As an unbiased observer, it is easy to notice the arbitrariness of popular political positions. What being against gay marriage has to do with being pro-life I will never know. Smart people keep a few exceptions in their back pocket so they don’t look like mindless followers. Still, it seems in a rational world whether one believes that we should have amnesty on illegal Mexicans should have absolutely no predictive power over whether the same one believes that we should have stricter gun laws. In real life, knowing one belief gives you a lot of predictive power over others.
One response is that popular political differences are about different basic values. We can see the reflection of these values in how each political actor talks about their policies. To borrow Jonathan Haidt’s categories, liberals believe more so in “fairness” and “care”, while conservatives believe more so in “authority”, “sanctity”, and “loyalty”.
Another response is that liberals are for more social freedom and less economic freedom and conservatives are the other way around.
There is no doubt each political actor emphasizes their own set of principles. I question whether these are principles at all or if they’re really just moral framing. Are these “principles” defined? Are they applied according to a method in order to reach conclusions? Or are they inserted as ex-post justifications?
I also question how much wiggle room there is in determining whether an issue is social or economic. Isn’t what one person calls the right to own a gun another’s right to buy a gun? To buy an abortion and to have an abortion? The right to immigrate and the right to sell your labor to a foreign employer?
For an activity, try switching the moral frames with their applications to discover how easy or difficult it is to pretend you’re about principle no matter what. I’ll go first:
The liberal argument against abortion:
“as citizens of this planet we have to care about the life of every living creature – every animal, every human, and yes every fetus. We find that conservative policies habitually oppress the weak for the sake of the strong. Their heartless policies extends to the poor, the sick, and now to children who haven’t even breathed in a gasp of fresh air yet. If civilization is to succeed we have to move past this social Darwinism, and tolerate the lives of the unborn even when it is inconvenient.”
Want to be a conservative who favors the freedom of abortion?
“I don’t understand what is so hard for liberals to grasp the right of every person to spend their hard-earned money how they choose. I believe it is individual’s right to contract with who they damn well please. If I want to buy an abortion, and a doctor wants to sell me an abortion, there is no reason for big government to step between buyer and seller and tell us it is wrong to do so. Besides, we have a crisis of children being raised without 2 parent households, it’s destroying our civilization, it’s destroying our families, and liberals are exasperating the problem by forcing teens into single parenthood.”
Here is a bit more strained liberal argument for free market health care:
“My body, my right to do what I want with it. Health is my choice, and I’ll be as healthy or unhealthy as I want to be without conservatives unloading money on already rich doctors to make my body into one of their temples.”
Conservative argument for socialized health care:
“In order to continue being the strongest nation on earth, we need the health care of the strongest nation on earth. We need fathers who have the strength to protect their families. We need businesspeople who live long and stay sharp so they can provide the standard of living we enjoy. And we need every one of our young patriots who risk their lives for their country to grow up with health care, sick soldiers on the battlefield is downright dangerous to everyone if you think about it. And lets face it, when we don’t have health care we are degradation image of God by frailty and illness.”
These might sound awkward, but I suspect that if they were more common it would seem natural for conservatives to want government health-care and liberals to want the life of a fetus protected. Also consider that I’m not the best moral framer, and I haven’t felt the emotional thrust of a political moral argument in a very long time. Hence I have a handicap in reproducing it. Especially against professional moral framers we hear on television, and from whom everyday political people derive their rhetoric.
Moral frames are powerful. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an issue subjected to a normal cost-benefit analysis only to be told that that missed the whole point – that this is about principle – followed by descriptions of what they like using good words, and descriptions of what they don’t like using bad words. This kind of moral philosophy is incoherent because anyone can describe anything with moral frames.
Libertarians are much more likely to deduce their policies from defined principles (like that of non-aggression). So they do have a an internally consistent web of policies all connected with each other, thus avoiding the arbitrariness of other political positions. Of course, so do Marxists, so that alone doesn’t make them right.
