Thomas Sowell's Dichotomy Of Vision

Thomas Sowell’s dichotomy of visions: Thomas Sowell suggests that people have two different basic beliefs: whether human beings have the limit of potential capacity. Therefore, people establish their moral view based on their own assumption of human being’s capacity. He concludes that “constrained” idea leads to the conservatives who focus more on individual happiness, while the liberals who value social harmony are inclined to believe people are unconstrained.
The framework can describe some of my views, but contradict with my opinion of the government, which are the “locus of discretion” and “mode of discretion”. I believe that there is a substantial limit for mankinds. Hence, we should be careful when we want to change the status quo. Moreover, since the mankinds are constrained, we could never find a way to allocate the resources that is perfectly fair, so that we should safeguard formal opportunity instead of intervening the outcome. This issue also can be described by using the different fairness suggested by Jonathan Haidt, whereby the thought can be explained by procedural fairness and negative liberty. In contrast, people believe in unconstrained assumption tend to support distributive fairness and positive liberty.
However, the framework doesn’t illustrate the situation that I …show more content…
He claims that with different weigh in each dimension, people have fundamental differences in their moral judgement. In addition, Jonathan Haidt suggests that the liberals mainly focus on the first three dimensions: Care, Fairness, and Liberty, while the conservatives value all of the dimensions. However, people who are socially liberal, but economic conservatives shows much lower interest in Care/Harm compared to whose who consider themselves as pure