Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist | Hacker News Reader

Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

openculture.com

174 pointsgslin435 comments

I think that the thing that most people don't realize about ethics is the meta-ethical problem that axioms are by definition arbitrary.

When we really think about the fact that all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms, suddenly the teeth to ethics have a deep, serious problem.

The only argument we have at that point is that the axioms "feel" correct, and I have no problem with this basis, I consider myself someone with strong ethical viewpoints. However, when the foundation of ethics is based on feel, then there are serious problems, because it stands to reason that folks who have a different feel are entirely justified in their ethical standards (assuming good-faith and good reasoning).

At that point, we have the problem that almost every ethical theory (I would argue the concept of ethics), must be universalizable. That is, if something is wrong for me, it should be wrong for someone else in my position (not necessarily everyone). This is completely impossible when ethics are ultimately based on feel.

Now, Chompsky here is basically saying, come on, we have innate instinctual ethical views. I generally agree with him, but it ultimately doesn't matter. If ethical theory is simply instinctual, the same meta-ethical problem exists, it's just that the founding axiom that most folks will have is that the "normal" ethical view is the "correct" view... it's a fine axiom, we needn't argue about it, but it's still arbitrary, and effectively amounts to might makes right.

I think you’re confusing epistemic problems for metaphysical problems. It’s quite plausible that any axioms we come up with are merely ‘based on feel', but there can be a truth ‘based on feel’ ultimately inaccessible to us except ‘[by] feel’. That inaccessibility does not make the underlying truth arbitrary; it merely makes our attempts to work it out arbitrary.

There is no truth coming from "feel". Our brain chemicals are designed in a way that suits evolution best, not to mention that there is absolutely no consistence in these feelings on an individual level (to a smaller degree) and on the the temporal and cultural level.

What you are saying assumes that brain chemical reactions have an ability to hint at some sort of truth. The idea itself sounds closer in nature to religious arguments. And I think if this was indicating a truth of some sorts, the differences morals doesnt sell this idea to me personally.

Some axioms are more useful than others, though. For example, Peano axioms can be used to formalize parts of math which we use to make models of physics which enable engineering that makes all sorts of technology. Many others can't get to that point.

Sure, but usefulness is itself an arbitrary criterium.

Only in the weakest sense where one can emit other noises from their mouth instead. That criteria is an outgrowth from our drive to fulfill our own material needs, without which one does not do philosophy or anything else, which in turn are dictated by the natural world we live in. And none of that is something where you can just plug in so many other ideas or axioms and get a similar result.

Those and similar axioms were used to develop science & technology that provides our ability to even have this conversation. Whereas if you give someone a Foucault book and ask them to make similar practical use of it, perhaps they might keep warm for a night.

> axioms are by definition arbitrary.

That is very reductive view of what constitutes most axioms.

Merriam-Websters has:[1]

>2: an established rule or principle or a self-evident truth

Etymonline has:[2]

>"statement of self-evident truth," late 15c., from French axiome, from Latin axioma, from Greek axioma "authority," literally "that which is thought worthy or fit,"...

So, no, not arbitrary at all. Which particular axioms do you find arbitrary? Is game theory arbitrary?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/axiom

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/axiom

> So, no, not arbitrary at all.

Nothing you say conflicts with being arbitrary. Axioms are arbitrarily self-evident—they are "arbitrary" because they are the result of some person's judgement, not somehow produced with some other processes, and they are self-evident because they provide the basis for reasoning and cannot be contradicted within reasoning parameterized by the axioms.

What OP likely intended is that our Western axioms, such as considering human life as the most important value, may be arbitrary because there are other cultures where it holds a lower position in the hierarchy of values.

In Western cultures, the belief in the intrinsic value and sanctity of human life is often considered a foundational and self-evident moral principle. It underlies many ethical and legal frameworks, including principles related to human rights, the value of individual lives, and the importance of protecting life.

An axiom, in this context, is a fundamental and self-evident belief or principle that serves as a basis for other beliefs and actions within a particular culture or belief system.

Yea a lot of game theory is built on the arbitrary axioms like that people will follow a given strategy with given information, or that there’s common knowledge. In reality people don’t necessarily follow the axioms of the theory.

Even in math, axioms are kinda arbitrary. They are mostly defined because they can be used to prove stuff that are perhaps useful, in this sense, they aren't arbitrary. But there are infinite sets of axioms out there for the same branch of math, which makes them rather arbitrary.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/327201/are-there-in...

chosen, yes, but -not- arbitrary. Axiom are chosen very carefully at the foundation based on all the upper knoweledge, based on these axioms -all- above must be proved (under Goedel blessing), not -some- stuff.

Change axiom and you end with -another- math.

By axiom OP meant "assumed truth on which we base all of our other deductions" not "a self-evident truth"

This is really silly and largely a result of our Western desire to turn everything into an impartial science when the experience of life is anything but.

Ethics are not arbitrary. If you do violence to me, that causes me suffering. If you have sex with my husband or my wife without my consent, that's gonna cause me suffering. Both of these things are also highly likely to cause you suffering because most people who are not sociopaths do not enjoy the direct experience of causing someone suffering and suffer guilt for bad actions.

The cycle of suffering is universal to all living things. There's absolutely nothing arbitrary about it.

Don't do things that are shitty to other people does not need a postmodern deconstruction to be understood.

Well those are very simple scenarios, but very quickly you get to a place where things are not so clear. For example, as soon as you need to compare two sufferings, you find trouble: is it ethical to kill before being killed? is it the same to have your neighbour suffer vs. someone whose suffering is far away and you don't perceive? It it better to have a child suffer, an adult, or an old man? Two people suffering less vs. one people more? Future people vs. current people? What's the relationship of not being alive / not being born / dying, to the avoidance of suffering?

Different people have different ethical opinions, so it is not so clear cut.

You're wrapping yourself up in mental games here, exactly what I was criticizing. The majority of people the vast majority of time are not encountering trolley problems. Start with the basics of not choosing to inflict what is harmful to others you encounter in your life.

As an example, surely you are aware about the ongoing discussions about whether abortion is ethical? Do you think people are just playing mental games for fun when they discuss that? Do you really think that it is not two different ethical systems clashing?

No I don't think people are playing mental games for fun. I think debates like these are not centered on the individual and their own responsibility to their and another's suffering.

In the case of abortion it's still the case that the mother is engaged in her own inquiry of harm. Notice how I've not brought myself into the picture.

That doesn't mean it can't be a complex inquiry but it is still her own inquiry and it is firmly rooted in suffering.

You have completely ignored the babies suffering here.

Until you can recognize in cases of abortion there are two parties with different interests we cannot make progress. (we probably cannot even after understanding that, but maybe we can be civil)

But basing your ethics on suffering rather than say some other model of virtue is arbitrary.

It's not arbitrary because suffering is universal and unwanted by those who experience it.

But that doesn’t make it a universal basis for ethics.

If you can come up with a better basis than that experienced by all living organisms, the floor is open for you to make your pitch.

