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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Because people who don't exist do not get to make moral judgements, so existing isn't just moral, it's pre-moral.

Taken seriously, this forbids dying for any cause, or even risking your life / shortening it by a couple of minutes for any cause. I definitely believe morality has an objective basis outside of people's minds, similar to math. Otherwise, how does morality survive at all? Even if your choices are moral when you're alive they vanish into nothingness when you die, so how are they ever moral in the first place? Realistically they are moral (or immoral) whether or not anyone is around to observe them and consider them as such.

But I think our fundamental disagreement isn't about those levels but about purely selfless sacrifice which I indeed view as immoral.

I don't think any sacrifice is purely selfless. Besides extremely evil people, even the worst that humanity has to offer shares plenty of values with me. Saving them grants me utility.

I agree we can't pump infinite resources into self-destructive people. If the threshold for blue were higher and harder to coordinate I might change my answer. But 50% is pretty attainable, and was attained in the original poll.

Taken seriously, this forbids dying for any cause, or even risking your life / shortening it by a couple of minutes for any cause.

Yet none of that is in the premise of the question. We don't get fully automatic luxury communism if >50% of the people choose blue. There's no carrot, only stick. The options are live or die, and there's a simple choice between choosing the former and risking the latter.

What I was saying there had nothing to do with the red/blue pill question.

There's no carrot, only stick.

The carrot is saving everyone rather than only those who coordinate around red.

The carrot is saving people who chose the stick, from the stick?

Yes?

how does morality survive

It's eugenic. Platonism isn't needed to explain it at all.

Saying a choice is moral without context is saying morality is true a priori, and Kantianism is heavily flawed. I take the empiricist view on this one. It's just a social behavior.

You choices vanish into nothingness when you die

Let's not reach into such wild assumptions, please.

Even the worst that humanity has to offer there's plenty of values with me

I'm not sure how I should take this. But we definitely disagree that most of humanity is inherently worth taking a risk for. Much less one that would require high trust.