Q and A

I found a somewhat interesting article on the Prindle Post, entitled: Your Political Party Isn’t Right About Everything: Intellectual Humility and the Public Square.

The author, to demonstrate the effects of partisanship, asks five questions:

1. Is abortion morally wrong in most circumstances?
2. Should homosexual couples be allowed to marry?
3. Is illegal immigration into the United States a serious problem?
4. Should the United States federal minimum wage be raised?
5. Is it okay to consider race when making college admissions decisions?

He notes that there is no particular reason why answers to these should be strongly correlated. But, to a degree, they are. Mainly because they're partisan questions, although same-sex marriage has become less so in recent years. One doesn't have to listen to a lot of stump speeches or watch many political television shows to understand that these are the sorts of questions that define partisan identity. Personally, I'm not so sure that, given American history, that these are questions that one would expect to be independent of one another, but i take the author's point.

As one can guess from the title, the author counsels that people "become more intellectually humble" as a corrective to partisan division. It's a suggestion based on a simple idea:

But if we do not have a strong reason to think that Democrats are consistently better at answering political questions than Republicans, or vice versa, then we are faced with a bit of a dilemma. If our opinions on many complex and unrelated political issues are best explained by our party affiliation, and we have no reason to think that one side is right more often than the other, then maybe we ought to be less confident in our political beliefs.

And here's where I think that the piece misunderstands modern politics. Take the first question that he asks "Is abortion morally wrong in most circumstances?" That's more than just a political question; it's a moral one, and it illustrates why partisanship has become so intractable. To the person who believes that aborting a fetus is murdering an unborn child, or the person who believes that restricting the practice is tantamount to forcing women to give birth against their will, calling for intellectual humility is effectively asking people to abandon their commitments to right and wrong. And the case can be made that the rest of the questions have become entwined with moral salience as well. And once people become convinced that opposing partisans are always on whichever side is morally wrong, they're even more unlikely to buy into the idea that the parties are equally good at answering important questions.

It's one thing for people to admit to not having all of the answers in the face of specific policy questions. It's easy to rule out a federal minimum wage of $4 an hour or $40 an hour; those are the stances of committed ideologues. But whether $7.50 and hour is better or worse than $8.00 is something that many people have difficulty with, if for no other reason than their day job doesn't require them to think much about it. But as to which is the moral imperative, leaving the wage where it is, or raising it to a "living wage," it's hard to find people who have an opinion one way or the other, but don't think that they understand enough to stand by whatever conviction they have.

Accordingly, in order to reduce the rancor of partisanship, and especially negative partisanship, one would first need to remove the moral salience of the issues that drive partisan activism. That is, I suspect, something of an unlikely outcome.