Note: When this diary was published Galtisalie was still a separate pseudonym from Francisco Nejdanov Solomin. Here's an explanation for the prior separate pseudonyms and the decision to discard the separation: http://www.dailykos.com/...
If you have not done so already, please read Amia Srinivasan's "Questions for Free Market Moralists", published on-line at the New York Times yesterday. It is a remarkable analysis of the right-wing's self-serving "moral justification" for the unjust world of poverty and exploitation. A Google search shows that it has the right-wing's intelligentsia falling all over itself to undercut the views of this courageous and truth-telling philosopher.
The questions and answers that Ms. Srinivasan states are superb. Please go to the piece and read them for yourself. It will be well worth the effort. But here is the bottom line, as I see it. We are engaged in a struggle for the hearts and minds of people against an opposition that has managed to turn Jesus into a tax evader and supply-sider. They realize that inversion of morals is just one more necessary tool in the tool box of oppression.
Ms. Srinivasan finds two compelling reasons for grappling with these specious "moral" claims of the right. The first has to do with the trends we see of endlessly assaulting the welfare state:
Why worry about the morally pernicious implications of Nozickianism? After all, I said that most Western societies remain Rawlsian in their organization, even if they are growing more Nozickian in their ideology. In the United States for example, there are legal prohibitions on what people can sell, a safety net to help those who suffer from really bad luck, and a civic ethos that prevents us from letting people drown. The first answer is, of course, that the material reality is being rapidly shaped by the ideology, as recent debates about welfare in the United States demonstrate.
The second has to do with the baseline of accepted human duress and tragedy that is hardly a "just" status quo, even in the first world:
The second is that most Western societies hardly constitute a Rawlsian Utopia. People might be legally prohibited from selling their organs, but that doesn’t remedy the desperate circumstances that might compel them to do so. The law does not stop people from falling into poverty traps of borrowing and debt, from being exploited by debt settlement companies promising to help them escape those traps, or losing their homes after buying mortgages they can’t afford to pay back. And there is certainly no prohibition against the mind-numbing and often humiliating menial work that poor people do in exchange for paltry wages from hugely rich companies. A swiftly eroding welfare state might offer the thinnest of safety nets to those who fall on hard times, but it does nothing to address the lack of social mobility caused by the dramatic rise in inequality. And while it might be thought poor form to walk by a drowning man, letting children go hungry is considered not only permissible, but as Senator Sessions said, “a moral issue.” These facts might be not quite as ethically outraging as walking past a drowning man, but they, too, grate against our commonsense notions of fairness.
I do not believe anyone has posted anything on Ms. Srinivasan's analysis at Daily Kos. It definitely deserves to be a part of the Daily Kos memory bank. (For another short appreciative analysis of the piece, please see this review,
"Rejecting the Nozickian Worldview".)