Evidences for Authoritarian Inclusivism

A week ago I initiated an occasional series with Inclusion and Authority. I followed with an elaboration on part of my initial argument with Foundations of Authoritative Inclusivism. I will make an even shorter follow-up in this post by observing--based on little more than hearsay--that the sort of evidence put forward for an institutional program to foster certain kinds of inclusivism should be disregarded. In other words, unverified and unrepresentative statements of feelings of exclusion are statistically insignificant. Building a platform demanding performative propitiation on the sandy soil of first-world whinging is another example of authority exercised in the managerial mode. Which, as I observed in the first post linked above, is not authority at all. It is power exercised for short-term institutional preservation rather than long-term human and social goods.

Following is a lengthy quote from "What's Wrong With Rights?" (OUP 2020) by Nigel Biggar:

We [have] observed the complaint of sceptics that natural, moral rights are too often no distinguished from positively legal ones, with the consequence that the qualities of the latter are imported--or, rather smuggled--into natural morality or ethics. ... It seems to be part of a current cultural inclination to assimilate morality to law and replace conscience with procedures. The intention of the project is to abolish the possibility of a failure of conscience. [This program is problematic] when seen as an expression of the general aversion to risk and denial of tragedy that characterizes much contemporary culture ... in the West. The cost of this aversion is a practical, moral rigidity that ranges from the imprudent to the absurd. (219)

Some might find Biggar a bit opaque so let me distill his argument into five points

1. Sceptics, those who do not believe there is such a "thing" as objective, moral rights, nonetheless believe that legal rights exist.
2. The demands of morality, thus reduced and tethered to legal rights, are met simply by following the procedural requirements of the relevant regime, whatever they may be.
3. The human conscience is either an oddity of evolutionary development or, even if a real faculty, is inadmissible as a resource in a secular liberal polity.
4. With only an attenuated connection to a transcendent order that may impose claims on us, the telos of human life, at least as far as the civil order is concerned, is reduced to the physical and psychological. "Feeling good" is all there is.
5. Completing the circle, a right to "feeling good" in an immanent frame freed from the claims of conscience opens the door to a regime of authoritarian inclusivism. Only a refusal to play the game (or poorly performed hypocrisy) will get one into trouble.