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My beliefs in regard to moral realism is that ethics are a sort of logically deducible game theoretical solution for the behavior necessary to allow social organisms to successfully live together, and are thus capable of being conditionally true, and moral sentiment is an emotional heuristic for approximating ethical behavior, in the same way that disgust is an emotional heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior.
this would make traffic laws an issue of morality.
there are lots of rules that make us all living together work well, but it doesn't seem like that is a moral rule.
also moral sentiment then is a heuristic for approximating going the speed limit? I don't really understand what you are saying here.
Disgust is a heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior? So when I'm disgusted by the conduct of the people at the capitol last week that's about cleanliness?
Traffic laws are totally an issue of morality. If someone cuts you off, you judge that person as a dick. Just because it's a very mild moral judgment doesn't mean it's not a moral judgment. Severity is a sliding scale.
And you are almost proving my point in regards to disgust; the emotion we have when someone does something morally repugnant is so close to the one we have when someone does something unsanitary that we use the same words for it. This is because they are both emotions that are meant to modulate our behavior based on heuristics.
It's very strange to me that you think that I was indicating that there is something similar between the disgust felt towards the insurrection, and the disgust when I see something gross on the floor. They are super different! It is only a weird artifact of language that we use the same word for both feelings.
Also that is just a bonkers ass thing to say about traffic laws. That it is even a mild moral issue that you drive 45 rather than 46 mph is a very strange position. Also I would contend that "being a dick" isn't really something that I would equate with moral condemnation. Politeness, based on rules of etiquette, is different than morality, and while you may have some overlap between what is polite and what is moral, it certainly isn't a moral issue that you eat your salad with the correct fork. You can have polite bastards, for instance.
I thought it was well-established for years now that moral disgust shares significant overlap with gustatory disgust. They aren't exactly the same emotion, but they're closely related.
Second, regarding traffic laws, showing that sometimes a decision may be reduced down to such a slight degree that it becomes trivial doesn't render the entire domain morally irrelevant. A claim that, for example, "stealing is immoral" may stimulate the response, "yeah? what if I took a penny from your change jar without asking?" It's below the threshold of triviality that warrants giving it any thought.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
+2
ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I am doing a final copy-edit on a paper we submitted and some of these sentences I'm like, damn, how did that ever get in there? That's horrible writing. But it's too late to be like "what if we changed all of our bad sentences to better ones?
It never even occurred to me to question how/why magic worked in that book (or in...any other books). It's magic! The whole point of magic is that it does stuff in a non real way. Sometimes we wanna talk about it being based in conviction so we can tell the reader that our wizards are exceptional and righteous people; sometimes we want it based in study so we can tell the audience that our wizards are intelligent scholars/studios tryhards; sometimes we want it to be a fluke of genetics so we can tell our audience that our wizards are elevated (or singled out for oppression) by an accident of birth.
Of course there's more to it--we can write a gloomy book about necromancy (or a really metal one heh); a hopeful book in which magic is used instead of technology to provide sanitation, food, and drink to cities; an adventure book where magic is mainly contained in hidden artifacts of the ancients.
I suppose the issue of a 'system' is one of 'believability' (certainly not realism, because again, it's magic). If in every scene so far we've been told that generating energy from nothing comes at an impossibly high personal cost, it would be strange to suddenly see someone do that--and of course it sets up the One Chosen Person who can in fact do that, or the Dangerous Artifact that allows someone to do that, or the Dramatic Death when someone violates that rule. But to go beyond that and ask, why does generating energy from nothing come at an impossibly high cost? My answer is, omg who gives a shit! It's magic!
My beliefs in regard to moral realism is that ethics are a sort of logically deducible game theoretical solution for the behavior necessary to allow social organisms to successfully live together, and are thus capable of being conditionally true, and moral sentiment is an emotional heuristic for approximating ethical behavior, in the same way that disgust is an emotional heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior.
this would make traffic laws an issue of morality.
there are lots of rules that make us all living together work well, but it doesn't seem like that is a moral rule.
also moral sentiment then is a heuristic for approximating going the speed limit? I don't really understand what you are saying here.
Disgust is a heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior? So when I'm disgusted by the conduct of the people at the capitol last week that's about cleanliness?
Traffic laws are totally an issue of morality. If someone cuts you off, you judge that person as a dick. Just because it's a very mild moral judgment doesn't mean it's not a moral judgment. Severity is a sliding scale.
And you are almost proving my point in regards to disgust; the emotion we have when someone does something morally repugnant is so close to the one we have when someone does something unsanitary that we use the same words for it. This is because they are both emotions that are meant to modulate our behavior based on heuristics.
It's very strange to me that you think that I was indicating that there is something similar between the disgust felt towards the insurrection, and the disgust when I see something gross on the floor. They are super different! It is only a weird artifact of language that we use the same word for both feelings.
Also that is just a bonkers ass thing to say about traffic laws. That it is even a mild moral issue that you drive 45 rather than 46 mph is a very strange position. Also I would contend that "being a dick" isn't really something that I would equate with moral condemnation. Politeness, based on rules of etiquette, is different than morality, and while you may have some overlap between what is polite and what is moral, it certainly isn't a moral issue that you eat your salad with the correct fork. You can have polite bastards, for instance.
Okay, so first you criticize my position by arguing that I defined disgust too narrowly, and then you turn around and argue the opposite when I try to explain why those terms overlap?
People absolutely take moral offense to violation of etiquette, or at least did in the past. Rules of etiquette are themselves holdovers from times when people would have fatal conflicts over the perception of offense, which is exactly why they became important in the first place. The fact that you don't is because it's not something you perceive as an important rule to follow because we no longer live in an era where most people have deadly duels over perceived offenses or stake their lives on minor social status indicators (at least, not these ones in particular). That's the same thing with the difference in speed limit, which is itself just an arbitrary legal definition trying to enforce something that I think people would rightly recognize as a moral imperative, which is that you should not recklessly endanger other people's lives by driving too fast on a shared road.
In any case, these rules are approximations of an approximation: they're rules that one is supposed to follow in order to prevent moral violations.
So you want to say that people morally object to breaking the speed limit and that when they do they are doing moral objection correctly (that they are reasonably asserting that someone has in fact violated their ethical obligations). If someone came to me and registered their moral objection to driving 46 in a 45 i would hope that i would laugh in their face, because that's just supremely stupid. I mean laws stipulating zoning requirements are moral commandments? Violating building codes is only different in degree than torturing someone to death? Do you see how completely fucking nuts this reads?
Also if you're right, and traffic laws are attempts to fulfill moral obligations that we have, that does not therefore render the traffic laws morally binding. We can do lots of things that could result in keeping our moral obligations, but that doesn't lend doing those things automatic moral worth.
For instance, were I to move to the middle of nowhere, forsake my citizenship and live in a cabin and never come into contact with another human being again, that would be probably super effective at making it so i meet my moral obligations, but I am not therefore morally obligated to do such and failing to do such doesn't result in me having done something wrong.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
0
ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
I have complicated feelings about neuroscience's influence on philosophy, even while thinking it's important.
My beliefs in regard to moral realism is that ethics are a sort of logically deducible game theoretical solution for the behavior necessary to allow social organisms to successfully live together, and are thus capable of being conditionally true, and moral sentiment is an emotional heuristic for approximating ethical behavior, in the same way that disgust is an emotional heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior.
Do you think it's possible to make a true statement about ethics that would still be true if there were no minds in the universe?
I just want to point out that the answer to this can be "no" and you can still be a moral realist, so long as you believe (as I do) that ethics necessarily involve things with minds.
To use an analogy: is it possible to make a true statement about ichthyology in a universe in which there are no fish? No. Does that mean that such statements are necessarily erroneous or meaningless in a fish-laden universe? Also no.
Yeah, just if he answered 'yes' then he had removed the ambiguity and he was definitely a moral realist.
It gets really difficult really quickly to probe extensively at the third category of moral anti-realism, the one where you think moral facts exist by way of thought, while speaking briefly
My beliefs in regard to moral realism is that ethics are a sort of logically deducible game theoretical solution for the behavior necessary to allow social organisms to successfully live together, and are thus capable of being conditionally true, and moral sentiment is an emotional heuristic for approximating ethical behavior, in the same way that disgust is an emotional heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior.
this would make traffic laws an issue of morality.
there are lots of rules that make us all living together work well, but it doesn't seem like that is a moral rule.
also moral sentiment then is a heuristic for approximating going the speed limit? I don't really understand what you are saying here.
Disgust is a heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior? So when I'm disgusted by the conduct of the people at the capitol last week that's about cleanliness?
Traffic laws are totally an issue of morality. If someone cuts you off, you judge that person as a dick. Just because it's a very mild moral judgment doesn't mean it's not a moral judgment. Severity is a sliding scale.
And you are almost proving my point in regards to disgust; the emotion we have when someone does something morally repugnant is so close to the one we have when someone does something unsanitary that we use the same words for it. This is because they are both emotions that are meant to modulate our behavior based on heuristics.
It's very strange to me that you think that I was indicating that there is something similar between the disgust felt towards the insurrection, and the disgust when I see something gross on the floor. They are super different! It is only a weird artifact of language that we use the same word for both feelings.
Also that is just a bonkers ass thing to say about traffic laws. That it is even a mild moral issue that you drive 45 rather than 46 mph is a very strange position. Also I would contend that "being a dick" isn't really something that I would equate with moral condemnation. Politeness, based on rules of etiquette, is different than morality, and while you may have some overlap between what is polite and what is moral, it certainly isn't a moral issue that you eat your salad with the correct fork. You can have polite bastards, for instance.
I thought it was well-established for years now that moral disgust shares significant overlap with gustatory disgust. They aren't exactly the same emotion, but they're closely related.
Second, regarding traffic laws, showing that sometimes a decision may be reduced down to such a slight degree that it becomes trivial doesn't render the entire domain morally irrelevant. A claim that, for example, "stealing is immoral" may stimulate the response, "yeah? what if I took a penny from your change jar without asking?" It's below the threshold of triviality that warrants giving it any thought.
I actually don't know the literature on disgust very well, i am just pumping my own intuition here.
my example with the traffic laws is more about the force operating on me rather than the triviality of it. it is not morally binding, that doesn't mean it isn't binding. in crossing the threshold from 45 to 46 mph, it at least doesn't seem like the same thing in kind as violating moral commandments.
Though I will say my intuitions about normativity are very thoroughly kantian, so in general I think that the domain of the ethical is pretty small, and that most things just aren't properly issues of morality.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
My beliefs in regard to moral realism is that ethics are a sort of logically deducible game theoretical solution for the behavior necessary to allow social organisms to successfully live together, and are thus capable of being conditionally true, and moral sentiment is an emotional heuristic for approximating ethical behavior, in the same way that disgust is an emotional heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior.
this would make traffic laws an issue of morality.
there are lots of rules that make us all living together work well, but it doesn't seem like that is a moral rule.
also moral sentiment then is a heuristic for approximating going the speed limit? I don't really understand what you are saying here.
Disgust is a heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior? So when I'm disgusted by the conduct of the people at the capitol last week that's about cleanliness?
Traffic laws are totally an issue of morality. If someone cuts you off, you judge that person as a dick. Just because it's a very mild moral judgment doesn't mean it's not a moral judgment. Severity is a sliding scale.
And you are almost proving my point in regards to disgust; the emotion we have when someone does something morally repugnant is so close to the one we have when someone does something unsanitary that we use the same words for it. This is because they are both emotions that are meant to modulate our behavior based on heuristics.
It's very strange to me that you think that I was indicating that there is something similar between the disgust felt towards the insurrection, and the disgust when I see something gross on the floor. They are super different! It is only a weird artifact of language that we use the same word for both feelings.
Also that is just a bonkers ass thing to say about traffic laws. That it is even a mild moral issue that you drive 45 rather than 46 mph is a very strange position. Also I would contend that "being a dick" isn't really something that I would equate with moral condemnation. Politeness, based on rules of etiquette, is different than morality, and while you may have some overlap between what is polite and what is moral, it certainly isn't a moral issue that you eat your salad with the correct fork. You can have polite bastards, for instance.
Okay, so first you criticize my position by arguing that I defined disgust too narrowly, and then you turn around and argue the opposite when I try to explain why those terms overlap?
People absolutely take moral offense to violation of etiquette, or at least did in the past. Rules of etiquette are themselves holdovers from times when people would have fatal conflicts over the perception of offense, which is exactly why they became important in the first place. The fact that you don't is because it's not something you perceive as an important rule to follow because we no longer live in an era where most people have deadly duels over perceived offenses or stake their lives on minor social status indicators (at least, not these ones in particular). That's the same thing with the difference in speed limit, which is itself just an arbitrary legal definition trying to enforce something that I think people would rightly recognize as a moral imperative, which is that you should not recklessly endanger other people's lives by driving too fast on a shared road.
In any case, these rules are approximations of an approximation: they're rules that one is supposed to follow in order to prevent moral violations.
So you want to say that people morally object to breaking the speed limit and that when they do they are doing moral objection correctly (that they are reasonably asserting that someone has in fact violated their ethical obligations). If someone came to me and registered their moral objection to driving 46 in a 45 i would hope that i would laugh in their face, because that's just supremely stupid. I mean laws stipulating zoning requirements are moral commandments? Violating building codes is only different in degree than torturing someone to death? Do you see how completely fucking nuts this reads?
Also if you're right, and traffic laws are attempts to fulfill moral obligations that we have, that does not therefore render the traffic laws morally binding. We can do lots of things that could result in keeping our moral obligations, but that doesn't lend doing those things automatic moral worth.
For instance, were I to move to the middle of nowhere, forsake my citizenship and live in a cabin and never come into contact with another human being again, that would be probably super effective at making it so i meet my moral obligations, but I am not therefore morally obligated to do such and failing to do such doesn't result in me having done something wrong.
If you were anybody else, I'd ask "do you not know what the word 'heuristic' means?"
But I'm sure you do, so I can't really grok what you're doing here. The term heuristic by definition implies approximation, estimations, and imperfections; so fine-tuning to the level of granularity where we're pointing at a 2% difference in speed and asking "is this immoral?" or pointing to specific laws like building codes seems to be dramatically missing Winky's point.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
anyway, i'm going to go make some gnocchi with sage brown butter
later you bunch of degenerate perverts
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
+4
ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderatormod
It never even occurred to me to question how/why magic worked in that book (or in...any other books). It's magic! The whole point of magic is that it does stuff in a non real way. Sometimes we wanna talk about it being based in conviction so we can tell the reader that our wizards are exceptional and righteous people; sometimes we want it based in study so we can tell the audience that our wizards are intelligent scholars/studios tryhards; sometimes we want it to be a fluke of genetics so we can tell our audience that our wizards are elevated (or singled out for oppression) by an accident of birth.
Of course there's more to it--we can write a gloomy book about necromancy (or a really metal one heh); a hopeful book in which magic is used instead of technology to provide sanitation, food, and drink to cities; an adventure book where magic is mainly contained in hidden artifacts of the ancients.
I suppose the issue of a 'system' is one of 'believability' (certainly not realism, because again, it's magic). If in every scene so far we've been told that generating energy from nothing comes at an impossibly high personal cost, it would be strange to suddenly see someone do that--and of course it sets up the One Chosen Person who can in fact do that, or the Dangerous Artifact that allows someone to do that, or the Dramatic Death when someone violates that rule. But to go beyond that and ask, why does generating energy from nothing come at an impossibly high cost? My answer is, omg who gives a shit! It's magic!
yeah as long as the story doesn't constantly turn on magical things that don't fit with how the rest of the story has worked, i don't need the midichlorians, and in fact i think the midichlorians are almost always stupid and detract from the magic
My beliefs in regard to moral realism is that ethics are a sort of logically deducible game theoretical solution for the behavior necessary to allow social organisms to successfully live together, and are thus capable of being conditionally true, and moral sentiment is an emotional heuristic for approximating ethical behavior, in the same way that disgust is an emotional heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior.
this would make traffic laws an issue of morality.
there are lots of rules that make us all living together work well, but it doesn't seem like that is a moral rule.
also moral sentiment then is a heuristic for approximating going the speed limit? I don't really understand what you are saying here.
Disgust is a heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior? So when I'm disgusted by the conduct of the people at the capitol last week that's about cleanliness?
Traffic laws are totally an issue of morality. If someone cuts you off, you judge that person as a dick. Just because it's a very mild moral judgment doesn't mean it's not a moral judgment. Severity is a sliding scale.
And you are almost proving my point in regards to disgust; the emotion we have when someone does something morally repugnant is so close to the one we have when someone does something unsanitary that we use the same words for it. This is because they are both emotions that are meant to modulate our behavior based on heuristics.
It's very strange to me that you think that I was indicating that there is something similar between the disgust felt towards the insurrection, and the disgust when I see something gross on the floor. They are super different! It is only a weird artifact of language that we use the same word for both feelings.
Also that is just a bonkers ass thing to say about traffic laws. That it is even a mild moral issue that you drive 45 rather than 46 mph is a very strange position. Also I would contend that "being a dick" isn't really something that I would equate with moral condemnation. Politeness, based on rules of etiquette, is different than morality, and while you may have some overlap between what is polite and what is moral, it certainly isn't a moral issue that you eat your salad with the correct fork. You can have polite bastards, for instance.
Okay, so first you criticize my position by arguing that I defined disgust too narrowly, and then you turn around and argue the opposite when I try to explain why those terms overlap?
People absolutely take moral offense to violation of etiquette, or at least did in the past. Rules of etiquette are themselves holdovers from times when people would have fatal conflicts over the perception of offense, which is exactly why they became important in the first place. The fact that you don't is because it's not something you perceive as an important rule to follow because we no longer live in an era where most people have deadly duels over perceived offenses or stake their lives on minor social status indicators (at least, not these ones in particular). That's the same thing with the difference in speed limit, which is itself just an arbitrary legal definition trying to enforce something that I think people would rightly recognize as a moral imperative, which is that you should not recklessly endanger other people's lives by driving too fast on a shared road.
In any case, these rules are approximations of an approximation: they're rules that one is supposed to follow in order to prevent moral violations.
So you want to say that people morally object to breaking the speed limit and that when they do they are doing moral objection correctly (that they are reasonably asserting that someone has in fact violated their ethical obligations). If someone came to me and registered their moral objection to driving 46 in a 45 i would hope that i would laugh in their face, because that's just supremely stupid. I mean laws stipulating zoning requirements are moral commandments? Violating building codes is only different in degree than torturing someone to death? Do you see how completely fucking nuts this reads?
Also if you're right, and traffic laws are attempts to fulfill moral obligations that we have, that does not therefore render the traffic laws morally binding. We can do lots of things that could result in keeping our moral obligations, but that doesn't lend doing those things automatic moral worth.
For instance, were I to move to the middle of nowhere, forsake my citizenship and live in a cabin and never come into contact with another human being again, that would be probably super effective at making it so i meet my moral obligations, but I am not therefore morally obligated to do such and failing to do such doesn't result in me having done something wrong.
Things can be morally relevant on an incredibly small scale. People get angry at someone going over the speed limit in front of their house all the time, because what matters are the moral implications of the behavior.
Where did I say that traffic laws were themselves morally binding? I pretty specifically said that traffic laws are an approximation to prevent moral violations by prescribing behavior.
Do you think that there are more and less important moral judgments to make? You can also simply disagree that a traffic law is effective at preventing a moral violation, but that doesn't mean that isn't what it was intended to do, that only means you judge it to be ineffective at what it is trying to do.
Also your last paragraph is quite completely missing the point what with how my initial claim you had offense to was that moral sentiment was a heuristic meant to allow people to successfully live together in a society...
My beliefs in regard to moral realism is that ethics are a sort of logically deducible game theoretical solution for the behavior necessary to allow social organisms to successfully live together, and are thus capable of being conditionally true, and moral sentiment is an emotional heuristic for approximating ethical behavior, in the same way that disgust is an emotional heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior.
this would make traffic laws an issue of morality.
there are lots of rules that make us all living together work well, but it doesn't seem like that is a moral rule.
also moral sentiment then is a heuristic for approximating going the speed limit? I don't really understand what you are saying here.
Disgust is a heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior? So when I'm disgusted by the conduct of the people at the capitol last week that's about cleanliness?
Traffic laws are totally an issue of morality. If someone cuts you off, you judge that person as a dick. Just because it's a very mild moral judgment doesn't mean it's not a moral judgment. Severity is a sliding scale.
And you are almost proving my point in regards to disgust; the emotion we have when someone does something morally repugnant is so close to the one we have when someone does something unsanitary that we use the same words for it. This is because they are both emotions that are meant to modulate our behavior based on heuristics.
It's very strange to me that you think that I was indicating that there is something similar between the disgust felt towards the insurrection, and the disgust when I see something gross on the floor. They are super different! It is only a weird artifact of language that we use the same word for both feelings.
Also that is just a bonkers ass thing to say about traffic laws. That it is even a mild moral issue that you drive 45 rather than 46 mph is a very strange position. Also I would contend that "being a dick" isn't really something that I would equate with moral condemnation. Politeness, based on rules of etiquette, is different than morality, and while you may have some overlap between what is polite and what is moral, it certainly isn't a moral issue that you eat your salad with the correct fork. You can have polite bastards, for instance.
I thought it was well-established for years now that moral disgust shares significant overlap with gustatory disgust. They aren't exactly the same emotion, but they're closely related.
Second, regarding traffic laws, showing that sometimes a decision may be reduced down to such a slight degree that it becomes trivial doesn't render the entire domain morally irrelevant. A claim that, for example, "stealing is immoral" may stimulate the response, "yeah? what if I took a penny from your change jar without asking?" It's below the threshold of triviality that warrants giving it any thought.
I actually don't know the literature on disgust very well, i am just pumping my own intuition here.
my example with the traffic laws is more about the force operating on me rather than the triviality of it. it is not morally binding, that doesn't mean it isn't binding. in crossing the threshold from 45 to 46 mph, it at least doesn't seem like the same thing in kind as violating moral commandments.
Though I will say my intuitions about normativity are very thoroughly kantian, so in general I think that the domain of the ethical is pretty small, and that most things just aren't properly issues of morality.
@LoserForHireX Ah, got it. I think I understand a little better after this post.
Well, far be it from me to put words into Winky's mouth, so I'll put my own spin on it and hopefully I don't mangle what Winky is saying too much.
Driving recklessly puts people at risk and is therefore generally immoral. I think we'd probably agree that driving 90mph through a 25mph school zone is immoral, because putting other people at extreme risk of injury is immoral even if you don't actually hit anybody.
However, operationalizing that proscription against reckless driving into the law means making a lot of silly compromises, like setting speed limits estimated on insufficient empirical data and deciding for aesthetic/comprehension purposes that those speed limits all be integer multiples of 5. Meanwhile driving at all is almost always going to put other people at more risk than not driving, so we're really just finding arbitrary points on a curve where the amount of risk is more or less acceptable. That acceptable risk is culturally mediated, it's negotiated between drivers and insurance companies and police and the government, and much of it is based on intuition.
Therefore, speed limits are imprecise estimations of a pseudodemocratic consensus regarding what an acceptable amount of risk might be.
In the same way, we might see that "don't steal" and "don't kill people" are imprecise estimations of the intuitive moral senses of our cultures. Those moral senses differ between subcultures and individuals - some people think that killing people is okay if they're stealing from you and others don't.
We try to operationalize these into laws, but only the goosiest of legal positivists believe that laws are perfect reflections of objective morality.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one....why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house, doesn’t a car occupy scarce space? Doesn’t it deprive the others who use the roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn’t it lose its use value when everyone uses his or her own?
...If the car is to prevail, there’s still one solution: get rid of the cities. That is, string them out for hundreds of miles along enormous roads, making them into highway suburbs. That’s what’s been done in the United States. Ivan Illich sums up the effect in these startling figures: “The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes. Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”
The Valentine representing my particular obscure fetish
For the record, if I actually believed the statement:
"were I to move to the middle of nowhere, forsake my citizenship and live in a cabin and never come into contact with another human being again, that would be probably super effective at making it so i meet my moral obligations"
then I would argue that yes, in fact, you are morally obligated to do exactly that... and that yes, failing to do so results in you having done something morally wrong.
But I don't agree with with the scenario as described. It assumes that there are no positive moral obligations that you're neglecting by going hermit. Most of us at least have social ties with other people - my mom and my girlfriend would miss me a lot if I disappeared into the Sierra Nevada.
More complicated is the question of what moral obligations do we owe strangers? This is something I've grappled with all my life. I don't know what the right compromise is between self-interest and altruism, but I know that the optimal formula isn't one in which altruism=0. We have some amount of moral obligation to make the lives of other conscious entities better, even though I couldn't tell you what that amount is, and fucking off into a hermit cabin is reneging on that obligation.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
My beliefs in regard to moral realism is that ethics are a sort of logically deducible game theoretical solution for the behavior necessary to allow social organisms to successfully live together, and are thus capable of being conditionally true, and moral sentiment is an emotional heuristic for approximating ethical behavior, in the same way that disgust is an emotional heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior.
this would make traffic laws an issue of morality.
there are lots of rules that make us all living together work well, but it doesn't seem like that is a moral rule.
also moral sentiment then is a heuristic for approximating going the speed limit? I don't really understand what you are saying here.
Disgust is a heuristic for approximating sanitary behavior? So when I'm disgusted by the conduct of the people at the capitol last week that's about cleanliness?
Traffic laws are totally an issue of morality. If someone cuts you off, you judge that person as a dick. Just because it's a very mild moral judgment doesn't mean it's not a moral judgment. Severity is a sliding scale.
And you are almost proving my point in regards to disgust; the emotion we have when someone does something morally repugnant is so close to the one we have when someone does something unsanitary that we use the same words for it. This is because they are both emotions that are meant to modulate our behavior based on heuristics.
It's very strange to me that you think that I was indicating that there is something similar between the disgust felt towards the insurrection, and the disgust when I see something gross on the floor. They are super different! It is only a weird artifact of language that we use the same word for both feelings.
Also that is just a bonkers ass thing to say about traffic laws. That it is even a mild moral issue that you drive 45 rather than 46 mph is a very strange position. Also I would contend that "being a dick" isn't really something that I would equate with moral condemnation. Politeness, based on rules of etiquette, is different than morality, and while you may have some overlap between what is polite and what is moral, it certainly isn't a moral issue that you eat your salad with the correct fork. You can have polite bastards, for instance.
I thought it was well-established for years now that moral disgust shares significant overlap with gustatory disgust. They aren't exactly the same emotion, but they're closely related.
Second, regarding traffic laws, showing that sometimes a decision may be reduced down to such a slight degree that it becomes trivial doesn't render the entire domain morally irrelevant. A claim that, for example, "stealing is immoral" may stimulate the response, "yeah? what if I took a penny from your change jar without asking?" It's below the threshold of triviality that warrants giving it any thought.
I actually don't know the literature on disgust very well, i am just pumping my own intuition here.
my example with the traffic laws is more about the force operating on me rather than the triviality of it. it is not morally binding, that doesn't mean it isn't binding. in crossing the threshold from 45 to 46 mph, it at least doesn't seem like the same thing in kind as violating moral commandments.
Though I will say my intuitions about normativity are very thoroughly kantian, so in general I think that the domain of the ethical is pretty small, and that most things just aren't properly issues of morality.
LoserForHireX Ah, got it. I think I understand a little better after this post.
Well, far be it from me to put words into Winky's mouth, so I'll put my own spin on it and hopefully I don't mangle what Winky is saying too much.
Driving recklessly puts people at risk and is therefore generally immoral. I think we'd probably agree that driving 90mph through a 25mph school zone is immoral, because putting other people at extreme risk of injury is immoral even if you don't actually hit anybody.
However, operationalizing that proscription against reckless driving into the law means making a lot of silly compromises, like setting speed limits estimated on insufficient empirical data and deciding for aesthetic/comprehension purposes that those speed limits all be integer multiples of 5. Meanwhile driving at all is almost always going to put other people at more risk than not driving, so we're really just finding arbitrary points on a curve where the amount of risk is more or less acceptable. That acceptable risk is culturally mediated, it's negotiated between drivers and insurance companies and police and the government, and much of it is based on intuition.
Therefore, speed limits are imprecise estimations of a pseudodemocratic consensus regarding what an acceptable amount of risk might be.
In the same way, we might see that "don't steal" and "don't kill people" are imprecise estimations of the intuitive moral senses of our cultures. Those moral senses differ between subcultures and individuals - some people think that killing people is okay if they're stealing from you and others don't.
We try to operationalize these into laws, but only the goosiest of legal positivists believe that laws are perfect reflections of objective morality.
So either it's the case that we are pointing out that rules of behavior tend to, when properly abstracted away, rest on moral obligations (like the general rule of not harming) in which case I'm not sure that it says much about what the moral rules are or what moral rules themselves are to claim this. Except maybe you want to say that a moral obligation undergirds all social rules, which strikes me as wrong, but okay.
Or you are saying that social rules ARE moral obligations, in which case, that seems wrong.
One of the features of a moral rule is that it is morally binding, such that we are justified in saying that you have done something immoral if you break them. This doesn't seem like the binding force on traffic laws, or zoning laws, or rules of etiquette, or any other higher order social rule. Burping out loud is rude, not wrong. I'm inclined to be sympathetic to the first case, that of social rules being sort of based on moral rules. However, I don't know that really gets us anywhere, we still don't know what the content of the moral rules is, and we can maybe assert that it means that there must be moral rules, but that argument is circular because you have to assume there are to make the claim in the first place. Also it doesn't really deal with the issue of being bound, as it's perfectly consistent to say that breaking this approximate inelegant rules is totally fine as long as you don't break the real important rules underneath.
In effect, pointing out this basis for social rules results in a big so what?
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Also a thing that may confuse things a bit is that I am differentiating ethics from morality/moral intuition, as I think they are different things where moral intuition is an imperfect approximation of logically derivable ethics, and I think laws are a mix of imperfect and sometimes arbitrary approximations of both moral intuition and ethics. I realize this may be backwards compared to the way philosophers often think about it, where they're trying to derive ethics by looking at their moral intuitions, but I look at it the way a cognitive psychologist might where behavior is generally formed from a lot of imperfect heuristics meant to approximate reality. We find something disgusting because it looks or smells vaguely like something that might make us ill, not necessarily because we understand germ theory, etc.
