Stakes

I wonder how much of the contemporary “rights talk” would go away if, instead of weighing the importance of their beliefs against their feelings, people would weigh it according to the consequences of being wrong. <I prefer to believe I’m more attached to those of mine that have the greatest scope. Desmond doesn’t seem to think like that, or my “coworkers” where I volunteer. I almost always criticize them for a lack of foresight. Solomon agrees with me about people in general <He even admitted his advice column depends on this carelessness>. Is it this universal? Would that I could ask Cristóbal about it!> “It’s my right to do this, even if it’s immoral” doesn’t seem to stand very well when we remember that moral precepts are there to protect people from others and from their own caprice. Our rights would exist to protect us from doing evil against our will, and it could mean not being able to do it when we please.

This is a rather thorny idea before I notice that it biases us to different things in its own way. Certain beliefs “win by default” because they have higher stakes for being wrong than their negations do <Well, if we allow the precautionary principle to be more important>. I don’t expect many are prepared for where that could lead, and not just emotionally <A lot would change in this world>.

But before such a question could take us who knows where, how objective is a stake? If somebody doesn’t care that millions would die if he’s wrong about a choice, is it still a high stake, despite his values? And if not, people will have to return to their feelings. Why take my indirect route to do that instead of just starting there? And if it’s still a high stake, how do you show that it is? Could we —or should we— suppose that, even if ‘it’s obvious,’ you could show that some decisions are objectively better than others? The natural law tradition tried to do it, but people didn’t like what it had to say. Utilitarianism tried to do it, too, but it assumes too much, and it still can’t do its job. Whether we can prove that some choices are better than others or not, there’s a lot of work to do, including taking care of this person or his value judgments.

Things are so much harder now that there’s so little consensus about the Good… Without a hierarchy of greater and lesser goods, we can’t decide which public goals deserve priority and which to put off, sacrifice, or ignore. There’s so much to clarify.