> Both of these things are also highly likely to cause you suffering because most people who are not sociopaths do not enjoy the direct experience of causing someone suffering and suffer guilt for bad actions.

Why would someone having sex with your wife cause them suffering?

From all the gunshot wounds?

Axioms are only arbitrary in terms of the logical system they are involved in. If they conflict with other axioms, one of them has to go. So the choice of axioms isn't totally arbitrary, even at the level of logic.

When it's time to take an idealized theory and use it to make predictions about the real world, we first have to check that the axioms match our sense data. If they don't, it's not an applicable theory. That removes another degree of arbitrariness when putting any theory into practice.

"Feeling" good or bad is the bedrock of morality. From the vantage point of the human mind, our entire experience is colored with judgement. e.g. This is net good, that is net bad, etc. There are interesting questions to ask about how that evolved, or why it presents itself in consciousness, but it is first and foremost just a fact about the human experience.

That isn't arbitrary. A human cannot will their experience to stop containing judgements.

So yes, many people have come up with many theories about morality, ethics, and meta-ethics, but we can and should discard any of them that don't have their axioms satisfied by ground truth.

You're assuming a logical system, but these "axioms" aren't like math, trying to find a contradiction is itself a moral judgement.

So you're just arguing in circles. None of the grounding in reality is actually connected to moral judgements in the sense of proving them wrong or right.

I would say math has the same problem. Math is based on a bunch of axioms.

Here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompletenes...

>Axioms are only arbitrary in terms of the logical system they are involved in. If they conflict with other axioms, one of them has to go. So the choice of axioms isn't totally arbitrary, even at the level of logic.

We aren't logic systems, and neither are systems of ethics. People change their minds and are self-contradictory. Things vary from time to time. Kantian style ethics are a rareity and are almost a caricature people critique to make a point or argument in parable.

He’s not saying we have instinctual ethical views. He’s saying we have a biologically determined interpretive framework we use to evaluate ethical questions.

This is what he was talking about when he said we make a leap from scattered data to specific conclusions, and we all do this in a similar way. We all just have different data. However when we have very similar data, such as living in a particular culture, we mostly come to the same conclusions. The interpretive framework sets that reference frame for human ethics.

The comparison to visual systems is apt. Intelligent spiders would have a different biologically determined ethical interpretive framework in the same way that they would have a different visual system.

Within the range set by our biology there is a considerable degree of arbitrariness, for sure. He spells this out clearly at the beginning. He’s not arguing there is no relativism. He’s arguing against the absolute unlimited relativism espoused by Foucault because that’s what he was asked about.

> when we have very similar data, such as living in a particular culture, we mostly come to the same conclusions

That's not my take from the interview, but in any case this is provably false. People living in a given "culture" don't come to the same conclusions: they come to different conclusions -- usually opposite ones.

Politics wouldn't exist otherwise. Or most wars, which are almost always between neighbors sharing more or less the same "culture" but having values so different they're willing to die to defend them.

I mean if you recursively generate 'opposite' conclusions you still only end up with 2 different conclusions?

How about "similar enough?" People, particular people who've never lived in another culture overemphasize differences within their own culture between themselves and others in their own culture. They often overestimate similarities between themselves and other cultures.

If we consider that a person is a data point with its own properties (family, wealth, education, upbringing environment,...); the idea of a universal framework that handles these properties for ethics is still valid.

I didn’t say the same, I said mostly the same.

Cultures consist of a consensus. When the consensus shifts, the culture shifts. Politics operates within an agreed framework at any given time.

At the time of the founding of the USA some people had misgivings about slave owning, but even some of them still owned slaves. 100 years later there was a civil war over it. Today in the US slavery is almost universally maligned and only exists as a covert criminal activity.

Was there a diversity of opinion at the time of the revolutionary war, and is there now? Sure. Was there a consensus then and now? I don’t see how you can argue otherwise.

At the time of the civil war there was no country-wide consensus on the question of slavery, obviously.

Today, on that specific question, there seems to be a consensus (although one can argue it's largely a legal consensus: the song "Rich men north of Richmond" is choke-full of dog whistles advocating for a return to the good old times of pre-civil war in the South, and its runaway success shows it resonates with many people).

But there are a lot of other ethical topics where there is zero consensus, in the US, today. Guns, abortion, immigration, to name a few.

>At the time of the civil war there was no country-wide consensus on the question of slavery, obviously.

There was a consensus in the South. There was a consensus in the North. It's the existence of consensus at all that is the problem for Foucault's unconstrained relativism.

The very fact that individual societies do have consensus moral frameworks demonstrates that individual moral frameworks are not unlimited by constraints such as environment and culture. This is why he says relativism is incoherent. The fact that it accepts that cultural moral frameworks exist, and that there are reasons for that, kills this hard form of extreme relativism stone dead. After all if human ethics were truly unconstrained, how can cultural norms exist?

It is true that individuals can vary greatly, most people are not psychopaths but some are. Most do not experience extreme abuse as children that warps their perspective, but some do. Even so, these individuals have their ethical frameworks very largely determined by factors outside their control. A psychopath can't choose not to suffer from psychopathy, an abuse victim cannot just choose not to be warped by that abuse. They do of course have autonomy within a range, and it's not the same range as most of us, but it's still a range and these ranges are set somehow.

>He’s not saying we have instinctual ethical views. He’s saying we have a biologically determined interpretive framework we use to evaluate ethical questions.

I thought this was entirely obvious to everyone until I read GP’s to comment.

We act in a way that keeps the majority of us alive and reproducing. We have done OK at that so as a society, we keep doing it that way.

Sure, ok, that’s “relative”, but also obvious and doesn’t invalidate the idea that we know which things are good/ethical beyond how they feel.

instinctual -> biologically determined

views -> interpretive framework/evaluation system

The concept of a 'biologically determined interpretive framework' doesn't seem all that determined to me. The variation in our individual moral compasses and the existence of intercultural moral divides indicate that this framework is as vague and inconsistent as it can be.

Using empathy or feelings as a basis raises the question of whose sensitivity we should calibrate it on. We are not moral relativists because the concept of morality itself is built on the idea of distinguishing right from wrong. We believe that what we are doing is right.

In the future, there might be a carbon-neutral vegan society, and they will view us through their newly derived ethical compass, much like how we perceive morality when we look back at our recent history.

If this biological source had any consistency, why did people do monstrous things while believing they are on the right? Would you have had your current moral compass if you lived in another society/another time that you look back at now with horror? Can you find a single human ethic that all societies from any time can agree on?

>The concept of a 'biologically determined interpretive framework' doesn't seem all that determined to me. The variation in our individual moral compasses and the existence of intercultural moral divides indicate that this framework is as vague and inconsistent as it can be.

Is it limitlessly inconsistent as Foucault claimed?

>In the future, there might be a carbon-neutral vegan society, and they will view us through their newly derived ethical compass, much like how we perceive morality when we look back at our recent history.

That is correct, and Chomsky raised almost that identical example. As I said he's not arguing for no moral relativism, just that there are some biologically imposed limits.

>Can you find a single human ethic that all societies from any time can agree on?

You're missing the forest for the trees that are blocking your view. The very fact that individual societies do have consensus moral frameworks demonstrates that individual moral frameworks are not unlimited by constraints such as environment and culture. This is why he says relativism is incoherent. The fact that it accepts that cultural moral frameworks exist, and that there are reasons for that, kills this hard form of extreme relativism stone dead. After all if human ethics were truly unconstrained, how can cultural norms exist?

> all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms

But they aren't. Morality -- like all animal behavior -- is grounded in evolution.

Morality is set around cultural norms not animal behavior.

But cultural norms -- indeed, culture itself -- is grounded in evolution.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

Only partly, there is still a large degree of arbitrariness based on the social environment within the biologically constrained bounds

Sure, all behavior exhibits variation within evolutionary constraints. But it is still not the case that "all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms". That is no more true than that the weather is "based on arbitrary axioms".

Culture has social conventions that are not based at all around survival of the fittest, fashion and language for one are different between cultures. I do not see how they maximize survival, if anything they create needless competition.

You don't understand how evolution works. You need to read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.

Well, since i shed the shackles of religion and am diametrically opposed to simply following leaders, i had to find my own definition of ethically correct behaviour.

The question i ask myself: "Is my action beneficial to mankind and nature as a whole?"

I share your vector

However the point/problem is that our position has exactly the same epistemic grounding as to what is “right” as “my philosophy is to Kill all but 10 humans” does.

That question is not resolvable in any meaningful way. You can justify anything with a rationalization

Yeah, especially if you mix in long termism :)

>> Is my action beneficial to mankind and nature as a whole

You're going to have to make choices between those two.

Mankind has destroyed how many other species now?

What is beneficial can be debated, as can how to weight the pros and cons of any action. Still, it is a good question to ask!

So, you'll imminently lead a mob to kill executives of companies that majorly contribute to climate change?

Many people have kept slaves, even beating them to death - and still answered yes to your question. Many criminals in prison will tell you their victim deserved whatever.

I don't know how to define morality, but yours is not helpful.

Everyone that has ever that has done terrible things has likely asked themselves the same question. And that is a problem.

Whatever raises survivability and QOL is ethical. Though there is a feeling/emotion when dealing with QOL, it is measurable.

To put out two examples: Abortion and Guns are very hot topics where people with otherwise similar ethics some on the opposite side and refuse to understand how anyone could take the other position because whichever side they are on is so obviously correct.

Please think about the above next time topics like those come up. Once you take a moment to understand the different axioms someone puts higher in priority the better you can understand what is going on. And that there is no universal means you cannot call the someone who takes a different stance things like stupid, unreasonable or wrong (they might be - but not in relation to this topic). Maybe the world will learn to get along a little better if more people will try to understand each other. (I'm not holding my breath)

The complete sentence is "same meta-ethical problem exists as a possibility" but from all possibilities only a portion have any chance to be adjusted to reality. Hence, a natural selection of all theoretical ideas comes into place and excludes most of them (the ones that diverge the reality tests).

Far from being completely impossible, subjective ethics are entirely more consistent than the alternative. The important thing about analyzing ethical systems is to find axioms that you actually believe. An unanalyzed moral system tends to have false axioms: things that the speaker says are fundamental tenets, but on further analysis simply don't stand muster.

For example, the Commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is anything but an axiom. All but the most unreasonable followers will be able to produce some circumstance where killing is moral. That's not an axiom, that's a guideline.

So why find one's axioms? Ultimately, the entire study of ethics boils down to one simple question: "What ought I do?". When faced with a dilemma, what should I choose? With the understanding of your beliefs, you can make a reasoned decision, consistent with your broader choices. If you exist in a society, then you will inevitably be forced to react to the actions of others, which, in of itself, is a forced action on your part. If you don't have some framework with which to judge the actions of others, then your ethical framework is utterly incomplete.

> For example, the Commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is anything but an axiom. All but the most unreasonable followers will be able to produce some circumstance where killing is moral. That's not an axiom, that's a guideline.

So can you give an example of an actual "moral axiom"

Kant's categorical imperative is a decent attempt at one.

Also (closely related)- "do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

They both have holes and edge cases though.

> "do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

This one doesn't just have edge cases, it has a hole large enough to float an aircraft carrier through it. My grandparents (all deceased at this point) did not want to be treated in the same way I want(ed) to be treated.

The much less absurd version is: "treat other people the way they would like to be treated". Still edge cases, but the holes are much smaller.

Doesn’t work on the context of mental illness.

It breaks down when dealing with anybody who selfishly wants more than they deserve. A child stamps his feet and demands the biggest piece of cake, should you give it to him? Treating people the way they want to be treated rewards greed and selfishness.

On the other hand, treating other people the way you wish to be treated is self-moderating. If I am greedy, the golden rule commands me to be generous to others. If I encounter somebody who's greedy, the golden rule only obliges me to give them whatever I would think myself entitled to.

The golden rule can't make everybody happy, and isn't supposed to. If there is some delta between the way your grandparents expect to be treated and the way you want to be treated, so be it. I don't think this is a reasonable objection to the golden rule.

I think you meant to reply to my comment, rather than a comment on that.

When it comes to materialistic "treating", sure I agree. But in the realm of emotion and psychology, I stand by what I said: treats others as they wish to be treated (to the extent possible).

> But in the realm of emotion and psychology, I stand by what I said: treats others as they wish to be treated (to the extent possible).

How do you deal with narcissists, who feel entitled to praise and adoration beyond what they can reasonably be entitled? Do you humor them to the extent possible? And if you don't humor narcissists like that, what is your process for determining what is or isn't reasonable? Probably, that process involves you imagining yourself in their shoes and thinking about what you might reasonably feel entitled to in their position, e.g. applying the golden rule.

It’s actually better translated ‘though shall not murder’ for the modern reader.

> better translated ‘though shall not murder’ for the modern reader

Which cleverly punts the problem to the language centre of the brain, which gets to decide whether a particular killing was a good kill (execution, enemy combatant) or bad (murder).

It does for a reader, but reading wasn’t common ~4K years ago when it was written. These are communal truths verified through generations of dialog and discussion.

Yeah, which is a totally different epistemological view than the OP's, where ethics is basically math.

> does for a reader, but reading wasn’t common ~4K years ago when it was written

The point is murder is defined as bad killing. That doesn’t help us define what “bad” means. (Or whether a particular killing is bad.) It leaves it to context. Depending on your perspective, that’s either useless or savvy.

"Thou shalt not kill" is a mistranslation.

The commandment is "Thou shalt not murder".

For further reading, see Kant’s Categorical Imperative.

> the founding axiom that most folks will have is that the "normal" ethical view is the "correct" view.

I half-see your point here, and there are many other points to be made about ethics (which I still think Nietzsche does best) but I feel like you're brushing away Chomsky's argument. He looks at morality like language. It's just that normal does indeed have an apparently wide range, which according to his theory is actually quite limited. I like this idea. Similar to the limits of reason itself; from one perspective the human condition limits us to a frustratingly small territory of what is thinkable at all. Morality is narrow because humans are alike. This is a claim about the human condition itself, not about the moral majority.

The only real exception i can think of is psychopaths, but I think that they do live up to their name.

Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696482

(I mention how it's possible to define a notion of universality of ethics, and why!)

> axioms are by definition arbitrary

sorry, the axioms of Euclidean Geometry are not arbitrary. They are axioms by the definition of axioms, but not by the definition of arbitrary.

I’m a bit overwhelmed with the pushback on this point. The fact that axioms are, again, by definition arbitrary, should be anything but controversial.

The axioms of Euclidean geometry are very obviously arbitrary, in that, we can create other forms of geometries should we choose to. The fact that we are attempting, with Euclidean geometry, to create a model of the phenomena we experience is good and useful, but that does not change the fact that we could create a geometry of any other fashion, to map to any other phenomena we could imagine.

If we found that all minds feel the same with regard to an ethical mapping we created (I see this as Chomsky’s point) then we have effectively created a physics of ethics. The problem is that it is quite obvious that this is not the world we live in. In fact, if it were, I would hardly think we would have much disagreement about anything of moral substance.

Thus, we are living in a world where two people measure the same geometric line, and find two different results, form two different axioms to model their measurements, and then try to enforce their measurements with threats of violence.

Again, I consider myself a fairly ethical person, I have an moral theory, I just don’t pretend that my theory can be universalizable, and don’t think that moral judgments, in a philosophical sense, have much foundation. The reason I fight for what I fight for is that I feel that doing what we can to help each other is the way we should live. I just know there are plenty of people who will inherently disagree, and there is little way to reason with them.

I’m not a moral relativist in that sense, I just refuse to pretend that I can create an ethical theory in any moral sense beyond what makes good sense to me.

a million monkeys on typewriters typing arbitrarily will ultimately type out every known work of literature. But the known works of literature were not created arbitrarily.

You're confusing arbitrary with random. We have chosen the axioms of Euclidean geometry because they are useful, but we could very easily chose different axioms and derive a different geometric system. We didn't choose the Euclidean axioms randomly, but they weren't an a priori given either.

> Now, Chompsky here is basically saying

Heh, reminds me of how once I knew someone who named their dog Chompsky after Noam Chomsky

There are few thought experiments which would force you to a 'better' behaviour.

You don't know for example, if death is real or not (deah not real -> afterlife) which could bring up a few scenarios like you currently are supervised if you are 'good' enough.

Or the old idea of hell vs sky.

The best bet for you is always to be 'good' weird thing is people don't get it. The same issue with people getting asked if we should increase taxes for the rich people and they say no because they think they are affected by this.

Or a sentence someone once said: Don't teach kids playing footbal to win, teach them to play so that others want to play with them.

In my undergraduate engineering ethics class, our professor (who had an engineering and legal background) pointed this out in one of the first lectures and said “this is the first reason why I am not going to pretend to teach you ethics in this course. The second reason is that, even if there was clear set of ethics to follow, I am not going to pretend that this mandatory class will convince an unethical person to be ethical. What I will teach you is that decisions have consequences, and many of those consequences are bad for more than one party.”

Say the truth for once. I’m so sick of all the people thinking their standpoints are ultimately based on anything other than just that they “feel” they are correct.

The only exception I know of is the case for religious morality. It comes directly from God, so the believer only needs to believe in one axiom, that the scripture and the prophet is really from God, as opposed to many axioms, “feels”, and source-of-truths a non-believer may have.

It's weird to hear Foucault described as "amoral" when he himself claimed to be a moralist [1].

What is meant by moral relativism in this case I think is merely that morals do not come to us handed down by God or Nature as Chomsky claims, but are a constant choice made by people over a potentially infinite range. But to assert that the morals don't come from God is not to say that morals are not valuable or worth having.

As Foucault puts it, "What is good, is something that comes through innovation. The good does not exist, like that, in an atemporal sky, with people who would be like the Astrologers of the Good, whose job is to determine what is the favorable nature of the stars. The good is defined by us, it is practiced, it is invented. And this is a collective work."

1. http://www.critical-theory.com/read-me-foucault-interview-in...

Well, after raping countless boys in N. Africa and helping introduce HIV in the continent, I'd say he's IMmoral.

EDIT Add citation: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-...

Foucault was working in Tunisia from 1966-1968. HIV is thought to have spread to NYC in '71, and SF in '75 which is where Foucault probably was infected. AIDS was first clinically described in '81, and Foucault died in 1984 from AIDS.

> What is meant by moral relativism in this case I think is merely that morals do not come to us handed down by God or Nature as Chomsky claims, but are a constant choice made by people over a potentially infinite range.

I didn't get the sense he's saying morals are handed down by nature, rather that the potential range is not infinite.

E.g., consider that research where the primate gets angry and starts rejecting its boring food pellets-- and in fact throwing them at its handler (!)-- because the other primate is consistently receiving all the delicious grapes. We humans surely share and exhibit some similar social behavior. That truth doesn't determine exactly how a culture will conceptualize and enforce a sense of morality. But it does mean some theoretical moral systems just won't work in practice. E.g., history hasn't left us with examples of well-fed kings with no king's guards during famines.

So if you're a radical whose theories rely on humans asblank slates on which infinite moral systems may be applied (after the revolution, probably), you're going to have a bad time in the real world.

Digression: I have no idea how this truism fits in with Chomsky's political ideas about anarcho-syndicalism.

But what you are saying is just that the “range” of morality is handed down by nature. And the idea that this range is “naturally” limited is too often used, as it is in your comment, to make an argument from nature’s authority in favor of certain applications of power that may or may not be good for people. What I think relativism does is restore accountability to the individual and the society for moral decisions, rather than appealing to natural or theological authorities to absolve people and institutions of responsibility for their choices.

> But what you are saying is just that the “range” of morality is handed down by nature.

Yes, but for the generous interpretation of what I wrote.

E.g., you can't build a moral system that requires cordoning children off in individual stalls (one child per stall, no direct contact with other humans), feeds and virtually teaches them the rules of the society, then when they reach the age of 18 and pass a test get released into the wild to socialize with other humans for the first time. What we know about child development tells us that this system will be an utter failure.

If you can imagine accepting at least some version of that paragraph as supported by the scientific evidence for how humans socialize, then you agree there are some hard limits on what kind of moral systems humans can thrive under.

If you don't accept there are any limits whatsoever, then you fall into self-contradiction and incoherence which AFAICT is all Chomsky is pointing out.

Edit: clarification. I don't think it's necessary to use the "most generous" interpretation of what I wrote, just a stock generous one.

Lenin claimed to be the most moral because he had just one moral value: the good of the Party.

One can claim to be moral while being amoral, and Lenin is the perfect example.

