FlyOnTheWall
9mo ago
I'm not convinced it is actually cognitively possible for non-sapient animals to conceive of suicide, certainly not in the rational, goal-oriented way of a suffering human opting for assisted dying. Is it possible for human babies, even? I don't think "torturing an infant" is an oxymoron, but it would seem to fail your criterion.
So I did consider animals when I wrote the definition, which I why I carefully worded the condition as: "want[ing] to die" instead of the more sophisticated "wishing to commit suicide", etc. For animals, I am working on the assumption that they will express a death wish as going crazy and just thrashing about / attacking people / etc.
It's not a perfect solution, but unfortunately once an entity is unable to communicate verbally, it's hard to definitively rule out that it is not in some kind of terrible agony (see also: "The anesthesia only partially worked. The patient is unable to control their body, but feels everything"), so I think this is the best we can do.
I didn't really consider babies. I don't think it is an oxymoron either. But I think my definition still works, because we can try and reasonably infer if it is in agony, primarily by asking if the thing we are doing to it is painful (and, as I mentioned, there is the caveat of if you love the entity and are trying to help it, so medical procedures on newborns is not torture) - this is even less cut-and-dry than the animal case, but again I think it's just a hard problem to evaluate suffering on a living thing that cannot communicate its thoughts (and in fact probably doesn't even have "thoughts" in the way normal humans do)
If people from those two groups are put through the exact same torments, and experience the exact same amount of pain, but the first remains steadfast in wanting to get through this while the other starts shouting "oh for God's sake just kill me now", is it reasonable to say that only the second guy is being tortured? Seems weird and contrived to me
Actually this is an intended aspect of my definition. The primary goal of my definition is that I find it disturbing that intelligent beings are able to inflict extreme "unnatural" levels of pain on living things, and sometimes it is in their benefit to do so.
In general, it feels "unnatural" to ban a state from inflicting any kind of suffering on someone, because a "baseline" level of suffering just exists without states (people/animals starve to death, creatures get eaten by stronger ones, etc), so why just disallow inflicting suffering in just this particular kind of circumstance.
But for torture, this is a thing that only happens if you have civilisation (lions don't torture gazelles or other lions, they can't because they are too stupid) - so I think it should be considered always immoral to torture.
As you yourself have mentioned, sometimes there are good and necessary reasons to kill someone (a criminal just starts attacking people and refuses to surrender), so we can't go so far as to ban killing for any reason (plus what about killing animals, etc)
So my definition comes out as the best coherent imperative that can actually be adhered to in any circumstance, but also rules out a particularly egregious class of suffering: i.e. a fate worse than death (if whatever is happening to someone is truly a fate worse than death, under this rule, they have the right to choose death instead)
In your particular comparison - the strong willed person is personally experiencing whatever is happening to them as a fate not as bad as death. As long as they are always given the option of choosing death (consent can always be taken away at any point, etc, etc) - I don't think I can do any better without my axiom becoming non-universal.
Well, that's rather the problem. It suggests that he views the dog as property, as a living prop for his livestream, rather than a living being he loves and enjoys the company of.
I think you're right, I went too far with my previous statement. What I do believe is that this is less worrying than wanton suffering, but still, being able to actually act on the philosophy I propose for animals with a real animal, even for a useful purpose, is still worrying because he was able to ignore its suffering / lacked the empathy to realise its suffering.
but I don't think a Piker who was simply a principled Cartesian of that kind would have any reason to own a pet dog in the first place. Having a pet dog visible in his livestreams at all is a signal of "I'm the kind of person who enjoys the company of our four-legged furry friends", and if that's not actually how he thinks of dogs then the signal is deceitful and his whole moral character becomes suspect, never mind that he tried to cover up the shocking
I agree, it is quite slimy he lied that way. I already mentioned it was bad he covered up his rule breaking, but you're right he also went out of his way to mislead people into thinking he was pro animal rights by having a pet.
Though I think misleading people into thinking you hold a particular ideological stance is less egregious than actually breaking a rule (thought crimes vs physical crimes)... but I guess I'm biased, since (like many others on this forum, I imagine) I personally mislead the people around me to believe I am on-board with progressive ideology (but in my defence, I will say I have tried to keep this deception implicit, I don't go around with dyed hair and pronoun pins)
FlyOnTheWall
9mo ago
A lot of people would say that they find suffering to be more terrible than death, and thus, torture to be more wicked than murder
In general, I am also unequivocally opposed to "torturing" animals.
But "suffering" is a spectrum, ranging from getting wet in the rain to the kind of stuff drug cartels do.
My actual practical resolution for this is to say torture is any situation where you make the victim want to die and then do not allow them to die. With an exception if you sincerely love and care for them (to avoid classifying extremely painful things that eventually lead to something good for the "victim" as torture)
And this situation does not seem to be torture. If it were really on the level of torture, I think the dog would just wig out and attack Hasan. A dog that sits still in discomfort for a long time is just suffering a "reasonable" amount. I think it still prefers living, and does not wish to die to escape the shock collar.
