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I wish this was driven by a fear of aristocracy, but I don't think it is. Many of these same people scream for a dictator of the proletariat. They imagine themselves as the rightful aristocracy because they are just heckin' good people, you know? And if they had absolute power they'd show it to you.
No, the fear of noticing is driven by a paranoia of Eugenics. If we abandon people to the consequences of their choices, or heaven forbid their children, then that's nearly the same as putting them on a train to the nearest extermination camp. No, instead the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them and allow them to have as many kids as they want, and just keep giving them more and more and more forever because resources aren't finite. LBJ won a Nobel Prize for inventing the free lunch.
Yes, it is. This is true regardless of whether you have an IQ-aware society. "No human should ever go hungry, cold and homeless, nor be barred from the joy of raising a family; all else being equal it is always more ethical to help a sentient being get these things if it wants them than not to" should be the common-sense baseline of human kindness, and has nothing to do with true meritocratic hiring vs obfuscating credentialism. People like you who think "some people are dumber than others" is equivalent with "dumb people don't deserve to be happy and safe" is precisely what leftists are afraid of when they try to bury any discourse about the biological basis of IQ and you are making their point for them with this kind of cartoonish psychopathy.
I believe every person deserves to be as happy and safe as they can accomplish themselves. I don't understand why anybody should be charged with doing it for them, especially to their own detriment. That just inverts the roles. You want to make those incapable of taking care of themselves (or their families) my master.
And we're right back to what I was saying. Leftist clamor for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Is a volunteer at an animal rescue center a slave to injured puppies? "Should" and "must" are different words, and you're somehow managing to miss the entire concept of morality - indeed, the entire concept of kindness and helpfulness - by confusing them. There are such things as supererogatory moral goods. There are, too, such things as moral duties which it is incumbent on every man to fulfill but which for various practical reasons always go wrong if you try to mandate them by law. Saying "all human beings deserve happiness" is not the same statement as "you have a duty to wear yourself down to the bone to make all human beings happy" and it is a completely different statement from "the state should be an unconstrained human-happiness-maximizer". "Charity is good" is not a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Is the taxpayer, whose earnings are confiscated to pay for it?
My concern is that WhiningCoil does not recognize that all else being equal it is always good, rather than neutral, for sentient beings to have nice things. What trade-offs one is prepared to countenance in the name of acquiring nice things to give to sentient beings is an entirely different question and not the topic of this thread. Many libertarians take the line of "yes, it is good to give to the poor, it's just that it's also wrong to steal, and one doesn't cancel out the other" and I have no beef with that.
Does heroin qualify as a nice thing? Most of the people addicted to it would probably say so.
One reason most people don't think the state should subsidise people's heroin addictions is because consistent heroin use will inevitably kill the user, or at the minimum destroy their life in every meaningful sense.
Once you accept that it's wrong to subsidise someone else's independent decision to destroy their own life with drugs (perhaps because they're too stupid, through no fault of their own, to know better), it follows that the specific drug they use to do so is almost beside the point. Why would paying someone to kill themselves with heroin not be acceptable, but paying them to kill themselves with alcohol would be A-OK? Why not alcohol, but fast food? Why not fast food, but gambling? Why not gambling, but prostitutes?
That giving poor people money so that they can feed, house and clothe themselves and be fruitful and multiply is the kind, decent thing to do sounds sensible enough on paper. The trouble is that it's remarkably difficult to ensure they will use the money to ensure those needs are met, rather than using it to satisfy base urges which will kill them or destroy their lives.
I can respect that line of argument! But I think you're giving WhiningCoil too much credit. What he said (in a mocking, ironic way) was "the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them". I don't think there is any non-strained reading of his post that rounds out to "it would of course be good to actually feed, clothe and house them, the problem is that programs meant to achieve these things will instead have various unintended negative consequences".
I don't want to put words in @WhiningCoil's mouth. I, for one, would be more than happy to house, feed, clothe etc. poor people in the post-Singularity, post-scarcity gay luxury space communism future that surely awaits us. That society being, of course, the only society in which your policy proposal would actually work, and which wouldn't impose horrific externalities and create perverse incentives for every inhabitant therein.
If I had to parse @WhiningCoil's comment, he was scoffing at the idea that feeding, housing, clothing etc. poor people is the moral thing to do in our universe, with all of its attendant restrictions, limitations and trade-offs. I know that you think the correct approach is to imagine what the right thing to do would be if there were no constraints, and then try to get as close to that target as possible, given the constraints placed upon us. I know because you explicitly told me:
Fair enough. But the thing is: imagining what the right thing to do would be in a universe with no constraints really isn't that hard. Utopias are a dime a dozen, specifically because they skip over all those difficult problems that real life imposes upon us. In light of this, most people (myself included) prefer to just skip the imagining-what-to-do-in-a-universe-without-constraints step, and instead focus on trying to decide the best course of action in our universe, with the constraints we are operating under. But you seem convinced that unless we go through the motions of announcing "this is what the right thing to do would be [in the counterfactual universe with no constraints, limitations or trade-offs]... however, given that we live in a universe with constraints, limitations or trade-offs-"
Dude. We KNOW we live in a universe with constraints, limitations and trade-offs. That's why we're discussing optimal solutions in light of those constraints, rather than wasting our time with navel-gazing on what the right thing to do would be without them. I'm sure I can't be alone in thinking this insistence that we go through the motions of determining what the right thing to do would be in a counterfactual universe with no constraints seems sort of... performative? Do we have to say grace before eating our dinner? Must we do the land acknowledgement before we discuss optimal property tax rates? Do we have to listen to the elevator pitch for your fantasy novel before we can talk about whether or not performing a double mastectomy on a teenage girl is a good idea?*
I know, I know, I know: if we don't reflexively go through the motions of imagining a utopia, we won't notice when we've accidentally created a dystopia. Or as you put it:
But frankly, I don't think anyone here is at risk for advocating the latter position; some of the most moral and decent people I've ever met have been those most acutely aware of the very real trade-offs and constraints life places upon us (while some of the most selfish and inconsiderate were those who spent much of their waking life in hypothetical utopias); and I think your belief that imagining hypothetical utopias is the thing that prevents you from endorsing the democide of starving Ethiopians is both untrue from a psychological perspective and tremendously self-serving.
*My God, imagine if every profession was like this:
Oncologist: In an ideal world, your husband would never have developed prostate cancer. But in our world, he has, and here are your treatment options.
Police officer: In an ideal world, your wife would never have been murdered. But in our world, she has been, and we have a good idea of who did it.
Engineer: In an ideal world, this bridge would never have collapsed. But in our world, it has, and forty-six people are believed to have been killed.
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Finish the sentence.
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It seems to me more likely that they recognize that all else is, in fact, never equal, never has been, and likely never will be.
Solzhenitsyn figured out how to be happy in a death camp. Some Ukrainians in the Holodomor figured out how to be happy while they and their families were intentionally starved to death. These apparent historical facts appear to me to support @WhiningCoil's model of happiness, and undermine the one you are presenting.
Manic people are often happy as they're starving to death too. But being happy while being subject to genocide isn't the default state, that isn't just postulating a hedonic treadmill, it's setting it to overdrive mode in reverse.
Naming a few intellectuals isn't a very strong argument.
The point is that happiness does not derive from material circumstances, in opposition to the underpinnings of the argument that all people "deserve to be happy", contrasted with "every person deserves to be as happy and safe as they can accomplish themselves". I'm not sure the latter is the precise wording I'd nail my flag to, but the former seems profoundly untrustworthy and dangerous.
