Question begging and voting

Norm has taken issue with my earlier post, in which I wrote:

I’m left wondering, again, why it is that socialism seems to demand advancement by begged question, in a way that no other branch of politics seems to.

The issue being:

… I wasn’t begging the question. To beg the question is to assume, in your premises, the truth of the conclusion you have set out to establish; and in that post I hadn’t set out to establish anything. I was giving in summary form my own reasons for voting Labour. It would have been more than rash of me to think I could make a case for a whole conception of social justice in one or two lines.

I was taking issue with the phrase “social justice” rather than with the context Norm had used it in, and perhaps I could have been more clear about that. It is the phrase itself that begs the question, as do other phrases like “fair taxation”, and I wasn’t saying that this sort of language is exclusive to socialists (it isn’t), but rather that socialists seem to use it “in a way that no other branch of politics seems to”.

Such phrases do beg the question because they assume, implicitly, that a particular set of policies are “fair” or “just” without making that case, indeed they seem to be an attempt to win the labels of justice and fairness through assertion and repetition, rather than reasoned argument. This is not to say there isn’t any reasoned argument to be found on the subjects. There’s loads of it, in fact. But it tends to be of interest mainly to the converted, whereas the presentation of opinions to a wider audience tends to be more by the use of these types of phrase.

I can even suggest a reason why language is used to advocate socialist policies in a different way to other types of policies. The fact that their policies seem to them to be socially just, or that it would be fair for wealthy people to pay proportionally more tax than the poor, is the very foundation of socialist thought. Using the phrase “social justice” seems, I think, a convenient and pertinent shorthand.

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that these views are not restricted to socialists. Though few modern devotees of Adam Smith seem to have noticed this, Smith thought that the rich should pay more tax than the poor. Here he is, in the context of road bridge tolls:

When the toll upon carriages of luxury, upon coaches, post-chaises, &c. is made somewhat higher in proportion to their weight, than upon carriages of necessary use, such as carts, waggons, &c. the indolence and vanity of the rich is made to contribute in a very easy manner to the relief of the poor, by rendering cheaper the transportation of heavy goods to all the different parts of the country.

That seems to me to be a clear endorsement of progressive taxation, but one made directly rather than through the abduction of a word.

Rather like Godwins Law, the first person in an online debate to use the word “Orwellian” might be seen to have lost the argument. In this context, though, there is a difficulty: Orwell did make an issue of some of the language used to advance socialism. He was himself a socialist, and he exaggerated within the context of a novel, yet he still made this use of language an significant element in his work. His exaggeration extended to the degree that, in 1984, it was planned as a  way to make certain forms of thought impossible – there would be no words for some types of thoughts.

There’s a little of this – a little, I emphasise – in the use of phrases like “social justice”. The most extreme example, though, is “positive liberty”, which does seek to attach the word “liberty” to an entirely different and potentially opposite notion, that of ability to do something rather than a lack of coercive restrictions, and thereby inhibit its use in other ways, including that of the actual meaning of the word “liberty”. It isn’t unreasonable to point out that the freedom to, say, drive to an out-of-town superstore means little if you can’t drive, and less if the presence of the superstore has led to the closures of the shops you can get to. Why not make the case directly, though? Why try to advance an idea by kidnapping words?

Positive freedom, social justice, fair taxation are all phrases used by the socialist left. What are the equivalent phrases used, characteristically, by liberals and conservatives?