And actually, I think the "a torturer probably has something wrong with them" bit is important too, particularly here
As I said, I don't think this particular thing amounts to torture. But I agree that it is causing suffering to the dog, and it should make us worried about a person if they wantonly cause suffering to living things because of what it says about their ability to empathise, but:
- This doesn't mean the person is actually doing anything morally wrong. It's just that they are actively doing something that makes the people around them (who cannot access their true state of mind) update their priors to think they will later do a separate thing, that is morally wrong.
- In this case, I don't even think we should be worried* He wasn't shocking the dog for fun, he was trying to make his property stay in the right place for his livestream. In your teddy analogy: your guy is not ripping teddy bears apart with his teeth, but decided to use one of the button eye as a spare for his jacket. No need to worry about a missing empathy response - he probably did feel a little uncomfortable but understood the discomfort was irrational.
[*] Well, at least not worried he's a Ted Bundy. It is antisocial behaviour for him to break a rule and then hide his rule-breaking behaviour (even if the rule itself is bogus)
FlyOnTheWall
9mo ago
There are animals that we let trained people butcher for meat and do not think much of it, or otherwise subject to harsh conditions for our utility, and there are animals that we cherish and pamper, or at least respect.
I find the whole ranking of animal species business pretty suspect morally.
But fine, that is a self-consistent framework that justfies meat eating but not pet abuse (assuming you would be okay with someone abusing a pet from a "meat" species)
In principle - I have no good answer to the whole animal rights conundrum, namely:
A: They are living beings, even if they are not as smart as humans. It is not okay to kill them - would you be okay with a human cattle ranch of mentally retarded people?
B: This is indeed an ugly thing: I don't want to live in a world where the weak and stupid have no right even to their life if their death would cause some positive utility to one of their biological superiors (especially when "weak" and "stupid" are relative terms...)
B: But sadly, there is no good resolution to this. If we really wish to avoid this ugly notion of biological inferiority/superiority, "a great chain of being", etc - then we are forced to extend our compassion forever downwards, below the cattle and dogs, below the rats, below even the ants, bees and wasps - down to the level of unicellular organisms: on just your fingertip lies millions of bacteria, each time you wash your hands is a genocide. The only way to avoid actively harming innocent beings is the death of the entire human race, each breathe we take to prolong our murderous lives is an atrocity.
B: So, if we wish to continue living, and wish to retain some coherent notion of morality - we must accept the drawing of a line somewhere. So we must be able to say X is so low on the "chain" it is acceptable to take its life. And yes, this unfortunately puts the question of whether I deserve my own life onto the table.
This is a self-consistent rebuttal (and is the argument I personally believe in), but it's also exactly what an evil person trying to justify their evil would say in order to continue being evil ("Look, maybe being a cartel hitman is actually not a nice thing to do. But also, it's the only life I know, and I'd probably be killed myself if I stopped, and also coincidentally I have this neat philosophy that actually makes it kosher!"), so I often have doubts about this.
I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this (I have seen similar things written elsewhere, but never exactly this)
But - to go back to the original point: wider (meat-eating) society accepts the fact that animal lives are lesser than a human's. In particular, we kill and eat animals (okay, more realistically - we sponsor their killing by buying their meat in a supermarket), and not even for survival reasons. It seems that if we value a "life" so little, making said life have to stay still for a while and get shocked whilst being housed and fed and not slaughtered is pretty marginal in comparison ("it was one thing to kill and eat all those people, but when you trespassed into that lady's house to hide in her shower, you crossed the line")
I don't think it makes sense to oppose mild animal abuse unless you are a vegetarian (and even then there are other issues, but being vegetarian seems the bare minimum for holding this sort of position)
By the same logic, if I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) put a bag over your head and chained you to a bed, you would still be doing better than, say, a migrant labourer in the UAE who is worked to death in the blazing sun. That may be true, but we are talking "lesser of two evils" and not "this is fine, this is okay, what is everyone making a fuss about?"
If I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) kidnapped you from your home (and also a bunch of other humans), put you on a farm, eugenically bred you with other humans with the goal of making succulent offspring, and eventually slaughtered you, butchered you, and sold your flesh for a profit... you'd actually be worse off than even the migrant labourer. Actually this is the plot for an especially disturbing horror movie - so if we're comparing animals to humans this way, you (and I, and everyone else who eats meat) are at an off-the-charts level of bad.
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
Do you believe that it's actually truly subjective? As in, it's okay for someone to kill someone else as long as they don't consider the victim to be a person?
If we accept that personhood is truly subjective, then asking if it's okay to kill someone is an ill-posed question. Because personhood is not an objective quality of a biological entity.
I (and you and @Owlify) all have separate judgements on the morality of any given killing, which depends on whether we morally see the thing being killed as a person (in the most extreme case - I doubt even you would view a fertilized egg as human)
There's absolutely nothing wrong with people slaughtering "non-persons" as long as the non-person is sincerely believed by the slaughterers, and if people go around doing that you will have no complaints?
