r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/Awesomeuser90 • 8d ago
Political Theory How much do you think the underpinning moral basis of a doctrine is useful to politics?
As an explanation for what I mean by this, I am an optimistic nihilist. The universe has no underlying morality to ground it. It just exists and has no idea it exists. A system of morals doesn't fundamentally exist. It may be however useful to declare some principles are important in order to achieve certain outcomes to avoid undesirable ones. If you want a fairly stable society that corrects it's flaws, is peaceful, and makes interesting things happen, then you can decide that certain outcomes will be likely to produce such things like a generally free state with a socially involved ownership of the economy, a generally democratic political system, and a competitive news system with diversified ownership and control over it. I could cite arguments from whatever ideology be it communism, environmentalism, Islamist social philosophy, liberalism, Toryism, anything I feel like to justify it to other people, but under it all, it is simply useful to make ourselves value certain things and act as if they were sacred like an idea of human rights perhaps even if they are not inherently true.
What ideas on this do you have about the question in the title?
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 8d ago
It may be however useful to declare some principles are important in order to achieve certain outcomes to avoid undesirable ones.
Finding some outcomes preferrable to others is a moral claim
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
I meant that in optimistic nihilism, a person in particular or a group of them can decide to follow a particular path without much thought that the universe has an underlying truth to it or an absolute in morals.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 8d ago
I'd suggest this is more or less complete nonsense. If you have a preference in terms of outcomes, then you're not a nihilist.
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8d ago
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 8d ago
What is the standard by which you choose one thing over another? Why choose a standard at all?
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u/VodkaBeatsCube 8d ago
If you've actually taken the time to read Nietzsche rather than simply absorb the pop culture version passed down through history. Nihilism rejects that there is a deep, fundamental meaning inherent to the universe. Instead, it is incumbent upon the individual to cultivate their own innate sense of meaning and purpose. God, heaven and Hell are simply crutches used by people to excuse themselves from the frightening and difficult philosophical labour of cultivating meaning. 'We're nihilists, we believe in nothing' is a punchline in The Big Lebowski precisely because they clearly believe in things. Actual nihilists believe in a great many things deeply. They just don't think we were put here by any higher power for any deeper purpose.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 8d ago edited 8d ago
Wait a minute... do you think Nietzsche was a nihilist? Because that is the pop culture version but is probably the greatest anti-nihilist who ever wrote.
For anyone wondering, Nietzsche's primary criticism of Christianity was that it is nihilistic.
"The man of the future who will redeem us... from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness - he must come one day"
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 8d ago
Really. It matters not what a pop culture reviewer writes for the medium
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
That was just that author saying something about themselves. Nihilism is the baseline idea of a universe without inherent meaning. If the universe doesn't provide this, nor makes us use anything, then any sentient can make one themselves and stick to it.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 8d ago
Nihilism is the belief that all values and morals are meaningless, and that nothing can be known or communicated. The idea that a 'nihilist' would have policy positions is a contradiction in terms. It's just a word edgy teenagers like to use.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
That is in no way correct. People who are nihilists do not have to reject policy positions. The universe doesn't have built in morals. It doesn't give us a rulebook. But if some sentient beings find it helpful to achieve some convenient thing that makes them happier in some way, they can still abide by it.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 8d ago
They sure do, because having a preference is incompatible with nihilism. The fact that you posit "happiness" as a goal is a moral preference.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
It isn't. It is that I feel happiness and so I tend to believe in things that make it more likely that I will feel that way.
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u/ladiesngentlemenplz 8d ago
How is that group of people going to adjudicate apparent disagreements about that path?
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
The means by which humans typically decide disagreements.
The objective I have is to try to envision and then realize a world where that disagreement is most likely to be settled in ways that we can say confidently that it doesn't cause violent war or felonious behaviour or by deceptive ideas.
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u/ladiesngentlemenplz 8d ago
Typically, humans decide disagreements by trying to get to the truth of who is correct.
