Am I a Liberal?

An even more important question is whether all your beliefs are consistent. For instance you say that criminals should be punished but that it is better to let an innocent man go than to convict someone who isn't guilty. Well, yes, that would be great in a world in which judicial mistakes are never made. But in the real world what do you do when the evidence shows that the death penalty deters murder in certain situations (convenience store robberies, for example)? I saw an estimate that roughly 100,000 extra murders had occured in states with no effective death penalty over the last 30 years. Assuming for the purposes of argument that these figures are correct, would you or would you not favor the death penalty, knowing that in a small percentage of cases an innocent man (or woman) might be executed for a crime they didn't commit?

And then there are issues of fact: you assume that corporations tend to act in the interest of their share holders. Were that it were always true. There is a natural tendence for human beings -- all human beings -- to act in their own interest in preference to the interests of others. In many organizations the top management have become detached from the interests of the organizations they run. Witness CEO compensation for example, and the related phenomenon of the self-perpetuating board of directors whose members are chosen by the very CEO whom they are supposed to monitor, and who are themselves often the CEO's of other similar corporations. It is the problem of agency and has no simple solution.

Then there is the matter of connotation. In my book liberals and conservatives are both "moderate" by definition for the simple reason that no healthy democracy would be without both. Radicals and reactionaries are the extremes. Beware the corruptions of language and partisan fiends!

This post describes accurately the main tenets of liberalism. Use the word proudly.

The problem with labeling your beliefs is that the terms "liberal" and "conservative", and even "moderate" have been so misused for so long as to have lost all substantive meaning. I share almost all of your beliefs, but I have no idea whether that makes me a "liberal" since that term is defined in the eye (mind?) of the beholder, and not with reference to any standard definition. Rush Limbaugh uses the term "liberals" as an angry epithet..and Air America does precisely the same with the term "conservatives". Most people I know who consider themselves "liberal" actually mean, by that term, "good"...and most conservatives I know mean likewise with the term "conservative". I am a liberal in the classical sense of "lover of liberty", I think...but I am not a libertarian. Many people who know me think I am a conservative, because I opposed the corruption of the Clintons and because I support, for the most part, Bush's policy in Iraq, while other people who know me think I am a liberal because I am one of those atheistic secular humanists and believe in a strict separation of church and state and accept evolution as factual. But many liberals were appalled by Clinton corruption and support Bush on Iraq, and many conservatives oppose mandated, state-prescribed prayer in public schools and are evolutionists.
Th olds labels don't work any more, and maybe that's a good thing. Let's discuss policy differences without resorting to labels, and maybe we'll get somewhere.

Luke,

I can't speak for Mr. Dunford, but I think questions about the death penalty revolve more around the nature of the action than whether one approves of punishment or not. The death-penalty is the legal premeditated killing of certain citizens, and such is a grotesque overreach of power (more than taxes) especially given the prevailence of corruption, racial prejudice and bias against lower-income people that exists in our judicial system.

Personally, I don't the idea of "punishment" to philosophically sound, if by punishment you mean something along the lines of "retributive justice". It relies too much on the idea of "free will", something I find incoherent.

Luke: Your death penalty/crime deterrence statistic is a classic example of a post-hoc fallacy. In order for that causal inference to be valid you need to show that there are no (or very few) confounding factors. For instance, is there also a correlation with population density over that period? You can't compare a low-density state with the death penalty against a high-density state without a lot of work, and that's only one possible factor.

Even if you could demonstrate that the death penalty actually deters crime, I'd still opt for the "let 1000 guilty go free" side of the equation. It helps to personalize: How would you feel if you or someone you care about was the innocent person condemned?

Luke writes:I saw an estimate that roughly 100,000 extra murders had occured in states with no effective death penalty over the last 30 years. Assuming for the purposes of argument that these figures are correct,

No, I don't think I will accept those figures for the sake of argument (at least not yet). "I saw an estimate" doesn't cut it. Where did you see the estimate? What methods did they use to obtain it? How did they demonstrate that they had accounted for confounding factors? How did they demonstrate causation, and not merely correlation? How strong what the correlation? Welcome to the reality-based community. Please provide the supporting material, or sit down and shut up.

I guess I'm a bit of a pragmatist when it comes to the innocence/quilt thing. If letting 1000 quilty to save 1 innocent, means the released quilty cause great harm, then I say "that is a very poor balance". Of course issues of fairness etc. may mean we don't want to try to be exact, i.e. balance the damage done by the quilty we let free, versus the damage to the innocent that are punished.I'd probably accept that damage ration be 2 or 3, but I'd never accept putting it at 1000!
Notice I used punishment not death penalty, thats a whole other issue.

Deathpenaltyinfo.org lists murder rates by state, with those states with no death penalty highlighted... Of course, deathpenalty.org is a biased site, but those statistics seem to be the same as the ones on the Bureau of Justice Statistics web site (you can search for stats by state here.)