Firstly there is a difference between understanding someone's actions and being okay with them. I also understand why John Wayne Gacy tortured all those young men (he was incapable of human empathy and felt an intense sexual pleasure from his actions)
In the case of genocide, the (honest) argument is that the victims are human - but they are somehow biologically inferior or otherwise harmful to the host society (on the group level - bell curves, etc, etc), so they must be liquidated for the sake of self-preservation. So we have the moral grey area of 2 groups with competing interests.
In the case of abortion - I'm making an even stronger claim. That there is literally no fetus (not even a +4 sigma one) that counts as human, or even comes close to it. I am fine with looking at your side's propaganda photos of an ultrasound of a 24-week-old and saying that that thing is just not human. It has the capacity to grow into a human (like a sperm cell) in the future, but in its current state - it is a mere animal that lacks any kind of thought or self-awareness.
Or do you perhaps have a more nuanced and less genocidal belief about personhood grounded by something beyond mere subjectivity?
I have a definition of personhood (just like you do), which is that you need some amount of intelligence (in a very weak sense - I'm not asking our prospective personhood-haver to integrate sec(x), I'm asking them to show they are capable of thought at all, are aware of their own existence, etc) - and I accept there is nuance about where we draw the line and how to measure these things. But based on everything I know about fetuses, including what I've heard from the pro-life side, they do not come close to what I've described. Not as a group, not even if we just ask for a single exceptional individual in the far right tail.
I think you agree, under my definition, that I'm right. But then that definition I gave was just based on my own personal moral "vibes". You have your own definition of personhood that makes fetuses people. Neither can prove the other wrong*, because we are looking at the same map. That is why, despite how distasteful it sounds, personhood is just "subjective" (as is genocide, dignity, freedom, etc) - otherwise we just play word games and make contrived analogies that "prove" our morality is objectively correct (this is a good tactic if actually waging the culture war, but it does not help to discuss it)
In case this sounds too glib / edgy, I want to say I do understand the gravity of this disagreement. From your perspective, I am a horrible person advocating for killing left-handed people ("How is this thing a person?"). But this is what I honestly believe, and if there is evidence, even anecdotal, that contradicts my understanding of the mental capacity of fetuses, I'm happy to hear about it.
[*] Unless it's a religious thing. In that case it is a disagreement over the nature of objective reality, and it could (at least in theory) be resolved by logical arguments.
I agree, but doesn't this logic follow through to literally every "freedom"? When someone exercises free speech to advocate for X, they deprive those opposed to it from living in a ~X society, etc.
That is how I view the notion of "freedoms" (i.e. incoherent because you can just switch framings to switch what is/is not a freedom) - but it seems that some right-wingers like you and @AvocadoPanic think freedoms make sense in general (and sexual degeneracy in particular just doesn't count)
Could you give an example of an act of moral degeneracy that would still count as freedom? (Otherwise, I think we should just use the word degeneracy, since that is less ambiguous than "freedom")
The actual "utility numbers" come about from the fact that we always have some kind of preference between 2 hypothetical futures.
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Human minds don't run on integer math, and neither do they run on pure rationality, and neither are they very good at modelling future states. I'm pretty sure it's easy to get people to express preference loops, where they rank their preferences as a > b > c > a, for example.
I was not making the stronger psychology claim that a good model of human behaviour is to assume that everyone is maximising E[u] for some personal utility function (but I am claiming that this would be the best way for an agent to operate if it had oo computational power)
When I spoke of the utility numbers, I was referring to them existing as an abstract concept, which may be totally unknown to any human mind (similarly, the 10^100th digit of pi also exists) - it's just that they can, in principle, be calculated.
Your example of people "having" preference loops (scare quotes because it might just be self-deception) just falls under humans sometimes being wrong about stuff. We don't need to reject arithmetic because I said "2+2=5".
Do you agree that utility functions exist in the abstract? (I agree they are often unhelpful to reason about things in practice, and sometimes they can be an intentional overcomplication to trick people)
It makes you reliable, which makes you attractive in several senses of the word, which helps build a "we" to keep you out of such situations in the first place
I think you're right - and I didn't consider this initially since, in my case, I don't think I have anyone in my community who would reward such behaviour. But if you do have strong bonds with precommiters, it makes sense for you to act this way.
What assurance do they have of the King's honesty?
They don't have an assurance, but in my experience interacting with people, being nice and apologetic (even if the other person is in the wrong) can only make them less mad (even if they are still mad) - I would apologise to the king because maybe he would be content with having humiliated me and leave me alone (or maybe he might just kill me without being tortured - which I would value massively)
And even if he is honest, what are the remaining span of their lives worth? Even in terms of pleasure, what are they worth, compared to the pleasure of spite satisfied? What the king wants, he will never have
Well, this is kind of my problem with this Hylynkian philosophy. As I conceded, it makes sense for you to adopt this kind of attitude as a shared culture with your ingroup. You should stand up to unfairness because otherwise you'll be seen as cowardly.