I don't think Lenin ever made such claims, Marxists generally reject moral justifications of socialism because they view them as idealist.

His shots at Foucault and other philosophers always struck me as being some poorly justified dislike of them. Sometimes, that's all it is deep down.

I admire Chomsky but I'm afraid this particular argument isn't very convincing. He merely asserts his position but does nothing (substantial) to defend his position. In what way is moral relativism a logical contradiction?

   "...even if you’re the most extreme cultural relativist, you are presupposing universal moral values. Those can be discovered.”

That's not true at all. I don't presuppose universal moral values. And if I do, they can still be compatible with a relativistic description. (e.g. I can say they're relative to my current understanding, or relative to our collective shared understanding).

And as a linguist, he himself should know best that language usage here matters. What do we mean by "discovered" or "universal moral values" anyway. Clear all that up first before trying to eliminate moral relativism with a broad brush.

It's a logical contradiction in a simple way:

If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would be a relative claim which would undermine the assertion as a universal position.

Further, you end up in a position of equivalence of all claims and generate major contradictions.

I will go out on a limb on the universal moral values claim and I think again it's pretty simple:

The existence of even the most basic objective truth, such as 1+1=2 would imply by its existence a frame of reference by which all claims can be evaluated against. This constrains the scope of relative claims, as you pointed out, but also implies an actual truth or set of standards with which you can evaluate anything.

It's not clear what universal moral values looks like, like Epicurean pleasure/pain or maybe it stems from thermodynamics, or even just mathematics itself, but it is possible that it could be discovered.

>If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would be a relative claim

no it wouldn't because meta-ethical statements express objectives claims about moral values, they are not themselves normative or moral claims.

It is equivalent to pointing out that everyone is a relativist in regards to their favorite flavor of ice cream. That statement is itself verifiably true or false.

>That statement is itself verifiably true or false.

Is it verifiably true without spending more entropy than exist in the visible universe to answer the question, because really affects if the answer if verifiably true or not.

>If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would be a relative claim

Would it? If we define "moral absolutism" as "the position that there exist moral statements that are true independently of any observers" then we could define the position of "moral relativism" as its logical negation: "there don't exist moral statements that are true independently of any observers". Is that sentence itself a moral statement? Why? To me it reads like a statement about reality, not about what is moral or immoral.

>It's not clear what universal moral values looks like

Universal moral values are not the same as absolute moral values, though. For example, let's suppose that "murder is wrong" is a universal moral value. That just tells you that every human agrees on that, but we're still working off a subjective, biased system, because every human you could ask will evaluate this moral question using their human brain. And if you could ask every living thing in the universe, you would still have the bias of matter-based life. How could you tell a universal moral value is basic enough that it's independent of any subjective point of view? The only truths I can imagine that could meet those requirements would have to be really abstract, like 1+1=2 as you say.

> he only truths I can imagine that could meet those requirements would have to be really abstract, like 1+1=2

And that is not even universally or absolutely true, 1+1=2 is a set of symbols that need to be interpreted by someone for them to have meaning, it’s a concept made up by people

Hence, 1+1=2 is just as relative as anything else we express through language

"1+1=2" as a string of symbols is open to interpretation, however, both you and I understand the idea that that string of symbols is conveying, and that idea is true objectively.

It’s just an agreement that has been pretty much forced on anyone that has a basic school education

I can choose to disagree and doesn’t matter what you do I can assign a different meaning to it

No ideas are objective truth, and objective truth is something that can’t even be tested

>I can assign a different meaning to it

I don't even understand what that means. Ideas don't have meaning, they are meaning. What does it mean to assign a different meaning to the idea represented as "1+1=2"?

>No ideas are objective truth

No. Mathematical truths are objectively true. Even if addition itself is false in the universe, in the sense that in some cases you can put one real thing next to another and get other than two real things next to each other as a result, that 1+1=2 is true objectively. It would just mean that the universe is based on an axiomatic system that is more lax than our own.

You can believe whatever you want, assign any meaning you want

I can say that 1+1=2 means it’s lunchtime on the moon

I can also say that 1+1=11

I can’t force you (nor anyone else), to accept or agree with those meanings, but I can definitely assign any meaning I want

No ideas, nor meaning, nor formulas, nor math are objective truth

Just the fact that I can disagree with you right now means there isn’t an objective truth. If there was, then we wouldn’t even be able to disagree

And the universe is not based on any axiomatic anything, maybe your models of the universe are, but those models are just a subjective approximation to whatever the reality of the universe is, which we all perceive and experience differently in a subjective manner

>I can say that 1+1=2 means it’s lunchtime on the moon

You're still confusing the symbols with the meaning.

>Just the fact that I can disagree with you right now means there isn’t an objective truth. If there was, then we wouldn’t even be able to disagree

Please explain how objective truth existing would prevent people from disagreeing with each other.

>And the universe is not based on any axiomatic anything, maybe your models of the universe are, but those models are just a subjective approximation to whatever the reality of the universe is

Yes, that's more or less what I said. However, those models contain objectively true statements with regards to themselves. According to the theory of relativity no object can go faster than light, correct? A sandwich is an object, correct? Then it's objectively true that according to the theory of relativity a sandwich can't go faster than light. It doesn't matter whether sandwiches actually are capable of going faster than light, that the theory of relativity states (indirectly) that sandwiches can't go faster than light is an objective truth.

If I write "water is wet", I'm referring to the matter known as water, not the symbols that make up the English word "water".

Likewise, in this conversation, 1+1=2 is saying that if you take the idea represented by the symbol 1 and then add it to itself, the result is the idea represented by the symbol 2.

The ideas behind words and the words themselves are not equivalent.

Sounds like a pretty piss poor attempt at an absolute by someone who aspires to the label “sophomoric” in the most asinine and juvenile sense.

"1 + 1 = 2" has a commonly understood meaning that implies a system of axioms and theorems and whatnot so as to be an objectively true statement in that context. You're not being asked to interpret what someone means by "1 + 1 = 2"; you're being asked to examine that string of characters in the context of a specific system that you clearly understand.

>both you and I understand the idea that that string of symbols is conveying

Until the moment we have to take each other to court, then suddenly two different trials with two different juries comes out with conflicting answers.

What are you on about?

Yeah, I like to lie too.

> Hence, 1+1=2 is just as relative as anything else we express through language

The symbols are relative, the semantics are not.

Well, I can disagree with that, so what can you do then?

If you can’t force everyone to agree on the same semantics, you can’t have absolute semantics

Of course you are free to believe whatever you want, including absolute semantics, but that is your own personal subjective opinion (even if popular or accepted in the mainstream)

I don't know what "absolute semantics" means. If you mean "objective semantics", then yes that's already objective. If you mean "universal semantics", well there's rarely universal agreement on anything, so I'm not sure why I should find the existence of a few contrarians persuasive.

