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If you’re talking about public policy, IMO personal moral opinions have no place. Do you really want the state teaching “personal responsibility”? Even if you did, do you really think they could do it effectively? We have the highest prison population per capita as it is. It’s been tried. Over and over.

Using the idea that millions of people are just morally deficient as public policy is a proven failure. There’s always a reason when millions of people are doing the “wrong” thing, and the job of public policy is to assess the return on investment to society of removing those reasons or otherwise disincentivizing the behavior.

Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate

> We have the highest prison population per capita as it is. It’s been tried. Over and over.

You are conflating a flawed justice system (prison) with teaching morality. They are not the same.

I don't read the parent as conflating a flawed justice system with teaching morality.

I read it as using the failure of the justice system as an example of his larger point: Personal responsibility is a personal lesson that requires personal choices and experiences. It’s not something you can publicly mandate.

The justice system was one example of a failed attempt to publically mandate morality.

I don't think the aim is to teach that "millions of people are just morally deficient," as you put it. Rather, the aim should be to reinforce that everyone has the capacity to do good or bad, and the direction of your life is influenced partially (if not majorly) by the average value of your decisions.

In some aspects of our culture, shame still exists to great effect. For example, drunk driving is a behavior that never gets a pardon. Words never spoken: "We shouldn't judge Joe for his DUI, for if we were in his shoes, we may have done the same."

The drunk driver may deserve all sorts of considerations: They struggled with alcoholism, their judgment was impaired at the time, they needed to go to work in the morning, they couldn't afford an Uber, their designated driver didn't show, they didn't speak English well enough to coordinate another ride home. In function, no excuses are allowed. As a culture, we believe that no matter your situation, you must always make plans to avoid driving drunk.

What if this same type of intense shame existed towards other behaviors we wished to not see? To name one: What if we intensely shamed parents who let their young children become obese? Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?

Or my personal favorite application of shame at a societal level: shaming people for dodging taxes.

It sounds cool in theory, but in practice, it's just another tool wielded by the powerful. In practice, it's used most heavily for stuff like forcing people to express support for unjust wars, or to be quiet about a powerful person's abuses. Go to any conservative community and you can see the effects of what you're describing.

> Instead of blaming food deserts, lack of nutritional knowledge, lack of time to prepare meals, and so on, what if the blame went directly to the parents who are letting their elementary age children graze on a party sized bag of Doritos?

Most people who would be in any way affected by a society-level shame campaign already feel that way. You're talking about small pockets of communities that aren't fazed by mainstream society's norms. Mostly ones in small-town conservative areas that are heavily shame-based, but just about different things from what you care about.

So it seems it's not more shaming that you want, it's just that you want everyone to be shaming people in line with your personal system of morality.

Edit: also relying on shame for enforcement will ultimately just reward the shameless.

It can’t really come from public policy by definition. Public policy would look different in a world where people expect personal responsibility. But it cannot be mandated by the state. Its a value.

>Do you really want the state teaching “personal responsibility”?

but they do. All those "eat healthy", "don't do drugs", "play outside 2 hours a day"? They were all funded by some government if they were displaying in public schools. It's not the only nor even primary pillar, but it is a big one.

And of course I don't need to specify how they indirectly teach/punish personal responsibilities with subsidies. Slashing the subsidies on corn would cause more radical changes than any sort of propganda they show on ads.

> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture.

Asian and other immigrant groups have done that and you can see the results. (In a country overrun by “white supremacy” poor Asians have almost three times the income mobility from the bottom quantile to the top quantile as poor whites in the US.) It works, so long as you can keep your kids from becoming Americanized.

Another example is Mormons. They should be poor like Appalachians. They fled persecution to arid parts of the country nobody else wanted. But Mormons today are disproportionately likely to be middle class or upper middle class.

> It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility.

Well, many don’t believe in personal responsibility. Some argue individuals are inextricably bound by the shortcomings of society and society must account for that.

Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy.

Carroll's episode is worth listening to, not least for it's exceptionally clear exposition of the current physics consensus around QM, qft, standard model, etc., and how they are related, but the point you specifically mention is a weak spot for me.

For one thing he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory to make good on its initial promises nor the murky waters of anthropic claims and metaphysical notions of beauty, etc., used to keep it suspended like Wile E Coyote after running off the cliff of empirical support.

