What would change my mind?

Here I call on EconLog readers to try to change their minds!

Let me start with a proverbial throat clearer about what we all know: the persistent difficulties of changing one’s mind. This is often very difficult and people are reluctant to change their minds. And we are all biased to believe that we are all more open-minded than we actually are. That said, I Doing I think I am more willing than most to change my mind, even on very fundamental issues that have major life implications. Two examples: For a significant portion of my life, I was a very devout and faithful Christian. But I am now an atheist because I came across a variety of arguments that I found compelling and that changed my mind on the subject. (This also makes me a little skeptical when people say things like “it’s pointless to debate religion, no one ever changes their mind” because I I certainly did, and I know many others who did, for the same reasons I did.) Second, I was on such a heavy meat diet that I came pretty close to people who adhered to the so-called “carnivore diet.” ” Today. But I read Michael Huemer’s debate with Bryan Caplan on ethical vegetarianism, and I stopped eating meat that same day, because I found Huemer’s arguments much more powerful and convincing than Caplan’s. I had no trouble to abandon my lifelong religious beliefs or fundamentally change my diet and lifestyle when I encountered compelling arguments that conflicted with my own beliefs at the time.

So here are a few things that I believe to be true and that, I think, are controversial enough that a number of readers would dispute it. Now I’m not asking you to try to judge the issue in the comments here; you can only do so much in a blog post or a comment. Instead, if you disagree with my opinion on something, What would you put forward as the best, strongest, and most convincing explanation for the opposing position? – an argument that you would personally like to endorse? Depending on what comes in, I’ll pick one and read it, and maybe turn my response into one of my in-depth multi-post reviews.

Now that that stage has been reached, here are a few ideas I have in mind.

1. Moral realism – the idea that there are objective moral facts about what is right and wrong, independent of what anyone thinks about them. That is, if Nazi Germany had won World War II and conquered the entire world, and all subsequent generations had been raised to believe that the Holocaust was a great thing, it would still be the case that the Holocaust was wrong. While this isn’t exactly an unpopular view of mine (moral realism is the majority After all, in the opinion of philosophers, there is still enough disagreement to make it worth exploring. If you lean toward moral anti-realism, which book, article, or essay do you think is the best?
2. There is nothing morally special about the state. By this I do not mean that state action is never justified. What I mean is that there is nothing that justifies coercion by the state that does not also justify coercion against an individual. If a situation does not justify coercion of an individual, it does not justify state coercion either. Again, this does not mean that justified state action is an empty set – because justified individual coercion is not an empty set either. But the two sets are the same, or so it seems to me. Furthermore, I reject some Jason Brennan to call to action the ‘special immunity thesis’ in favor of the ‘moral parity thesis’. That is, the actions of the state must be judged by the same moral standards as those of any other person or organization, and can be justly resisted on the same basis. If you disagree and believe that the justice of coercion does not depend on the circumstances that create the justification, but rather on the circumstances that create the justification WHO is doing coercion, what is the best argument you know to support this? Or if you believe that agents of the state enjoy special moral immunity from resistance when they act unjustly, which do you think is the strongest argument for this?
3. Equal outcomes have no intrinsic value. While there may be instrumental benefits to equality of outcomes, the benefits are only instrumental. Of course, being ‘only’ instrumentally useful does not mean that something is unimportant. Yet equality of outcome in itself has no value. Imagine a world of enormous, crippling, and equal poverty, and another world where no one suffers from any poverty, but some are better off than others. Someone who believes in the intrinsic value of equal outcomes might still accept that the second world is better general – they could allow the intrinsic value of equal outcomes to be offset by the instrumental value of eradicating poverty. But they should still argue that at least it does any feeling in which the first world is better, even if the second is better overall. For me there is no sense in which the first world would be better; the equality of misery and suffering does not create a compensatory good by virtue of their equality. But if you think equal outcomes have real, intrinsic value, what’s the best argument you can point me to?
4. There is no coherent concept of aggregate decisions or preferences. Which is to say, phrases like “we as a society have decided” this and that are at best a misleading shorthand, and at worst fundamentally incoherent. There is no meaningful sense in which individual decisions can be aggregated into an overall social decision, or individual preferences can somehow culminate in a meaningful social preference. But perhaps you disagree and believe that there is a deeply meaningful concept of social preferences. If so, please tell me who makes the strongest argument for that case and where I can find it.

I’ll leave it at these four for now, but if this proves fruitful, I might try this approach again. Commentators, join in!