Megan McArdle thinks that both sides can benefit from some advice from 18th century Scotland:
Are you tired yet of hearing about what we need to do to fix American politics? The earthquake of Trump’s election has unleashed a torrent of such suggestions. Mostly, it turns out that we need to do whatever it was the author wanted us to do on the day before the election. Those few contributions that struck an original note have caused an eruption of white-hot molten outrage from former allies.
So it is with some trepidation that I offer yet another suggestion for improving the sad state of our political discourse: Study David Hume’s distinction between “is” and “ought,” a concept that a whole lot of people on both sides seem to be struggling with.
The 18th-century Scotsman was complaining that philosophical treatises often went along discussing things that are, and then suddenly jumped to discussing how things ought to be, without seeming to notice that these were quite different categories of argument. His work has been widely available for two centuries, and yet, a casual observer of political discourse will readily note political warriors confusing their goals (“ought”) with tactics that might achieve them (“is”).
For example, in a column last week (and in private for longer than that), I argued that however noble the goals that social justice warriors seek, total war against religious conservatives is probably not the right tactic to achieve them. Offering religious conservatives the choice of recanting their beliefs about sexuality or forfeiting their livelihood is apt to create fierce political resistance that could reverse recent victories. Even if you don’t place much value on religious liberty, even if you are outraged by the beliefs those people espouse, I argued that it is far better to adopt a live-and-let-live policy than to try to exterminate those beliefs by any means necessary.
