Lifted from the comments on this post:
Where does someone whose commitment is to utilitarianism + empiricism fit into the framwork? It seems to me that this describes a large number of people on both sides of the political center (Democratic technocrats and the endangered species of Republican good government types) who think that barbarism, liberty, and oppression are awfully abstract notions to base concrete government decisions on.
I probably need to emphasize that I do not think that the three axes are used to reason carefully about political issues. I think that they are used rhetorically to solidify loyalties and to put down opponents. If someone uses utilitarianism and empiricism, then that tends to involve reasoning carefully, and it gets away from the three axes.
I do not think that one encounters much careful reasoning nowadays. I think people are too busy engaging in political tribalism. I have a lot more to say about this in my 60-page e-book, which I hope will be available in the not-too-distant future.
Anyone who thinks that trying to practice utilitarianism excuses them from the debate over what would be a good aggregate utility function doesn’t really understand utilitarianism.
Empirical results or careful might change how you get to that utility function: If increasing liberty or civilization turn out to indirectly help the plight of the oppressed, you could turn a principled liberal into a pragmatic libertarian conservative; if liberty isn’t sociologically stable except in certain kinds of civilization or with sufficiently low levels of inequality, you could see some varieties of principled libertarian acting like conservatives or liberals; etc. But at some level any utilitarian still has to decide “these good things with these coefficients are the utility we should maximize; other goodness is only instrumentally good insofar as it helps us do that.”
So, would the point of developing the three-axes model be – in part – to expose political tribalism?
Well I don’t necessarily disapprove of tribalism.
It’s atleast better than this politically correct view that all three axes are equally valid.
However that’s not a plausible claim at all. While the conservative view has prevailed for practically most of human history, the progressive and libertarian views are less than 2 centuries old – with extremely mixed results. So the burden of proof is always on the progressives and libertarians.
I find the three axis model makes it much easier to talk to people of other political persuasions. It makes it easier to figure out where they are coming from.
Let’s think about the 3-axis model in relation to our best science of institutions such as moral practices and governmental practices and social practices and evolved law and custom and etiquette and so on.
Burke & Hayek & Darwin & Wittgenstein are essentially correct about institutions — we acquire them via imitation, training, correction and teaching, and these institutions allow to do things and achieve things we otherwise wouldn’t be able to achieve. And they are the results of all sorts of accumulated choices and grappling with situations no one today can possibly fully know, reconstruct or even imagine.
Now, what do these institutions do? Do they:
1) serve to oppress people, or do they protect us from oppressors
2) do they allow for barbaric practices or do they protect us from barbaric activities.
3) do they provide us with freedom or do they serve to coerce us?
I’d suggest that leftists and classical liberals have view on all _three_ of these issues, that these issues are not exclusive to one political tribe or another, and that the leftist vs classic liberal answer differs on all three issues because leftists and classical liberals have different scientific understandings of the nature and role institutions.