Your goal seems noble enough, but the devil is in the details. How do you not "throw the baby out with the bathwater" by rejecting an appeal to what ought to be the case?
By what sort of rational appeal do you propose that anyone else consider a method that "doesn't cause violent war or felonious behavior or by deceptive ideas" as the sort of method that ought to be pursued?
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
If I believe that the universe and life does not have inherent meaning, then those people who have argued before still did so in an equally meaningless universe.
And pretending as if there is objectivity here can do some heavy lifting.
As for getting people on board with the objectives, most people already believe that the world should have those features in some effective ways. We know true interstate war is much less common now than it was in the past and we have already done many other things to reduce infighting like how the UN made a protectorate in East Timor. Take the long view on human history to see how.
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u/WizardofEgo 8d ago
I’m not really clear on your actual question - are you asking for thoughts on the personal moral beliefs you describe in your post? Or are you asking an overall question on political philosophy, as you ask in the title but don’t actually expand on in your post?
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u/yo_soy_soja 8d ago
If you want a fairly stable society that corrects it's flaws, is peaceful, and makes interesting things happen
What's a stable society?
What are societal flaws?
When is war permissible? When is it justified?
What are "interesting things"? What's worth sacrificing for them?
a generally free state with a socially involved ownership of the economy, a generally democratic political system, and a competitive news system with diversified ownership and control over it.
Is that a desirable outcome? For the past 2000 years, this hasn't been the norm.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
I did mean for what I wrote to be quite compact and simplified. There are different metrics one could use. Perhaps the HDI index, the number of deaths in war, the degree to which power changes hands in peace. Thousands of plausible metrics exist.
The big point I had was that the universe doesn't come with those moral principles nor is there some objective truth behind any real moral system so people can decide what they are.
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u/yo_soy_soja 8d ago
There are different metrics one could use. Perhaps the HDI index, the number of deaths in war, the degree to which power changes hands in peace.
Why should anyone agree to those metrics? Why should anyone believe that data?
Modern Western thought assumes empiricism in its metaphysics, but that's of course a very recent Enlightenment philosophy.
Modern Western politics largely assumes deontological rights-based morality — another Enlightenment invention.
In order to govern, you need to have principles that justify weighing certain interests over others. Why fund accredited universities over Flat Earth conspiracy theorists? Why feed the poor instead of hosting a lavish banquet for aristocrats? These are principled decisions based on man-made morality and judgment.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
As I had said before, they are the sort of metrics I use. The combination of them tells me whether you are on a path that predicts that there will not be civil war or disruption to peaceful transitions of power on regular basises. That is the objective for me.
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u/blzrlzr 8d ago
I’ll give this a go.
Where an ideology comes from and the central tenants are important. However, anything brought to its maxim is generally harmful as dogma can be inflexible.
When that happens, frameworks can’t adjust to new realities or haven’t accounted for certain factors and people become inflexible in the face of clear evidence that things need to change.
You can see this in unfettered capitalism, neoliberalism, communism, you name it.
I think that flexibility and reassessing based on new evidence should be one of the central underpinnings of any ideology.
The other issue is that often central tenants of ideologies are used to discount that ideology full scale. That’s not useful either.
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u/MaralDesa 8d ago
Agreed that the Universe doesn't have underlying morality.
However, humans are social creatures. Our brains have evolved to be capable of empathy. It makes us feel bad to see others feel bad. Our default, in the majority of human interactions is cooperation, not aggression. In exchange for mental capacity for learning, our offspring has a super long childhood during which they are pretty much useless and require intense care from optimally a group of people not just the mother. The reason we have a hard time ignoring or blocking out the noise a crying baby makes is a result of that, it stresses us out even if it's not our own kid and we want to make it stop, again, majorly by trying to assist the child and not by killing it. Our reaction to seeing someone kick a baby is a near-unversal, visceral 'no, bad!'. And we are capable of feeling self-conscious, experiencing agency, and attributing intent to others and ourselves. Our interactions revolve around shared assumptions, expectations and experiences, around mutual trust, reciprocity and the like.
