of deontologies and authorities and 'theory', depending.
Whereas at least in my case, the switch from libertarianism to liberalism/social democracy was all about a switch from moral principle and theory being primary to empiricism being primary. "You know, Sweden just seems like a nice place to live." It's less true that I have different axioms now than it is that I don't think axiomatically nearly as much. And even when I think I do -- "torture's just *wrong*" -- I'm not sure I really do, e.g. in the face of evidence of torture really really working for interrogation or criminal rehabilitation.
Which on the one hand means I'm on shifting moral quicksand and on the other means I (speaking for my kind of liberal vs. other political positions) have a reason to think I have among the clearest views of reality, with the least amount of cognitive bias. On most if not all issues, if there were a sudden surge of evidence against me there's not a lot of ideology compelling me to reject it as threatening to my entire world view, the way accepting anthropogenic global warming is threatening to anyone ideologically committed to small or non-existent government.
I think I remember Milton Friedman saying in Capitalism and Freedom that it was a lucky coincidence that the path of freedom was also the path of greatest prosperity, but that he would advocate freedom even if it wasn't most prosperous. (This in 1963, when lots of people still worried about the competitive powers of Communism.) I was impressed by this statement of principle, back when I was 14.
These days, with more age and cynicism, I note it's cheap to make a stand on principle when you think it pays off the best anyway, and that very few people actually advocate a system they think makes things worse off in a way they care about. (E.g. some liberals might grant that social justice measures slow GDP growth, but not think that's very important.) Almost everyone's an implicit consequentialist, invoking good consequences as fall-back to defend a system they primarily defend for reasons of deontology (morality) or tradition or authority or self-interest or something. Perhaps out of instinct, perhaps because it's the only way to reach someone who doesn't share one's deontology, tradition, etc.
Of course, that opens the door to intellectual dishonesty and corruption, if it turns out the consequences of something one is already committed to believing in aren't in fact optimal. Easier to deny the evidence than to actually admit inferiority but believe anyway or to admit error and change one's mind.
Which suggests to me that the people who are have the least amount of principles or axioms, and the most commitment to consequentialism for its own sake, are most likely to have an accurate view of consequences.
And these days I think that's what the US calls liberals, or at least a subset of them. Libertarians have the non-aggression principle (deontology); some conservatives at their best have reverence for tradition as a living and gradually evolving thing; other conservatives have straight religious authority deference, or deference to the rich, or the self-interest of the rich; the far lefts [sic plural] I don't know well enough to talk about much really, but it seems like a mix of deontologies and authorities and 'theory', depending.
Whereas at least in my case, the switch from libertarianism to liberalism/social democracy was all about a switch from moral principle and theory being primary to empiricism being primary. "You know, Sweden just seems like a nice place to live." It's less true that I have different axioms now than it is that I don't think axiomatically nearly as much. And even when I think I do -- "torture's just *wrong*" -- I'm not sure I really do, e.g. in the face of evidence of torture really really working for interrogation or criminal rehabilitation.
Which on the one hand means I'm on shifting moral quicksand and on the other means I (speaking for my kind of liberal vs. other political positions) have a reason to think I have among the clearest views of reality, with the least amount of cognitive bias. On most if not all issues, if there were a sudden surge of evidence against me there's not a lot of ideology compelling me to reject it as threatening to my entire world view, the way accepting anthropogenic global warming is threatening to anyone ideologically committed to small or non-existent government.