E.G.

Certain moral and political issues capture the attention and the imagination of the masses.  A partial list of those issues: Abortion, public health care, public schooling, government welfare, environmental policies and restrictions, sex and violence in the media, gay marriage, euthanasia, stem cell research — just to name a few.

It’s not immediately obvious why these issues are so interesting to so many people.  To be sure, some of these issues directly concern large numbers of people.  Lots of people have kids in the public school system, for instance, so that might explain the prominence of discussions about public schooling in the media.  But I don’t think very many people are in a position to be affected by stem cell research, or government welfare programs, or even (for many people) abortion.  Yet these topics are routinely discussed in the same newspaper opinion columns and on the same TV talk shows as is the public school system.  As I see things, the "hot button" issues with which our culture concerns itself seem almost to have been chosen at random.  What do they all have in common except that they are all vigorously disputed in public forums?

As I’ll suggest again below, I think the way in which these issues are clumped together and, often, dealt with in groups, has made it difficult to find consensus on them.  But is this difficulty really a problem?  I’m not sure we should really care very much whether these issues get resolved.  Many people derive pleasure from arguing about them, and it would be cruel to spoil their fun.  You might say we should try to resolve them in order to know what our personal obligations are and what our public policies should be.  But policies regarding contentious issues get made all the same.  Laws still get made restricting pollution levels, for instance, even though many pundits claim not to be sure whether global warming is even occurring.  I think it’s possible that our public policies and personal mores would not change very much even if many of these issues reached a public resolution.

Still, there might be something to be gained from reaching consensus on some of these issues, so it might be worth thinking about what would need to be done to make that occur.  So here are some (admittedly not very novel) suggestions for Limbaugh, Charen, O’Reilly, Matthews, and the other pundits who’ve made careers out of debating these issues.  [Of course, many big-name pundits are regular readers of this blog, so I know all of this will have a big impact.  In fact, aside from that guy in Germany who keeps accidentally arriving at my Nina Hagen post via Google searches, I understand Limbaugh is my biggest fan.] 

Generally speaking, I think one of the biggest impediments to progress on these issues lies in the way they get organized.  It’s confusing to think about environmental policy, abortion and gay marriage all within the space of a few minutes, but this is precisely what people attempt to do in the popular media (e.g. on radio talk shows).  So my first suggestion to the pundits is to try to put some space between the issues.  Avoid putting positions on diverse issues under broad headings like "liberal" and "conservative"; group together positions and issues only when you’ve got good reasons for thinking they have something relevant in common. 

Once the traditional categorizations have been discarded, we might want to try to think of new, more useful, ones.  I suggest dividing issues intro groups according to the sorts of considerations which would help resolve them.  Some issues can be resolved almost completely by factual matters.  If we knew global warming really is occurring as a result of pollution, for instance, and will make our planet hostile to human life within a certain number of generations, then only the truly deranged would oppose restrictions on pollution.  Considerations about "brute facts" such as these would, I think, go a long way — perhaps all the way — toward reaching a resolution to questions about environmental policy which everyone should accept.

On the other hand, some issues seem to depend very little, or not at all, on these sorts of "brute facts."  For instance, whether euthanasia should be legal or is immoral, and under what circumstances, seems to depend mostly on considerations about the intrinsic value of human life or human dignity, the badness of avoidable suffering, and so on.  We cannot do empirical research to weigh those sorts of considerations; anyway, we can’t do the same sort of empirical research we’d need to do in order to determine whether global warming is actually occurring.  These are considerations of value, mostly — not fact.

So, I think, when one approaches a "hot button" issue, it might help to ask at the outset: Is this an issue which depends mostly on factual questions, or is it an issue which depends mostly on values or other sorts of "purely moral" considerations?  Asking this question will help to determine the proper way to approach diverse issues – as well as to avoid the mistake of trying to answer questions of both types in the same way, or in the same breath.