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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23377 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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There a fun dramatic little scissor statement happening in the rationalist / post rationalist corner of twitter at the moment. Started by @_brentbaum talking about his girlfriend's high agency:

i learned something about agency when, on my second date with my now-girlfriend, i mentioned feeling cold and she about-faced into the nearest hotel, said she left a scarf in a room last week, and handed me the nicest one out of the hotel’s lost & found drawer

I, and many others, chimed in saying hey wait a second... this is actually kind of concerning! Some of the negative responses:

  • not to burst your bubble but isn't this kinda stealing?
  • you can just steal things
  • I suspect your about to learn a lot of things

and my personal favorite:

  • was it shaped like a giant red flag?

As I said though, this is apparently a scissor statement because a ton of people also had the OPPOSITE reaction. Some examples:

  • God damn
  • She's a keeper
  • my wife is exactly like this

etc etc.

Now the reason I find this fascinating is that it's one of the clearest breakdowns between consequentialists and virtue ethicists I've yet seen in the wild. Most people defending the girl of 'scarfgate' are basically just saying "what's the harm? nobody ever goes back for those scarfs. besides they're like $20 most of the time anyway."

Unfortunately a lot of folks get drawn into this argument, and start saying things like well, what if somebody comes back for it later and it's gone? Or what if someone's grandma knitted them that scarf?

To me, going down the consequentialist route is doomed to fail. You can justify all sorts of horrible things in the name of consequentialist morality. (Same with deontology, to be fair.) My take is that this is wrong because she directly lied to someone's face, and then proceeded to steal someone else's property. The fact that most people think it's cute and quirky is probably down to a sort of Women are Wonderful effect, imo, and then they use consequentialism to defend their default programming that women can't be bad.

Either way, curious what the Motte thinks? Is scarfgate just salty sour pusses hating on a highly agentic women? Or are there deeper issues here?

This really is one of those cases where 'imagine if the genders were reversed' actually tells us something- and that something is not positive. There are definitely things that are less bad when a woman does it, but this really doesn't seem like one.

It doesn't necessarily ring that way for me. The kind of guy that will break into a campus building so you two can... "watch the stars" on the roof. Or the type of guy that goes backpacking for a few months in developing countries, street smart can adapt. Lying your way into a club or fancy party. All sorts of things that happen in rom-coms. There's a spectrum between goodie two shoes and felony lowlife.

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