There’s been a debate among the Postmodern Conservatives (and also our own Daniel Larison) over the nature of a philosophical life and whether Red Staters or Blue Staters, roughly speaking, are best equipped to live it. The whole thing is very much in medias and I could just be confused about what the arguments are — e.g., it would be a lot easier for me to know how to assess a claim like “[c]ultural libertarianism is not only ill-equipped to make sense of tragic universe, but it assumes that a tragic universe…does not exist” if I knew how to interpret “cultural libertarianism” or “tragic universe” — but still, the discussion has direct, and I think, unfortunate implications for the rebuilding of right-of-center politics after the coming Blue Team landslide, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to stand athwart a dialectic and yell, ‘shenanigans!’

The consensus has been that Helen Rittelmeyer was broadly correct when she kicked things off this way:

Let’s put aside the question of whether or not New Yorkers really question their moral assumptions…and simply look at the end result of this Blue State skepticism. Most of the time, it’s some variation on the harm principle under which the most important ethical question becomes “Does it increase everyone’s happiness?” What could be less sophisticated?

Contrast this with the moral decision-making of a Red Stater who has unquestioningly accepted a truckload of inherited traditions (the clod!). He has to weigh love of country against love for his brother serving in Iraq, not to mention Christian morality, which has a thing or two to say about war. Or he might have to consider family loyalty versus the desire to do something about his sister’s alcoholism. Or loyalty to his wife versus passionate love for another woman.

One wonders what Socrates would make of an effort to claim him for any political-cultural-regional grouping at another’s expense. And notice how the deck is stacked: the superficially Socratic Blue Stater has resolved her examination of her deepest convictions into a trite, conventional fusion of utilitarianism with the harm principle — in other words, she has failed in her introspective obligations; whereas the genuinely Socratic Red Stater is virtually torn apart by conflicting obligations to values deeper than watered down versions of fashionable ethical theories — in other words, she is at least partially fulfilling the Socratic imperative.

Supposing for the sake of argument that reining in these sweeping generalizations won’t render them completely contentless, how about comparing a Blue Stater and a Red Stater on even terms? Utilitarianism and frameworks of individual rights — the harm principle being a token of the latter — are only compatible by dumb luck if at all. And just the potential for deep, irresolvable conflict between them is enough to preclude everyone who finds both doctrines intuitive (of whom districts that were not carried by Al Gore or John Kerry are hardly experiencing a shortage) from reaching any facile resolution of the Socratic project of self-examination. Consider John Taurek’s framing (my summary, not verbatim) of a traditional dilemma in normative ethics (from “Should the Numbers Count?”, in Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, 1977), which unlike some other versions rules out inaction as a permissible option:

Suppose six people are afflicted with some terminal illness and you possess the only dose of the only drug that cures it. One of the six requires the full dose to live; the other five only one fifth each. If you at all feel the pull of the idea that, all other things being equal, you have an obligation to save five lives over one, congratulations: utilitarianism appeals to you. But what if the one person who needs the full dose, call him ‘David’, is a very close friend of yours and the other five are perfect strangers? In that case, if you choose to save David’s life, many people would say you are acting within your rights. Or what if David were your partner, or parent, or child? In that case, a lot of people might want to say that you’re even obligated to save David at the expense of the other five lives. But we can stack the deck in the other direction, too: what if it were fifty people each needing a fiftieth of the drug? Five hundred people? At what point would you be obligated to sacrifice the life of a loved one to save many other lives? Now, what if the drug actually belonged to David, and you were just a spectator: would the other five people have a legitimate claim on David’s life to save their own? Would you be prohibited from rescuing David if they tried to take the drug from him? On the other hand, is there some number of people whose long-term good obligates David’s self-sacrifice?

It won’t do to respond that the example is artificial; its artificiality is (deliberately) nothing but a function of its simplicity, and it is structurally equivalent or nearly so to dilemmas of scarcity that pervade every society.

The moral: The properly reflective Blue Stater’s conflict of values is every bit as profound, substantive, and worth examining as the properly reflective Red Stater’s. Indeed, what’s at stake in each case — duty to country versus duty to family, duty to abstract ethical/religious principles versus duty to repay loyalty and honor personal relationships, duty to obey law versus duty to obey one’s deepest moral convictions — are the same sorts of values under different modes of presentation.

Merely stipulating that the Blues’ values are embedded in “cultural libertarianism” while the Reds’ are “Christian-flavored” (not my term) — even assuming that those notions can be given consistent, meaningful interpretations that won’t undermine the case for privileging one over the other by their own lights — comes nowhere near proving that one set of values is any more authentic, deep, valuable, or whatever, than the other. Rather, so stipulating is just begging the question, as in Helen’s ultimate conclusion:

[T]he generalization that Red States are into traditional Christian-flavored values and Blue States are culturally libertarian…doesn’t prove that Democrats lead unexamined lives and Republicans examined ones; however, it does mean that Red State lives are worth examining and their Blue counterparts aren’t.

Nonsense. There are Blue State lives worth examining and Red State lives worth examining, and neither culturally libertarian nor Christian “flavoring” is any guide to which is which. The reason all this has practical political significance is that, having shed anything resembling a political philosophy — normative “conservatism” isn’t so much incoherent as it is just empty — the center-right has replaced political beliefs with various tribal and cultural identity markers piecemeal, and at this point the replacement is nigh-on complete. Now, the left exemplifies some of the same pathology, but there’s a basic asymmetry: all the cultural and demographic trends are pointing in the Blues’ favor and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

So besides the fact that deliberately hardening vacuous cultural divisions is analytically confused (Socrates doesn’t “belong” to anybody) and rather contrary to a spirit of charity, Christian or otherwise, a successful right-of-center politics in the future is going to have to be built upon a kind of mutualism (think of it as pomo federalism if you like) whereby people are free to seek out their own means of living flourishing lives without being conscripted into pointless contests to see whose tribe can be more spiteful, envious, condescending, or vocally dismissive of its neighbors than any other.