Issues in layman politics

Discussing politics with friends is often exhausting and antagonistic. But because of how much I love philosophy and debate, I really do think that it's worth it to deal with the bad actors. But when I engage the typical layman, who has minimal exposure to philosophical discourse and only has exposure to your typical FOX News, CNN, or ABC, I think that I can identify two big barriers to being able to fruitful political discourse. 

1. Inability to properly define terms or share/access certain concepts. 

A lot of philosophy is built on intuitions about what things mean. For example, the debate over the proper definition of what counts as a conscious subject is primarily a debate over what intuitions come with the word/label of consciousness. Most theories of consciousness require representations. First-order representational theories confers consciousness to beings that have the ability to represent the world in their mind -- for example, seeing the color red or experiencing smell of coffee. Higher order representational theories of consciousness requires that the subject be able to make representations of representations -- or representations of the second or third degree, or so on. For example, a monkey might able to represent a branch (to climb on) in their mind (first-order consciousness). They may even be able to differentiate between stable and unstable branches (second-order consciouness -- a belief about a representation). But does it have concept of stable and unstable? Does it know what a stable bridge is? Or a stable mind? These require higher order concepts.

What first-order and higher-order theorists disagree is not what capacities any specific organism has. Where they disagree is how we should define consciousness, and these require intuitions, not empirical evidence. I try to point out that we should be precise in where the disagreement lies, and if it is a simple definitional difference, then it is easily resolvable. 

Typically, in debates with laypeople who are fixed in certain definitions and unable to change what concepts words are linked, I will concede the point and use their definitions, because we actually agree. This is okay, but when I use the language that is typically used among philosophy contemporaries and that is the language of the whole field, I feel a little frustrated. I can only imagine how vitriolic it is among laypeople. 

2. I really hate it when people view the world through a solely political lens. When you begin to sort people into boxes and worldviews into categories, you automatically assume certain lines of argumentation are taken, and the reaction tends to overtake any careful consideration of the subject matter. For example, I just watched a TikTok where a creator's main argument was that conservatives were unable to make "good" art, movies, or stories, and that all good media was inherently liberal in nature. 

For someone like this, when you're encountering any sort of media, the gut reaction is to sort it into a political category, which I think is an absolutely miserable way of thinking. 

Furthermore, I think that politics is so shallow that it really shouldn't be the first line of evaluation. To give context, this where politics sit in the entire realm of philosophy: It's a small portion of applied ethics, which is a small portion of ethics in general (along with normative ethics and metaethics, which I believe to be even so much more exciting and interesting!). Ethics is only one subfield in traditional philosophy, of which there are four more: logic, epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics. 

Now that we have laid out exactly where politics sits, what is worth considering over politics? Let me give some thoughts on this -- here are 3 different approaches that one might take: 

(1) If ethics is ultimate for one, then the first line of consideration is metaethics, then normative ethics, and then applied ethics. Metaethics asks: What are the foundations of morality? Are they actually true (like 1+1=2) or only subjectively true? Normative ethics asks: What is the highest good? How can we know what is morally good? 

(2) For those that are religious, we should consult philosophy of religion (a subfield of metaphysics) and theology, which directly influence our positions and have implications on our metaethics. 

(3) Lastly, for someone like Hobbes, we might take metaphysics seriously first. For him, the state of nature is critical to his theory of ethics (might makes right). 

My point is that for any political position, we cannot lazily come up just any proposition that we "feel" is true. There is much foundation to build -- and philosophy is so much richer than just politics.