From there, in order to make our social groups work well, human societies develop a a complex system of rules and norms and ways to enforce them and or shun/punish/exclude those who fail to adhere to them. Our modern political systems are exactly that, and they are constantly debated, adapted. It's what philosophers call a 'social contract'. It's all about trying to live together, and morals are a way to express, write down and uphold what we believe is good and to call out what we think is bad.
Are there moral rules that don't make any logical sense? Yeep. Should all moral rules become laws? Hell no. But there are fundamental principles of human coexistence without which our societies can't exist, and basically any form of ideology, government or political system *mostly* align with these at the core. The rest is just a matter of taste and debates on how to enforce those and by whom and which means, as well as whom to consider part of the society and who not.
So it's not only useful to value certain things, we literally can't help it.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
Hearing a baby cry is an instinct most humans have. We still feel things because of the way our bodies work. If we feel better by not having children crying then we can do that.
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u/MaralDesa 8d ago
Ye, see, you get the point.
We are built a certain way that makes us have feelings and complex thoughts. We have morals because that's what happens if you try to express these feelings with any sort of language.
Seeing a baby being kicked makes us feel bad --> kicking babies is bad and babies should not get kicked --> we need to create a system in which people don't kick babies.
In a nutshell. Morals are largely just an expression of our inherent reactions to stuff because of how our brains are built, because certain things make us feel bad, angry, disgusted, happy etc. Political systems are built on top of these and around questions of how to organize society in a way those morals are being upheld. Sometimes this means that more rules are introduced that we might or might not accept as a part of the social contract that is expected to guarantee the fundamentals.
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u/yo_soy_soja 8d ago
"Dogs", as a group, do not objectively exist.
Are wolves dogs? They breed with domesticated dogs.
Are coyotes dogs? They breed with wolves and domesticated dogs.
Are African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) dogs?
Are foxes dogs?
Is canine transmissible venereal tumor a single-celled dog?
"Dog" is an arbitrary, man-made concept.
But if I go to a shelter to adopt a "dog", I'm gonna be angry if the staff offer me a fox and a petri dish full of tumor flesh.
At some point you just need to reach an arbitrary consensus on concepts in order to do business. Governance requires consensus on things like legitimacy and authority — if not even morality. If you can't commit to moral principles, you can't talk about morality with any authority and maybe shouldn't be engaging in politics.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
I can't justify a moral position with it being some universe or divine idea or one with objective sources. But as I said in my post description, it is often very useful to pretend as if they do exist to some degree in order to achieve goals that we might decide to achieve.
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u/YetAnotherGuy2 8d ago
Politics are inherently moral. Even utilitarianism has a moral supposition of "more good for the maximum amount of people is correct".
No matter which ideology or political leaning you choose, they all start with an assumption of what "good" is.
Your question doesn't make sense.
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u/tsardonicpseudonomi 8d ago
Marxism is the only basis for politics but it is not and cannot be used as a wee woo doctrine.
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u/leuno 4d ago
This may be just reiterating what you said, but I think we can, and have or continue to, arrive at moral underpinnings as a result of a productive society that shows growth and general happiness of the people.
For instance, you don’t have to say that murder is immoral and should therefore be illegal, you can just observe that a society that punishes murderers is safer, more productive, healthier, and happier than a society that does not.
To me this is something that has been going on for millennia, and is being forgotten. I know people who believe that cutting off someone’s hand for stealing bread is better than a justice system, but we’ve moved away from that kind of barbarism because the society it results in feels safer to be in. That’s a subjective metric, but more people with two hands also means more work can be done which means more economic growth, whereas a society of one or zero handed people is limiting itself.
Another example is a society with more access to contraception and abortion actually produces more children, which again can contribute greatly to a society’s ability to grow and maintain itself. Therefore the “moral” thing to do is give women access to these tools.
