Are we cut out for universal morality?
nautil.us
nautil.us
I didn't see a definition of "tribalism" in the article. I see references to the "January insurrection" and vague references to other "far-right" things.
If you go back to Plato's Euthyphro, you see the character Euthyphro on his way to testify against his own father for mistreating a criminal. This is a very early "moral" moment in our intellectual history; it was practically inconceivable that a son would take such a position against his own father. I'd feel comfortable calling it "anti-tribalist," and it isn't so obvious whether Euthyphro is pursuing the right course.
If you look at the laws of practically every developed country, there is no "tribalism." Given the vagueness of the authors target, I suspect what he'd rather say is that we have to give up things like nations, borders, ethnic identities, sex-based sport leagues, and so on. If he bothered to spell out in detail what he means by "tribalism," and not simply let the reader's imagination carry the burden of supplying the target, I suspect his proposal wouldn't have made it out of his own mouth.
The laws may not be tribalistic, but their enforcement certainly is.
Take, for example, drugs. This report from the U.S. Department of Justice[1] indicates that arrests for the selling of drugs disproportionately targets black people by 33%, and arrests for possession of drugs disproportionately targets black people by 26%.
The same is true of voter suppression laws. For example, the closure of voting places in minority communities, which lead to people of color waiting, on average, 29% longer to vote than white people[2].
The January insurrection is also a perfectly valid example of tribalism. A majority of Republicans falsely believe that this crime was perpetrated by Democrats, Antifa, or even the Capitol Police themselves[3]. We cannot have a serious discussion about the morality of armed insurrection when tribalism causes such a large number of people to reject reality wholesale.
[1]: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00024.pdf [3]: https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/republicans-blame-d...
In a post about an article wanting to secure a "universal morality" I would be wary relying on statistical data that has an abundance of plausible explanations, especially when it's meant to be deployed against something on the scale of 'our very moral existence.' If the issue were "tribalism" you would expect minority groups to be persecuted to some extent greater than the non-minority group. But in the US, there are other minority groups besides blacks, and they tend to have a lower incarceration rate than whites. I'm not sure how to square that with "tribalism."
He'll never admit that the insurrection on 1/6 was a result of tribalism because it reflects poorly on the tribe he's chosen to be a member of.
People expose themselves through language.
I get what you're saying overall, and I agree with most of it, but you're giving too much credit with this statement. Some laws are tribalistic in America. It's not just that drug laws disproportionately target Black Americans in their enforcement, they were in their original forms designed to do so. The whole history of segregation and voter suppression is laws that were designed to hurt others, largely in the pursuit of tribal power. Voting suppression is inherently tribal, the whole point of voter suppression is to limit the voting power of other demographics or tribes.
The current push for anti-trans legislation in multiple states is also being driven by tribalism. Keeping trans people out of bathrooms and sports didn't suddenly become an emergency to anyone because of any brand new risk or development or scientific discovery. There's no reason why this would be more pressing to Republicans now than it would have been 4 years ago.
The major increase in legislation now is because it's a culture war, because it makes Democrats mad, because it's a backlash to the progress trans communities have made in securing rights, because it hurts people who are different who are symbolic in people's minds of power shifts and changing demographics.
On an individual level, things get more complicated. You can't use tribalism to explain everything. But on a broad, society-wide level, it just seems absurd to me to say that tribalism has no impact at all on American laws. I mean, heck, forget about America: if people don't think that classism, party-loyalty, all of these tribal instincts affected how Britain has approached Brexit and what debates people had about Brexit, then they really aren't paying much attention to how laws get made and policies determined.
Culture, in-groups, and out-groups all influence law.
No one was talking about that 4 years ago. Its like saying its tribalisme to care about the environment compared to a century ago.
For the trans its just we have move higher in the scale of 1st world problems.
Boy and girl sports leagues reinforce this conclusion for me. I'm watching people who I know have never once argued about the integrity of girls' sports in any capacity suddenly tell me that this is a pressing issue that is reducing safe spaces for women. It's hard to explain that shift without tribalism. Maybe it's just ignorance of what's going on, maybe they don't actually realize that trans athletes aren't a brand new thing, maybe they believe this is a novel situation. Or maybe some of this is fueled by reactionary rhetoric from leaders and new sources, both of which really shouldn't be able to believably claim ignorance as an excuse.
It's not universal, I don't claim that tribalism explains everything. But you can at least in theory point to environmental issues and argue about them using actual data in the real world. We can point to statistics about, say, incarceration and show that it was a problem before awareness went up. We can point to environmental issues and believably say, "species were always going extinct and we would like it to stop." In contrast, there's no objective reason to argue that transgender athletes are more dangerous today than they would have been in the past. And importantly, there's very little to point to as evidence that anybody was getting hurt because of transgender athletes in the past. It's not just a 1st-world problem that people suddenly have bandwidth to argue about, it's a debate that's almost entirely defined by opposition to a social trend rather any kind of data or visible problem.
I do think at some point it makes sense to call that a reactionary movement.
And of course, this isn't necessarily Republican-exclusive, I do also see Democrats who call themselves allies but have done very little research about what problems trans people face or how trans communities talk about these issues. And I do think there's a little bit of tribalism there where a subset of the Democratic party has picked a side in this debate based pretty much entirely on their party identity, not because they understand what's going on or because they've done any research. However, in my opinion there's comparatively very little real-world harm from clueless allies, so I spend more time focusing on the Republican side because laws that restrict medical care for children are just obviously a more harmful, dangerous result for the trans community than a tone-deaf message from a company or a poorly phrased Facebook post is.
Independently of how i feel about it, It IS new to care about the feelings of minority groups that much.. we moved up the "maslow" scale of problems to adress as a society.
I think you're making the mistake of conflating the motivations behind people who are fighting for trans rights and the motivations behind people who are fighting against trans rights. But the motivations between those two groups are not going to be identical.
I buy that Maslow's hierarchy of needs might maybe offer some explanation why we're finally getting around to addressing problems affecting the trans community, but is not sufficient to explain why it would be a brand new priority for Republicans to regress trans rights.
Tribalism/reactionism however does go a long way towards explaining why the GOP would not just oppose new legislation helping trans communities, but actually go so far as to pass new laws restricting their rights, as if trans people were never using bathrooms before 2018 or if there's some kind of brand new problem that requires blocking medical care for them. It makes a lot more sense to look at the opposition through the lenses of reactionary politics and polarization -- that the GOP is lashing out against trans people in anger over the progress they have made and because their rights have become a polarizing issue.
Because 1/ adressing some issues means not adressing other.. the public debate cannot handle so many things at once and 2/ from the point of view of a french person america is particularly confrontational when defending pretty much... anything.
In practical terms, republicans feel for 1/ that if you defend trans rights, you are going to forget more important fights such as the obesity crisis, the opioid crisis, the absurdity of your healthcare system, the economy. And for 2/, that they are going to be shamed if they disagree with the actual issues such as letting men compete in women categories.. so yeah i have 0 problems with trans people but understand the republicans motivation.
Im rather left but i feel the left has too much moved to defend minorities issues, wich is a shame because historically left wing movements were workers rights which were more about the mass vs the few "elite". Thats why, in france at least, a lot of the working class now vote extreme right, and in usa, trump.
I don't understand this argument at all.
Lots of people disagree with the Left's proposed policies on these issues, but they do have policy proposals. It's just flat-out inaccurate to argue that trans acceptance has reduced Left focus or fervor about other subjects. If anything it's the opposite, the people who are most likely to be arguing the loudest for trans rights are also most likely to be proposing large changes to our health care system, mass decriminalization of drugs, mass reform of how we police opioids and how we rehabilitate addicts, and public health laws and restructures of our food system. I can count on one hand the number trans activists I know online who aren't fiercely pro-union and fiercely in favor of raising minimum wages at a federal level.
The common argument from USA Republicans is not that the Left is too weak on these issues, it's that the Left is too radical on these issues. I don't know what experience would lead someone to believe that trans activists are less likely to be politically involved in other areas or less likely to support at the very least populist-adjacent ideas. It just does not match up with reality in the US at all.
People can criticize the far-Left activist-sphere for a lot of things, but they're definitely not rejecting populist ideas or cozying up to the elites. It's just a wild argument to make. Ask McConnell if he thinks that people like AOC aren't interested in worker rights or unions. I mean, my goodness, the position of the mainstream GOP leadership in the US right now is that the far-Left is composed of dangerous radicals who want to execute Bezos and give all of his money to his factory workers.
If what you say is the common French perspective about what attitudes are in America, then France is not getting good enough reporting about American issues or how people over here are actually arguing about them.
Similarly:
> adressing some issues means not adressing other.. the public debate cannot handle so many things at once
I don't know how this is being reported elsewhere, but to be clear, it is Republicans who are proposing these bills. More anti-trans legislation has gotten proposed in the last year alone than we had in probably the last decade. Republicans did that, not Democrats. So the idea that this is an attempt to avoid distracting from other issues just doesn't make sense, because if that's what Republicans actually believed then they wouldn't be constantly bringing the issue to the forefront of debates and passing a ton of legislation fighting against trivial issues like what bathroom someone walks into.
What would make the response make sense is if Republicans viewed petty victories like policing genitalia inside of a public restroom as victories in a broader "culture war" in which trans people symbolize a cultural enemy.
Which, look, it's fine. We can acknowledge that some things are a culture war. You bring this up yourself when you talk about the fear that allowing trans rights to progress too far will lead to people who dissent being ostracized. For Americans that is inherently a tribal fear. It is a fight over a change in cultural values and standards: a worry that a certain cultural tribe (often white, Conservative, and/or Evangelical) is losing power compared to other subgroups.
P.s. Most people in france do not think that much about america, its just my take from watching debates on HN and the trump election. We have A LOT less identity politics daily, so trans right has just never really been on the radar / something people are going to care opposing.
Sure I did:
> You bring this up yourself when you talk about the fear that allowing trans rights to progress too far will lead to people who dissent being ostracized. For Americans that is inherently a tribal fear. It is a fight over a change in cultural values and standards: a worry that a certain cultural tribe (often white, Conservative, and/or Evangelical) is losing power compared to other subgroups.
I don't disagree with you that people have this as a fear, but it is a tribal fear, it's a fear of turning into the outgroup. In America, anti-trans legislation seeks to mitigate certain demographics' fear by othering the groups that "threaten" them. The anti-trans laws that get passed because of that fear are passed with the intention of slowing down and hurting what Republicans have designated as the enemy tribe (in this case, the trans community).
It's hard for me to think of anything more tribalistic than viewing an entire demographic as a threat, and then actively taking away their rights in an attempt to reverse cultural change.
Im not sure conservatives are the one who started it. Trump merely surfed on (tho amplified) an existing tribalistic divide.
From a french person pov, the polarity and violence between is literally insane considering you guys mostly agreee on important (to me) issues.
I don't think that's at all an accurate representation of what I've said:
> And of course, this isn't necessarily Republican-exclusive, I do also see Democrats who call themselves allies but have done very little research about what problems trans people face or how trans communities talk about these issues. And I do think there's a little bit of tribalism there where a subset of the Democratic party has picked a side in this debate based pretty much entirely on their party identity, not because they understand what's going on or because they've done any research.
My main argument here from my first comment has been:
> Some laws are tribalistic in America.
It's not just the populations that are tribalistic, it's not just the way the laws are applied. The laws themselves are tribalistic. The laws themselves are designed to hurt people.
To the extent that we're focusing on Republicans, it's because Republicans are behind the vast majority of this legislation. We're talking about tribalism within the law itself. Cancel culture as modern Republicans see it is a cultural issue, not a legal issue, so it's not really applicable to a debate about tribalism within the law.
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> when you can lose your job for voicing conservative opinions, no wonder you turn to voting trump.
Honestly, on the Republican side of things, if people want to be bigoted in private or express an opinion... I mean, I don't like their opinion, I'm not going to pretend it's not homophobic/transphobic, I'm going to exercise my right to free speech and call them out -- but that scenario would be a very different thing from Republicans passing legislation to take people's rights away, and I wouldn't be nearly as upset about it.
I think there's this characterization of the trans community itself that they're looking for a fight; the more I interact with them the less I believe it. They want to be left alone, they want people to give them a few extremely basic accommodations like using correct pronouns. They want to have access to medical care, they want to be able to make their own medical decisions without a bunch of governors getting in the way. I mean, talk about cancel culture, they want to be able to come out as trans or present as their gender identity without getting fired.
This is something Conservatives should be able to sympathize with, but they seem to be under the impression that cancel culture is something brand new that's only getting applied to Conservatives, rather than the default state of the world that's been applied to trans people and minority communities for generations in America. I mean, I'm genuinely sorry about Conservatives getting harassed on Twitter or losing their jobs, that must be really scary. They should try getting kicked out of their households by their parents and becoming homeless just because they dated the wrong person.
But whatever, to the extent Conservatives are only trying to believe things, fine. They can do that, go ahead. They just need to stop threatening business owners with jail time over their bathroom policies, they just need to stop threatening doctors with legal punishments if they provide affirming care to trans children. It's wild for Republicans to be complaining about cancel culture at the same time that they're passing laws that threaten to take away doctors' medical licenses just for telling a kid that trans people exist and they might be one.
My beef with Conservatives is not that they have "wrongthink", Conservatives can believe whatever they want. My beef with them is that they are actively going out of their way to hurt people that I care about, and that it really seems like the cruelty and suppression of the communities I care about is the entire point of their laws.
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> From a french person pov, the polarity and violence between is literally insane considering you guys mostly agreee on important (to me) issues.
This might be just skewed reporting in France. Republicans and Democrats currently disagree on a large number of issues, including health care, unions, minimum wage, environmental policy, election policy, voting rights, economic policy like tax rates, stimuluses, and unemployment. Even stuff that really should be bipartisan like ranked choice voting doesn't seem to be.
So yes, partisanship is real, it is getting worse, it is concerning both on the Democratic and Republican side of things. But also no, there are real fundamental disagreements here on almost every single aspect of how to run the country. If the "real issues" you're looking at are stuff like workers rights and the economy, Republicans and Democrats do not agree at all on that stuff. The conflicts there are (imo) entirely legitimate: they're actual policy differences based on real differences of opinion on how to fix things.
There may be no tribalism inside of developed countries. But there's lots of tribalism between groups of developed countries and the rest of the world. Forcing all sorts of laws and customs on what they see as lesser countries. Sort of colonialism 2.0.
What does a rich person need to do to be segregated from society? Simply go to a expensive restaurant or country club.
Differing tastes/hobbies/actions is not enough to meet the criteria of tribalism, less we fracture into “pineapple on pizza vs no pineapple” tribes.
He did though:
> Under conditions of real or perceived out-group threats involving competition for scarce resources, for example, the disposition for tribalist and exclusivist responses is triggered [...]
I suspect that the existence of country borders and ethnic identities is safe as long as they don't support themselves on the fear of the "outside world" and the "other".
People involved in the insurrection, weren't going against universally agreed moral standards — i.e. the need for democracy.
While I don't agree with their motivation or interpretation, these people felt that democracy was being attacked. It was a desire to uphold moral principles that fuelled the raids.
I think that this article is missing a few insights that I value. One is that I’ve come to view something like philosophical truth essentially unknowable- There may be universal truths, but proving that across all scenarios is not feasible. They may even (or likely) be contradictory. Even morality derived from written religious texts has been subject to countless interpretations and reinterpretations. This it’s best to treat morality as probabilistic- I might be highly confident that my stance is correct, but I must always accept that I may be wrong and update on new information.
The other is that authors desire to “give up tribalism” is too simplistic. Tribalism is deeply intertwined with identity, and I don’t think it’s possible to get humans to give up on the concept of identity. However, identity is a complex multilayered thing. I identify as an engineer, as an American, as a man, as a Catholic, as an ethnic Jew, as a Seahawks fan, as a skier, as an alumnus, and many other things. These groups do not share a common morality, but I find ways of coping and moving between them. I think we'd have more success getting people to embrace multiple identities and seeking tolerance between them then to abandon tribe seeking behavior.
"Any human life holds the same intrinsic value".
To me this looks like a moral absolute that "can be known". :)
There can be discussions on the side of it about how this "value" can come to fruition, or how it can be extended to encompass all sentient life, or just all life, but you can take it as it is and it represents an objective moral absolute that has no influence from "the inside", as prof. Fitzpatrick put it. Do you think I am wrong?
The best thing evolution did to us is to make a lot of our behaviors learned. So how we perceive morality is something we can learn, and we can pass onto generations, basically recreating the concept of evolution through culture, at a much faster pace.
The article claims we need to give up tribalism to get there. I disagree. Tribalism is a powerful instinct that can be used for good or bad. We need to stick with tribalism, but make everyone part of the same tribe.
How is that different than giving up tribalism?
Two people can support different football teams, but still serve in the same army side by side, or work for the same company. They can support different politics and even be friends. Yes really.
Erasing group identities is user dumb. Why not just promote and encourage tolerant civilised behaviour. Since when did that become unthinkable?
Well, we need to buckle down and think it. That is the way forward.
They aren't all good, and they aren't all bad, like everything else. You can't have all the good without the bad unfortunately.
Because you're saying that we need to unite and expel the "negative," but you're either suggesting that we don't use any criteria for that, or you're using a special definition of "religion and politics" that doesn't encompass all forms of human organization and ranges of perceptions of our environment.
I suppose this is just another suggestion that we use rational, objective criteria, like the ones the person making the suggestion uses (when they're at their self-assessed best.) Once we're using those criteria, uniting to eradicate the "other" is fully rationalized, er, rational.
I think if you commit yourself to listening to critique then the "other" fades away. If you commit yourself to the party, or inextricable party ideals then the other is always a reasonable option to reach for.
We are each members of many tribes not just one.
That sounds completely psychotic to me.
You know, when a president says "we gotta unite the nation" in a speech, that's kinda what they're trying to do. Except just saying "oh yeah, let's unite" falls quite short of achieving that goal.
But no, it's not about coercing and crushing anyone.
IMHO, the best outcomes come from moral, economic, political systems competing with each other.
Show me an instance of purity and a lack of competition of ideas that ever turned out well. It always turns out tyrannical, hypocritical, and oppressive. Always.
Diversity of thought, as taboo as it might be to say today, is more important than what people tend to think of when thinking of diversity.
But it can't be so diverse than millions of people are all going their rabid individualistic path. It needs to be a competition and inter-influence of tribes
That's not diversity of thought. That's lack of thought, with a few different colors of paint on each side.
Tribalism isn't merely "competing ideas". It's literally the tribal members suppressing their own thought process in order to align WITH their tribe and AGAINST the other tribe. This alignment makes otherwise intelligent individuals collectively quite stupid and easy to mislead and manipulate.
The basics of tribalism comes either from isolated tribes (generally under Dunbar's number) for hunter-gatherers or, later with agriculture, extended family units/clans - where you have both close blood relations and know each other.
Then we see city-states and various unions of many tribes (e.g. for nomadic steppe peoples) forming a much larger shared identity that is using the same behavior and loyalty principles, but you're much more distantly related and can't know everyone anymore.
And this starts a trend of the "larger tribe" intervening in the "smaller tribes" to prevent conflict with them and have individuals of different "subtribes" interact between tribes with a shared goal instead of defending the tribal identity; they start punishing raids and violence between the "subtribes", and form a larger shared identity based on culture, religion, etc.
Fast forward a few centuries and we see the great "religious tribes" unifying many decentralized rulers; and then we see the age of nationalism in 1800s which in many cases unified many smaller states with aggressive unification of their identities and elimination of dialects so that the "tribe that includes everyone" is stronger, but despite the suppression of "smaller tribes" IMHO it's quite clear that the peak nationalism was also very much a peak of tribalism attitudes.
In that regard, humanism is essentially nothing else than treating all humans as a single tribe, and it is an extension of the same trend and practice; we know that dissolving the smaller tribes in order the larger tribe stronger works and is possible as we have done that before; though, often the unification was facilitated and driven by external threats.
Sure, but it always comes at the expense of "smaller" tribes. Either in the form of losing their language and culture, or their economic independence. Even within countries you get tribalism in many forms, whether it be accents/dialects or their morality that varies state to state. So making people to conform to a single ideology [in public] only works with tyranny. Of course secretly they resent it.
Looking at the contrast between different societies, it often seems that the fragmented tribalism is actively harmful to how pleasant it is to live in that society. For example, in places where "clan identity" matters, that clan mentality is a direct driver for nepotism and corruption which makes life worse for the larger community; countries where different ethnic groups have a strong "tribal" behavior tend to have a lot of inter-community conflict, discriminatory behavior and sometimes even violence up to the point of genocide; and I'd argue that it is better for individuals to live in a more integrated larger tribe without that inter-community conflict even if it does make these smaller tribes weaker or perhaps irrelevant.
[1] https://www.stitcher.com/show/odd-lots/episode/52-what-math-...
If someone would manage to establish single world order, it's only a matter of time when it would fracture into pieces.
We've arguably backslid in some places over a 20 year lookback but those backslides are fairly minor in historical context.
Roman empire collapsed. HRE collapsed. Austro-Hungary collapsed. Tsarist Russia + Soviet union collapsed. Ottoman empire collapsed. UK is still slowly collapsing. Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth went separate ways. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia split. Roman catholic church was pretty close to superstate at it's height.
* Was partitioned by external forces and eradicated from existence for decades.
At first, giving up tribalism is just the formation of another tribe. Then there become multiple tribes that exist to define what it means to truly give up tribalism and so forth.
The tribalism the author uses is the same created by your argument that evolution forged our behaviors. The tribalism evolution forged is a space-dependent concept, it's almost literally those who exist within 5 meters of myself, who eat, shit and sleep with me.
I don't necessarily think we need to ditch it, it might be useful for something. But we need an equivalent for the whole species, independent of time, planet or place, and also as someone else said, to include other species.
Ol' tribalism needs to be taken down to the cellar, mercilessly beaten and left chained there until we are attacked by aliens or something else accordingly.
That does not really work since nothing would stop people from changing their minds years later, especially when it feeds into the human instinct of tribalism. See WW1, WW2, how the nazi party rose, etc.
> We've evolved, and still evolving.
Only if those with non-tribalistic tendencies outbreed the rest of the population.
I wasn't even asking a question about HN, just making a remark.
The definition of objectivity simply does not reference objectivism.
Even so, a moral framework doesn't have to be complete to be justifiably considered "objective", so attempting to find universally acceptable moral axioms may not be altogether futile.
For this article, it fails to remember that for every unbiased observer there is an equally biased human at the root.
Random morals are constantly being created - mutations. They sometimes are negative for cultural survival, sometimes neutral, and sometimes positive.
Based on a changing environment morals needed for a culture to survive will also change.
Over a long enough time, some moralistic behavior has become embedded in our DNA. (e.g. protecting children). Moralistic behavior that is embedded in DNA is probably the closest thing we have to "universal morality".
Controversial examples might be procreating at 13. When people died at a much younger age, it was not immoral to procreate as soon as we were able. Now it is morally abhorrent. Some cultures still allow it. It is absolutely not universally immoral.
Unified morality, like a unified concept of what is “human”, is a temporary consequence of centralization in a single location. Right now, that’s Earth. But good luck maintaining a uniform conception of right and wrong when it takes a few decades to get to the next civilization.
For that matter, good luck maintaining a unified concept of human being. Mars, for instance, has a number of qualities that will select for certain traits over others. A colony developing there, sufficiently isolated, would start to develop into a variant quite unlike us earthlings.
It might look improbable or unlikely, but I don't see how it is impossible.
Unity in the underlying organizing principles (logos) of the universe, the idea of pantheistic view of a "god" as "the one" is at least as old as neoplatonism. However far from achieving a full grasp, all life forms find approximating to reality to be highly adaptive and valuable. As such, there could as well be a continuity between our moral values and general structural functional organization of the universe. Even though we are hopelessly unable to compute our way towards it, we could have been incrementally approximating it (while also occasionally deceiving ourselves). One could say the evolution of consciousness was adaptive towards processing these calculations, but by no means a requisite to have some contact with and understanding of a part of reality.
But I still don’t think this is sustainable once we factor in evolution and adaptations to different environments.
Time and again aggrieved citizens on both sides have try to be heard by delaying political fait accompli. From city counsels to county seats, state legislatures to native reservations, the US capital to foreign embassies... naive believers, the agitated, sometimes driven by agent provocateurs have risked prison and worse to remind representatives that victory in a vote doesn't erase diversity of belief; and that governance is more effective when the aggrieved are sincerely heard.
Tribalism (on both sides) is all earmuffs and blindfolds that results in shortsighted public policy, and devaluation of different thoughts & tastes.
They won't.
So there won't be.
The same politicians who pilloried Hillary Clinton for 2 years over the Benghazi incident want nothing to do with an investigation of the events of Jan 6th. They know who their political base is.
Tribes are shaped by a common reality, friends and enemies, and the common reality of those who stormed the Capitol was created by the conspiracy scene they followed and participated in.
My personal view is that decisions that affect the individual should be left to the individual, decisions that affect groups should be made by those groups (in a democratic fashion). Of course the devil is in the details.
His is view is the seed of this universal morality, surely?
Vegetarianism and veganism used to be much more fringe just a few decades ago than they are now.
Animal right groups and laws didn't exist until relatively recently as well.
Understanding and valuing ecology and every species role in it as well is relatively new (at least among non-indigenous people) and making a difference in how we treat animals as well.
There's also a lot of research in to how animals view and understand the world, how they communicate, how much they understand and feel, and how they differ (or don't) from humans. That's also opening people's eyes.
I'm usually pretty pessimistic, but on this issue I am cautiously optimistic that we are moving in the right direction.
Tellingly (to me), despite some non-negligible percentage of the population becoming more sensitive to the plight of animals, the scale of animal cruelty today absolutely dwarfs that of any bygone era. I see the modest gains in the population of vegetarians as a pyrrhic victory that would not have been possible with, perversely, the common knowledge of the current scale and scope of modern animal cruelty.
"Tellingly"? What does it tell? The scale of X (for almost all X) today absolutely dwarfs that of any bygone era. I wish when people say something is telling, they'd say what it tells them, but they usually don't. (It's like saying "Of course" or "Obviously". Rhetorically effective maybe, but doesn't help communication. They are a kind of bluff.)
> I see the modest gains in the population of vegetarians as a pyrrhic victory that would not have been possible with, perversely, the common knowledge of the current scale and scope of modern animal cruelty.
Sorry, I really tried, but can't work out what you are trying to say here. (It feels like at least a triple-layered negative.) Could you put it more simply? Seems like you're maybe saying "If more people knew the horrors of modern animal cruelty there would be less vegetarians", but that reading makes no sense to me. It's a very confusing, unclear sentence anyway.
And then there's the impact that our activities have on wildlife that we aren't intending to harm. We know we are causing harm, though, so much so that we regularly drive animals to extinction. We also know we are currently driving a mass extinction event but that seems to barely register on our list of concerns. I don't see any meaningful action right now towards addressing this. I honestly hear so, so little about it, even when we are discussing the impacts of climate change. I kind of forgot about it myself during this discussion.
So in summary, I see us as being willfully cruel to some and fully indifferent to others and ultimately I think we have gotten worse over the years, not better. If I were an animal, I would much rather have shared the planet with humans from 1000 or even 100 years ago than with humans from today, and I believe the trend continues.
Hope that clears things up.
Is it immoral to make a plant species extinct? Is morality rooted in subjective experience?
I pre-answered your question about the animal kingdom.
When I say "must include" I imply only that it's necessary, not sufficient. My premise is simply that I have identified a necessary condition which will never be met.
The utility function is not up for grabs; it has to be axiomatically assumed and utilitarianism does not state whose utility matters and how much.
It is true there are preference utilitarians and various other flavors, but I don't think cutting out animals outside of one's moral circle of concern can really be justified under utilitarianism.
Or they may determine that all you mention plus natural formations like lakes and mountains and rock formations deserve protection and equal protection.
That’s why this entire article is a waste of time to me.
The best course of action is never to try to find a single “universal” truth but to accept a plurality of “truths”. That’s the only way we can survive as a species.
That is that a government is morally justified in performing actions that we would find abhorrent of performed by an individual or smaller group.
That we have chosen to collectively outsource the things we need to keep the sheer number of us alive without having to personally do them? Its not like we can return to hunter gathering because chaos would ensue.
Police, taxes, welfare and narrowed choices of how you can live are our bargain for living in large numbers and close proximity.
Which means that other views can similarly be “educated” in.
Dominant cultures always impose laws on subordinated cultures. In the 19th century the answer to this problem was simple. "Just go over there and make them follow our rules." These days we tie ourselves into knots doing the same thing while pretending to respect other cultures.
I guess "we" is "the west." I imagine a Saudi cleric is describing a porn clip he saw on the internet to his flock, explaining how cultural relativity = the abuse of women, and that imposing the world caliphate is the greatest act of mercy imaginable.
Am I the only one terrified of this? This type of "study" has been abused very well in the past, phrenology being just one decent parallel. People have believed bad science in the past as "good" science. There's zero reason to imagine we're immune to it in this day. Some asshat out there is going to "prove" something about a demographic and use this as a means to enforce action. Just going to throw it out there, if they already dislike a demographic, they're going to prove how they should get arbitrary punishments or re-education because, "the science says so". It takes one shitty paper to fuck things up for a long time, cough cough anti-vaxxers cough cough. An average population is dumb as hell. It's even worse if they're convinced if something was scientifically proven, even though it wasn't. Take all the bad media reports on random papers released. That chocolate diet one fucking flooded the media even though it was total trash (yes, I know it was a hoax paper to prove the media is a dumpster fire). Just imagine the political party that doesn't like you get's ahold of this narrative. Fuck it, while we're at it, is it then better for your preferred party to wield the weapon first? Does that make it morally right for anyone to wield it or just who you approve of because you're perfect at deciding someone's character?
This is a very misguided view on morality. The author doesn't know what morality is, why it exists and what actually compels us to behave the way we do. Many people who are very intelligent fail to comprehend this.
Morality is biological in origin. You think and behave, debate and contemplate morality because you are evolutionarily predisposed to do so. Morality does not exist outside of this framework.
Morality is simply a set of rules that allow us to form stable societies and biology evolved you to behave within this rule set because if you didn't your society or you would be naturally selected out. That's it.
The problem is, most people don't realize this. When people think about fairness and morality they think they are deploying their logical and conscious mind to decide the meaning of right and wrong. Nothing is further from the truth, and this is 100 percent an illusion. When you are thinking about morality you are deploying the instinctual side of your brain, the same part that triggers hunger, sexual arousal or fear.
It sounds so absurd to say this but believe it or not it can actually be logically proven that this is what the human brain is doing. I can prove to you that your entire logical framework of morality is built off a biological predetermined moral instinct that is absurdly identical to everyone else's concept of morality.
The way this is done is that the moral module in your mind is imperfect. By identifying this imperfection I can illustrate to you that like how evolutionary programming doesn't always converge at the global optimum the same has happened in the moral module of your brain. Of all our brains.
Consider a baby drowning in a pool next to you. You are wearing fashionable clothes that costs thousands of dollars. By jumping in the pool to save the baby you permanently ruin your clothes. What would be the moral thing to do?
The moral thing to do is to save the baby. The life of the baby is more important the your clothes even if it's thousands of dollars. In fact our brains will be disgusted at the person who let's the baby drown just to save thousands of dollars. Essentially the moral precept here is saving a life is worth more than a couple thousand dollars so you should always do the former.
Here is where the flaw comes in. Leave the situation the same but change some of the superficial aesthetics. The baby is no longer drowning but is now a child in Africa who is starving. This child can be saved with a donation of thousands of dollars. Is it reprehensible that you don't save the baby? Most of us reading are aware that poverty exists in Africa and that donations can save them yet most of us haven't donated a dime.
Keep in mind the premise is identical. Save a baby in exchange for sacrificing thousands of dollars. What has changed? Why does the psychopath who refused to save the drowning baby is evil and why is the person who refused to donate money less evil when the basic moral premise is exactly the same?
The answer is easy to identify. Something has changed and that change influences the moral module of our brain in an illogical way that is unresolvable.
The change is superficial... basically the location and sensory stimulus is removed. By making the baby far away in Africa and removing visual stimulus, it is no longer triggering the moral instinct in your brain. Why does this fail to trigger it? Because there is no evolutionary advantage to societies who have morals that are concerned for entities that are far away and unrelated. Your morality is associated with visual stimulus and proximity but your brain does not incorporate these axioms into your reasoning because there was never any evolutionary pressure for your brain to evolve this way. That is the inconsistent flaw. Our moral modules are not designed to correctly apply moral reasoning to subjects outside of a certain physical proximity, so our brain triggers behavior that contradicts our own reasoning.
Thus our instincts do not trigger when a baby in Africa is dying of starvation, only when a baby next to you is dying from drowning. Of course there is a gradient. Starving babies in Africa triggers far less concern then drowning babies next to you even when the cost of saving those babies is completely identical.
If I presented to you these two scenarios separately and asked you to analyze the moral logic behind each, most people would derive separate and valid logic that would condemn the person who let the baby drown and vindicate the person who let the baby in Africa die.
By presenting both scenarios to you at the same time, however, the contradiction becomes apparent and your brain is now most likely trying to contemplate the moral logic and rules that will resolve the contradiction.
My point is to tell you that the resolution and everything your brain is doing to make sense of this moral contradiction is pointless. You are giving in to instinctual behavior. The moral contradiction exists regardless of what you do because morality is an imperfect biological phenomena. There isn't a universal explanation here. These are arbitrary rules applied to arbitrary events and you attempt to resolve it is just you giving in to your biological predisposition. Same as you giving in to eating when you are hungry.
There is no point in making sense of why rocks scattered on the ground is the way that it is any more then it makes sense to resolve this moral contradiction. Like the rocks, morality is simply an arbitrary set of rules... A biological phenemona unique to humanity and not a universal phenomena intrinsic to the universe.
Once you realize this, you will see that all this language, philosophy and structure built around morality is sort of pointless. It exists to help us survive there is no deeper meaning here and any search for something deeper will likely result in you making something up without realizing it (see religion).
I can say with absolute certainty that the lives of both children are morally equal, yet I can appreciate that one can not help equally in both cases. I would even agree that having a lower empathy for a child in Africa is evidence of how one is not a "moral" person, but that doesn't take away from the initial axiom: their lives have equal worth.
Apologies if my naive interpretation of your words and attempt at an explanation doesn't make the matters clearer. I think that looking into effective altruism might make more sense, the people behind it have a lengthier and better reasoned thesis.
You can help them equally that is my point. One requires you to ruin your clothes by jumping in water the other requires you spending a bit of effort locating a legit charity and sending a check. Make no mistake, your capability to donate to Africa vs. jumping into water is EXACTLY the same. That is my point.
The urgency is different, but that's an illusion. The effort and cost to save either child is exactly the same. Say your clothes is worth $20,000 and you only need to donate $5000 to save a child in Africa. Then even saving the child in Africa costs less.
