Quote:
Originally Posted by Eternal Paradox
This question is posed at all you anti-liberals. What is so bad with liberalism? I see liberalism as being progressive.
I really can't see why the term liberal is seen as being negative. Conservatives want to keep things the way they are, liberals want to change things for the better. Is it that conservatives fear change?
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Be very careful with your usage of terms and definitions.
Liberals are those who "want to change things for the better."
Well, when you put it that way, I'd have to be pretty stupid to be conservative, wouldn't I? After all, who wants to change things for the worse?
Quite clearly these nominal definitions are too superficial to have any real bite in a debate.
I would suggest that we investigate a few things.
Do liberals want change for the sake of change? This would seem pointless. Change is not a thing which is good in and of itself, it is only good inasmuch as it brings us to a good.
Having established that change is not necessarily good (after all, when what you have is good you definitely ought not to change it), then we could perhaps trivially define liberals as wanting change for the better. But this is clearly vacuous-- who doesn't want change for the better? Conservatives surely would not oppose this.
I think the conservative mentality is not that change is bad-- I certainly don't think that-- but rather that change ought to be navigated slowly, carefully and with the aid of tradition. It is difficult to foresee how a change will turn out and what effects it will have. A saying which I am fond of is that one ought not to take a fence down until one learns the reason why it was put up. Conservatives give more weight to how things have been and require a compelling reason to change.
But have I defined liberals out of existence now?
-Rob