So you are essentially saying that you can keep your own ideas of “objective semantics” because you can dismiss people who disagree with you

Which means you have a subjective definition of the meaning of “objective semantics”

Objective doesn’t exist

Everyone can assign their own meaning and not agree on what something means

We are doing it right now on this thread

You might say that there is an objective reality or truth regardless of whatever anyone else says, but you can’t prove that

Your whole life experience is subjective, and you can never detach from it, you (nor anyone) can ever have an objective experience of anything

You believing that there is some sort of objective anything is just your own subjective belief

There are objective truths in the world. Or, to be more precise, there are objective truth's in each person's "world", their sense of reality. "1 + 1 = 2" is objectively true given a certain system of axioms and theorems that are generally understood. Yes, you need to include that context to be objective, but that doesn't make it invalid. Another objective fact that I can confidently say is that I can think. Does that mean I know I'm not living in a simulation? Of course not, but some way or another, my perception of the world includes my thoughts. I can't prove to you that I think, because Hacker News might just be glitching and sending this reply to you (or maybe it's the simulation overseers, ha!), but I know that I think. How? Because I think. Why? I don't know and I don't care that much.

> You might say that there is an objective reality or truth regardless of whatever anyone else says, but you can’t prove that

I get what you mean here, and I agree, but it's untrue that "1 + 1 = 2" can't be objectively true. It can, as long as certain semantics are applied. A sufficiently smart alien that understands what we mean by "1", "+", "=", "2", the set of integers, what a field is, and so on can only reasonably conclude the same. It also isn't objectively true that there are no objective truths in the sense of "racism bad". We can't know if it's objectively true, but given the context of, well, the world, maybe it is an objective truth. Not that it matters, since we can't know, but still. Although you could argue that those statements shouldn't be considered statements anymore.

So for the first point about 'moral relativism is true' yes it's a meta-ethical statement, but at the same time, logically, you're affirming the set 'moral relativism'.

And the second point, I would argue that 'universal moral values' arise from 'absolute moral values', whatever that might be, if it's even possible to know it.

I also don't think that moral relativism is a logical negation of moral absolutism, more like an opposing view.

But my point is that the existence of universal moral values do not prove the existence of absolute moral values, because universal moral values can also arise in the absence of absolute moral values (or it would have to be demonstrated that they can't). That every moral agent agrees that murder is wrong does not prove that murder is wrong independently of any point of view.

Yes, there are physical facts, most moral relativists are physical realists.

But that is also exactly where the moral relativism originates. You _do_ have physical laws, you _do not_ have moral laws. You can _test_ physical laws, you _can not test_ moral laws.

Once you axiomatically ordain some set of rules as "moral truths" or some measure of "moral truth" then the physical apparatus comes in, and you get to use it. But you have to pick the framework of morality first!

> But that is also exactly where the moral relativism originates. You _do_ have physical laws, you _do not_ have moral laws. You can _test_ physical laws, you _can not test_ moral laws.

First, this assumes a very specific kind of moral realism, but does not describe all forms of moral realism. Second, we do just fine testing mathematical laws by checking for consistency without any tests of the sort you're describing.

Finally, these sorts of arguments against moral realism have been discussed for decades, so I'll simply leave this here for people to assess:

A Proof of the Objectivity of Morals - Bambrough (1969), https://www.dropbox.com/s/p9v7qt23p21gfci/Proof%20of%20the%2...

>Second, we do just fine testing mathematical laws by checking for consistency without any tests of the sort you're describing.

So is there some axiomatic system that can elucidate moral truths, such as the wrongness of stealing, from first principles?

>A Proof of the Objectivity of Morals - Bambrough (1969)

Quickly skimmed through it, but: awful, just awful. I challenge Bambrough to prove to me that I have two hands.

> So is there some axiomatic system that can elucidate moral truths, such as the wrongness of stealing, from first principles?

Read Kant.

> Quickly skimmed through it, but: awful, just awful. I challenge Bambrough to prove to me that I have two hands.

Clearly you missed the entire thrust of the argument, and Moore's before it.

>Read Kant.

Nah. And either way following such a reasoning would just tell you whether a statement meets a condition defined by an arbitrarily chosen axiomatic system. Whether someone chooses to call that moral or not is still subjective. Look, I can do it right now:

bool is_moral(string s){ return false; }

Math is also composed of arbitrarily chosen axiomatic systems, and yet math is still objective. I'm afraid such trivial arguments aren't much challenge to moral realism, which you'd know if you actually bothered to read anything about it.

Yes, but math just seeks to find truths that are internally consistent. is_moral("not murdering people") is objectively true in the exact same sense that mathematical truths are true. Yet this tells us nothing at all about whether not murdering people is moral.

Let's see if I can achieve the same tone that you just did.

Math cannot be proven to be objective. Therefore a trivial appeal to the objectiveness of math don't make your case. You'd know this if you actually bothered to read anything about it. I suggest that you start with Gödel.

Seriously, no matter how much you might know about the topic, this is not how you make an argument that convinces anyone else.

In this sense subjective opinions can be said to be objective to some extent: subjective opinion is brain configuration, and the latter is objective. But moral realists probably mean something else.

Ironically I talked about Kant with my son 2 days ago. He literally couldn't get through the first sentence without disagreeing. Kant argues that the only thing that is good in itself is good will. However it is trivial to find ways in which good will leads to bad things, and therefore having good will is not necessarily good at all!

From my son's perspective, the argument did not improve from there.

So people who disagree with you are not necessarily going to be convinced by an appeal to Kant.

It's a strange claim that Kant somehow helps with realism. He sees reality as unintelligible noumena, that's agnosticism at best, absurdism at worst.

Appealing to mathematics is the least useful, because there is no objective mathematics. There is true logic, either, for that matter. Logic is a tool to talk about the physical world, not the other way around.

These sorts of arguments definitely have been talked to death. So has the existence of god, yet people still believe in Santa.

> The existence of even the most basic objective truth, such as 1+1=2

You might be surprised that even this is a relatively (sorry) controversial view. Many (most?) practicing mathematicians do not hold it.

Even if it were, then you get the is-ought gap -- the existence of objective / analytic / verifiable / what have you facts doesn't obviously imply anything about moral "facts".

> It's not clear what universal moral values looks like, like Epicurean pleasure/pain or maybe it stems from thermodynamics, or even just mathematics itself, but it is possible that it could be discovered.

I strongly suspect they come from game theory, although they look more like statistical mechanics in that they govern the bulk behavior of societies and individuals will have widely varying personal moralities (serial killers) just like atoms have widely varying individual velocities. There will also be some society-to-society variation. Plus the game theoretical concerns have probably changed over time (Genghis Khan's army raping and murdering 11% of the world population probably represents an early peak in the selfish strategies of following a powerful leader and subjugating others). And those forces will have shaped our biological evolution and neural wiring as well.

> If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would be a relative claim which would undermine the assertion as a universal position.

Moral relativism means that everyone views the world through the lens of their own experiences. And my statement about moral relativism is also, as you point out, viewed through the lens of my own experiences (with that particular topic). But the second statement does not undermine the first one, instead it sort of "recurses" over it.

