Letter to the Editor: 2/4/2013

To the Editor,

This letter is in response to the column “President’s inaugural speech …” published on Jan. 28. This column does a good job of challenging the claim that we can simply “act in our time” and presents some good detail on why this is probably more of a dishonest notion than anything else.

As something of a tangential angle, I think there is a more serious concern with the way phrases like “social justice” and “do what works” are used; namely, those phrases smuggle in certain premises that hinder debate. If a politician says we should just “do what works,” what they really mean is that we should do what they want to do; and if we disagree about what counts as working, we should sit in the corner and be quiet. If someone refers to “social justice,” we should ask ourselves what they actually mean. For instance, whether they are an objectivist or a Marxist or a catholic, etc., will have a non-trivial effect on that person’s conception of ‘social justice,’ and, if we want to have debates, we must acknowledge that.

If we want to have honest political discourse, we need to start by not hiding from the philosophical differences that exist. Debates over policy are inherently debates about what we should be trying to accomplish, and burying those questions under labels like “what works” and “justice” has, in my opinion, only served to make political discourse into the art of talking past each other.

Joshua Phillips

Junior, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences