Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
"Morality" refers both to abstract morality and to morality-in-practice i.e. the belief that the universe is fundamentally moral and good things happen to good people. These should not be conflated. God did not define Good, but the fact that we can look around and see a fundamentally Good universe is still evidence of God.
Right, but then the inference is hypothetico-deductive ("If God exists, then good things to good people; good things happen to good people; which is some evidence that God exists") which is different from a deductive argument ("If morality exists, God exists; morality exists; therefore, God exists"). These are very different arguments both in logic and content.
Of course, different Christian intellectuals have different arguments.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I think that what you are describing is what the vast majority of Christians actually believe. It's not so good for Christian intellectuals trying to use morality in various ways to support their claim that God exists (because you're not an ethical deviant or impotent, are you?!).
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I absolutely agree, but the natural Christian response is that 100s AD Malaysians did not deserve a shot at accepting grace, nor do moderns deserve to see tangible miracles. The key thing about grace is that it is not what anyone fairly deserves. God is going beyond what people deserve and giving a gift.
(There are other responses, like saying that there are other ways to salvation than through Christ, but they struggle with the standard Christian interpretation of e.g. John 3:16.)
But a supremely benevolent being would give all his creations at least of a chance of accepting grace.
The Christian followup to this point is: how do you know? Then you might say, "How do you know that God isn't just playing a cruel joke on you, so that heaven is just a great big spider in front of a dark glass?" And then, arguments for God's existence aside, their answer is "Faith." And then you can say, "That is not a reliable way of knowing things."
So the theodical debates end with the epistemic debates, AFAIK, which is why I find epistemology more interesting than things like the Problem of Evil, even though the point you raise is actually the original one that made me doubt Christianity as a child. (The best explanation of God's restricted grace is not his inscrutable will of gifting, but that Jesus was a Jewish prophet living near the Red Sea who didn't have access to mass communication to reach the whole nations.)
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I'm definitely not a fan of the Divine Command Theory, but I think you're being unfair here. Why not posit a difference in degree of disobedience? Surely murdering someone is more disobedient than committing adultery in your heart.
What's more disobedient about it? Both are breaking God's commandments.
On Matthew 22, the key term here is magos (μεγας) which is used in the New Testament to mean largest or highest in rank, just as "greatest" is ambiguous in English. One clever thing about the commandment Jesus gives is that it is both largest in scope (every violation of every other commandment is an instance of it) and rank. If humans truly had complete faith and love for God, then they would neither commit adultery in their hearts, nor murder.
Note I'm not saying that this is common sense, but just a natural implication of an unranked DCT.
I think the better question is why you'd give your own interpretation of Divine Command Theory any time at all, given the many times in the Bible when it's explicitly contradicted.
Oh, that's just teasing! Don't be so coquettish, show the goods.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Sure, I'm not trying to argue that Christianity is plausible. If anything, I suppose my most point is that Christianity is far weirder than people (including many Christians) think. This can make it harder to argue against in a fair-minded way, but it doesn't help with its plausibility.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
That's giving people a right to be wrong, which is different from respecting their beliefs.
And the aesthetics. Maybe Lynch is responsible for my instinct on this issue (I saw his film before I read the books) but I have always thought of the Dune universe as vivid. Giedi Prime is black and putrid green. The women are beautiful. The Baron is disgusting. The worms are huge and alien. Paul is expressive and vibrant (ok, that really doesn't match the books, but film is a different medium). The spice-coloured eyes are glowing blue.
Also, though Lynch's film misses the moral ambiguity, it works really well as a portrayal of the Dune story as the Fremen themselves might tell it thousands of years later. Paul is a supernatural hero who saves the universe and then instantly brings rain. He understood the power of words, which were literal sound guns! Jamis? Who is Jamis?
It's the same sort of selection and compression that means that our idea of what Moses or Buddha was like could be hilariously different from what a god's eye narrator would tell us.
Lynch's Dune is like a first girlfriend for me, so I judge it by different standards. It was one of the fist science fiction films I saw as a young child, along with Star Wars and bits of the original Star Trek films (I was too scared by those to watch them all the way through until later). Lynch's Dune didn't make a lot of sense to me, but no grown-up films made 100% sense to me at that point, and what I could understand was exciting, inspiring, and mentally stimulating. The weirdness probably helped to make me a sci-fi fan; in particular, of that sort of "alternative societies" and "mythology in SPAAACE" sci-fi. Were it not for the queering of sci-fi, I suspect I'd still be a fan of new sci-fi books; as it is, there is a wealth of stuff from when sci-fi offered ideas that I couldn't find in a SLAC.
I actually wrote entire novellas (30+ pages) in notebooks when I was about 10, which were basically ripoffs of Lynch's Dune ("except mine is on COLD planets... And there are these shadow-aliens from a parallel universe...") which in retrospect is less embarassing when I consider that this was before I knew about fan fiction and that telling your own stories in other people's fictional universes/stories is a perfectly natural, very old way for imagination and fiction writing skills to develop.
In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines
This is a debate that we could probably have for years, but I like the idea that the Honored Matres were not running from machines and that the Butlerian Jihad wasn't even about Skynet-style enemies. Rather, the Jihad was about maintaining human significance and freedom in a future with AI (how speculative!) and the Honored Matres were running from MANY powerful factions in the Scattering, of which they were a relatively minor one. The latter would exemplify the success of the Golden Path: no power, not even the Honored Matres (who sweep the Old Empire in short order) can gain supremacy over all humanity after what Leto II did. The Scattering is the end of such threats. This wouldn't be the only way for the Golden Path to succeed, but it would be the most dramatic, as well as dizzying the reader with the thought that the Honored Matres are just a minor faction in what humanity has become.
This does raise the question of an antagonist for Dune 7. I like the idea of something like the advanced Face Dancers, who present more of a philosophical threat to humanity - a species that can adopt countless personalities, but is never truly any of them, like the difference between hearing a recording of your dead parent's voice and hearing them speak new words. AI as an enemy was already explored by lots of people by the time Herbert was writing the later Dune novels; I think he'd want something weirder and more original as an antagonist, just like the Spacing Guild, Bene Tleilax, Bene Gesserit, Honored Matres, and of course Paul Atredis.
I agree on all these points. My main concern with the first film was how bland things tended to be in terms of aesthetics, acting, and culture. This film improved:
(1) Somewhat on aesthetics. I liked the Harkonnen stuff. I liked the biomorphic technology: a recurring theme in Herbert's work is the idea of making a plausible future by implementing or magnifying tropes inspired by recurring patterns in human history (aristocracy, verbal manipulation, women attaining power through manipulation and intrigue rather than brute force etc.) and biomorphic technology is all around us without us noticing, e.g. velcro.
(2) Acting. The actor playing Feyd was weird in a good way, Paul's mother was suitably insane and menacing, Javier Berdem is a god of acting, and even Zendaya was less flat (acting-wise).
(3) Culture. Lots of time with the Fremen and the Harkonnens. I wanted more Islamo-futurism and I got it. My main complaint would be that the Harkonnens should have had more Spartan themes. While that doesn't fit the books, I think it (a) helps audiences to understand how the Harkonnens represent a dehumanized future with an alien culture, where humanity is ceasing to be recognisable to us, and (b) gives more explanation of the Harkonnen appeal, given that the wild sex, drugs, and rock n roll weren't going to be represented on screen. Dune One showed how the Harkonnens rule by fear, but no empire survives on fear alone; Dune Two gave more hints of what Harkonnen culture and legitimation might be like, but I wanted more, especially if it satirises modern Spartan cults. Ideally, I would have liked more discipline, more survival of the fittest, more homeroticism, to extents that offend gymbros and wokists alike.
Any Dune film is going to be full of missed opportunities. This film missed somewhat fewer than the first.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Who is "we"? This is a thread about Christian nationalism.
As I understand it, the standard Christian position is that nobody deserves salvation, but God sometimes grants it. So the Christian answer is that there is no reason. Whether that is satisfying is another debate, but it's an important aspect to understand if one is going to understand them charitably: from a Christian perspective, God is not morally obliged to save anyone. In fact, from a Divine Command Theory perspective, the very notion of moral obligations for God is a category mistake, like a moral obligation for the number 11. God behaves morally not because he is obliged to e.g. keep his promises, but because that is what a supremely benevolent being does. In contrast, from a Christian perspective, a supremely benevolent being does not necessarily save anyone from the consequences of their nature which he created.
Not all societies are created equal, and there are varying degrees of misalignment. If I look at a woman in lust, I am clearly sinning and am condemned; but at least my desires are in alignment with God's ideal. It is only the object of my desires that is inappropriate, as being attracted to my wife is not only not a sin, but is a key part of a relationship that is a representation of Christ's love for the Church. Same-sex attraction is more disordered as both the object and the desire itself are misaligned. Transgenderism is completely disordered: the object, desire, and self are all misaligned.
