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Arguably coercive? My friend. We live in a society. It's always been coercive. You see progressives say that they want more diverse sets of people to be permitted to exist, and conservatives say they want to be allowed to force people to all fit a certain mold, and you call the former coercive?
Very well. It may well be. We live in a society until the day we are all so powerful that we no longer need to and can live in deep intergalactic space off the skin of our hydrogen collectors. But don't tell me the society crafted by our forefathers isn't just as coercive if not moreso.
Holy writ? No not by everyone. I expect combat. I expect culture war. I would prefer a peaceful unfolding. But I am here to change the world. Not to coddle it.
I don't expect- I think our world is built up from the tragedies of the violent birth of our species into a hostile world. Our precedents are the sacrifices we have made to keep ourselves alive. And even thinking about it costs energy. Costs scarce resources. Time spent arguing over whether it is time to remove Chesterton's fence is time not spent growing food. The legal system costs millions of dollars and the time of our best and brightest just to print and execute precedent at a grueling rate. I get that it's not cheap. I get that it has value that we have paid dearly for.
But- this is probably because I am an American born in the Live Free or Die state. But I expect people to not terminally value fences- to merely instrumentally value them. Even though I do understand- you can terminally value just about anything.
What I want... I want people to have... reasons beyond inertia or precedent for why things are bad. I want people to actually be interested in understanding why Chesterton's fence is there, and remain aware of when it can, or should be torn down. They don't have to be objectively correct. I don't expect all humans to have the same understanding of good and evil or the same predictions of the consequences of actions. I just want everyone to remain aware and humor the idea that there is a point at which we outgrow the fences we have erected for our safety. I want people to imagine when tearing it down would be viable, so that they can give one another firm expectations of what they have to build if they really need it torn down. If the suppression of trans people and enforcement of gender norms hadn't been so coercive, if conservatives could have made some compromises and set firm expectations for what trans people have to do before they're allowed to remove that fence-
If we had been cooperating on this from the start with clear expectations then this culture war never would have happened.
Of course this is a fantasy. Our history didn't build us up as people who could have cooperated like that.
Skulls? I have seen millennia of skulls. Skulls of the strange and the outliers. Skulls of the weird slaughtered in the name of conformity to make sure food could be grown. Are we simply looking at different skull piles here? I get that sometimes, when the weird grow in power, walking off the beaten path, the food stops getting made, and the skulls become myriad. I am told "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". And I agree, but I also contend- "Do not let the good be the enemy of the better."
Morality? Everyone has one. Get yours now. 50% off. If you don't like having a conscience get rid of it. Don't worry. I won't get rid of mine. If you hurt someone I'll just kill you. If you can erase your conscience without doing that- or want to die- go for it. That's not a threat. It's more... this all just seems so simple to me. We are all here. Just don't let go of the parts you want to keep and they'll stick around. Yes. It doesn't escape me that conservatives are doing the same thing- to a degree. I can appreciate that trans people may have pushed too deeply too quickly for systems to adapt. I can appreciate that where exactly I draw the line is somewhat arbitrary, that some people might not want to let go of the gender binary for reasons more terminal in addition to the pragmatic. But my concern is more the lack of interest some people have in letting the systems ever change to support more types of people. Some people don't seem to be looking for how the world can become better, they are only looking at how the world can become worse.
I have a fetish for novelty. Definitely. Novelty and intensity. Glory, expression, fire, intensity, fearlessness.
Ah, yes. perhaps I do expect other humans to at least taste a hint of why those things are good. Even if they weigh them against other values.
I think conservatives have a fetish for safety. I think many of them have very reasonable takes around safety and sustainability. But I think some of them have a fear-driven blindness to almost everything else that makes the universe wonderful. I think conservatives, as the leaders on caring about safety and sustainability- should have been the ones thinking about global warming. Not necessarily cutting emissions earlier- there were real economic tradeoffs there that merited consideration. But actually recognizing and thinking about the problem. But instead it was fully denied because of the implication that we might have to change the way we live our lives over it. Something has gone horribly wrong- when precedent is the thing blinding us to the safety it was built for. When safety is the thing stopping us from living the lives it was built to preserve.
