deontology and teleology in politics.

pseudo-intellectual weenie that i am, once i get to talking about something, i latch onto it for a little while and kinda do my thing. so i'm about to get into a semi-philosophical discussion that's probably not very interesting, because i'm thinking about using that idea i mentioned in my post earlier today for an ethics paper. and i figured i'd reason it out in a rudimentary stoned way before i got to writing an outline. skip this post and read the next one, i wrote it this morning and it's quite a bit more interesting. not to mention shorter.

so basically what i was thinking was about the distinction between teleogical ethics and deontological ethics. in a nutshell, teleological ethics state that moral conduct is valuable because of the things that follow from that conduct. ie, it's nice not to get murdered, robbed, whatnot, so we don't want people to do that. deontological ethics state that moral conduct is valuable in and of itself. ie, there's some intrinsic value to not murdering others, etc.

so in terms of politics then, maybe a teleologically-based political system is like hobbes' social contract, which i love. it's a contract which every citizen makes with every other citizen in agreement that certain things just are shitty when everyone is going around doing them, so we as a society won't do them. and in order to make sure that people won't do them, we'll create a government, that's going to punish people for doing those things.

the ethics of democratic government have some mythic originary teleological nature. which essentially, i think, is the beauty of the myth of america, which is in modern times, i think the archetypal myth of democracy. (forget greece and the french revolution.) it constituted a breaking away from a government that did not serve the ends of the people, but instead acted solely in its own interests. the colonists wanted to be their own country, with their own social contract, so they instituted their own government.

and maybe i'm romanticizing things, but i tend to think that the american ideal, in the mold of the french to some extent, and the greeks to a lesser extent, was very teleological. the parallels between the original constitution and hobbes' "minimal moral set" by which he thought the social contract should be structured are particularly interesting. it was as though the founding fathers saw what was coming, knew that people would vote in stupid ways sometimes, and tried purposely to keep things minimal. don't make laws about the press (though god knows that didn't work so well; that's a different discussion), don't make laws about expression, right to assemble, or right to believe. let people keep their freedom. hobbes thought the same thing. and of course, that oh-so-controversial 'bear arms' thing - hobbes thought that too, when he said that people should always have the right to defend themselves. and oh, coincidence, when things get hairy in terms of government getting big and creepy, when everyone is armed, it's a built-in mechanism for government overthrow.

and maybe the problem, really, in a shift from small, good, helpful, interests-of-the-people government, to big creepy big brother government, is necessarily a shift from teleological government to deontological government. any respectable teleological ethics can't support a government that serves its own interests, that deludes the populace, or that for whatever reason does not effectively promote the best interests of the body politic. because, well, that wouldn't be a good telos.

and in moving from teleology to deontology, we move from my beloved hobbes, to kant. backward, ridiculous, antisocial windbag immanuel kant has to be one of my least-favourite philosophers. (i still think there's alot of value to alot of his stuff, of course. but he's just hell to read, and so full of shit sometimes.) my main problem with deontology is the potential fallaciousness of the argument that morality is intrinsically good. how do we know that? difficult, and totally linguistically-constructed. whereas the argument that morality often causes good things to happen is alot more concretely obvious, when you think about it.

and thus my main problem with deontological politics is that government gets this idea that somehow it's intrinsically good. as a result, all of its laws aren't simply for the benefit of the populace at large, but eventually become focused on the benefit of the government itself and the hand that feeds it (eg, corporations). thus we have defense spending well beyond the needs of the population to support a military-industrial complex. inadequate spending on the construction of a worthwhile social discourse to feed a hungry hollywood. inadequate spending on the poor, the uneducated, the minorities, and the various other margins of society that really need to benefit from the social contract in order for it to function. and an overweight government that sits there and pats itself on the back for serving the needs of the population so damn well.

(digression: why social programs in teleological ethics? isn't that altruism? it's not. because educating and feeding and clothing the kid from the ghetto who shoots you so that he doesn't shoot you in the first place makes you a lot less dead than throwing him in jail afterwards. i'd rather have freedom from being capped than freedom to save on my payroll taxes. besides, i'd feel a hell of a lot better about life, myself, and everything if there weren't people dying in the streets every day.)

so, in summation, i'm burnt-out and i'm ending this post well before i got around to saying much of anything. story of my life. i took a break in the middle of that post and watched the paris hilton episode of south park and my reasoning took a definite downhill slide after that. ha, ah well! what a shitload of writing i did on here today.

we all have our days.