| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Jesus Is a Liberal Democrat | ||||
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There is an issue here that even non-Christians like me and Bernie Goldberg can find interesting. The immediate issue is: Are people who vote for the government to give resources to people who need them practicing Christian charity? Behind this is a deeper issue, which does not presuppose Christian ethics: Are they practicing some virtue of benevolence or other -- perhaps generosity?
Colbert thinks the answer to both questions is obviously yes. I think the correct answer is no, for two reasons.
(Both are different from the reason O'Reilly gives, which is that , as he sees it, Christian charity and liberal charity are different traits, as the former is qualified by ideas, such as individual responsibility, which are absent from the latter. This is the idea that Colbert is ignorantly ridiculing in the above video.)
First: If you are really generous, charitable, etc., you have already given to the needy. The only thing your vote can add, at most, is to force others to give. Now, if I give you my coat, that may be generous, but if I give you someone else's coat, it cannot be. You can only be generous, etc., with your own property. If Al Capone tips a shoeshine boy with a stolen $100 bill, he is not being generous. His subjective affect at that moment may be identical to what a generous person might feel, but generosity is a moral concept, not a psychological one. A mere feeling is never sufficient to make an act virtuous.
Second: Further, by voting, you are not even forcing others to give. When you vote, you are never doing anything but voting. Unless the tally, minus you, turns out to be 1,395,735 to 1,395,735, with yours being the tie-breaking vote, your vote has no effect on the outcome of the election whatsoever. As Thoreau put it: "Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it." Voting is thus a great corrupter of morals, a smugifier, a hypocriter. Well, at least I've done something about the problem now! No, you haven't. Now get off your fat ass and really do something.
I think there are a significant number of liberals who believe the Colbert thesis: that simply voting a certain way and having certain opinions makes them more virtuous than people who do otherwise. It would explain the moral contempt some of them seem to show toward people who are to the right of them. It would also explain why they are often so easy on people who are to the left of them. Stalin may have murdered millions, but at least he presided over a state that gave free medical care to those it did not kill. (The same thing is true of Hitler, but nevermind that.)
The intuitive idea behind this is obvious: the liberal voter, the charitable Christian, and the Communist dictator do have something in common: all care about the needy. That may be true. But it does not show that liberals and socialists are more virtuous than others. Aside from the empirical fact that there are plenty of people who care and yet do not fit this political profile, there are reasons #1 and #2, above.
7 comments:
Why would Jesus bother with liberal democracy? He'd go full socialist: Ex hypothesi, he's omniscient, which avoids the socialist calculation problem.
Ah, that takes care of the epistemological problem of socialism, but what about the ethical one? Would he sacrifice the good of some individuals to the good of the whole?
I think there are a significant number of liberals who believe the Colbert thesis: that simply voting a certain way and having certain opinions makes them more virtuous than people who do otherwise.
Well, yes, that's true,but trivial.If you replace "liberals" with "conservatives" it's also true. If u doubt me, ask my mom: she'll tell u voting Democratic is evil--those socialists don't believe in God.
Stalin may have murdered millions, but at least he presided over a state that gave free medical care to those it did not kill. (The same thing is true of Hitler, but nevermind that.)
Question: could you name one liberal, living or dead, who justified Stalin's killing because he offered national health care? If you can't (as I suspect you can't), I have a follow-up question: how does a philisophy professor justify using a strawman argument? Would you let your students get away with such flimsy reasoning?
This is not a straw man argument because I was not arguing against the position, I was only trying to explain it. The explanandum (thing to be explained), furthermore, is not leftists "justifying" Stalin: rather it was their thinking he was less evil than Hitler (though he killed a lot more people). My explanation: they think that at least he had good intentions.
I think it is beyond dispute that a lot of people on the left think Communism was less evil than Nazism. I am reminded of this every time I see look out into a classroom full of students and see people wearing "cool" symbols of Communism on their clothing and headgear. Can you imagine university students wearing "cool" swastikas? Me neither. Che T-shirts, yes. Horst Wessel T-shirts, no.
I posted about the Communism-or-Nazism issue here:
http://lesterhhunt.blogspot.com/2009/11/nazism-or-communism-which-is-more-evil.html
As to your first point, that conservatives think that people who vote liberal are ipso facto immoral:
I think it depends on what kind of conservative they are. If they are the sort that says "socialism is a fine ideal in theory, but it doesn't work in practice," if they vote against welfare state policies simply because they have undesirable consequences in the future, consequences the other side doesn't understand or a appreciate -- if that's what they think, then they are thinking that folks on the other side are not knaves but fools. They think they are committing a factual error, not moral error. They think that their own voting behavior show a superior understanding of how the world works, not superior moral character.
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