You:
Also You:
You say you want to tear down restrictions without end. I point out that some of those restrictions are load-bearing, that they're there for very good reasons. You say it's fine, because you're only going to tear down unnecessary restrictions, and of course are totally fine with coercive punishment of bad behavior in all the usual ways, so long as you get to be in charge of judging which restrictions are unnecessary, and which behaviors are bad and deserve suppression through force. You offer zero grounding for those judgements other than your personal aesthetic preferences. You indicate that your judgements are entirely relative and change over time, such that the arguments you make and accept now will not be the arguments you make and accept next month or next year, so any agreement we arrive at is simply a temporary respite between aggressive renegotiations. You appear to be incapable of good-faith agreement, of reaching a solution and then sticking with it long-term. Your positions cannot be reliably predicted in advance, even by yourself, because they do not derive from an axiomatic structure, but rather a meta-structure where the only constant is change.
Those skulls were produced as an apparently-irreducible byproduct of stable, prosperous civilization. The skulls people like you produce come in much larger volumes on much shorter time-scales, and the byproduct they produce is failed states and large-scale immiseration. People arguing that we should ditch the old structures and just figure it out through reason and the scientific method killed somewhere between 100 and 200 million humans in a mere century, and ruined the lives of many hundreds of millions more. They created what was arguably the greatest concentration of misery and injustice the world has ever seen, based explicitly on the logic that you are preaching.
We have reasons beyond inertia and precedent for why we think things are bad. Do you have reasons beyond aesthetic reaction? If so, you have failed to describe them.
...Then we'd be right back here regardless, with you arguing that we did it wrong and the fence has to come down anyway, because your only standard for when the fence comes down is whether you can imagine a different solution working better. Between cold fact and your imagination, imagination will always win, and so you will always vote to gut what we've built to chase your dreams of a brighter world, and to hell with the consequences.
It sounds like you think it's impossible to know that a change will improve things, that it will inevitably kill tons of people, and we shouldn't try. But you seem to be talking about communism and the French revolution and so on. I'm willing to build things up via incrementalism rather than revolution. I'm not willing to stop moving altogether. I am certain that there are restrictions that most people think of as unthinkable to remove, that will prove worthless and die after the thousandth cut to their necessity. But that certainty is just a prediction. Whether I'm right or wrong will be obvious enough when the time comes. If I go crazy and pretend it's obvious when the opposite is true. Stop me. Sorry for the hassle in that timeline. I aim to avoid it.
I'm not here to tear down the wall per se. I'm here to tear down the thing it's keeping out, then share the good news once that's done. And expect that- at that point someone else will tear the wall down for me.
And the thing I keep saying that I want- for people to focus more on what the wall is keeping out than the wall itself, is a good idea anyway. You have to maintain the walls as they rot. And in order to maintain them you have to know what they were for. You have to know whether it's actually true when someone like me says the thing on the other side is dead. You can't just coast on your ancestors cached outputs and assume they will be applicable forever, because even if you wanted to, you can't make the world stand still enough.
Besides, those piles of skulls were made by people who didn't know what the fence was for weren't they? It seems that at some point or another, the people who don't know why the fence is there overdo things in one direction or the other. And we start seeing revolutions and skullpiles.
It depends on what you mean by "improve"; I think moral progress, in the sense most people understand it, is impossible. We can certainly make ourselves richer and more comfortable though. Being richer and more comfortable is not morally better, but if we can do it without compromising our moral values, why not do so?
On the other hand, I think stable, peaceful, prosperous society is not the normal state of humans, and is actually a fairly rare and highly valuable thing. I don't think it happens by accident. I think it's easier to destroy than most people appreciate. If damaged or destroyed, I think it's much harder to reconstruct than people commonly appreciate. I think we should be very, very careful about monkeying with the social systems that serve as its foundation.
Incrementalism is great when you have stable values and axioms, and use incremental adjustments of policy in an attempt to reconcile what is with what ought to be.
You are incrementally modifying the values and axioms themselves. You don't seem to have a fixed understanding of what ought to be. Scott once wrote a parable about "Murder Gandhi" that talks about why this poses a problem for optimization, but the short version is that your opinion of what ought to be is derived from how things are, so if we agree to your proposed changes, you'll just change your proposals and demand further changes. You've declared that you can't possibly be satisfied, so there's no point in attempting to satisfy you. There's no concrete objective you're actually aiming for, and so for those of us that do have such an objective, our best play is to exclude you from the process because you are indistinguishable from a defect-bot.