>It's not clear what universal moral values looks like, like Epicurean pleasure/pain or maybe it stems from thermodynamics, or even just mathematics itself, but it is possible that it could be discovered.

So if you want to take thermodynamic morals for a spin, the answer is complete chaos.

In the case of humanity we are just a waveform, a state, running from low entropy to high entropy. The only outcome of any open universe long term thermodynamic equation in itself is entropy maximization.

Mathematics seems like another dead end here. Mathematics is both incomplete and paradoxical. My assumption is any mathematical system that attempts to answer morality questions will quickly fall foul of Russel's Paradox.

And as of so far no one has any proofs that morals/morality is a reduceable problem. If morals are NP hard, then it is not a problem with findable solution, one could exist, but finding it would be random chance. And for example said morality solution could have hash conflicts, any reducible answer could be one many potential random answers.

1+1=2 (standard arithmetic)

1+1=10 (base 2 arithmetic)

1+1=11 (base 1 arithmetic)

1+1=11 (string concatenation)

1+1=true (+ often is used for AND in boolean arithmetic)

1+1=0 (mod 2 arithmetic)

Those are just what I think of in 3 minutes. I know there are others that I can't remember at the moment, and I'm sure there are even more that I've never encountered in my math studies.

I think the point is that if you're a moral relativist across the range of morals encountered in human societies you're hardly a moral relativist at all because from the space of all possible moral positions you've accepted as equally valid the tiny subset that have organically originated from the extreme restraints of human culture. It's far rarer to see moral relativists for example who think the moral positions of serial killers and humanitarians are equally valid, but even that range is small across the landscape of all possible moral positions.

Moral relativists don't believe that all positions are equally valid, my position is the most valid obviously. They believe moral positions are subjective.

He is attacking extreme relativists who claim all morals are based on culture and culture alone

The fact that all human cultures have notions that can be described as morals, that are biological in nature and connected to physical sensations (disgust, anger, etc) presupposes a universal system.

That universal system can’t be completely siloed from affecting the morals themselves. By virtue of having the same biological underlining there should be some connecting thread between all human morals

It's funny, I read "universal" and think about the universe. Would an alien intelligence recognize our morals? Even Star Trek pushed this limit with races like Klingons that honor a good death that earthlings find abhorrent.

Here's a though experiment, if I blew up the entire planet and left no trace of the existence of humans, did I violate anyone's ethics if there's no one around to be upset? In theory I destroyed ethics too.

Asserting a position is like choosing an axiom, you don’t have to defend it, you are just laying your cards out.

Sounds like Chomsky thinks moral relativists don't believe in any sort of morality.

I think what Chomsky is saying here "rhymes" with his theory of Universal Grammar (UG).

The UG belief is that there are a finite set of "primitives" of language, and all human languages have grammar syntax that are the permutations of those primitives. This is actually pretty clearly the case for programming languages -- primitives like addition/subtraction, methods, objects, etc. -- are chosen by language developers in different doses, and we group languages together based on these grammatical syntax choices (e.g. functional family of languages, declarative/imperative languages).

It sounds like Chomsky is claiming morals work the same way; there are a finite set of things that humans find reprehensible or good. Per that, certain cultures at certain times may have different permutations of what they group into the 'reprehensible bucket,' but the set of choices is constrained.

Even if you admit the hypothesis, that there is a finite set of _expressible_ moral statements. That does not impose a universality to a particular selection.

Just like there is not one-true-programming language, regardless of there being a finite number of them, there is not one-true-moral truth.

You could say "well just combine _all_ the programming languages!" and you will have almost everyone hating it (except perhaps you yourself), just like with moral codes.

Eh, this sounds like they are trying to say that the halting problem is reducible.

Simple finite components can generate infinite, non-halting answers.

"Moral" is a problematic word with religious baggage. If you exclude the words "right", "wrong", and "ethical" from the debate, you make things easier as well.

If you simply use the word "strategy" instead, most heated arguments vanish. Yes, there are foundational social strategies that exist in every successful human culture. It's pretty easy to account for why that is the case, and no reason to oppose the idea that such commonalities exist. And looking at the other side of the argument, "strategic relativism" isn't that inflammatory either, of course you'll find unique and situationally inspired strategies too.

This, exactly. I think most people don't even realize why they feel something is right or wrong or what it even means for something to be "moral"

At our core, everything we feel is based off self-preservation -- for ourselves, offspring, family, mates. Instinctually, the concept of what is "morally right" comes down to "what strategy will ensure my self-preservation best".

Most humans are smart enough to realize that a strategy made up of a lot of win/lose confrontations is unlikely to end well in the long run. Ergo, morality is simply the current best strategy for individual self-preservation given the current state of human knowledge.

If you refuse to engage with a challenging concept and instead talk about something else entirely, you make things easier. Go figure.

Strategy helps us decide which actions will help us reach a goal. It does not tell us what that goal should be. It has practically nothing to do with morality. Human societies adopt different means but they also work towards different ends.

The only goal is self-preservation. It's universal. All individual "moral" decisions are based on this one goal.

This is trivially debunked. People regularly sacrifice themselves because they think it is right. You could say soldiers fight to protect their kin, but people sacrifice even out of devotion to ideas like truth and honor. There are people who refuse to kill animals, even ones as distantly related to us as octopuses, because they think it's wrong. There are people who vow celibacy out of religious obligation, like the Shakers who abstained themselves out of existence. These things cannot be easily explained in your framework.

It can't be disputed that morality is partly instinctive. There are those who argue persuasively that morality is largely self-deception, with our alleged values being just a way of rationalizing our instincts. I think you have something of a point. Still, your simplistic version is just plain wrong.

It's not a challenging concept, it's a mistaken distinction. Using those specific words, just confuses the issue with ancient religious dogma.

I'm not sure I understand the point being made. Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent morality of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal morality. But how does that allow for the fact that different cultures do have different moral codes and that those do change over time?

I think he’s proposing a universal moral grammar, or something to that effect. I’m not sure it’s particularly convincing but I can’t say I take a particular side on this.

I think his point is not that there is an absolute moral landscape or that moral relativism can't exist in abstract. But that morals are so deeply held, that they shape your being and understanding of reality. So on a day to day basis you would feel revolted against something that appears to be immoral in another culture despite being able to logically pare out that it is okay in their system of morality.

Ah, I see. So you can understand why another culture holds a particular moral position but you still _feel_ it to be immoral yourself. That makes sense. But how does that tie to the sparse data and acquisition of morality?

I don’t think it’s that radical in a sense but trying to argue it is.

When you think about it though, we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to slavery. So we have folks like Washington freeing the slaves in his will, which of course his wife walked back on, and he probably had an idea that she might do that too.

And yet people are able to jump through mental hoops to justify it anyway. We tell ourselves, well it was okay during their time. They probably said the same thing to themselves too. One day I’m sure our ancestors will curse us for bringing about the environmental disaster that was the end of days.