I also think of ethics more as a calculus than a set of universal rules; you have a set of actors with goals they want to achieve and things they want to prevent and relative amounts of power over each other and you calculate a way for them to reach their best cooperative conclusion. Morality, being a heuristic approximation of this, however, has an easier time dealing in hard and fast rules or by matching a perceived situation with a way to behave that will create the ideal outcome, and in any situation moral intuition has to deal with imperfect information. Hence why I think morality can be subjective while I think ethics is ultimately objective but difficult to compute.
The cresting wave of cottagecore tradwife egirls is really quite breathtaking
I'm being radicalized and I need to blame women
/pol/ was so fucking mad that "Pelosi dressed those two clerks who kept the ballots up like tradwives" lol
I mean never mind that but I do think that the appearance expectations and norms of female political staffers are fucked up. Any industry that mandates high heels, dresses, and makeup from its women as a daily outfit and does not genuinely accept an alternative (e.g. you probably wouldn't get fired but it would be very abnormal and people might have words with you about your outfits) feels messed up to me.
Achilles was as straight as Paris' arrow. Achilles fought that Amazon chick for three days and three nights until he finally stabbed her in the heart. As she laid dying in his arms on the battlefield, in that fleeting moment, they fell in love.
I also think that the ethical thing to do can sometimes appear morally repugnant to us the same way that life saving medicine might taste disgusting and make us want to gag; our heuristic that works the vast majority of the time simply fails in this situation.
+1
SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
Posts
Oh god, i’m not even acquired
I’m a pretty good onion i guess
I thought it was well-established for years now that moral disgust shares significant overlap with gustatory disgust. They aren't exactly the same emotion, but they're closely related.
Second, regarding traffic laws, showing that sometimes a decision may be reduced down to such a slight degree that it becomes trivial doesn't render the entire domain morally irrelevant. A claim that, for example, "stealing is immoral" may stimulate the response, "yeah? what if I took a penny from your change jar without asking?" It's below the threshold of triviality that warrants giving it any thought.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Of course there's more to it--we can write a gloomy book about necromancy (or a really metal one heh); a hopeful book in which magic is used instead of technology to provide sanitation, food, and drink to cities; an adventure book where magic is mainly contained in hidden artifacts of the ancients.
I suppose the issue of a 'system' is one of 'believability' (certainly not realism, because again, it's magic). If in every scene so far we've been told that generating energy from nothing comes at an impossibly high personal cost, it would be strange to suddenly see someone do that--and of course it sets up the One Chosen Person who can in fact do that, or the Dangerous Artifact that allows someone to do that, or the Dramatic Death when someone violates that rule. But to go beyond that and ask, why does generating energy from nothing come at an impossibly high cost? My answer is, omg who gives a shit! It's magic!
So you want to say that people morally object to breaking the speed limit and that when they do they are doing moral objection correctly (that they are reasonably asserting that someone has in fact violated their ethical obligations). If someone came to me and registered their moral objection to driving 46 in a 45 i would hope that i would laugh in their face, because that's just supremely stupid. I mean laws stipulating zoning requirements are moral commandments? Violating building codes is only different in degree than torturing someone to death? Do you see how completely fucking nuts this reads?
Also if you're right, and traffic laws are attempts to fulfill moral obligations that we have, that does not therefore render the traffic laws morally binding. We can do lots of things that could result in keeping our moral obligations, but that doesn't lend doing those things automatic moral worth.
For instance, were I to move to the middle of nowhere, forsake my citizenship and live in a cabin and never come into contact with another human being again, that would be probably super effective at making it so i meet my moral obligations, but I am not therefore morally obligated to do such and failing to do such doesn't result in me having done something wrong.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Yeah, just if he answered 'yes' then he had removed the ambiguity and he was definitely a moral realist.
It gets really difficult really quickly to probe extensively at the third category of moral anti-realism, the one where you think moral facts exist by way of thought, while speaking briefly
I actually don't know the literature on disgust very well, i am just pumping my own intuition here.
my example with the traffic laws is more about the force operating on me rather than the triviality of it. it is not morally binding, that doesn't mean it isn't binding. in crossing the threshold from 45 to 46 mph, it at least doesn't seem like the same thing in kind as violating moral commandments.
Though I will say my intuitions about normativity are very thoroughly kantian, so in general I think that the domain of the ethical is pretty small, and that most things just aren't properly issues of morality.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
If you were anybody else, I'd ask "do you not know what the word 'heuristic' means?"
But I'm sure you do, so I can't really grok what you're doing here. The term heuristic by definition implies approximation, estimations, and imperfections; so fine-tuning to the level of granularity where we're pointing at a 2% difference in speed and asking "is this immoral?" or pointing to specific laws like building codes seems to be dramatically missing Winky's point.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
later you bunch of degenerate perverts
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
yeah as long as the story doesn't constantly turn on magical things that don't fit with how the rest of the story has worked, i don't need the midichlorians, and in fact i think the midichlorians are almost always stupid and detract from the magic
Things can be morally relevant on an incredibly small scale. People get angry at someone going over the speed limit in front of their house all the time, because what matters are the moral implications of the behavior.
Where did I say that traffic laws were themselves morally binding? I pretty specifically said that traffic laws are an approximation to prevent moral violations by prescribing behavior.