But on an individual level (my friends are also non-Hlynkians) - if I keep spiting the various kings I encounter in life, I'll just keep running into trouble and it will add up and make my life worse than it would be otherwise. Isn't it better to focus on our own happiness than to try and punish people who do bad things? If I literally had no control over anything else, I would want to spite the king, but in practice (even in this example as I said above) - we can usually significantly lessen the chance of us getting in trouble if we just swallow our pride (e.g. when someone in real life who isn't a close friend or family says that what I just said is offensive, I just apologise instead of pushing the point)
and it is fitting that the cruel should suffer for their evil, that the scales should move toward balance in all possible ways.
I fully understand this impulse (and have felt it myself!), but I think this is an immoral view to hold, and we should try and repress this desire. I will elaborate.
I think that suffering is always a bad thing, no matter how bad the entity is that is suffering. Of course in practice, for instance with criminals, we sometimes have to make them suffer (to alleviate the suffering of their future victims), and since they can so easily opt out of the suffering the state imposes on them by not comitting crimes, I am okay with making them suffer prison/execution (and I don't advocate for making jail cells into fancy hotel rooms, because if there is the money to do that - it should be spent on the non-criminal public)
But if we weren't constrained by resources (or we were in a situation as you describe, where the suffering is not a means to an end, but the end itself) - I would not want anyone to suffer. In this story (it's a lot longer than Heather Ale, but I think it helps convey the "emotion" behind the "suffering is always bad" worldview, like HA does for precomittment), I find the serial killer sickening, and it feels like he should atone for his wrong-doing... but why? His victims are already dead, and no one will see what happens to him, so there is no use in "making an example" - isn't it just "better" if he goes to heaven? (And then you feel even more sick when you imagine if you were one of the victims, but the logic still holds!)
(unless you're attuned to what seems to be tacitly acknowledged to be a genuine racial dog-whistle)
To my awareness, there is no racist meme in which you list someone's name and just say "oh". If we are really reaching, I suppose this falls into the general paradigm of "Noticing" (that would be a dogwhistle, since it's just a normal word that has a secret related meaning that was arbitrarily assigned to it to allow for people to make controversial statements that sound innocuous to someone unaware)
There is no shared context you are missing here. Just the common context we all have from living on the same planet.
Maybe I have to brush up on my linguistics, but I still don't see any notable connection between that name and any region, let alone any political stance.
There probably is a way that a linguist could deduce much more than just him being Black from the name alone, and there's probably also some jargon that could help precisely describe what about the name "sounds SSA". (If I think about it a bit, I suppose the consecutive consonants "Nt" in particular sound SSA)
But we do not need any advanced linguistic machinery to make this inference in this case, anymore than someone needs to understand General Relavity (or even Newtonian gravity) to infer that if I let go of an object in mid-air, it will fall to the ground.
I had the same reaction as @EverythingIsFine
As I said, I don't think this is really the reaction any of you had to the comment. Charitably, I think that you feel this way consciously, because you dislike racism, and so you avoided letting your mind make this hard-to-explicitly-articulate, but obvious inference.
I guess I'm also being a little obtuse here though. I think what you guys are getting at, is that it is unfair to make an inference based on the professor's race, as opposed to his work, because he has no control over the former. If he doesn't want people to assume he hates White people on the basis of his work, he can try and address this by softening the tone, or even reconsidering the substance - but if someone assumes things about him because of his race... what is he to do? It's not like he can stop being Black.
And I agree (at least from the perspective of the person who is being discriminated against) it is really unfair and sucky to be judged on the basis of something entirely beyond your control and decided at birth (whether that is your race, sex, disability, etc) - and on this basis, you can make an argument that, as a society, we should uphold this tacit norm where we avoid acting on, or even openly acknowledging, the information given by these characteristics (and instead wait for them to tell about their nature through their behaviour)
But this is a pseudononymous internet forum whose principle goal is truth-seeking (or at least acknowleding the truth when presented before us), even when said truth is offensive, hurtful or upsetting. So even if we want to maintain the "no-Noticing" social norm for society (I have mixed feelings about that), I strongly disagree that we should do that here, because it prevents us from seeing the true nature of reality.
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
No, physical possession does not entail deprivation
Wait, what? Then how are you defining the word "deprivation"? Surely, if I am using an object, I am not allowing others to use the object at the same time, i.e. I am depriving them of the ability to use the object.
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
So kill them? That's what you mean, right?
I think this is uncharitable. I assume he just wants to dispossess the "elite parasite class" of their land and assets (and redistribute them to poor people), and then convince them of the error of their ways (if you hold his worldview, then they will just understand how much better it is to share once we let them see what a society unshackled from the notion of "ownership" looks like)
Because people have tried this, and it didn't become "clear" what remained to be done except continue killing until you run out of people to steal from, limp on in totalitarian misery and eventually give up.
