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 -
No, it's not empirical. Not everything has to be, IMO.
I don't really understand your alien example. If they believed in a god that said humans were cattle to be exploited, I think I would just... disagree? Unless I were somehow converted to their human-hating alien religion? Which I think would be a really hard sell?
Re. caring about X while Y exists, nah, I reject your general point. This always smells like a motte and bailey to me that relies on conflating "nonzero" moral weight with "significant" moral weight.
The motte for this usually imagines a framing like "Why help starving children in famine-stricken Gondwanaland when there are plenty of starving Laurasian war orphans to feed?!" Starving children from any foreign country can be assigned roughly equal moral weight, so it's easy to say "we can care about both without neglecting either." The ratio of caring might be close to 1:1.
A less clear-cut example is "We can care about starving Gondwanan children AND the opiate crisis at home." It's a bit murkier -- who do we have a duty to first? Children overseas? Our own citizens? What about the children of our opiate-addicted citizens? Are they more or less important than starving children overseas? It's debatable, but the ratio her might be 1:2, or 2:3, or 1:4, or something similar. Both are serious problems.
The bailey usually smuggles in some problem of dubious moral weight, e.g. "We can care about both starving Laurasian orphans AND reducing plastic straw usage, you know!" It's impossible to just totally reject doing something about plastic straws, because their impact isn't zero, but it's hard to articulate exactly how much less important reducing plastic straw usage is than feeding starving children (in the opinion of most people outside the Motte, at least). Maybe for most folks the ratio would be something like 1:100, or 1:10,000.
So tl;dr while it's strictly true that you can care about X and Y at the same time, I find that a lot of people who make that argument are trying to steal some of the gravity of (actual) problem X to bolster their pet problem Y.
And so it is with human and animal suffering. Animal suffering is so unimportant to me compared to human suffering that I'd rather round the ratio off to zero rather than have to calculate some absurd number of bovine lives I'd need to save in exchange for the life of a single human.
What I meant was, what if whichever religious figure you respect said they had a revelation from the same God you believe in saying that the aliens had dominion over you?
For the sake of argument, whatever series of factors make you believe that you have dominion over animals on religious grounds, the same factors happened within your own religion, saying the aliens have dominion over you.
Sure, but my point is more about the fungability of efforts to address problems.
There already exists a regulatory body in charge of passing regulations on restaurants, and they have free time. That legislative body can easily pass a plastic straw ban; it is not clear how they would direct that effort instead towards feeding children in foreign nations. They have neither the authority nor the mechanisms nor the expertise to do that.
Perhaps you can imagine firing half the people who work in that regulatory body, re-training them on international diplomacy and supply chains, and assigning them to figure out how to feed those starving foreign children. But there's going to be huge costs to that transition that probably the benefits to those children, those people probably don't want to do that kind of work and wouldn't be good at it anyway (there are reasons people have the jobs/interests they do), and theoretically the regulatory body shouldn't have a lot more staff than it needs anyway to begin with.
So I'm not arguing about the ratio of importance between the two things, I'm challenging the idea that all issues are in competition with each other for resources, and that ignoring one means you are definitely making more progress on another one. Society as a whole isn't perfectly efficient and friction-less like that.
If a straw ban is good and you have a mechanism by which to issue it, but no mechanism by which to transfer the resources for a straw ban into food in the mouths of starving foreign children, you might as well do the straw ban. Saying 'what about the starving children' as a way to oppose the straw ban is disingenuous, if the resources saved by not doing the ban won't actually be used to materially aid teh children instead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link