Defining “left” based on i vote New Labour or Democrats makes no sense. Those parties represent more than 50% of the voters and voters are on average more right than the population as a whole. Both parties are odd allieances of liberals, labour and environmentalists, pushed together just by a voteing system that alows for only two parties. Only the labour group is really left. The others join those parties based on conflict lines that needs a lot work to get pushed into the left right scale.

Whatever the merits of ‘Equality of What?’/recipes-for-the-cookshops-of-the-future philosophising may be, it can’t possibly provide a litmus test for who is or isn’t on the left. It’s possible that you could be the only person in the world who has the correct answer to ‘Equality of What?’ By contrast, if you think you are the only person in the world who is on the left, then you are not on the left.

I’m not really a fan of this conception of equality generally, and I don’t agree with your claim that ‘the left, over the past two centuries or so that we’ve had a left, has consistently pursued it’, or that it ought to do so in the future, but here I’ll just give one reason why I don’t think it can characterise ‘the left’. In general I don’t think it’s likely that the difference between being on the left or on the right could boil down to a difference in normative convictions about how the world ought to be. This is because for practically any principle you can think of (people ought to have equal prospects of a flourishing life, say) it is possible, I think, to find people on the conservative right or in the liberal centre who will endorse it but who maintain either that it already roughly obtains (in America today anyone can succeed in life with hard work and determination, etc…) or that it does not obtain, and is desirable, but that radical social change aimed at realising it would be self-defeating.

So if your intention was to explicate what it mean to be on the left then I think your emphasis on endorsement of normative principles is misjudged.

No, I was talking about the attitude of the central authority towards these backward communities. If the community is overwhelmingly against homosexual teachers and abortions, then should we force them to accept homosexual teachers and abortions, or should we provide easy opportunities (economic opportunities) for homosexual teachers and women in need of abortion to relocate? The Amish communities, for example.

I believe the latter solution is much preferable and I’m curious if this is compatible with ‘being on the Left’.

I mentioned that, on Harry’s criterion of “What makes the left the left”, Frankfurt, Raz, and Wiggins fail to qualify as on the left. One might react to this with a shrug and say “Well, I guess I never really thought of people like them as on the left”.

So I’ll add that Karl Marx also fails, by Harry’s criterion, to count as on the left, at least on Allen Woods’s reading of Marx’s ethical commitments as extending to ‘non-moral’ goods that are tied to human needs and flourishing, but as failing to extend to such ‘moral’ values as justice and equality.

Now Wood’s reading of Marx is a controversial piece of Marx scholarship. But I don’t think anyone would want to deny that, on Wood’s reading, Marx still clearly qualifies as ‘on the left’.

It doesn’t seem to me that “live and let live” adequately describes the community’s actions toward the teacher in comments 40 and 47, nor the same community’s likely actions toward young women in need of abortions (let alone the abortionists).

In various times and places throughout history respect for local autonomy would involve tolerating such cultural practices as slavery, suttee, genital mutilation of infants, human sacrifice, cannibalism, honor killings, and lynching.

I consider myself on the Left, and I generally endorse the program outlined in comment 53 above; but despite the stereotypical association of the Left with multiculturalism, it’s partly in pursuit of those basically liberal goals, ISTM, that respect for local autonomy needs to have limits, particularly when local autonomy comes at the expense of individual disfavored members of the local community. (Although it’s also possible for a society to oppress its own members equally, in practice it rarely works out that way.)

P.S. @Tim Wilkinson, bianca steele: ISTM that you may be proceeding from different definitions of “extra-political”. More detailed definition of the term might avoid misunderstanding (if, indeed, you have one; I could be wrong).

and that someone who discounts his own self-interest will be less than concerned about protecting the interests of others: likely to say to them, “but you’re just being selfish, aren’t you?”
I certainly wouldn’t suggest giving zero weight to one’s own mundane interests – so I assume by ‘discounts’ you mean ‘doesn’t give infinite [or undue] weight to’. But in any case, the thing about saying to someone ‘you’re just being selfish’ is that it depends on a concern for someone else’s (a third party’s, or one’s own) interests.
‘Don’t take all the food for yourself leaving none for others – that’s selfish.’
‘Don’t you oppress me.’

They are extra-political.
OK, rephrase: ‘why should I consider them extra-political?’, or if you prefer: ‘In virtue of what are they extra-political?’.

Advocating for adjustments in social norms is fine, but the world will never become culturally homogeneous. For example: rural environments inevitably produce a culture different from that in cities. You might be fighting windmills, I’m afraid.

interests can come into conflict
Sure. I assume this is inevitable, and not a bad thing. This doesn’t mean self-interest is always and everywhere wrong (or even always wrong but often unavoidable), which I thought you implied by saying self-interest is necessarily selfish. I think a healthy regard for self-preservation ought to be encouraged, and that someone who discounts his own self-interest will be less than concerned about protecting the interests of others: likely to say to them, “but you’re just being selfish, aren’t you?”

though why must they be considered extra-political?
I’m trying to begin from where we are, not to determine a theory from first principles (or to declare loyalty to the spirits of leftists past). They are extra-political.

I think about that a lot, but then (and watch me turn this back ‘round around to the thread topic), perhaps it’s better that I’m here and doing what little I can to advocate for adjustments in social norms, to pull the society nearby me Left a little. Which brings me to:

This is the one great question that any kind of ‘left’ finds it hardest to face: is there any sense in which people, taken in the aggregate, can be good enough to live well together – to allow each other to equally flourish?

I’ll be honest: as a Leftist, I’m not terribly interested in equal flourishing. I’m interested in ensuring that every human being has the opportunity to live a life in which:

• Suffering is not imposed upon them due to characteristics beyond their control.

• A physically comfortable though meager survival is possible without work or contribution to society. This includes reasonable accommodations: shelter, food, access to health care. By comfortable I specifically intend “the conditions of survival do not themselves directly impose suffering on the individual.”

• Individuals who wish to work, contribute, and socially cooperate have the opportunity to do so in exchange for money. By “opportunity” I specifically intend the concrete opportunity to do work for which their body, brain, and value system is reasonably well-suited.

• Education and career-matching services are readily available for any individual who wishes to prepare themselves for a life of work and contribution, or improve their ability to work and contribute.

• With work, contribution, and social cooperation, it is possible to accumulate property beyond what is strictly necessary for physically comfortable survival.

I… I don’t know what you mean by “various degrees of compromise” but I’m confident the consensus opinion in my community is abortion = murder. As for whether abortionist = murderer = life in prison, I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s the doctor who is the murderer, not the mother, who in detailed conversation that hasn’t turned contentious yet is usually portrayed as either (A) a kind of half-wit who is being conned into getting an abortion or (B) a wild half-wit who doesn’t have sufficient control over impulses to avoid getting an abortion (this would be the conjectured crazily promiscuous female who gets 10 abortions a year due to wild sexual exploits).

The weird thing is, I don’t seem to meet very many anti-abortion people who understand it’s possible for a woman of sound mind to arrive at the logical choice that abortion of the fetus she is bearing is appropriate and desirable. The folks I know seem to commonly presume the woman getting an abortion cannot be of sound mind and healthy psyche: making abortion illegal is seen as a kind of protection for the mother as well as the child.