To the editor:

The fundamental question at the heart of all political debates is simple: principles or pragmatism. One may observe these two approaches in local debates (smoking bans, living-wage laws, Wal-Mart, etc.), international affairs and ultimately in the realm of ethics where one’s political views derive.

The principled approach says there are universal, immutable laws that govern every moral or political question, that they are based on an objective, knowable reality, and that each issue must be grasped through the integration of knowledge into a noncontradictory conceptual whole.

The pragmatist says that reality is unknowable, subjective, or too complicated to understand. Therefore, we must disintegrate our knowledge into isolated piles of concrete-bound precepts, pick a few to work on, and struggle to find some temporary expedient solution that could be changed tomorrow.

Principled people deal only with noncontradictory, rational facts and formulate concepts from them like individual rights, justice, and honesty. Pragmatists traffic in notions of “inherent contradictions” between “relative” truths and fabricate anti-concepts like “the common good” or the need for “flexibility” and “compromise” in all affairs.

Pragmatism has caught nearly everyone (especially our politicians) in its whirling, Heraclitean flux. The consequence is that instead of a free, moral society based on individual rights, free markets, and limited government, we have a mixed economy of pressure group warfare, collectivism and militant subjectivity.

If Americans desire a free society we must reject pragmatism, then rediscover and consistently practice our nation’s foundational principles: reason and individual rights.

David Claassen-Wilson,

on behalf of Kansas Objectivists, Lawrence