This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's an argument against Utilitarianism only if you ignore 2nd-order effects. (This happens a lot with arguments against Utilitarianism.)
Take the extreme variant of the trolley problem, where a doctor has 5 sick patients who each need a different organ transplant. In the doctor's waiting room, there's a healthy patient. Should the doctor kill the healthy patient and use their organs to save the 5 sick people? After all, it'll be saving 5 lives at the cost of one; Utilitarianism demands that you kill the healthy person, right? It's exactly the same as pulling a lever on the train track to save 5 people, right?
... except no, because no one wants to live in a society where at any moment you can be righteously murdered for your organs. That's an insane way for a society to function. Everyone would be terrified all the time. No one would set foot in a hospital. There'd be constant revenge killings against doctors. Everyone who could afford bodyguards would hire them. Everyone would carry whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Society would collapse in about two days. The outcome is: you get no organ transplants, because you've destroyed the mechanisms that allowed for organ transplants in the first place.
Same thing with Nazi experimentation on live prisoners. The Utilitarian argument against it isn't just "the prisoners suffering is bad", it's that plus "if your society has a policy of experimenting on live prisoners, that generates a bunch of horrific problems", such as:
... so it's very much not an "unalloyed good", even leaving the suffering of the prisoners aside. (For that matter, even if we ignore 2nd-order effects, I'm not sure that the medical advances necessarily do outweigh the suffering of the prisoners! Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.)
It might well be possible to construct a situation where Utilitarianism does give an unacceptable answer. But I don't think this is it. And typically, when these arguments go "Utilitarian says we should do X, which we can all agree has bad consequences" -- that's almost intrinsically self-defeating, because Utiliarianism is all about weighing up the consequences and minimising the badness!
More options
Context Copy link