Why Mislabeling Keeps us Stuck in Partisan Politics

by | Nov 14, 2017

Why Mislabeling Keeps us Stuck in Partisan Politics

by | Nov 14, 2017

The biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that “[c]ategories often exert a tyranny over our perceptions and judgments,” adding that “[w]e do not ponder the bases of our classifications with sufficient scrutiny.”

Popular political debates have yet to fully appreciate this vital insight. Our political categorizations facilely conflate questions of fundamentally different kinds, leading to a conceptual confusion that hobbles constructive discourse. Clarity in this discourse requires a separation between two kinds of questions, those about means and those about ends.

Debates about the goals themselves are values questions, premised on our normative judgments, that is, our views on what ought to be—what makes a good society or political system.

These questions and our answers to them are importantly quite different from our arguments about the practical question of how to arrive at those goals once we’ve settled on them. And at a sufficiently general level of abstraction, there is actually a rather broad consensus as to ends, the goals at which public policy should aim.

Read more at The Hill.

David D'Amato

David S. D’Amato is an attorney and adjunct law professor whose writing has appeared at the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Future of Freedom Foundation, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Law and Liberty, the Foundation for Economic Education, and in major newspapers around the world. D’Amato is on the Board of Policy Advisors for the Heartland Institute and he is the Benjamin Tucker Research Fellow at the Molinari Institute’s Center for a Stateless Society. He earned a JD from New England School of Law and an LLM in Global Law and Technology from Suffolk University Law School.

View all posts

Our Books

Shop books published by the Libertarian Institute.

Podcasts

scotthortonshow logosq

coi banner sq2@0.5x

liberty weekly thumbnail

Don't Tread on Anyone Logo

313x0w (1)

313x0w (1)

313x0w (1)

Our Books

Recent Articles

Recent

John Locke and the Libertarian Tradition

John Locke and the Libertarian Tradition

The Enlightenment produced many innovators, but few have left a legacy as contentious and influential as John Locke. Born in Wrington, Somerset on August 29, 1632, Locke wrote the political treatises that shaped England’s Glorious Revolution and later guided the...

read more
Why Politicians Seek Power

Why Politicians Seek Power

In The Dictator's Handbook, Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, Professors Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith look at historical examples as well as modern ones and conclude successful politicians do not gain power by helping "we the people," but...

read more

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This