I think this is what would happen in practice if OP's idea of abolishing ownership was actually implemented. But I don't think this is his intent, I think he just has a different model of human nature and societies than we do (if I don't believe in germs and I sneeze on my immunocompromised friend, and he dies, that doesn't mean I wanted to kill him, or had any kind of malicious intent towards him)
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
I don't think so, no. Utilitarian calculus breaks down with infinites, and this is about infinites
The actual "utility numbers" come about from the fact that we always have some kind of preference between 2 hypothetical futures. And we could effectively encode the idea of -oo utility by just making all these "above utilitarian calculus" things be -10^10^10^10 utilons (and having the mundane and tangible be on the scale of 10s of utilons)
But I suppose this is kind of a nitpicky point (you may as well do "calculations" by treating the idea of liberty as something with its own calculus if the numbers cannot overlap) - so it's just a matter of perspective if you want to see it as a utility thing or not. I'm happy to not use the utilitarian lens here - I'm just trying to point out that it can be seen though this lens in principle (like how, technically, any maths proof could be formalised into Lean, even though this is usually unnecessary and impractical)
It's well-known that small compromises lead to larger ones, and it is in this fashion that one moves from compromising to being compromised
But what can you do in situations where you have no leverage over the compromising party? What is there to do other than give them whatever they want, and hope they will slightly nicer to you (even if "nicer" just means taking all of stuff instead of torturing you to death and then taking all your stuff)?
I know what you suggest - which is to stubbornly refuse like the Picts in your poem, and get tortured to death. What does this achieve (the King presumably just doesn't care, so he won't abdicate the throne or anything)? These principles Hlynka proposes only seems to bring misery and suffering to it adherents in these sorts of extreme situations.
Precommitment, in other words, the most durable sort of commitment. And such commitments are often decisive, especially in a crisis
[Heather Ale poem]
I understand this as a strategy, and I think it even makes sense in various real-world cases (e.g. MAD with nuclear weapons) where you have a reasonable chance of overcoming your adversary (I'm not a pacifist - I don't think a nation should just lie down and accept being conquered if a similarly-powered neighbour invades them, for example)
But in the situation of you acting as an individual, against an entire government, I don't see what good precommitment will do. You have no threats or leverage over the person violating your rights. The "Heather Ale" poem is basically my point - the dwarfs died (and the father was presumably horribly tortured too) , and that was the intended outcome of the father's "trick". I agree in this sort of situation, it's very unlikely that the king will just let the dwarf family live happily ever after once they give up the secret, he'll probably keep escalating his demands. But we don't just how far he will go yet - why not give in for now, and if things actually get really bad, the dwarfs can just kill themselves? (killing themselves now just closes options)
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
I really need the money, too. Maybe even more than you do. So, where does that leave us?
We don't even need to use hypotheticals as @sarker did. There are people all over the world who need your money more than you do (you could save a child's life with a malaria pill for just 1 dollar)
There are various reasonable arguments for why you deserve the money more than these children do, but I strongly suspect you don't believe in any of them (but I'd be happy and surprised to be proven wrong!)
So why aren't you donating all of your money to save these lives? What gives you the right to, in your own framing, "deprive" all these sick, unfortunate children of urgent medical care? Even if you totally bankrupt yourself, you could go on welfare or just be homeless and live off the kindness of strangers (you'd still be better off than all those children)
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
How can you detach from yourself to form an attachment that could be construed as "owning" yourself? It's just a figure of speech that doesn't correspond to the reality of the matter
I guess this becomes dicey when we get close to the brain. But certainly a person exists detatched from their limbs (is amputation death?)
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
We all know how to share. It's one of the first things we were taught. I don't have a private definition for it.
I think I understand intuitively what you're trying to get at - e.g. why not let a billionaire share his summer house with homeless people? (Is this the kind of scenario you have in mind?)
Are you trying to propose a system where people are obligated to share stuff they aren't using? (so in the system, I don't have to "share" my computer, coffee mug, or charger, since I'm using them now - but I should share my electric cooker with someone else because I'm not using it now)
If so, do you not think there's value in having "right of access" 24/7 for various items? In my case, I like the fact that my books, my bed, my crockery, etc are all "on retainer" to be used whenever I want. Whereas if I had to share them all the time, it would cost me utility. Is there nothing that you "own" (I know you are against this concept, but I mean in the sense that society believes that you own it) which you don't like having unfettered access to?
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
I view inheritance as part of meritocracy. If you have an inheritance, excluding adoptees, chances are high that your parents are some variety of high-quality stock and you will be too.
I agree that the practice of inheritance is eugenic. And it is probably going to make a better society than a pure meritocracy where everyone is raised by the state starting with no assets (will people still be motivated to make the enormously outsized contributions that make a billionaire, if they cannot pass it down or take it with them?)
But the point of the word "meritocracy" is distill the concept of rewarding people for their individual accomplishments, and explicitly avoiding rewarding them for "higher order" traits (parents, race, sex, age, disability, etc) that correlate well with actual useful contributions and achievements (growing a company, solving an open problem in maths, constructing a house, etc)
If you, the inheritor, are not well adapted to present conditions then you’ll lose all the money and it makes its way to everyone else anyways.
"Well-adapted" is a spectrum. Yes, if the inheritor is a total moron, he will throw away everything passed down on gambling, drugs and alcohol. And if the inheritor is as competent as the progenitor, they will preserve all the wealth. Somewhere in between these levels of adaptedness, there is someone who would not be able to create a large amount of wealth for themselves, but could preserve it.
