How can political philosophies be built around the notion that some people are entitled to coerce other people? From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
setting the sacred wolves to prey upon the people
i am a free speech absolutist. i think we ought to all be free to speak as we feel and as we believe and thereby gather audiences and consequences as befit our utterances. i feel the same way about association. you should, as a private actor, be able to associate or refuse to do so with anyone you like for any reason you chose or no reason at all. i may judge you as a person for decisions you make along these lines, but i will, at the same time, defend your right to make them.
once, this was hardly a rare belief or exotic concept. it was called “a principled stance on individual liberty” and it underpinned the basis for a republic in which the rights of the individual stood paramount to the dictates of the state and in which the negative rights to self-determination stood tall and rendered moot and untenable the idea of what have come to be called “positive rights” which are, of course, not really rights at all but rather entitlements that must, of necessity, rest upon a basis of coercion for if you have a “right” to healthcare and no one wishes to provide or pay for it of their own free will, then clearly, someone must be compelled if you are to have it.
this basis for the idea of “compulsion based justice” ran riot through the “progressives” and has essentially eaten any virtue once encapsulated in their ideas and bent their movement into a truly nasty form of self-justification for tyranny. it’s all rather obvious when one really looks at it. it’s just economic law.
part and parcel to this deviation from self-awareness and from any form of defensible ethics or agency was the idea of “moral relativism” whereby there was no objective virtue or honor or justice but only competing subjective views thereof none of which could be in any meaningful way claimed to be superior to any other or to possess any greater claim to rightness or goodness.
