On Wifi in the sky now headed home from thanksgiving.

My obligatory heated family debate consisted of deconstructing the morally incoherent socially liberal philosophy of my parents, by highlighting their insistence on having their cake and eating it, too. This was evidenced by my dad’s unwillingness to even propose a solution to the basic moral dilemma of the sinking boat:

The boat has 10 people on it, and will sink causing everyone to die unless you throw 3 people off. Who do you decide to throw off and why?

Every moral philosophy must have an answer to this dilemma, and changing the premises of the dilemma is not a valid move. You must prove you can propose viable solutions to artificially simple moral dilemmas before it is even worth discussing and untangling proposed solutions to complex moral dilemmas. Most liberals refuse to give an answer to this dilemma in the name of egalitarian humanism.

So QED on the qualification of most liberals being able to propose viable solutions to complex problems.

Then it was time to break down the philosophy of my conservative uncle which was overly reliant on the notion of “personal responsibility”.

I challenged him to actually define his assumptions on where the onus of responsibility lies on a scale that ranges from total responsibility of the individual to total responsibility of the system.

“Where on the spectrum do you allocate the responsibility?”, I asked. 100% of personal responsibility falls on the individual and none on the system?”

Unlike my liberal father, he was actually willing to state his assumptions and not engage in performative contradictions. “90 on the individual and 10 on the system” he said, after some resistance.

Then, I challenged him on the point that humans have way less agency than we think. And we must attribute more responsibility to the system and its incentives, because humans aren’t self-interested, perfectly rational beings. Homo-economicus is wrong. We must embrace the insights of Behavioral Economics and embrace a philosophy of liberal paternalism.

And he actually moved his dial knob more towards the system. Not as far as I would, but at least there was MOVEMENT.

Key Takeaway 1: Stalemates in political debates amongst friends and family members are NOT inevitable. PROGRESS is possible if you improve your debate and deliberation skills.

Key Takeaway 2: Conservatives are generally much more pleasant to debate than liberals, because their beliefs are actually backed up by an intellectually rigorous philosophy. Liberals on the other hand are often driven primarily by the rage of witnessed injustice, which leads them to consistently make irrational recommendations for improvements that ignore the complexities of reality.

How did your hea