On a deeper level, you seem to be arguing that most moral states are good, and we should explore as many of them as possible. It seems obvious to me that most moral states are bad; injustice comes in infinite variety, but justice is boring and regular and repetative, one of those stolid, archaic fences you complain about. Notably, justice loses all coherence if the principles behind it are not stable over time. If we do eye for an eye today when you poked my eye out, and then we do mandatory forgiveness tomorrow when I poke your eye out, that isn't a system of justice that anyone is actually going to accept. Your obsession with change destroys the entire foundation of cooperation between individuals; by constantly changing the rules, you remove any incentive to consent to the game.
Why not? Why should murder and rape and thieving not stay illegal and immoral four thousand years in the future, as they were four thousand years in the past? What is gained by changing our principles on them?
Then it should be trivial to point to basic restrictions that have previously been successfully removed. Certainly there is no shortage of historical examples of such attempted abolitions: take the various attempts at abolishing the family, for instance, or the attempts to stamp out religion, or attempts to radically reshape definitions of justice, or property, or economic principles, or sexual/relationship norms. Which attempts to undercut old systems stand out to you as successes worthy of imitation?
Of course, since you have no fixed position, you are immune to contrary evidence. If your proposed changes result in disaster, well, that would just mean we need to change things even more, wouldn't it?
I complain that someone stole my wallet. Friend A says he saw that guy over there pickpocket me, and look, there he is looking through my wallet, we should go over and take my wallet back and maybe kick his ass. Friend B says that the real problem here is that we live in a society where money is needed to satisfy our material needs, and we should all come together to coordinate a general solution to the problem of scarcity and want.
It seems to me that you are claiming that Friend A is "focused on the wall", while friend B is "focused on the thing the wall is supposed to keep out". I call it "dealing with the actual problem", as opposed to "ignoring the actual problem by focusing on pointless speculative abstractions".
Points for nominative determinism, though.
A task made easier if we restrain people like yourself who are actively trying to rot them.
Suppose I told you that you can't just coast on your ancestors' cached outputs and assume they will be applicable forever, which is why you need to respond to my endless arguments about why 2+2 actually equals 5, and that even if you wanted to, you can't make the world stand still enough. Get with the times, man!
Only, that's not how it works, is it? Math doesn't give a fuck what year it is. Correct sums are correct sums in Sumer and in New York City. I observe that it is the same with morals and values: what humans are and what we want does not change over time, neither what is healthy for us, neither what causes us to grow strong and to wither. I can observe that the principles underlying the Code of Hammurabi are entirely clear and sensical to me, and in fact that my own society is built on largely identical principles, with at most only minor adjustments in weighting despite vastly different material conditions, a temporal distance of thousands of years, and a completely alien culture. The historical record argues against you.
They thought they did, they claimed they did, and they convinced a lot of people that they did. Evidence indicates they were mistaken or lying. I think the nature of the mistake (or lie) can be observed and analyzed, and similar mistakes and lies therefore become easier to detect, which is why I'm objecting when I see you making what seem to me to be similar claims. Society is an intricate, alien machine designed to minimize the size of the skull-piles humans naturally produce. The really big piles of skulls happen when people deliberately break that machine in an attempt to get it to do things it can't actually do. That is why demands for outcomes that seem impractical or impossible should be treated with suspicion.
Murder isn't illegal in Minecraft because it's not really murder.
That's about all there is to say about this. There are reasons murder is bad, and they don't apply in Minecraft.
The thing I am talking about has already happened for murder. It hadn't happened for murder for hundreds of thousands of years, and then someone made video games, and all of the sudden, you could kill without consequence.
If you don't think it has happened for murder, then we still aren't on the same page, because I am talking about precisely this sort of thing, the ability to bathe in aesthetics previously associated with evil, without any of the actual evil.
If you don't think there will be a day when you can get stabbed with a knife and laugh, pull it out and heal the wound instantly, that's understandable, but I think there will be such a day, and in that era, the idea of locking someone up for doing something mildly annoying will seem like disproportionate retribution, so we won't.
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