Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Fri Apr 10, 2020 4:17 pm
My dismissal of some claims and arguments is not 'knee-jerk', because that would be irrational. If a claim is false, or an argument invalid and/or unsound, then I dismiss it. What do you do? Pretend the claim may be true, or the argument valid or sound?
What do I do? I would argue we should prove that it's "false...invalid and/or unsound" by providing the contrary evidence and reasons.
Some claims are worth falsifying, and some arguments are worth refuting. But many of them don't deserve even a moment's attention.
And how does one even know, if one already admits one hasn't "given them a moment's attention"?
Scruton's case for Burke's 'heritable principle', justifying social and economic inequality, is one example.
So it seems you have "given him a moment's attention." But what's missing is your reasoning why the "heritable principle" you describe is wrong...the claim that it "justifies social and economic inequality" is one that a) needs proof, and b) even if proven, would need a showing that "inequality" is evidence of injustice, rather than, say, inevitable hierarchies of competence or achievement.
Then there's a further problem: the
ad hominem problem. For let us suppose you to have proved Roger Scruton's particular "heritable principle" a thoroughly loathsome and unrealistic axiom. Had you done so, it would not tell us whether the very next utterance out of Scruton's mouth was true or false, if it wasn't about "the heritable principle." It would only have refuted that one thing that Scruton said.
But I think any defence of political and economic conservatism - any defence of injustice - intellectually and morally disgusting.
"Disgusting" is merely a visceral descriptor, not an intellectual one. And the identity of "conservatism' and "injustice," as if everybody simply already knows they're the same thing, is specious and merely propagandistic. Not only do many have rational disagreements with that reaction and that alleged identification, but they provide reasons for thinking they're right.
And as long as their underlying reasons go unaddressed, what rationale do they have for coming to an agreement with you? Again, you're stuck with polarized camps hissing "Nazi," "Commie," "Oppressor," "naive fool," and now, "Conservative," "SJW." And where does all that get us? Just irremediable animosity...winners and losers, with no understanding of each other, nor even good understanding of their own values.
Dialogue, not dismissal, is what rational positions call for. It's also the way forward to something better than we've now got.
And for the information of anyone following, I offer the ensuing clip from Roger Scruton's own description of "the heredity principle," so we all know what it really is:
"The final argument that impressed me was Burke’s response to the theory of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary Rousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went before and those who came after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the massive squandering of inherited resources at the Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal danger of modern politics. In Burke’s eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on."
Thus understood, Scruton's call is not for a "defence of injustice" at all...but a
remedy to a great injustice: that of the treating of the dead and yet-to-come partners in the social contract as worthless. And his fears have been born out with abundant evidence in our day. We now treat not just the dead but even our elders as less valuable or worthless partners in the social contract, and the unborn as a resource for us to exploit today.
What was "heritable" in all this was not ancestral privileges, but the right to be recognized as a human partner with a justified interest in the state of social and political arrangements. How is that an "injustice," Pete? Do you think that the past generations are really worthless, and the pre-born are devoid of any significance in our framing of a social contract? Do you take any thought at all for your forebears or your children, in other words?
Hardly an odious principle. What might turn out to be odious is having no view but that the present generation is the only one that ever counts.