This is the moral conflict. Logically you interpret the lives of both children as equal but behaviorally most people will likely only act to save the drowning baby. Even from a judgement perspective, without deep introspection people will be outraged at the person who watched the baby die and not be outraged at the millions of people who haven't donated a dime to Africa.
The judgement and behavior differs from the logic which says both lives are equal. That is the biological flaw. It basically shows that because our morality is flawed, it is then basically an arbitrary set of biological rules, not worth the time for deep analysis. This is entirely different from the fundamental laws of physics which is very much worth our time for deep analysis.
But in the end, I think that you didn't really address my assumption that you don't distinguish between "moral behaviour" and "theoretical moral concepts" as being different. In my mind, the later can be influenced as you said by various factors as geographical proximity, but the former can be treated as axioms of a hard science.
Consider the situation I talked about and the two possible moral axioms that arise from it.
The psychopath that sat and watched the baby drown. Should he deserve any form of punishment? What should we encode as an axiom from our instinctual response to this situation? Should we just let people who sit by the pool watching the baby die not be punished? Is that the right thing to do?
What about the people who didn't donate a dime to Africa? Should they be punished? This is basically most people in the US. Should we punish everyone in the US?
Axiomatically speaking if one is punished so should the other.
This is the axiomatic conundrum. We evolved moral emotions to determine our behavior. Even when we try to interprete these emotions from an axiomatic perspective the conondrums remain on which axioms to choose. Depending on the situation neither axiom completely fits our interpretation of what is right or wrong.
Some people resolve this by choosing not to punish anyone by basing their decision on the axiom that punishment should only be reserved for murder by action not murder by inaction. However that is just an axiom you arbitrarily chose. Emotionally speaking murder by deliberate inaction is something everyone feels is fundamentally wrong as well and can be shaped into an axiom. The problem is this axiom conflicts with our instincts that are telling us that the people who killed starving kids in Africa by refusing to donate money are not guilty of murder.
There are other moral situations that can hijack our brain. Consider a train that is about to run over and kill 5 people tied to the track. You can save those 5 people by pulling a switch causing the track branch to switch to another lane. This lane only has one person tied to the track. Do you pull the switch? Save 5 people or save 1 person? By default the train will run over 5 people.
Think about your decision before I adjust the parameters. Most people choose to save 5 people over saving 1 person and they will flip the switch.
Imagine the same train. The track is now linear with no branch. 5 people are tied to the track. You see a really big fat man standing next to the track. You can save all 5 people by sneakily pushing the fatman onto the track. The fatman will die but his weight will stop the train saving the 5 people. What do you do?
The situation is the same, only superficial parameters have changed.
Basically the situation is this: you have the choice of saving the lives of 5 people or 1 person. Axiomatically we by default think that you should save 5 people over 1 person.
However while both situations are the same we feel the the second situation tends to feel wrong. It feels like murder if you save 5 people. The axiom of murder by action and the axiom of saving 5 people over 1 person in this situation form a moral paradox and the feeling of what's wrong or what's right changes depending on if we push a person onto the tracks or if we flick a switch.
This indicates that when you try to encode our moral instincts into axioms they form inconsistencies. An inconsistent system means the system is arbitrary and made up. It is not a "science" and just an arbitrary set of inconsistent behavioral rules. In other words, it's just a biological group of behaviors that coincidentally helps humans survive in a society; it is not some universal truth in the universe, not like the laws of physics.
Is it worth studying an arbitrary set of rules as if they were some universal truth? No. I think it's excessive. You need to create laws so that society functions but any analysis deeper then that (like the philosophy of ethics for example) is a pointless endeavor. There is no axiomatic or fundamental truth here.
Given your eloquently put understanding of her philosophy, I doubt that you are interested in digging deeper. But in case I'm wrong, everything is summarised in a short interview with Mike Wallace (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHl2PqwRcY0).
Of course, you definitely can derive a full system of morality logically if you start from a few "ought" axioms - many proposed systems of morality are done this way, and likely Ayn Rand's proposal as well. But in such cases these axioms are the subjective and potentially questionable part, and we don't have an universal agreement on them. If your system has 99% of logical reasoning based on 1% intuitively assumed axioms, that 1% carries pretty much all the weight.
We know where many particular "moral axioms" lead, but that only leads to disagreement about them when seemingly reasonable moral axioms logically lead to various outcomes that intuitively seem unacceptable, so we don't have anything approaching consensus; for every proposal there is enough substantial critique that it doesn't seem suitable to be the One True Perfect morality - perhaps we should keep looking, but perhaps it's futile, there's no strong arguments yet to say that an universal morality must be possible in the first place.
Truth is not truth due to everyone agreeing on it.
I do find it interesting that most people who agree with Rand are less like her than the people who disagree with her. I am sure if you spend some time researching her (not reading opinions) you will find yourself wondering how Ronald Reagan could ever agree with her. Yet here we are.
Universal morality doesn't appear to be particularly successful, when faced with tribalism. As far as I can tell, from a darwinian perspective, the right thing (so called) would be to encourage universalism in your competitors, while practicing tribalism yourself.
What do you define a "darwininan" as? What about that definition are you opposed to? What would you define yourself as? And what is the definition of that thing?
Personally, I'd be shocked if that were true.