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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   35760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Judith Butler is putting an unbounded demand for empathy as default and defining everything else as cruelty. You can't get it with me anymore. I can see the transparent attempt at manipulation. I didn't want to be a cruel person, but if I want anything for myself I have to be. Empathy requires reciprocal return. Why should I care for people who hate me and want to see me destroyed?

Everyone pushing defect ends poorly. Beyond utility, there is virtue.

Well said. At the end of the day, acting virtuously is good in and of itself. The fact that many people don't understand this any more is a key cause of decay in our society.

I think there is a trap for the Republicans: being virtuous losers. Upstanding polite candidates like Romney are smeared as misogynistic "vulture capitalists" "who are going to put black people back in chains" and bear it with dignity. Then he loses and presumably is comforted by knowing he went high when they went low.

Rather than being virtuous, maybe the Republicans should win even if that means ratfucking the Democrats. The term "ratfucking" being invented to describe what you should do to win.

They probably will do that, because politicians (regardless of affiliation) are just about the most amoral, do-whatever-it-takes people in existence. But they shouldn't do that. If morality means anything at all, you must stick to it even when it is personally inconvenient. It is far better, morally speaking, to be a virtuous loser than a vicious winner.

But they shouldn't do that. If morality means anything at all, you must stick to it even when it is personally inconvenient.

Even non-divine command deontological systems depend on the rule being a good thing overall. It's fine for a rule to be bad sometimes.

But if the rule you followed consistently brings you and all you value to defeat it is not a good rule.

If you're worried about outcomes, you really aren't in deontology land any more. You're in consequentialism land. Which is fine, but... that isn't deontology.

no deontologists exist because no one pulls morality from the ether; the deontologists of today are little more than traditionalists who have adopted consequence tested morality from their ancestors

the "deontologists" of yesteryear who picked suicide duties and rules are gone, forgotten, and irrelevant

Oh goody! I get another opportunity to share this gem of a paper.

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