Do you think that there are more and less important moral judgments to make? You can also simply disagree that a traffic law is effective at preventing a moral violation, but that doesn't mean that isn't what it was intended to do, that only means you judge it to be ineffective at what it is trying to do.
Also your last paragraph is quite completely missing the point what with how my initial claim you had offense to was that moral sentiment was a heuristic meant to allow people to successfully live together in a society...
@LoserForHireX Ah, got it. I think I understand a little better after this post.
Well, far be it from me to put words into Winky's mouth, so I'll put my own spin on it and hopefully I don't mangle what Winky is saying too much.
Driving recklessly puts people at risk and is therefore generally immoral. I think we'd probably agree that driving 90mph through a 25mph school zone is immoral, because putting other people at extreme risk of injury is immoral even if you don't actually hit anybody.
However, operationalizing that proscription against reckless driving into the law means making a lot of silly compromises, like setting speed limits estimated on insufficient empirical data and deciding for aesthetic/comprehension purposes that those speed limits all be integer multiples of 5. Meanwhile driving at all is almost always going to put other people at more risk than not driving, so we're really just finding arbitrary points on a curve where the amount of risk is more or less acceptable. That acceptable risk is culturally mediated, it's negotiated between drivers and insurance companies and police and the government, and much of it is based on intuition.
Therefore, speed limits are imprecise estimations of a pseudodemocratic consensus regarding what an acceptable amount of risk might be.
In the same way, we might see that "don't steal" and "don't kill people" are imprecise estimations of the intuitive moral senses of our cultures. Those moral senses differ between subcultures and individuals - some people think that killing people is okay if they're stealing from you and others don't.
We try to operationalize these into laws, but only the goosiest of legal positivists believe that laws are perfect reflections of objective morality.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
🚗 🔨
oh neat i found one of the worst things
you're in court for sedition and the judge is reading your list of charges ASMR
"were I to move to the middle of nowhere, forsake my citizenship and live in a cabin and never come into contact with another human being again, that would be probably super effective at making it so i meet my moral obligations"
then I would argue that yes, in fact, you are morally obligated to do exactly that... and that yes, failing to do so results in you having done something morally wrong.
But I don't agree with with the scenario as described. It assumes that there are no positive moral obligations that you're neglecting by going hermit. Most of us at least have social ties with other people - my mom and my girlfriend would miss me a lot if I disappeared into the Sierra Nevada.
More complicated is the question of what moral obligations do we owe strangers? This is something I've grappled with all my life. I don't know what the right compromise is between self-interest and altruism, but I know that the optimal formula isn't one in which altruism=0. We have some amount of moral obligation to make the lives of other conscious entities better, even though I couldn't tell you what that amount is, and fucking off into a hermit cabin is reneging on that obligation.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This is that bird what comic
I love that this meme works regardless of whether or not you know what Jesse is talking about.
i keep rereading it and sensibly chuckling to myself
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So either it's the case that we are pointing out that rules of behavior tend to, when properly abstracted away, rest on moral obligations (like the general rule of not harming) in which case I'm not sure that it says much about what the moral rules are or what moral rules themselves are to claim this. Except maybe you want to say that a moral obligation undergirds all social rules, which strikes me as wrong, but okay.
Or you are saying that social rules ARE moral obligations, in which case, that seems wrong.
One of the features of a moral rule is that it is morally binding, such that we are justified in saying that you have done something immoral if you break them. This doesn't seem like the binding force on traffic laws, or zoning laws, or rules of etiquette, or any other higher order social rule. Burping out loud is rude, not wrong. I'm inclined to be sympathetic to the first case, that of social rules being sort of based on moral rules. However, I don't know that really gets us anywhere, we still don't know what the content of the moral rules is, and we can maybe assert that it means that there must be moral rules, but that argument is circular because you have to assume there are to make the claim in the first place. Also it doesn't really deal with the issue of being bound, as it's perfectly consistent to say that breaking this approximate inelegant rules is totally fine as long as you don't break the real important rules underneath.
In effect, pointing out this basis for social rules results in a big so what?
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I also think of ethics more as a calculus than a set of universal rules; you have a set of actors with goals they want to achieve and things they want to prevent and relative amounts of power over each other and you calculate a way for them to reach their best cooperative conclusion. Morality, being a heuristic approximation of this, however, has an easier time dealing in hard and fast rules or by matching a perceived situation with a way to behave that will create the ideal outcome, and in any situation moral intuition has to deal with imperfect information. Hence why I think morality can be subjective while I think ethics is ultimately objective but difficult to compute.
I'm being radicalized and I need to blame women
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Oh, the Sailor Moon approach
/pol/ was so fucking mad that "Pelosi dressed those two clerks who kept the ballots up like tradwives" lol
Eddy supports gay-baiting, a practice prohibited both by social rule AND moral obligation
I was also mad, but for different fetishistic reasons
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
I mean never mind that but I do think that the appearance expectations and norms of female political staffers are fucked up. Any industry that mandates high heels, dresses, and makeup from its women as a daily outfit and does not genuinely accept an alternative (e.g. you probably wouldn't get fired but it would be very abnormal and people might have words with you about your outfits) feels messed up to me.