This sounds like ranking sins, which is commonsensical and popular in e.g. Catholicism, but hard to reconcile with ideas like the Divine Command Theory of ethics. If what's wrong with sinning is disobeying God, then committing adultery in your heart is bad in exactly the same way as raping and murdering a baby. There's no moral sense in which you are better or worse than the cruellest, most perverted person you can imagine; the only possible difference of moral significance between you and a baby-raper-killer is that God may have chosen (and I stress "chosen") to save you from what you morally deserve. Focusing on e.g. the difference in harms is swapping the DCT for something like consequentialism or care ethics.
(I leave aside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagianism and non-DCT metaethics as interesting but very widely condemned by Christians.)
If Jesus or the Bible had provided a comprehensive ranking of sins with varying degrees of sinfulness, then it's obvious consistent with a Christian DCT, but as you know that's not the case.
Societies that venerate increasingly disordered behavior will inevitably sink into corruption and decay.
I think that this is the better option for what you want to say. Even if all sins are equally sinful, you can still coherently argue that different societies have different propensities to sin vs. redemption. A hardline Christian DCT fan can still reason in a consequentialist way about maximising the probability of redemption and minimising the probability of sins.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
A person who does that to have sex with an animal? Not meaningfully different from the case where the person initiates.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Agreed. But how do we know that something is or is not?
That's hard to answer unless the standard of "knowledge" is sufficiently defined for the context. We know quite a lot about child psychology in general, which is sufficient for setting general laws and ethical norms for child behaviour. Of course, these get ambivalent and complex at edge cases, e.g. a 16 year old and a 15 and 11 months old can presumably satisfy any ethical demands that anyone might reasonably have for sex, but it still makes sense to have a law at 16 (or 15 or 18 or whatever) that makes sex acts between them technically illegal.
Substance use is a very tricky part of both Westen and Wertheimer.
The gambling and drunk example is an interesting one and you give a clear introduction to it. I'd be quite happy to forbid physical casinos from admitting the heavily intoxicated. For online casinos, such a rule isn't worth enforcing, so to me it's regrettable but inevitable (given that the restrictions on freedom from banning online gambling would be so great) that sometimes drunk people will e.g. go broke gambling online.
LOL! Nah, tho. They're Aella-based and enlightened-pilled. They'll be as happy as all get out to describe how sex-positive they are about all the sex they chose to have. "Even the sex I kind of regret was good in its own way, and I'm glad to have had the choice," or whatever. See the NYT article that I linked in one of my comments that I linked way back up in our earlier conversation.
Depends on the person, but the Aella example is pertinent: my suggested method could be opening Pandora's box (pun not intended).
I mean, this is going to go very poorly for you. You've sort of given up the game that you can have the same level of understanding of sex (and presumably the gravity and breadth of any moral implications), but somehow, those children still can't attain some mystical additional "sophistication"?! Like, what? How does this even work? What religious magic is this?
I never suggested that sexual partners should have the same understanding of sex, only more than that possessed by a child.
Fair enough. We might be doomed, you and I, regardless of whether we can actually complete this project. They're probably going to do what they're going to do, regardless of whether we actually have a rigorous argument that children can't consent. Mayyybe, it miiiight help, but probably they'll just find some way to ignore it or minimize it anyway. Of course, it doesn't help that their counter to, "Children can't consent," is something short and pithy like, "Why not? They consent to all sorts of stuff!" whereas our counter to their counter is, "Well see, if you understand this complicated rigorous argument that fixes all the prior issues with not being able to analogize this situation to intoxication and avoids falling into the trap of, and... and..." I guess we really just are doomed to the fate of being right (ya know, if we can fix all of the problems in the project, which I'm still not seeing yet) but ground under an unstoppable cultural force.
At the very least, "Why do you think that children can choose radical medical interventions but not minor sexual acts?" is a simple yet effective question in some debates. Of course, there will be people blind to thinking through the issues raised by the question, but it's an analogy worth drawing.
As for our historical fate, I'm reminded of Allan Bloom in the Closing of the American Mind, when he takes inspiration from Irish monks in the Dark Ages. They were unable to contribute much to the stock of human knowledge, nor to solve the problems of their times, but they lovingly preserved certain ideas and texts, thereby greatly influencing the history of Western Europe and ultimately the world. If those Irish monks did what they saw as their duty, then it seems like others in less hopeless circumstances can do likewise.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
To be clear, the moral requirements are upon those who are human, specifically, and not those who are able to consent, right?
As I assume you wouldn't be okay with children having sex with animals (since you think both are unable to consent)?
Not specifically humans, no. If Vulcans existed, they would also have moral requirements.
