The organization Intelligence Squared put on a debate about universal health care. A previous post featured a segment of that debate. It actually was an interesting debate and I highly recommend viewing it.

One thing that I was struck by was how often the supporters of universal health care invoked moral imperative to justify forcing taxpayers to assume the cost of providing health care to all. Those arguing against universal health care would point high cost of health care for all and often times supporters would argue that regardless of cost, we have a moral obligation to provide that care. Another variant of this argument was that health care is to important to be handled by profit making in the private market. Again implying that health care has a moral element which mandates a different treatment then say the production of automobiles.

What I find odd about using morality to justify health care is that at it’s core, its a religious argument. When supporters are pressed and fail to show the merits of universal health care, they appeal to this moral imperative to overcome the deficits in the merit of their position. Invoking moral imperative signals this kind of argument: “yes I realize their is no cogent argument for universal health care, but you should feel guilty about people dying because they lack health care and want to do something about it”.

Being raised Catholic I am all to familiar with this kind of argumentation. The incongruity of people on the left relying on an argument I have associated with religious argumentation was quite ironic given the left’s hostility towards religion.

Arguments based on moral imperative almost always come from a place in which it’s rationally obvious the argument can’t be made on it’s own merits. It attempts to engage emotional regions of the brain to overcome the more rational skeptical regions that find the argument wanting. It’s a kind argumentation I deplore.

All ideological systems have concepts that seem silly to those that that don’t buy into the system. What’s odd is that people on the left honestly think the problem with Christianity is that they believe these silly things. For example, Christians believe an omnipotent, omniscient, ubiquitous entity created the universe. Liberals think this kind of thinking is ‘irrational’ and indicative of an ignorant person. All the while they think what distinguishes knowledge from ignorance is belief in an incomprehensibly massive universe started from a practically imperceptible speck of a dust billions of years ago.

Having grown up dealing with religion I can tell you first hand that the problem of religion has nothing to do with their beliefs. The problem with religion is that they use those beliefs in conjunction with moral imperatives to force you to do their bidding. For example, Catholics believes in something called original sin, in which by virtue of the fact that you are born, you are lacking and must prove yourself in the eyes of god. Of course the system is set up so that if you do the Church’s bidding, what they would call the ‘moral imperative’, you would be A-Okay in god’s eye.

You see this is the kind of dangerous thinking that I rejected at very early age. Using guilt and emotion to force someone to do your bidding is only a marginal improvement over outright force. It was on the basis of this repeated argumentation found all throughout Christianity that I eventually abandoned the system entirely. For quite some time I associated the use of moral imperative to win the argument without merit to be a strategy unique to religion. Only later did I realize many kinds of people like this kind of argumentation.

I find people on the left using the worst part of religion to win the argument about universal health care to be problematic. More to the point, you would think that people on the left, having taking up the cause to fight religion, would know better than to employ religion’s most dangerous tactic in trying to ‘convince’ people of the merits of their argument. Unsurprisingly though, the left wishes to align itself with one of religion’s most heinous aspects while at the same time condemn them for their beliefs. Catholics are stupid because they believe through the process of transubstantiation they drink the blood of their god every Sunday. Meanwhile those on the left consider it a mark of erudition to believe one electron can be at two different locations simultaneous.

I should also like to make one more observation about the supporters use of moral imperative to win the argument about universal health care. Its somewhat disingenuous to argue for a moral imperative and then demand the state enforce it. If it’s such a compelling moral imperative it would not require the use of the state’s monopoly on force to implement it.

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