As non-crackpot physics profs and postgrads (e.g. [1], [2]) have pointed out, this has not engendered public trust and is a key ingredient in whatever "crisis" the discipline is undergoing.

Not that Carroll doesn't make plenty of good arguments to support his views, but his seeming equation of any criticism of the field with crackpotist heresies is a cheap trick for a philosophy prof.

1: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?cat=8

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

>he hardly mentions the epic failure of string theory

I'd argue that implies you don't know where string theory fits in the "pantheon" of physics. It applies to the realm well below the radius of the proton, required to explain only the most exotic times and places (like the moments after the big bang, or the boundaries/interiors of black holes). Carroll's point is that basically ALL of "everyday physics" is known - everything above the radius of a proton, which governs all the stuff and signals we are and deal with in our solar system and local chunk of galaxy. String theory is an example of a "weak" theory because it's not unique, but it also applies only to exotic things and it's haziness does not affect our understanding of the larger regimes.

"Failure" in terms of producing any empirical support, that is, while its proponents have been predicting confirmation any time now for literally decades. See the example links I provided on this. It has now largely retreated these claims into an inscrutable and non-falsifiable "landscape" of possible theories, such that the question of whether it any longer qualifies as a scientific (rather than mathematical) endeavour has become legitimate to ask.

The residual feeling that academic recruitment and budgets have been dominated by what essentially turned out to be physics vaporware is a large part of the perceived crisis that Caroll doesn't appear to want to fully acknowledge.

> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture.

Can you clarify who you actually mean here by neoliberalism? It seems a very loosely defined ideology. Do you just mean ‘the mainstream West’, or something more specific? It’s a strange -ism. It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting.

> no one ever professes to be a member of it

Go to reddit.com/r/neoliberal, there are lots of people claiming to be neoliberals there.

Well, I don't mean it pejoratively. It harnesses the ideas of mutation + selection which has been proven to be successful for 5 billion years. "Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler," describes the limits of practical reason. People have a great deal of latent evil within them, and society should be the least oppressive it can be, but not less oppressive.

> It’s very vague in definition, and no one ever professes to be a member of it, yet it is ostensibly an ideology. And I only ever hear it used with a pejorative subtext, which is interesting.

Is there a name for the phenomena? Its almost like a strawman but not really.

I actually think the OPs comment was fair a d not maligning, but this is a real rhetorical trick. Perhaps not exactly the same but it makes me think about how many Atheists read the bible like fundamentalists.

> For instance, Corey has fun rebutting an atheist who accuses a “devout” Christian girl of hypocrisy for having tattoos, because those are supposedly forbidden by the Bible—if you read the Bible like a fundamentalist. As a Christian myself, I’ve been accused by atheists of inconsistency for holding that neither Christians nor theists in general need believe that God created the universe in literally six 24-hour periods, somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. It’s as if I can’t be a creationist at all without being what’s called a young-earth creationist. That would be news to St. Augustine as well as to many respectable contemporary Christian thinkers

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2017/08/why-atheists-read-th...

In this case, you have someone who disagrees with an ideaology insisting on what the ideology is, in spite of many genuine believers espousing less extreme ideas.

"I'm not a fundamentalist just a hypocrite who picks and chooses which truths are fundamental to suit my own agenda"

is not the strong argument you might think it is.

You're not wrong about displacing talk of personal responsibility. But, appalling though it may be, I doubt many would argue that horse has not already bolted from the stable (to a first approximation).

I think it speaks to the incoherence of their views they don’t consider culture, including teaching personal regulation and responsibility, as a feature of systemic problems.

How can culture not be an aspect of a social creature’s systemics?

> The neoliberal view is that you can prove your point by forming subcultures that do better than the surrounding culture.

That has nothing to do with neoliberalism, which is an economic ideology. I guess its metaphorically connected if you interpret it as a market of subcultures, but that's a pretty strained metaphor, not a real connection to the ideology.

> It's appalling that public discourse about systemic issues has entirely displaced talk of personal responsibility. It's appalling that a positive openness to alternative lifestyles has extended to an absurd dropping of ALL standards.

Its apalling that public discourse has seen grounded criticism and fact-based debate replaced with ludicrous strawmen and hyperbole in which any connection to reality is so distant and minute as to be undetectable like this.