But you're fundamentally right: being unable to consent to sex is not a sufficient condition for being outside the realm of moral responsibility. However, in most plausible examples, a child who engages in sexual acts with an animal (and hasn't been specifically told not to etc.) likely doesn't understand what they are doing, so should be treated as someone who did something wrong without knowing. I think this is common sense: if you saw your 7 year old daughter doing things with your dog, you'd treat her very differently from your 70 year old neighbour doing things with your dog, and one of the pertinent differences is their likely degree of understanding what they are doing.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I wouldn't condemn the animal ethically, any more than I'd condemn the weather ethically for having a storm when I'm sailing and breaking my back. Would you?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Of course not. But what aspect of that is relevant to make the distinction below? They still can surely consent to all sorts of things, even having generally weaker understanding.
Agreed, but obviously not everything is beyond a child's understanding.
Expand on this. I'm considering Activity X, and I want to know about the gravity and breadth of the moral implications. How do I check where it falls? How do I connect this to the particular aspect of the weaker ability that you identified in the above question?
That's hard to answer in the abstract, because different activities have different moral aspects. I think that value pluralism is a plausible explanation of why moral issues can be so complicated, and (almost?) any moral principle seems to be riddled with contextual defeaters. However, there are some recurring aspects. One of them, which might suggest somewhat of a convergence with a "harm to children is the (main?) reason to think that pedophilia is wrong" is that the harms involved in making a bad decision.
Analogously, think about someone who is blind drunk, staggering back from a nightclub on their own. Should they be able to buy a greasy, fatty, sugary kebab? Well, there's some potential harm to their health, but they can plausibly comprehend that, if they're able to e.g. exchange the cash. Should they be able to hand over all their assets to support the charitable works of the Church of Latter Day Suckers in a legally binding and irrevocable contract? Presumably not, that's a level of commitment and potential harm that's beyond their capacity in that context.
Are you aware that, as I mentioned in the linked comment far above, many people think that sex is like tennis? It's just a fun activity that two people choose to do, expecting to have a little bit of a good time, and then nothing interesting follows from it. They don't think there's any gravity to it, and certainly not any breadth of any moral implications... at least not to anyone who isn't a sex-negative prude (probably due to religious superstition). How would you perform the gravity and breadth of moral implications analysis in your explanation to them?
That's a tough one, I think that's what a lot of people say, but not what they actually believe. So I'd start by talking with them about their own personal sexual choices and emotional history. Then I'd probably get slapped in the face...
There is a funny irony here: some (mentally able) adults, especially among the young, the unwise, or the unconservative, don't have a much better understanding of sex than children, yet they can still consent to sex. However, (a) edge cases make bad laws and (b) I don't claim that a sophisticated understanding of sex is required for consent, only a stronger one than children can attain.
Of course, I am pleased that you do not hold a consent-only sexual ethic. Of course, that does also open up the question of whether there are other areas that do not abide by a consent-only sexual ethic. It is truly a shame that you will be a cancelled bigot as soon as this is found out.
Depends on the circles. I was teaching about labour exploitation and sex in a class not long ago; it was the left-wing students (albeit not Americans and not liberals) who almost all found it quite easy to reject a consent-only view in both areas. I also know a lot of left-wing academics and I'm not sure that any of them think that consent is all there is to sexual ethics, though I admit I haven't talked with them a lot about it for years (if ever).
I only hope that the two of us can figure out a really careful, theoretically-solid reason for this, preferably within a consent-only framework, because without it, when we tell the new social revolution that children can't consent to sex, they're going to ask why not, and then they're going to shun us for not having an answer and for being a bunch of outdated bigots (probably clinging to some religion or something).
Not sure about that. Eugenics wasn't killed off by carefully reasoned arguments, nor did the careful reasoning of e.g. James Fitzjames Stephens do anything significant against the influence of John Stuart Mill's muddled views and the rise of social liberalism. Outside of the sciences (Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origins are masterpieces of thoroughness; they were rightly once included in some Great Books courses) I struggle to think of many books that were both theoretically solid and very influential in the course of history.
Rigorous arguments are great and I'm glad that people are developing them, but I think that their historical influence is limited, for both good and ill.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Are you opposed to animals having sex with each other?
No, because I don't make the same moral requirements of animals as I do of humans. "It's wrong for humans to have sex with a non-consenting partner" doesn't imply "It's wrong for animals to have sex with a non-consenting partner," any more than "It's wrong for humans to torture mice for their amusement" implies "It's wrong for cats to torture mice for their amusement."
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Ok, what is the nature of the mental capacity that they are lacking?
Not sure what you mean by "nature" here. Do you deny that children, in general, have weaker abilities to understand the implications of their decisions than adults, in general?
Is there something about sex that requires a different type of mental capacity than what is required for children to consent to the variety of other things that they can consent to?
