this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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If you can radically change your political views like Fetterman has, based solely on a personal experience and not logical argument, then you never had a rational basis for your new views.
Even if everything Fetterman said was true, it's still damning.
Also, he was elected based on the views he professed at the time of the election. Even if he personally changes, he still owes it to his constituents to act like the person who they thought they elected. It's like he doesn't even understand the most basic principles of representative democracy.
Nobody bases their political views rationally. I promise you, the foundations of your values are based on stuff you believe, but cannot demonstrate.
Statements like: "society should help the vulnerable", or "society should enable the strong" cannot be validated or rejected based on formal logic. Logical valuations like true and false are incoherent when talking about how things ought to be.
What? Of course you can base your political views on rationality. For example, climate change is literally an existential threat to life on this planet, so the rational thing to do would be to support policies that preserve the biosphere and therefore dramatically reduce carbon emissions. This is rooted in the core biological desire to reproduce and care for your offspring. Similar arguments can be made for all basic human and animal needs, like food, shelter, etc.
If your point is that everything is contrived and therefore irrational, then that precludes this entire conversation to the point of uselessness.
Some people are pretty strict utilitarians. So, they wouldn't say that "society should help the vulnerable" or "society should enable the strong", but that society should try to maximize utility, which is also often called "happiness", but it shouldn't be confused as being exactly the same as the layman's term of "happiness".
I am not a strict utilitarian, but utilitarianism can be a useful tool, and it absolutely can be used to rationally examine your example statements. The only part of it that is a belief is that it's better to maximize utility, and then the question of quantifying utility, but there is much more logic in that than you seem to think exists in a system of values.