Help Me Doug Adams

From Dissent:

Pragmatists argue that political rights and freedoms are founded on community traditions and shared history. Rights are not “natural,” but they are still meaningful and extremely important. The pragmatists recognized that rights mean different things in different historical contexts. The meanings of “freedom of speech,” “citizenship,” the “right to vote,” and “property” have changed over time in the United States because of important shifts in public understanding.

Thus, for most progressives, rights represent a wager we have made as a political community, a wager with our fellow citizens as to the sort of life we aim to live...

From Overcoming Bias:

...what exactly do most people mean by “the meaning of life?” [...] It seems what people want is a satisfying story about their place in the universe. Since characters are the most important elements of a story, the main “place” that matters to people is their social place – who they relate to and how. People feel they understand their place when they have a story saying how they can relate well to important social entities.

Conor Williams in Dissent is right to characterise progressive pragmatism as a wager (something like a contract, something like a promise, something like a dare). The crucial factor in a bet is a lack of information: it's not a bet if you already know your horse will win. Most folks don't like not knowing. They want to ask, what is it really that makes rights right? Pragmatism relies on not asking that question, saying it cannot be answered.

When it comes to the meaning of life, if Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias is right, most people are pragmatists. We are capable of being satisfied by answers situated in a social and historical context: our place in a world that is already given. The question not asked is, 'why is that context there at all?' I have a feeling that's not really the case (for me anyway). Am I insufficiently pragmatic?