In my social work world, post-modernism reigns over much of the intellectual space. I have not engaged enough with postmodernism to thoughtfully criticize it. However, my experience with it is mainly in deconstruction, criticism, and the insight that there is no big-T Truth. I find myself within the interpretivist camp (in regards to social science, not hard science) so it's pretty comfortable to use post-modernist thought and analysis. I also LOVE critical theory, so again pretty safe territory for me.
All of that being said, I still wonder "what comes next?" After tearing down the pretense of absolute knowledge, what do we do now? This is where classical liberal economic theory points me to the concept of emergence--how individuals acting on their own information and values coordinate to create increasingly complex and robust truth. It is an evolutionary process, incredibly sensitive to context. I don't yet know enough about it to really come up with a modestly cogent definition or explication of the concept of emergence, but as I learn more, I will try to think more about what it means.
In relation to the sociological paradigms (and the title of this blog) emergence is a concept that is most salient in the radical humanist paradigm, where radical change and interpretivism hold.
I look forward to your intellectual progression on this issue. You're right that deontological ethical/political arguments are pretty vacuous without some sort of divine underpinning. In the field of ethics, it seems to be mostly Christians who back the more convincing formulations of deontological ethics (e.g. the Kantian categorical imperative).
ReplyDeletePerhaps it's my training in philosophy and psychology, but a lot of the pro-capitalist and libertarian arguments strike me, even on their face, as implausible. This is mostly due to their stated and unstated assumptions, along with the fact that the progression of how things are supposed to end up being more fair ends up sounding like a non-dynamic closed system.
With anarchocapitalists, for example, there seem to be some serious objections: (1) The problem of international relations, (2) the problem of regression to a worse government, and (3) the problem of crime and inequality. For (1), assuming country A becomes anarchocapitalist, what is to stop countries C, D, and E from invading/subsuming/conquering country A? For (2), assuming one reaches an anarchocapitalist state of conditions, what is to ensure that it stays that way, and what is to ensure that it doesn't go back to something worse than market representative democracy? For (3), what if you reach your alleged ideal, but crime increases and the inequality makes for all sorts of inefficiencies?
Anyway, anarchocapitalism is something that I assume you don't defend, so I'm not trying to set up a straw man. The point is that I can come up with analogues to points (1), (2), and (3) for minarchism quite easily.
It strikes me as odd that one would begin a political framework without something like "fairness" or "equality" as the paradigm, but instead with the idea that "liberty from government" is the goal. It seems to beg the question (in the philosophical sense), because if liberty is to be desired, it takes some extra rhetorical work to show that diminishing government is a necessary condition.