I didn't realise your original point. Given that most governments are undemocratic, your point presumably applies to all undemocratic governments.
Right, good. (Bearing in mind that this is just about political freedom; I think that non-democratic governments can still be ranked in terms of morality or desirability on other criteria, as indeed can democratic ones.)
Given that, I will point out that prior to English invasion and the East India company takeover, Ireland and India were indeed ruled by undemocratic governments.
No doubt, but I don't see the relevance of that. If a bully supplants another bully, he is no less a bully for that. This rather pointless argument resulted from someone saying that he wished the British empire were still in existence today. I don't see what relevance the political state of its colonies
before the empire existed has to this. Surely the relevant question is the political state of its colonies
today, and whether they would be better or worse off if the empire still existed.
Explained by the fact that "societies" are arbitrary.
No doubt it would be if you had demonstrated that "societies" are arbitrary, but you have not demonstrated that.
There are "real" cultural differences, but they are on a spectrum rather than divided into clear categories- one can distinguish between "Asian" and "Western" culture ("Islamic" or "Arab" are different alltogether) and notice substantial differences. On the other hand, differences between the Spanish and Portugese are hard to find. (Even their languages are similiar)
Right, so it sounds like you agree with me. Societies are
not arbitrary, because there are real cultural differences. The fact that they are on a spectrum may make it hard to define the boundaries but that does not make them any less real. It is hard to say at what point you count someone as "tall" rather than "medium height", but it's still the case that someone who's seven feet tall is "tall" and someone who is five foot nine is "medium height".
As for the validity of nominalism, it can easily be proved by the maxim that one should not believe in the existence of something without evidence. Is there any evidence for the existence of a "real" thing, as opposed to an abstraction made from several parts?
Well, realists would say there is indeed evidence, namely the fact that abstract nouns have meaning, and for a word to have meaning it must have a referent. Also, the supposed maxim you cite has come under heavy fire from philosophers of epistemology and religion in recent years, some of whom have argued that in fact it can be quite rational to believe something without evidence (e.g. it is rational to believe that the world is more than five minutes old, even though all the evidence for its being more than five minutes old, such as our memories of earlier times, is also consistent with the alternative hypothesis that a capricious God created us all five minutes ago, complete with false memories; thus you have a case where the evidence is equally consistent with each hypothesis, yet we consider one of them rational and the other irrational). However, that is really neither here nor there, since you seem to have misunderstood me. I was not criticising you for being a nominalist. On the contrary, I think nominalism is eminently sensible. I was criticising you for misunderstanding nominalism. Nominalism states that supposed entities such as universals, sets, and other abstracta, and indeed anything other than concrete individuals, have no existence outside our minds. The task of nominalism is to explain how we can nevertheless talk meaningfully about such things. You seem to have accepted the nominalist premise but to have overlooked all of the work done since at least the time of Peter Abelard on the task, and to have concluded that we cannot talk meaningfully about such things.
Additionally, you have not managed to explain away the evidence against it- the spectrums I talked about.
Those are not evidence at all. As I have said, you can construct all sorts of sorites paradoxes from the existence of spectrums, and "prove" that no term with vague boundaries can be applied to anything, which is absurd. Uncertainty is no evidence of absence of fact. An astronomer may be uncertain whether there is a planet revolving around a particular distant star; the data may be unclear on the matter. But it doesn't follow from that there is no such planet, or that planets in general don't exist, or that there is no fact of the matter. There may, in fact,
be such a planet (or perhaps in fact there is not). But you can't conclude any of these things from the difficulty of the astronomer in ascertaining the facts. Similarly, the fact that we find it difficult to classify people culturally or socially does not prove that there is no fact of the matter about their cultural or social status. So this difficulty is not only compatible with being able to talk meaningfully about such status, it is even compatible with a realist understanding of such status. (With the clarification, again, that I do not hold such an understanding.)