Interestingly, the vast majority of no-death-penalty states are below the national average. Of course this says nothing definative about how many murders are prevented by death penalty statutes (perhaps people in death penalty states are just naturally a lot more murderous...), but at least argues for the possiblity that the death penalty doesn't do a damn thing to prevent murder.

In my book liberals and conservatives are both "moderate" by definition for the simple reason that no healthy democracy would be without both. Radicals and reactionaries are the extremes. Beware the corruptions of language and partisan fiends!

Extremes?! Oh noes!

The very idea of putting political affiliations on a one-dimensional measure is absurd. The idea that anything sufficiently outside of the 'mainstream' is dangerous is even more absurd. What matters is how far away from the truth any viewpoint is and the degree to which any viewpoint is correct. Sanity and reason are quickly becoming 'extreme' viewpoints. Should we then abandon them and let our limbic systems dictate policy, as the majority of Americans seem to prefer?

I hate to be a stick in mud, and I do realize that language evolves. Still, it strikes me that in trying to give some content to the term 'liberal' there's no mention of the old-fashioned liberal _principles_ like freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of inquiry, freedom of association,...

Has liberalism ceased to be a matter of principle?

bob:

I don't think it's that at all. In fact, most liberals would agree profoundly with the four points you describe, and the first three are fundamental tenets of the scientific/skeptic point of view. As for the fourth (and to an extent the first), it is perhaps a bit more nuanced than libertarians interpret it -- much as your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, your right to freedom of association holds only as much as it doesn't restrict anyone else's. Much of the right wing seems to lean heavily on an overly simplistic interpretation of freedom of conscience and freedom of association, and often seems to be not such a fan of freedom of expression and inquiry at all.

Truth be told, the bulk of liberals and the bulk of "classic" conservatives, at least those outside the religious wing, are quite compatible in terms of policy initiatives; liberals, broadly, see the state as a means to rein in injustice, while conservatives put more stock in the free market and personal responsibility. That said, it's the extremes that dominate the arena today -- religious zealots and neocons on the right, propagandists and moralistic fanatics (like radical feminists and ecoterrorists) on the left. They aren't that different really; they're both quite mad, it's just that they have different madnesses.

Excuse my pedantry, but that isn't pragmatism, it's utilitarianism. That whole "The good of the many, ..." stuff sounds good in movies, but I bet you, lacking Vulcan total logic, would sing a different tune if you were that innocent man sitting in the chair.

Brian X - OK, classical liberals who embraced the principles I mentioned were also intelligent enough to acknowledge the necessity of constraints on liberty, chief amnog which is the requirement of reciprocity. But I'm not so confident that most contemporary self-identifying liberals actually do "agree profoundly" with the principles I mentioned. I encounter much more "lip service" than nuanced understanding of liberal traditions.

Bob: Those ideas do not define political movements or ideologies. Those ideas are part of the litmus test for basic civility. Any ideology which does not subscribe to them is not even on the political spectrum, and should be denounced as barbarism.

- JS

You seem pretty moderate to me. Most of the time the popular conceptions of liberal and conservative are defined by the charicatures of pundits, which unfortunately actually describe some of the more strident extremists on each side.

I am thoroughly convinced that everyone, scientists included, are controlled mainly by their limbic system most of the time. It is the thin tissue of scientific method and commitment to reason that elevates us (sometimes), and often after the heavy lifting is done, we descend back into screeching, chest beating and feces flinging. Blogs bring this out in spades.

Luke, in the first post, reminds me of something I just read in Sam Harris' The End of Faith" - specifically, to check the logical consistency of as few as 300 beliefs (represented as statements of fact) would not be possible in the time the universe has existed. Granted, we want to be mostly self-consistent (and I'm not suggesting being inconsistent deliberately to any degree is a good approach!). It just doesn't appear to be strictly possible.

A lot of what separates decent people on the opposite ends of politics is a disagreement about the implications of certain beliefs. And we end up using shorthand, a set of emotional commitments to one side or the other rather than risking being overwhelmed by the combinatorial explosion of changes that have to be made when something successfully challenges part of our worldview.

I think that's why you see something like 9/11 being a political turning point for so many- it has enough emotional weight to overcome the inertia of one's existing assumption set. However, it seems unlikely to me that a sudden, unexamined change in attitude would to lead to coherent or approximately correct representations of reality.

As an example, it's difficult for me to have a discussion about how much regulation of business is appropriate with someone who regards all private property to be theft. But that is an extreme that I rarely encounter. The real difficulty arises, in my personal experience, in assigning relative weights to propositons that people may generally agree upon in isolation. Two people can find themselves at odds when trading off the costs vs benefits of almost anything, even when they agree on the goal of the policy.