Data Is Not Morality
Why people's political beliefs are so weak and vague.
There’s this Veritasium video on YouTube that has been living rent-free in my head for a while. The video may just be a long advertisement for ‘ground news’, but it’s not bad. It’s just that this video represents an egregious misunderstanding of morality.
I’ll summarize it below, but here’s the link if you want to watch it:
The premise of this video rests on the assumption that political beliefs should be based on data. In an apparent effort to appear reasonable and unbiased, everyone in the video agrees with that assumption.
The video demonstrates that people misinterpret political data according to their pre-existing political beliefs. I don’t doubt that.
The example they used was gun control. Both sides incorrectly interpreted fake data on crime related to gun control. After they were told the data was fake and that their misinterpretation demonstrated their bias, the participants whose reactions were shown agreed that they should be more open to changing their beliefs based on new information.
Excuse me. When did everyone become ends-justify-the-means utilitarians?
Our political beliefs should not be based on data, much less the terribly untrustworthy data coming from our institutions.
To be clear, I would support gun rights even if I knew for certain that violent crime would increase. That belief is not based on data, it is based on philosophy. I support gun rights because I believe it is moral.
Let’s try another example. If I convinced you that re-enslaving black people would reduce violent crime, would you support slavery? I believe there is a strong possibility that something like that could reduce violent crime, but I do not support slavery. I believe that slavery is immoral.
The right of self-defense is perhaps the most fundamental difference between a free man and a slave. A slave has to take a whipping. A free man can fight back. Self-defense is a fundamental human right. The right to arm yourself follows from the right to defend yourself. What good is the right of self-defense without the means to enact it?
Real philosophy like this is painfully absent from important cultural discussions. In its absence, people have such a limited and misguided understanding of morality.