If you really don't give someone any advantage from an inheritance, then people wouldn't go to such lengths to give their children inheritances.
I consider that there would actually be a lot more meritocracy if there was an effective way to keep coffin-dodgers from spending down most of their children’s inheritance just to hang on to another 4 or 5 years of rapidly decreasing life value. I also reserve blame about this for descendants who are unwilling to just let Mom and Pop die with some dignity.
If you just replaced the word "meritocracy" with something like "utility" or "a better society", I would agree.
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
Both of those statements are true, and are just different ways of framing the same thing. I would say you "gave me your car" because I am fine with the fact that ownership involves depriving other people of an object. If I were OP, it would make sense to frame it you "ceasing to deprive me" because I would abhor what I see as a backwards, oppressive social construct.
Normal people absolutely do use this double-negative framing for more controversial issues. For example a leftist might describe the state not giving someone asylum (Article 14), denying a transgender person gender-affirming healthcare ("trans rights are human rights") as "depriving them of their human rights". I can't give any (mainstream) right wing examples, because standard conservative/libertarian ideology believes that there is a meaningful distinction between "positive and negative rights", and that people are only entitled to negative rights (a conservative would view e.g. free speech as different to the above examples - a state does not "deprive" someone of their right to free speech, because infringing on someone's right to free speech requires them making a positive action to repress them - instead of just passively not giving them something they want)
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
My honest first reaction was simply what I said: “is this guy supposed to be famous or is there some in-group reference I’m missing?”
You're saying that you didn't think to yourself - "that sounds like a Black man" (even given that the topic of the OP was DEI in the US, a practice that heavily rewards Black people)?
Even linking his faculty page like you did would have been a more effective point and IMO a valid comment. In fact, pointing him out as someone with an obvious career stake and bias towards finding bias IS a good point.
Sure, but that is an additional point, going beyond the original comment. The point of the original comment is just to point out that the author is Black - we can infer he has a particular bias towards finding bias because he is a Black intellectual (so the alternatives to systemic racism would be especially unflattering to him) - Magus' point still makes sense even if we couldn't see any of his works/publications.
You might believe that judging him on his race is morally or factually wrong. But I don't think that expressing such beliefs should count as a rules violation if done plainly and in a calm tone, so while this comment is rule-breaking, the implied point should still be expressible on the forum (e.g. if Magus had explicitly said "the author is Black"), without having to add further justifications and context about his career choices, publications, etc
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
... it's clearly not standard and obviously not how [CONCEPT] normally works
Sure, but that doesn't a priori mean it's a bad idea. A lot of the most useful things in rationalism involve taking a normal word, and making a better, non-standard definition that fits better to a coherent concept (e.g. "belief" is just a predictive model of the world)
Do I deprive you of my car? Does my mother-in-law deprive you of the vegetables she grows in her garden? Does my landlord deprive me of the apartment I rent? Do I deprive my employer of the wages I earn? Does a customer deprive a store of the products he buys? Does a hunter-gatherer in a jungle at the other end of the world deprive me of some berries and a squirrel? Do you deprive me of the device you use to post here?
Yes, to all of the above. Not just if we assume OP's worldview, but just in the normal sense of the word - all of these are examples of OP (and me) being deprived of something.
But, under the way the world currently works, these are all things that the respective parties are allowed to deprive OP of.
This is ass-backwards.
I think OP is wrong in wanting to change the system, and also in describing the right to deprive others as the "essential" part of the concept of ownership. But he is right that ownership of X is fully encapsulated by the notion of "having the right to not let others use X".
I just think this falls under the general pattern where people attempt to pathologise normal, functional things by "deconstructing" them and describing them in bizarre, but technically accurate ways ("marriage is a way for a man to control a woman's body", "capitalism is a system where billionaires spend millions on yachts whilst homeless people freeze to death on the streets", "we live in a Eurocentric, cisheteronormative society", "jail is society locking human beings up in cages")
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
the proper way to begin one's political reasoning from: not what you are willing to kill for, but what are you willing to die for
Both of these feel like a strange and arbitrary place to start my political reasoning from (I would start from "what does my Utopia look like?", and then see how close we can practically get to that Utopia when constrained by the laws of physical reality and conflict theory)
But it's a reasonable question anyways, so I'll answer it. I am indeed willing to die for some things, examples off the top of my head:
- To save the life of my own child that survived past infancy
- To save the life of the mother of any of any of my children that survived past infancy
- To avoid a credible threat of being tortured to death
- I would kill myself if I was very sure that nothing was left except pain and misery (e.g. if I had some incurable terminal illness and 3 months to live)
What comes above utilitarian calculus?
But doesn't all of this just fit neatly into utilitarian calculus? If you just assign utility -N for your own death, then if you are willing to die for X, that just corresponds to ~X having a utility -M < -N. I'm not pretending to be some genius rationalist robot man who calculates everything in utilons to make decisions, but the idea of utilitarian calculus is just that all of the rational (in the weak sense, where we don't use logic that leads to contradictions) decisions an agent can make boil down to maximising some utility function (or in practice, a protocol that approximates this maximisation)
in the thought experiment, you will let yourself be shot in the head, instead of capitulating?