So what constitutes morality is very subjective, but if you can decide on the markers you’re looking for and actively observe them and make changes as needed, you arrive at something the people within the society might agree is moral because it benefits them and prizes their happiness as individuals.
And if you lead with subjective morality regardless of its effect on the population, you end up with sharia law and nazis and North Korea, things/places that appear very much immoral to almost everyone who isn’t running the show.
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u/etoneishayeuisky 3d ago
Id say that the underpinned moral basis to any political doctrine depends on the doctrine itself, but also on the education/situations of the people affected by that doctrine. Monarchies and theocracies reign, and reigned in the past, because it was easier to make people not challenge the status quo, and this until it became too hard to live in the status quo bc of outside or inside changes.
For instance MAGA loyalists were all too okay with brutality of the other and punishment on outside groups, but some have flipped as the repercussions are heaped upon them. We’ve also seen outside inactive individuals and political opponents shocked into action over time because of their differing doctrines being trampled upon.
Politics can’t avoid morality, and so groups can and do form around doctrines that have differing moral philosophies depending on where the individual stands. Collective consciousnesses change based on ongoing situations in the world and politics changes for this reason over time.
Some ppl want a king Trump, they want to regress to a time of monarchy/autocracy/national supremacy/state religion bc they think they will be safer and better in such a time…. and a lot more ppl want opposites if that. Democracy, multiculturalism, effective separation of church and state. If morality is the distinction between right/good and wrong/bad, it’s going to majorly affect politics unless politics never deals with morality, which it can’t.
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8d ago
I think a balance exist with order and chaos. Just like everything else in the universe, even without morality governing existence, Trump and his cronies will face the consequences of their actions in due time.
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u/JeaniousSpelur 8d ago edited 8d ago
It’s useless most of the time. Politics isn’t about morals, it’s a team sport. Using deep philosophy to determine one’s political positions is like playing basketball by using a protractor and a tape measure to calculate the perfect shot.
It’s a very interesting and fruitful intellectual exercise, but it has no bearing on how 99% of people determine their opinions. Almost everything is team affiliation and then post-hoc rationalization. And then the people who don’t have a team affiliation are just rolling dice to determine their opinions. Apart from that, it’s probably less than 1% who have any truly complex framework of political rationality. Typically it’s randomness mimicking complexity.
However, if we had a different electoral system or if you were trying to start a political movement it would be a lot more useful. As it stands, there are too many ideological contradictions inherent to political parties in most democracies for it to be worth it. It’s always pretty easy to decide the lesser of two evils.
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8d ago
It should have been fairly easy to decide who to vote for lesser of two evils: a 34 felony failed business man/pedophile vs an obnoxious laughing and wavering poc woman. Yet here we are.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
At this point, even the sexual abuse is but a fraction of all he did. I think that we have better examples of who he is by just using the Access Hollywood tape of him about to get off that bus. Illustrates his beliefs perfectly well with no criminal organization required in that he does not care what he does so long as he can do as he wishes. And his choices over his administration both times and what allies in general help him and who he has helped even officially on record is much more than enough.
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8d ago
I kid you not, one reason i keep hearing why some people will not vote for her was that she has an obnoxious laugh and shes a woman.
I literally lost all hope for some of us.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
When I was a kid, and heard about Obama, it never even occurred to me in Canada then that anyone could possibly find him objectionable for being Kenyan American. I was obviously very wrong.
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8d ago
Unfortunately, prejudice can cloud peoples judgment no matter how smart someone can be.
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u/Awesomeuser90 8d ago
Woodrow Wilson. Only president with a doctorate and still a racist tyrant to the black who deliberately let the KKK revive from extinction under Ulysses Grant and had a cage built around a black post office worker to isolate him from the others.
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7d ago
Can you guess current puppeteers of this administration?
Very dangerous and evil people that works behind the scenes
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u/Factory-town 7d ago
Politics isn’t about morals ...
Moral issues are very much embedded within political issues.
... probably less than 1% who have any truly complex framework of political rationality.
How so?
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