Yes, probably quite a lot of things, but one major respect (which I alluded to with the example of becoming a heroin addict, and which I later suggested with the example of transgender interventions on kids) is the gravity and breadth of the moral implications. A child consenting to buying sweets without parental supervision is a less serious decision than a child choosing to have sex. This is one reason why parents, as a general rule, should have a lot of social and legal authority over children. Why doesn't that authority extend to choosing to let (or require) children have sex, without the child's consent? That's a good example of where a consent-only ethics (or legal doctrine) falls short and something like a harm or corruption principle does work.
Can you help explain the theoretical mechanism to me and to the professional philosophers who have written entire books on this topic, but seem to have just missed the super simple and super obvious way of doing this?
(1) There's no reason to expect it to be super simple and super obvious.
(2) In many (all?) of those professional philosophers, they have various background moral beliefs that (a) lead to implications they don't want regarding pedophilia/pederasty/etc., but (b) they'd rather hold onto at least most of them. You correctly alluded to some examples, e.g. their desire to avoid being X-ophobic or (perhaps worse for some people) being regarded as X-ophobic. As you might have guessed from my presence on here or my comments on how I find male homosexuality physically disgusting, I'm less worried about that than a lot of people.
(3) Professional ethicists are seeking a level of rigour that is neither required for law, nor that I expect from my own moral beliefs. It's akin to how I don't need to know professional physics or engineering to do DIY. If you're aspiring to that level of rigour, then great; I only hope you don't have better things to do with your time than working out really carefully why it's wrong to have sex with children.
Yes, I think this is one of the problems with people thinking they believe, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," without actually believing that: "consent" gets gerrymandered in this real ways. Liberals (as a movement) did a similar inflation with "justice": if you think that the state should not direct society, but merely address injustices, yet you're really more of a social democrat, then you start talking about "social justice" meaning redistribution of income etc.
Utilitarianism can also get pretty silly doing the same sort of thing.
It's almost like a sort of expansion principle: try to push too much ethical gas into one container (ethical principle) and that container gets expanded by the pressure. It's somewhat of a blessing, insofar as it limits the extent to which many people follow through on the implications of these narrow views. Then you get a really rigorous thinker like Peter Singer, who takes such a view seriously and thinks it through, and the pearl clutching from the gerrymanderers begins...
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
You mean, why can't children and animals consent to acts they lack the mental capacity to understand?
Before you ask, no, I don't think that retarded adults with childlike levels of understanding of sex can consent to sex. Nor do I think that children can consent to e.g. "have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents!" So neither of the reductios you have mentioned so far are worrying for me, but as I've indicated, I'm probably not the type of person you were addressing above, which was why I was curious as to whether you were addressing me when you used "you" or you were using it in some hypothetical/indirect sense/whatever.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Ah, well, then I'm sure you have some other, non-consent reason why children can't have sex. That's fair enough, but it's a bit surprising considering your comment that I responded to. There, it seemed like the pertinent question (which is the only question to the consent-only folks) was about consent
Your confusion seems to be because you are missing the distinction between "inability to consent is a sufficient reason for children not to have sex" with "lack of consent is a necessary condition for sex to be wrong." It may help you to do some work on pen-and-paper using Venn diagrams: for example, you see how "All non-consensual sex is wrong sex" is logically distinct from "All wrong sex is non-consensual sex."
Similarly, that consent is one pertinent question in sexual ethics doesn't imply that it's the only question.
I also suspect that even many people who sometimes say, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," actually make exceptions for things like "power dynamics" and "developing bad habits," but I'm not interested in rationally reconstructing their views.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic
How are you using the word "you" here?
I have never subscribed to a consent-only sexual ethic.
But all of them are punished in exactly the same way, according to traditional Christianity. So while there is more disobedience, it doesn't seem to make a moral difference: someone who commits one sin is treated by God exactly the same as if they've committed them all.
If all other sins (breaking of God's commands) are implicit in the first commandment, then it isn't.
That's one possible interpretation of the text. However, the text itself is not a contradiction, since it's not clear that Jesus is saying that these are more morally important, as opposed to e.g. important for spiritual development (the context is condemning the religious practices of scribes and Pharisees.
Biblically? One advantage is that it (allegedly) explains why a benevolent Father would punish his children in a lake of fire for the slightest infraction of his will, excepting grace. More generally, it neatly answers the Problem of Evil which otherwise perplexes the Bible (Job in particular; the Jews' efforts to explain their suffering in spite of being God's people; Jesus's partial revelation to humanity) as there is no separate standard of morality by which God can be judged. On a DCT view, God being anything other than perfectly good is a category mistake. This is not so much grasping one of the Euthyphro Dilemma's horns as try to ride it off into the sunset.
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