Seriously? You're saying if some dictator came into power, and tries to violate your rights (even if you don't even care that much about the object-level thing - like literally just clenching your fists), then you would just steel yourself up, and deny him. That you wouldn't back down - even as the situation escalates to the point where some agent of the state is literally holding a gun to your head? In this situation, you'd just grit your teeth, look your executioner in the eye with righteous anger, and be "nobly" shot in the head - not to avoid even mild physical suffering, or to protect the life of a loved one - but literally just because you've decided that freedom "comes above the utilitarian calculus"?
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
This gets to why having a framework of ownership, and via ownership exclusion is useful!
I agree with your point about ownership, and generally just being allowed to "control your own body" being a useful social construct in most cases. I just disagree with your claim that it is some kind of elegant "natural" law, because actually we all live in a shared reality and all of our actions effect other people, and vice-versa (but often the externalities are so negligible, we can just use the approximation of "live and let live" - e.g. pseudononymous users arguing about politically incorrect topics on an obscure web forum)
Nudists can have spaces where they are nude all day and they can exclude prudes who would be upset by this. Everyone else can have spaces where they exclude nudists.
How do you interpret the nudists not being allowed in public spaces? Is it that you see the public spaces as being owned by the government, so it is the government's right in this case (not as specially privileged actors, but just as the group that happens to own this particular space) to exclude the nudists?
(If that is what you think, can we not just remove people's rights in practice by using the loophole of "excluding" everyone who does(n't) do X from using any kind of public space - "let the transphobes/communists/Catholics construct their own parallel society, without any help from the existing one of course, where they can be transphobic/communist/Catholic all day long")
We've already seen that its possible to exclude people on basis of vaccination status.
But do you think this is morally okay? (why can't the anti-vaxxers "control their own body"?)
Likewise, you can exclude people with 'ugly' tattoos or require them to cover up (but now you've smuggled in the topic of aesthetics which, hoo boy).
From public? I haven't heard of any such laws, not even laws requiring people to cover up tattoos in public (I've certainly seen people walking around with tatoos!)
I didn't mean to smuggle in aesthetics. But even if we allow for the sillier tattoos as having some kind of artistic value, I can think of deliberately shocking and obscene tattoos that I think almost everyone would find "ugly", in the sense it would upset them to see it (perhaps a hyperrealistic image of a penis being split apart by a modified pear of anguish in the urethra)
"Society" can be built on a framework of people agreeing to respect property boundaries and agreeing to abide by rules set by the owners under penalty of exclusion.
It can (it could also be built on a framework of "equality of outcomes", or "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, or even "we should minimise suffering, so we should sterilise everyone and start encouraging people to OD on heroine), but why? I don't see how this framework handles anti-social behaviour that harms society as a whole (like not vaccinating yourself, loitering in public spaces, public nudity, public drug use, etc)
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
I actually know full well that at least I am capable of not capitulating to threats
I don't understand - are you saying that in the thought experiment, you will let yourself be shot in the head, instead of capitulating? And that during COVID you actually didn't follow the rules about distancing, masks, vaccines, etc? (didn't you get in trouble?)
... it's actually slightly less crazy than what many governments in the world tried to do to their citizens
I understand you hold some kind of libertarian principles that make you respond negatively to such acts of government coercion. But surely you are exaggerating here? At least in the COVID case, there was a supposed benefit for this restriction of rights (but in the fist closing example - it is literally just a gangster being drunk on his own power)
But you wanted to paint the people who refused to capitulate to the abrogation of their bodily autonomy as the ones harming society.
So, in the specific case of COVID, I weakly believe that the government response (at least in the UK/US) was disproportionate to the actual severity of the pandemic. I haven't done any research or calculations here, this is just a hunch based on my lived experience (but given your comment, I think you agree with this point, so I'm happy to go along with this premise)
But this is a more general discussion about the principle of bodily autonomy, and in the general case it just seems straightforwardly true that an anti-vaxxer would be harming society. If there is a disease that really is sufficiently deadly (i.e. the mortality rate outweighs the major inconveniences to the entire population of mandatory vaccines, lockdowns, etc), and there is a vaccine that is sufficiently safe and effective - then yes, the government should vaccinate people against this illness (and if they refuse, they should be met with escalating consequences that eventually peak in their death, as is the case for any other illegal activity)
Given what you wrote, I assume you are against the mandatory vaccination purely on the liberatarian principle of bodily autonomy. I agree with you that the feeling of freedom is a good thing, that we all want to have. But I think, like all other good things, it is just N utility points (and N is on a scale of more mundane things, like being able to have a delicious meal each day, or being exposed to lots of sunlight and fresh air), and can just be traded for other kinds of utility. Do you disagree with this? (Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I get the impression that libertarians, and sometimes also normiecons, view "liberty" as something kind of sacred, that is incomparable to other kinds of good things, e.g. New Hampshire's motto)
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
Or, if I'm particularly brave or foolhardy, they don't.
