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So, like a lot of you, I guess, I'm in search of a political party. I have in mind a party with at least a passing regard for playing by democratic rules, so obviously that rules out the Conservatives. I'm neither a Communist nor an anti-semite, so of course Labour's out.
But what do I believe in? I guess my two startpoints wld be 1) that ordered liberty is the proper minimal goal of any political system (tho it can have other richer ones as well); & 2) both rulers & governed are sinful, so both need their conduct constrained.
By "ordered liberty" I refer to the concept that order does not come by degrees - there is simply order or not. Liberty & order are not "traded off". Instead, we must have order, but we seek the maximum liberty consistent with having & maintaining that order.
By noting both rulers & governed are sinful I refer to the principle oft expressed in the quote "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
I regard morals (& hence natural justice) as relative to our gods. To be "right" is to be "what my god wills". If we were creating a state from scratch that cld create the challenge that we'd need sufficient alignment of our views of justice amongst society or at least its rulers
But in this case we have a country already & it has habits or assumptions abt what justice is that came from its gods of the past. So it's best to work from them - esp as that is convenient for me since my gods & theirs had similar instructions on most key points.
That cld still create a problem tho if something caused the balance of views of justice to change too rapidly - eg if we took over or were absorbed by a people with very different gods or if we had too much immigration from those with v different gods from ours.
Nonetheless, provided we can all accept some basic ground rules of society there are some considerable advantages in our not all needing to share morals or aesthetics or other philosophical precepts. The most important such advantage is that I might be wrong & others correct me.
Society should therefore seek to enforce conduct only to the minimum required. But that does not mean society shld forbid moral conflict. I need others to be able to preach at, criticise & shame me so I can learn & discover I was wrong & how to be better!
We are born as subjects (subject to our parents' rule) & our instinct is to seek someone that we can be ruled by or rebel against. But as adults we shld be granted self-ownership. We shld be able to leave our country, marry whom we choose, work at the jobs we want.
Our self-ownership means we should be able to use our work to create property & to give our property to others & receive property from them. Property, gifts, inheritance & trade are all fundamental reflections of our self-ownership.
Markets, trade & property are thus not to be seen primarily in terms of their contribution to collective welfare - that they facilitate rapid economic growth or technical progress. They are fundamentally moral in nature, reflections of self-ownership.
One reflection of our group progress closer to Truth is political engagement. Such engagement neither requires nor has a goal of creating one collective "us". Instead, the goal is to pick ways to inform & discipline our rulers. Democracy is best understood as a form of civil war.
When we understand democracy as a form of civil war we can see that there need be no single "public will", since there is no single "public" (no "demos"). Rather, there are the factions & the art of democratic processes is to determine how one of them triumphs (for now).
One implication of this is that it is simply confused to believe that all democracy is about absolute majorities, that everything that happens must reflect majority opinion or that everyone in charge must be elected.
Another implication is that it is a mistake to claim states must correspond to nations so there can be one collective "us", a "demos". Making our states from nations has advantages when we are 1st building political states, for the reasons I set out above, but is not needed later
The key objection to Communism is thus twofold. 1) I own myself & the fruits of my work, my property. Neither my work nor its fruits are "ours" to decide how "we" should distribute. 2) There is no proper goal of awakening a collective political consciousness, eg a "class".
