User blog:Pikapi/Civil Liberties Versus Social Justice

Introduction (if your impatient, skip ahead or this will kill you)
We are all very opinionated people here on Wikination, so I'm sure that as soon as you read this episode's title you instantly braced yourself for a surefire political debate. You're already going on the defensive, setting up the fortifications, rallying your armies, establishing base-camps strategically to gain some territorial foothold, raising your rifles and versing a witty reply to whatever that controversial bastard Pikapi is inevitably going to say, right?!?

I'm raising the white flag. Don't start firing just yet.

I'm going to need you to approach this with an open mind. I've been thinking, and I'm going to be arbitrary here (Me, arbitrary - I know! Right?). The war between left and right isn't a war between "good" and "evil", no matter how you slice it. The people who care about politics enough to even use this site aren't evil Machiavellians, we're philosophers. Ethical philosophers.

More specifically, ethical philosophers divided on one very critical, pressing issue. This is where it gets interesting. I think I've narrowed the root of this down to a point that it can't really be simplified down from any further. Do you want to know what it is? Wait, you already do? I put it in the title and gave it away? Dang!

Overview
Civil liberties versus social justice. Which is more important, essential, vital to a happy society?

An innocent, apolitical viewer might read this and wonder: "What's the difference? They're all about protecting people's rights, right?" Yes, but its more complex than that. I'll explain the difference. Civil liberties stand for the individuals, whereas social justice stands for the needs of the many. Civil liberties are advocated on the right side of the political compass, and social justice is represented by the left.

Associated political doctrine
Libertarians support civil liberties that allow people to do what they want (within the necessary boundaries) to achieve happiness, contentment and their goals. On the other hand, socially-leftists are all all about direct compassion, social unification, their idealism and morality (not in the religious sense, calm down you raging anti-theists, you! :D). Those who are socially-conservative with set religious principles can put themselves anywhere on the scale that they like or that will be to their advantage, they just care about spreading their religion (lets say, Christianity) or its morals (chiefly because people that don't follow it bother them).

Then there are people that seek to control people for power. I'm going to assume that we have none of them here on Wikination, even though there are far to many of these people in the real world. To be fair, I see too many Machiavellian thinkers milking the noble intentions of social justice and leftism in real-life, which has to do with why I think the way I do. Perhaps because narcissistic people tend to find their way into positions of authority.

Scale of individualism to socialism
On a scale of "civil vs social thinking and its respective political implications", I'd say that you have individualist-minded thinkers on one end (libertarian, capitalist, ambitious people), social minded thinkers on the other (socialist, communist, idealist people), and religious people (that can be anywhere as long as they have their religious voice and moral code heard [which I suppose makes them not so different from socialist thinkers after all]). Both civil and social thinkers I'd mark as progressive, but I wouldn't be able to mark the religious thinkers that way because that is the very definition of conservative.

None are inherently bad. This is where our ideologies split. I'd tell you to look up Kohlberg's morality theory, but I feel that it is incomplete and it might make some people unhappy. His viewpoints do not represent mine, but I build off of it.

To wrap things up, if you are interested, I'd like to say whether or not you agree with my assessment, offer insight, tell me why your opinion is in some way superior and all around more thoughtful, etc. Anyways, thanks for reading!