Then what.
Well, then you get killed by the gangster, so in this formulation you maintain "ownership" of your body (at least before you die, then they control it)
And also most people (like me, and I think, in practice, you too) would just close their fist, despite the gangster not having to put much more effort into it than you would - which violates your principle of "I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes."
But isn't it just WAY SIMPLER for us to agree "yeah I control my body, you control yours" without overphilosiphizing it.
For your contrived example, yes. In practice, there is just no incentive for anyone to threaten deadly violence to make someone close their fist. And I'm happy to accept that everyone has the negative right not to have their fist closed without consent.
But if we are going to step out of philisophical thought experiments, then "yeah I control my body, you control yours" is not really that simple. There are a lot of non-silly situations where someone is just, on an intuitive level, "controlling their body", and in doing so causing harm to society:
- Refusing to be vaccinated
- Loitering in public spaces
- Public nudity
- Making a political speech to a large crowd that advances an ideology that worsens society
- Getting visible tattoos that look ugly
I'm sure you would be happy to just allow people to do many of the things on my list, but I disagree that it is some obvious "easy, fundamental, universal concept" that no reasonable person could oppose, on the level of, say, "not torturing people to death because you like to hear them scream"
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
If I have fewer 'steps' to take between the signal I send and the event that occurs, you're surely going to agree that I have 'more' control over that event, no?
The number of "steps" isn't a well-defined concept (if I go into arbitrarily fine detail about the mechanism of a human body I can extend you "having my brain send a signal down my arm" into infinity steps) - I think the only coherent thing this idea corresponds to is how easy it is for you do it.
But there are systems where someone other than yourself could make you close your fists with just the effort of sending brain signals to their voice-box and jaw to speak. They could be a very powerful dictator or gangster, with an established history of extreme and brutal violence, and just order you to do it, or else.
FlyOnTheWall
1yr ago
- Usurp rights over resources (physical or intellectual, materials or people or property) by fiat and, if necessary, by fraud and/or force
- Kidnap (abduct) said resources (e.g., put them into captive situations with no alternative)
- Hold hostage
- Demand ransom
- Release upon payment
This description of Capitalism applies to middle-men (e.g. quant traders, supermarkets, etc) - but it doesn't seem to fit the central example of a business: where it actually creates value by making a resource whose utility is greater than the sum of its raw resources (e.g. a shoe factory). If we treat the raw materials (leathers, rubbers, dyes, etc) as being "usurped and kidnapped", the shoe factory definitely does more than just "hold them hostage" before release.
Also I think it just doesn't make sense to refer to storage/warehousing as "holding hostage". The entire point of holding X hostage (even something non-living) is that you threaten to kill/destroy X unless your demands are met, and when someone pays ransom to release a hostage, they generally do not own the hostage. When I buy something from Amazon, it is so that I can own and use it somehow, at no point does Amazon threaten to destroy the merchandise if I don't pay up (and if they did, they would be met with perplexed indifference)
First, I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies (I agree that there were terminally online people who actively celebrated it, but I am talking about "irl" woke people)
The leftists at my workplace (the kind of place where "Trump is [generally] bad" is just in the groundwater) were very unsympathetic to Kirk. But none of them actually celebrated his death, they (quietly) discussed how he was a bad person, and that he had sort of brought it upon himself (I'm given to understand this is because he was pro-guns) To cherrypick the very worst things said (I'm paraphrasing):
But everyone to my recollection affirmed that it is bad that a human being died. And this general direction of discussion was lightly shut down by another progressive.
But Charlie Kirk was an individual, who personally held the "misogynistic" and anti-LGBT beliefs of a "modal Charlie Kirk" - not all Palestinians share the sentiments (or crimes) of the mode. I'm not saying group punishment is axiomatically immoral, but it is clearly a gray area because it involves punishing innocents. I think it is much more straightforward morally to support punishing a bad person for personally doing a bad thing (I'm not saying Kirk / Muslims do a "bad thing" by holding these views, just addressing this particular line of inference you drew)
But the above is my own disagreement to your logic. If we are looking at the world through a progressive lens:
The bathroom stuff is only one of the flashpoints. Respecting pronouns, concerns about the growing anti-trans (or "transphobic", if we are pathologising it) sentiment, access to hormones, trans children, trans men, non-binary individuals - these are all pretty clearly "flashpoints", and none involve males in female spaces.
As I suspect you are aware, progressives assign a different meaning to the word "woman" and "man" than you do. It is a reference to one's gender identity, and can be unrelated to their chromosomes, sex organs, appearance, etc (i.e. "transgender")
None of these policies benefit men - they benefit (trans) women (at the expense of cis women) One can argue that this is a bad definition, but it is the definition used by progressives - it is what they mean when they say "man" and "woman". So there is absolutely nothing "incoherent" about being feminist and pro trans rights.
Also, on top of that, it's not even incoherent to oppose violence against AFABs and support trans rights. It is possible to have multiple moral goals, for those goals to come into conflict, and to have to choose one over the other:
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