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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32423 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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I agree that often duty based ethics is framed in terms of mutual duty. But @Clementine is still correct with the assertion that duty without reciprocity is virtue, not exploitation. You may not be required to discharge your duty towards someone who doesn't discharge theirs to you, but it's still praiseworthy to do so. For example, Judaism and Christianity both depict how God continuously acts benevolent towards humanity despite them not deserving it. This isn't framed as "God is a sucker", but rather as God being the exemplar of virtue whom we should strive to imitate. Not all religions frame things that way, of course, but when you have some 3000 years of one religious tradition which does, it seems fair to call that just as established as the reciprocal duty that you outlined.

This misses the argument previously made.

Religiously-derived deontological ethics aren't a duty towards the person you are doing the virtue towards, but the duty to the god who sets the paradigm of right and wrong action. Other people don't need to reciprocate your execution of virtue because the duty relationship isn't to them, but to god. The execution isn't praiseworthy because the recipients or human observers praise it, but because the worthiness is set by god regardless of the beneficiary.

In turn, the sucker being raised is the deontologist if god does not exist, not god if the deontologist fails. Being the root of deontological legitimacy challenges any premise of obligation to god by those without deontology-setting power, but people who do something on the grounds that derive from god are being suckers if that belief was always wrong, regardless of how socially commendable their niceness may be.

edit: forgot to mention that your explanation of Christianity is very much not how it works, and is in fact a heresy! Salvation is explicitly not something that God owes us because we upheld his law, but rather is a freely given gift. Thus our only choice is to say "yes, I accept" (out of which comes trying to uphold God's laws, again not out of obligation but out of love for him), or to reject his gift (because we would rather do our own thing). Salvation as a gift rather than earned by our conduct is a core tenet of Christianity.

Reciprocal relationships are not the same as obligation relationships, much as they are not synonymous with transactional relationships. The duty (deontological obligations) to god for freely given grace is still a reciprocal relationship, even though it is not a transactional relationship nor does is obligate god in return.

Reciprocal relationships are not the same as obligation relationships, much as they are not synonymous with transactional relationships.

It seems like a lot of your argument hinges on this distinction. Can you elaborate? Because I confess that I can't see the difference you're trying to point to.

This is fundamentally a categorization boundary difference. This is the sort of thing where we may simply have different categorization hierarchies/boundaries.

What you quoted is / was intended to be a reminder against the fallacy of composition without calling it such, since overtly calling on a fallacy can come off as an attack / belittlement. Which was not the intent, but lost some clarity, particularly on the categorization hierarchy.

The fallacy of composition is the error in which what true for a part of a whole is assumed to be true for the whole. It is a common categorization error when sub-sets are conflated with broader overarching categories. What is true for a subset (all dogs are mammals, A = B) does not necessarily apply to the over set (all mammals are not dogs, B =/= A). (Part of the error is that it's not actual the same category in both sets, as 'mammals' and 'all mammals' are not the exact same group- that is, they are not both 'B'.)

Reciprocal relationships are a category of relationships, distinct from other, non-reciprocal relationships. It itself is a subcategory of [relationships]. Reciprocal relationships as a (sub-)category can in turn be broken down into further sub-categories.

Obligation-based and transactional relationships are subcategories of reciprocal relationships. There are additional subcategories as well, types of reciprocity that are also not obligatory or transactional. Mutual love and mutual hatred are both reciprocated relationships that have no intrinsic obligatory or transactional element. More can be found.

The fallacy of composition limits the application of any of them to characterizing the others- what is true for a part (a specific subcategory) is not true for the whole (other subcategories / the broader category). What is true for one subcategory (god's relationship with man is not a specific type of reciprocal relationship, i.e. not a transactional relationship) does not disprove another subcategory, or the overarching category.

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