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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38224 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Bullshit. The people who aren't US citizens have some inherent moral worth, even if it isn't as high as a citizen's.

Perhaps to you. But I'm not speaking from your perspective. If it was not clear, I began my post with "I will not...".

What a trivial response. Yes, we all understand that you speak from your perspective. I'm asserting that you are wrong. Or do you claim that your perspective is just that, unfounded and unsupported? Something that has about as much relevance to it as a discussion about one's favorite color?

You asked why employers would not be immoral. I told you why. That you disagree is noted but pointless -- there is no right or wrong in morality save that which we decide. What response are you expecting? I don't care if you think I'm wrong, I wasn't asking you for permission to have my moral values.

I'm expecting some kind of justification or elaboration. Your position is drastically out of the Overton Window, but you assert it as if it wasn't.

You want me to explain my values? It would have been easier if you'd just asked for that in the first place. I don't bother with this often because values, being terminal as they so often are, have no real value being communicated to someone with different intuitions. So I'll answer this for you, but I expect it to not be persuasive.

So, broadly, I reject notions of universal right and wrong. Whether something is moral or not is a personal choice we make for ourselves, which we then pit against the collective opinions of the society around us in the hopes of making our personal aesthetics the community norm. For myself, this moral aesthetic is tribal, with concentric rings of fidelity based on first personal and blood relationships and then on social and symbolic relationships. Me against my brother; my brother and me against our cousin; my brother, my cousin, and me against my town; my town and me against our state; my state and me against.. etc., etc.

The wider out those circles get, usually, the weaker the connection felt and loyalties owed. Furthermore, it is always moral to support an inner ring over an outer ring, provided that support does not violate a different inner ring. Some examples:

If my brother gets in a fight with a stranger, I take my brother's side. If my brother gets in a fight with my sister, I evaluate their conflict on its personal merits and intervene or not as I deem appropriate.

If my town is having a competition with other towns in the region, I support my town. I'll root for my local teams and prioritize local businesses. This extends up to the national boundary: I'll support Team USA over Team France in any given sport, and if I had to pick between the world dying off or America dying off I'd sacrifice the world in a heartbeat.

I am not swayed by any common brotherhood of man, so my widest circle of concern is the country itself. This is also the weakest circle, and it is on the threshold of ceasing to be one entirely due to the culture war; the more proof I see that 'the nation' is not really a coherent group that shares my values anymore, the less I feel a part of it. As it stands, the country is roughly split into Red America and Blue America -- I'm still loyal to Red America, but I've firmly checked out of Blue.

Relating this back to the illegals issue, it is simply not offensive to my moral sensibilities for the in-group to violate the out-group. Illegals have no positive moral worth whatsoever to me. I will not support punishing employers for skimming illegal wages and using them as cheap labor for the benefit of the rest of us. There is nothing you can do to an illegal, as an American citizen, that bothers me, other than helping them get here to begin with.

The wider out those circles get, usually, the weaker the connection felt and loyalties owed. Furthermore, it is always moral to support an inner ring over an outer ring, provided that support does not violate a different inner ring.

If this is the case, then you saying

There is nothing you can do to an illegal, as an American citizen, that bothers me, other than helping them get here to begin with.

is only correct if you also believe that anything action up to and including murder is morally justifiable against an illegal immigrant. Just to be clear, is this the case for you?

Yes, I don't care if someone kills an illegal immigrant. Obviously, the law cares, so you shouldn't take my apathy as a sign you're good to go a-purging.

Your morality is confusing to me because if everyone espoused the same ideology, your position becomes that much more tenuous on this planet. And I don't mean moral position, I mean literal position - your life.

By your standard, there's nothing inherently immoral about someone invading your nation and killing all of its citizens including you. If morality is just a conflict of might to impose on others, then physical might is very much a part of that, and foreigners have no reason to care at all, as opposed to some different morality in which some actions are immoral regardless of who or what the target is.

What you've done is open up your very existence as acceptable for targeting, and you cannot even complain if someone tries it. Your brother is not immoral for trying to kill you if he doesn't think you deserve to live - by his morality, that's perfectly fine. The closest thing I imagine to a world in which this is believed is Hobbes' State of Nature, but your position doesn't even benefit from that resulting ceasefire and eventual peace because you don't allow anyone to actually lower their guard around others.

This is a meta-position on the nature of morality that makes the world actively worse off if everyone actually believed it, and one I suspect is actively informed by your object-level considerations.

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