The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving).

Ideally it would be nice to give this an explicit logical structure, with quantifications, etc. But if I read your response correctly, there may be no such translation of your statement. The best I could do would be something like:

There is a broad swath (95+ %) of the population that agrees that a broad swath of things are to be valued. My valuing function (let’s say ordinal rather than cardinal) is incommensurable with yours. It is not analytically true that liberalism is Pareto-optimal– in fact, it’s probably just not true at all, since some people don’t like liberalism. However, if you restrict attention to the overlapping values of the agreeing 95+%, you end up with a multidimensional space: there are a bunch of axes, one for each value, and there is a mapping from world-states to points in the multidimensional value space. Since the different axes/values are incommensurable, Pareto is the only acceptable ordering of points in the multi-dim space. Now, you are saying that within this space, liberalism is pretty much Pareto optimal.

Well, already I have a question. If Pareto is our only guide here, how can you make a unique claim about liberalism? Aren’t there many, many incommensurable Pareto-optimal points? Presumably not all of these are liberalism?

I’m certainly inferring things here you haven’t precisely said. If I’ve said something you wouldn’t say, please let me know.

The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving).

Ideally it would be nice to give this an explicit logical structure, with quantifications, etc. But if I read your response correctly, there may be no such translation of your statement. The best I could do would be something like:

There is a broad swath (95+ %) of the population that agrees that a broad swath of things are to be valued. My valuing function (let’s say ordinal rather than cardinal) is incommensurable with yours. It is not analytically true that liberalism is Pareto-optimal– in fact, it’s probably just not true at all, since some people don’t like liberalism. However, if you restrict attention to the overlapping values of the agreeing 95+%, you end up with a multidimensional space: there are a bunch of axes, one for each value, and there is a mapping from world-states to points in the multidimensional value space. Since the different axes/values are incommensurable, Pareto is the only acceptable ordering of points in the multi-dim space. Now, you are saying that within this space, liberalism is pretty much Pareto optimal.

Well, already I have a question. If Pareto is our only guide here, how can you make a unique claim about liberalism? Aren’t there many, many incommensurable Pareto-optimal points? Presumably not all of these are liberalism?

I’m certainly inferring things here you haven’t precisely said. If I’ve said something you wouldn’t say, please let me know.

I can’t speak for Reihan, but in my case I objected to it as strongly as I did because it seemed to give the impression of that kind of accusation. Even though I accept now that it wasn’t such an accusation, at least not directly, I objected to it because I thought it was false and because it seemed to be designed to shut down argument rather than illuminate anything. However, if you believe that “certain kinds” of national identity considerations should be regarded as being more like racism, that suggests that you think those who have these considerations are rather more like racists than most people would take them to be, which would seem to make the harping on about Ross’ nationalism to be less of a description and more of an anathema. It seems to me that it can’t be terribly good for the “theme” of liberty to tie it to transnationalism and enrichment of corporations, but that’s just me.

I can’t speak for Reihan, but in my case I objected to it as strongly as I did because it seemed to give the impression of that kind of accusation. Even though I accept now that it wasn’t such an accusation, at least not directly, I objected to it because I thought it was false and because it seemed to be designed to shut down argument rather than illuminate anything. However, if you believe that “certain kinds” of national identity considerations should be regarded as being more like racism, that suggests that you think those who have these considerations are rather more like racists than most people would take them to be, which would seem to make the harping on about Ross’ nationalism to be less of a description and more of an anathema. It seems to me that it can’t be terribly good for the “theme” of liberty to tie it to transnationalism and enrichment of corporations, but that’s just me.