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Eh, some people are so mentally disabled that I've seen academic philosophers in ethics (certainly left-leaning) seriously consider whether they are capable of even consenting to sex (IIRC, concluding that some of them likely are not). See also related questions about whether some people should not be held morally/legally accountable to certain crimes in the same way (and quite the lengthy jurisprudence at this point specifically with regard to the death penalty). This is and should be a true edge case, not "hurr durr, your IQ is 90, we should sterilize you", but these conversations are often still happening in the open in 'respectable society'. My sense is that it's typically left-leaning people pushing ideas that low IQ means different criminal justice, though I'm not sure if there's much of a partisan lean either way on the consent to sexual relations question.
Sure. But that is not an argument about moral weight - it is not a claim that the mentally disabled deserve the joy of parenthood less than geniuses, that it is all, else being equal, less regrettable for them to be deprived of it than for a clever person to be deprived of it. That is what I find ghoulish. What you describe are arguments about whether certain mentally disabled individuals are even mentally capable of tasting that particular joy without instead expe. "Can dogs safely eat chocolate?" is an entirely different question from "Provided you had a dog that could eat chocolate with no ill effects and liked it, would it be better to give a bar of chocolate to the dog than not to?".
I think it is a moral argument, through and through.
Desert is an even more complicated area of philosophy which is kind of neither here nor there, but let's go back to what I was responding to in your earlier comment real quick:
This is sort of just not true, at least given the sort of academic work I've discussed. They do, in fact, think that there exists a person who is not able to morally consent, which, given the conceptual framework, cashes out as "they should not have sexual relations", and it would be morally wrong if they did. Do not interpret this as assigning any particular blameworthiness at this stage; blameworthiness is yet another separate consideration. That said, I think folks would be getting pretty close to assigning some level of blameworthiness to another individual who helped such a mentally disabled person (who is incapable of morally consenting) have sex, even if they wanted to. There's sort of nothing about desert in here.
I don't think this is really the case. IIRC, the academic work was perfectly happy to stipulate that the hypothetical sufficiently mentally disabled person in question was mentally capable of feeling joy from sex. It was the consent part, the morally-important part (especially to those who think that consent is the be all end all of sexual morality, in which camp this philosopher definitely resided), that was subject to consideration.
Since the academic work was confined to the question of sexual relations, specifically, I don't believe it addressed questions about 'the joy of raising a family', but I think it would be at least coherent to similarly assume that such a person may, indeed, be capable of feeling joy from having children and doing whatever it is that they can do to raise them, but I think that's also kind of neither here nor there if we're in a world where they may not be capable of consenting to sexual relations in the first place. Questions may get even harder if one pokes at the content of what it means to 'raise a family' and to what extent they are able to do that. (I am taking no position on this.)
I think this is emblematic of one of the other issues I had with the entire academic project of distilling all sexual morality down to consent. How broadly does one look for possible ill effects? There were multiple different cases (youth for sure, but some of the discussion touched on other cases) where even he couldn't stop himself from turning it into some sort of empirical test. Vaguely something like whether, say, 'allowing' youth to legally/morally consent to sexual relations generally did more harm to them or not. When one goes down this route, IMO, it's no longer an actual investigation into the philosophy and conceptual nature of consent. It's about being stuck to only having one term in your toolbox to use for all things sexual morality and simply trying to slap it on to cases that one finds objectionable for other reasons (some sense of empirical 'harm' in this case). Letting this sort of thing leak through into the conceptual nature of consent and one's ability to consent opens the door to all sorts of other thorny, even hotter-button issues, where many people (especially left-leaning ones) would vehemently object.
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It would help their legitimacy and they wouldn't be smeared that way if the average leftist didn't think there were vast numbers of people that don't deserve to be happy and safe, just defined on other terms.
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Having children and raising a family are two distinct actions: the underclass tends to excel at the former while stumbling over the latter.
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LBJ never won a Nobel Prize. He was nominated in 1964, but even that nomination was for steering American foreign policy toward international cooperation.
You don't say?
Hey, random question, what's the markdown tag for sarcasm?
/s
:) :) :)
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