To make the same point differently, any given phenomenon is (definitionally)
evidence for a given hypothesis if (and only if) that phenomenon would be more probable on the assumption of the truth of the hypothesis than it would be on the assumption of the falsity of the hypothesis. The greater the difference between its probability given the truth of the hypothesis and its probability given the falsity of the hypothesis, the better the evidence. Now you say that the difficulty of categorising liminal cultural or social cases is evidence that there are
no cultural or social categories at all, and we cannot talk meaningfully of them. (I think this is what you're trying to say, at least.) For this to hold, you need to show that the difficulty we experience would be less probable on the assumption that these categories do exist (in some sense, even the nominalist one) than they would be on the assumption that these categories do not exist. But you haven't even begun to show that, and indeed I can't see how such a thing could be shown.
So the fact that we have difficulty specifying when a term should be applied is not evidence that the term has no meaning or that it can never be applied; to think it is is simply to make either a logical error or a category mistake (I'm not sure which).
Finally, I should point out that language constantly changes and the understanding of words does also. There was a time when, for example, "cyan" would be seen as "blue".
Certainly, but I don't see the relevance of that.
I have also pointed out that constitutions in modern times are not amendable without a percentage of the vote larger than a majority. I will also add that politicians can make unpopular decisions and avoid deposal, that due to the media and pressure groups influence in practice is disproportinate, and that most people are indoctrinated to believe a large number of doctrines (e.g.- racism is morally wrong) thus rendering them immune to challenge.
I don't see the relevance of any of this either. That seems to me simply to come down to the assertion that no democracy is perfect, and that democracy is flawed because people are easily-led idiots. I wouldn't disagree with either of those. But that doesn't stop me seeing a difference between a tyranny and a democracy, because I'm capable of distinguishing between darker and lighter shades of grey, not merely stark black and white.
It sounds to me like the whole tenor of your argument is supposed to be that it wouldn't make any difference if Ireland, India, and the rest were still under the heel of the British empire, because however terrible the imperial governments may have been, all governments are equally terrible, so there's no point preferring one over another. But no matter how much you snipe at the notion of democracy and point out the impossibility of realising it perfectly, that won't demonstrate this.
Even on that level, large parts of it are arbitrary. For example, of my grandparents- on one side they are considered Chinese with a background in Singapore, one grandparent is Bristol, and one from "Australia" but was ancestors that orginally migrated from England and with French ancestors. I am considered Australian, but I can't exactly consider myself "pure-blood"...
You're confusing nationality with ethnic background. You're not "pure-blood"? So what? That doesn't make you any less Australian if that is where you were born and brought up. "Australian" is a national category, not an ethnic or biological or indeed cultural one. Your parents could have come from Mars and you'd still be just as Australian as anyone else. And that wouldn't be arbitrary as long as
you came from Australia.
Additionally, you will have to at least concede that such constructs only describe a limited part of human history (e.g.- Native American tribes did not have nationality) and can be arbtrarily changed by society (e.g.- if a politician is sufficently effective with their P.R and sufficently poorly known, they can change their percieved nationality).
I grant your first point, but you contradict yourself in the second. "Arbitrary" means a decision which is taken for no reason. The case you describe gives reasons for the change - reasons which are objective facts (the politician has good PR and is sufficiently poorly known). A truly arbitrary case would be one where everyone just decides, for no apparent reason, that a person now has X nationality instead of Y. But in fact this doesn't happen. This indicates that no matter how much nationality may be what the scholastics called an "ens rationis", that is a thing that exists only in the mind, the mind constructs and regulates it in ways that are not purely arbitrary but are based upon things outside the mind. This is the case with most abstract terms - if it weren't then there would be no linguistic regulations upon the way that we use them and they would be completely useless.
People with low IQs and/or poor knowledge of politics cannot exercise the vote in an informed and reasonable way- yet they're still given the vote. The only moral difference following from the premise is that children eventually recieve the vote.
Anyway, parents in practice would have enough influence over their children to prevent the Chocolate Party or similiar coming to power- in two-party systems at least, it would favor the two major parties.
Maybe so, but I notice you've still avoided answering my question!
