I’ve updated over the past year over to try hard not to pass such judgments, for the reason you describe. But I’ve still found myself in political arguments over the underlying principles. People who disagree with the beliefs I previously would have advocated strongly for tend not just to disagree with me on the effects of taxes and regulation, but on what moral imperatives we’re trying to satisfy.
It seems crazy to disagree on economic principles anyway. The ways about which one should try to answer a question like “The GDP will go down under policy X, as compared to policy Y” are fairly uncontroversial, and yet people disagree passionately about which answer is right when it’s clear that their convictions are under-determined. How can they become so moralistic about what to me seem like dry amoral facts? And yet, I have the same impression—that peoples’ moral intuitions correlate strongly with the type of economics they believe in.
I’ve updated over the past year over to try hard not to pass such judgments, for the reason you describe. But I’ve still found myself in political arguments over the underlying principles. People who disagree with the beliefs I previously would have advocated strongly for tend not just to disagree with me on the effects of taxes and regulation, but on what moral imperatives we’re trying to satisfy.
It seems crazy to disagree on economic principles anyway. The ways about which one should try to answer a question like “The GDP will go down under policy X, as compared to policy Y” are fairly uncontroversial, and yet people disagree passionately about which answer is right when it’s clear that their convictions are under-determined. How can they become so moralistic about what to me seem like dry amoral facts? And yet, I have the same impression—that peoples’ moral intuitions correlate strongly with the type of economics they believe in.