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I see the pursuit of logically consistent views both a sign of moderate intelligence and a sign of intellectual arrogance.

It takes some intellect to question the foundations and consequences of your beliefs and to try building a unified framework around them. It also takes some arrogance to assume that if you can't reconcile two contradictory views you hold, nobody else can either, and one of them must be wrong.

For example, I find it rather obvious that nobody deserves to be rich when many poor people are lacking the basic necessities of life. I also find it rather obvious that allowing people to become rich encourages, under the right circumstances, behavior that benefits everyone in the society. I haven't been able to reconcile those views, and I haven't been able to find anyone who can do that and explain it to me. On the other hand, I have found many people who see the contradiction and choose to reject one of the beliefs. They choose to believe that some people deserve to be rich (and others deserve to be poor), or that nobody should be allowed to get rich.

And that's how we get political polarization.

The way I think about it is that you are applying mechanism that evolved and is useful for small close groups of people (morality) to the whole world (or a country).

Think about it this way: you have two countries at two ends of the world. They are independent, have their own policies, culture, economy. People in one are pretty smart about policies and hard work and build wealth over decades while people in the other can't organize, have constant struggle for power, zero social policies and end up not being able to feed their every growing population.

Is there any reason people in the rich country should feel moral obligation to not be rich and devote resources to lift the other country out of poverty? Additional problem is that the poor country won't easily give up independence and accept smart policies so the situation is kinda hopeless.

Now apply to the local level. Even if you feel moral duty towards those in need you can't do much if you don't get some authority over their decisions/culture/education etc.

I upvoted this even though I think you have a hopelessly Confucian mentality wherein the imposition of authority can be a cure for bad policies/backward culture/lack of education. I believe culture, education and good policy can only grow and thrive among educated populaces (i.e., those educated to reject blunt authority), and really can't be induced from the top down. In third world basket-cases, a distributed, non-authoritarian approach of soft power is better; it's only American or Russian or Chinese imperialist ideas that argue an external imposition of order or a new political hierarchy will be the cure for social arguments in a nation that can't grow enough grain to feed itself.

For examples of how local authority is less impactful than soft power, consider the economic and cultural growth of the entire planet under American cultural dominance from 1918 to 2001.

I don't think there's a contradiction in your example. "Nobody deserves to be rich" seems to be just a moralistic opinion about individual behavior - and perhaps, what they do with their wealth. It's not really a policy prescription, in that it's purely negative, i.e. preventing people from getting rich doesn't necessarily have any relationship with preventing other people from being poor. (See: USSR).

But "allowing people to become rich ... benefits everyone in the society" is, however arguable, a policy position and not a negative judgment on personal behavior. It proceeds from the fact that in every society, ever, wealth stratification emerges; and it accepts that the state has an interest in both allowing some accumulation of capital and in preventing a runaway hoarding of wealth.

So I think you could reconcile these views. Both of your statements follow a consistent, demonstrable underlying argument: That without some intervention by the state, too much wealth will accumulate at the top and extreme poverty will reign at the bottom. From that starting point, your views aren't contradictory; you would be on the side of well-regulated markets. You're not stepping into the fantasy lands where either eating the rich or trickling down wealth will cure poverty.

It's not true, though, that 70% of Americans hew to standard partisan platforms. Polling consistently shows that support is heterogeneous (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/5-views-of-p...): positions on individual issues have strong majority support within each party, but a strong majority of individual people disagree with some of their party's positions.

The right wing view on it is not illogical or inconsistent. It just comes from different values. They believe that you can kill someone if they deserve it by breaking the rules in significant enough way. They also believe children are innocent so you can't kill them and it's your moral duty to take care of them when they are vulnerable.

It's consistent and logical. The values it comes from are just different then yours or mine.

They're inconsistent in that they think it's wrong to kill fetuses - whom they consider children - but they think it's fine to beat and sexually abuse children who are already born. If there's any consistency in their logic, it's cruelty towards females.

So yeah. I meant to say somewhere else that consistency isn't the only thing.

edit. just in bouncing my eyes between my response and yours I know that we both understand some of the underlying basic honor system of the thing you're describing as a set of ethics. And in protecting their family they ain't wrong, just that that's not what they're really doing, is it.

I am sorry but I am yet to meet a Republican/right wing person who thinks it's ok to beat and sexually abuse children.

My main gripe with pro-lifers as with others moral warriors so to speak is authoritarianism. I don't want to prove my values are superior or more consistent . I just want them to leave me and people like me alone. If they want to enforce their views on their community it's fine with me as long as you can voluntarily leave. It's not enough for them though. They want to force everyone else to accept their moral judgement as well.

Authoritarianism and inability to understand that their value call is not universal is the problem here.

Who's logical system though? You can define self consistent logical systems that agree and disagree with capital punishment and abortion in any permutation. Does it have to match their own logical system, or your logical system?

No, I don't want to be misunderstood. It's true that you can define a consistent logic for any permutation of abortion and capital punishment. It's just that so few people do attempt to define that logic. Most people viscerally agree or disagree with them as a matter of tribal / partisan identity, without asking themselves why they agree with one but not the other.

There is no logical contradiction at all in simultaneously opposing abortion while supporting capital punishment or vice versa. A right-winger believes that the state should serve to enforce the social contract and punish violators—they believe that a fetus is entitled to protection because it has done nothing to violate the social contract whereas a serial killer is clearly a menace to the interests of society. Right-wingers don’t object to state power over the individual in the abstract—they object to it situationally because they think state power is largely controlled by people who are hostile to their preferences and interests.

Is objecting to state power, or really anything, only situationally - when it doesn't suit you - just another way of saying you're willing to argue logically inconsistent positions from one day to the next?

No.

If your only logic is a boot to the face of anyone you're told to hit, or to kill people you never even met, you aced the test.

Today you're the victim of a lot of conspirators.

Tomorrow you're the hero.

Nevermind the people driving you to kill those other people are also conspirators, using you to kill their personal rivals.

Must be easy to see the world this way. I've never been dumb enough to do it, but maybe you could spare a couple words and explain why it's so great.

"No".

I want a state that does things I'm in favor of and doesn't do the things I'm not in favor of. This is not me being "logically inconsistent" by "objecting situationally"; it's almost a tautology.

It's only a tautology if you're completely solipsistic and think the state exists to grant your wishes. Once a state works that way, it's out of control, and the only people who get their wishes are the ones at the very top.

Say you and I both agree our city should build a new ballpark. I think they should put it out in the old industrial zone. You think they should build it conveniently close to downtown, which would involve tearing down my house. The city ends up deciding to build it near downtown, except they're going to tear down your house to do it. Now who's going to take you seriously if you complain about your house being torn down, when you were just arguing it was fine to tear down someone else's?

I want a state that does things according to reasonable, universally applied principles. Sometimes those are going to be things I don't like, but it's more important that the principles be upheld than that I get the result I want. I might want to see someone dead, but the principle of not killing people supersedes that. Because if the city has no guiding logic like, "it's wrong to tear down houses because this guy thinks we should" then they'll eventually come for your house, because you're never gonna be that guy.