> we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to slavery

From where did that secret sense of guilt come?

Maybe there was no sense of guilt at all and it was all performative, cynically done for the sake of his reputation. But perhaps the arguments from contemporary abolitionists were secretly eating away at him from the inside, inspiring a real sense of guilt. I think that is congruent with the theory that some small kernel of universal morality exists in all humans capable of feeling empathy, derived from that innate empathy instinct. People can be conditioned to ignore it, and this explains much of the variability in human morality across cultures. A slave owner can ignore that part of his mind that empathizes with the slaves because ignoring it is socially and financially convenient. Some can be needled and prodded into acknowledging it, while many go their entire lives with this empathy buried and ignored. But however ignored, that kernel of universal morality still exists in them. It's universal to humans because we're all the same species of social ape evolved to have instincts which facilitate social cooperation, particularly empathy. This morality is universal in the sense that all humans have the theoretical ability to access it within themselves, but actually doing so obviously isn't universal.

(Actual psychopaths, if such people even exist, may be the exception. If they truly lack the ability to empathize they would be unable to tap into this otherwise universal morality. Furthermore, the empathy instinct is not as perfect as might be wished; in almost all people empathy is felt more strongly for people who are close (socially and geographically.) Less empathy is felt for people who are distant or "other". Innate empathy has limits, and therefore universal morality is woefully flawed and incomplete.)

Heh, yea, trying to use the internal feeling of guilt as a basis is a path to complete failure in my eyes.

This overlaps with the quest for AI we have and Chinese Room arguments. We can't even argue that people have the same sense of guilt. Is guilt in some people performative for social gains? Do other people feel guilty on things that at least to me make no sense?

I don't argue that people all have the same sense of guilt. Demonstrably they don't. Some people refused to own slaves; some people owned slaves but then released them, while other people owned slaves and never showed any sense of guilt.

What I say is that everybody (excepting the possibility of true psychopaths) has empathy available to them but many people suppress it. It's a universal ability, but not universally put into practice.

> a path to complete failure in my eyes.

And I dispute complete failure. Humanity does not behave perfectly morally, so if that's your expectation then we've failed and always will fail. But most people do have the capacity to behave morally most of the time, and people are guided in this primarily by their internal sense of right and wrong (informed by their innate social instincts.) This system doesn't work perfectly but it's very far from a complete failure.

> He identifies “a tendency to move from the uncontroversial concept of moral relativism” — that, say, certain cultures at certain times hold certain moral values, and other cultures at other times hold other ones — “to a concept that is, in fact, incoherent, and that is to say that moral values can range indefinitely,” tethered to no objective basis.

The existence of a tether is what he’s focused on here, it seems to me.

Possibly the article is poorly written? It doesn't seem to make sense. Either Chomsky is saying something quite academic or the article hasn't captured the point.

It can be seen in an individual. A boy is raised in rural Oaxaca, Mexico. He works on a farm, speaks Copala Triqui and no Spanish. Then when he's 14 his family moves to east Los Angeles.

As he adjusts to his new situation, his behavior changes. The moral code of rural Oaxaca is different them that of east LA. His moral code changes. Perhaps he always gave a great amount of help when needed to neighbors in rural Oaxaca, but stops doing that as much. This changes. In Oaxaca, he did not steal from his friends, nor does he in LA. This does not change.

It's obvious even in US culture. Two students go to Harvard, one goes into engineering, one diplomacy. What group are the moral traits of candor, frankness and directness valued? What group are the moral values of politeness and courteousness valued? Morality can be relative, depending on the situation. But for some situations it is not, the more universal things.

I don't think it's obvious that those traits, e.g. not stealing, are universal or part of some fundamental moral grammar. It just means they're common and widespread.

Not stealing, but as I said, stealing from one's friends. Most cultures frown on that.

If you had to qualify it with "most", then it isn't universal. Moreover, I don't think morality is what applies only to your friends.

Well the qualifier could be the writer’s way of stating that he or she lacks knowledge of every society. After a brief search I can find no society that approved of stealing from peers.

People from which it's okay to steal aren't peers.

“good artists borrow, great artists steal.” - Pablo Picasso

“You believe stealing is wrong, but if your family was starving and could not afford bread, wouldn’t you say it’s okay to steal a loaf to feed them?” - A.J. Darkholme

etc.

The basis of a morality may start with a simple set of propositions. Life ensures that the unknown unknowns that you encounter morphs them into an ever-evolving ruleset.

in a commune there is no concept of "stealing" because there is no private property

In communes without private property, there is generally still personal property. Taking somebody's personal property is theft if you had reason to believe their feelings would be hurt by the taking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property#Personal_ver...

Even communal property may be stolen if there are any sort of expectations about one person having temporary exclusive use of that item. Maybe you and I live in a cult compound where literally everything is communally owned, even the cult robes on our backs. Now suppose that when you step into the shower, I take the robe you were wearing, the clean robe you were planning to wear, and all the communally owned towels as well. I have violated your reasonable expectation to have temporary use of those communal items. I have therefore stolen from you. Maybe our cult has a different word for it, but fundamentally I have stolen from you because I've deprived you of something you had a reasonable expectation to possess.

I can easily imagine a culture where it's only OK to steal from friends. Because a friend would "obviously" be happy for you to have it, but it's not OK to steal from anyone else.

Like how it's OK to prank a friend, but not a stranger - but the friend doesn't actually want to be pranked (i.e. the friend does not want to be stolen from).

> I can easily imagine a culture where it's only OK to steal from friends.

It is easy to imagine contexts in which taking something from your friend is morally permissible, because in that context you know the other person won't mind that you've done so. But because they don't mind, it's no longer stealing. Taking becomes stealing when you should reasonably expect the other person to feel hurt by the taking. Hurtfully taking things from your friends is universally immoral in all cultures, but different cultures have different expectations and standards for what kind of taking causes hurt feelings.

Take the idea of a post-singularity culture. To an individual in this society (if the idea of individualism still existed) have a moral framework anywhere near ours?

What is stealing if I can push a button and said object can be easily duplicated?

Does pain exist if I can turn if off an the level of my brain? Is death horrible if I can reconstitute myself from a backup?

The idea of a universal set of morals, and that humanity could even come close to finding them at our point in development is just not something I believe in happening. We are enslaved to our emotions and bound to our physical meat.

I think you described manners rather than morals.

Seems very close to his argument about the innateness of language structures. I can rephrase your question replacing moral* with language:

> Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent language of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal language structure. But how does that allow for the fact that different languages do have different grammars and that those do change over time?

Which, again, is a poor argument in that Chomsky never demonstrates his central conceit: Is there a poverty of the stimulus? Here's a review of a book that makes the case that children need, and use, plenty of stimulus to learn new linguistic constructions:

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/so-much-for-chomsky...

> It’s been noticed that children rarely learn a new pattern that’s demonstrated in front of them, which has been taken as meaning that they don’t imitate adult speech. But now we see that they don’t do it because a single instance isn’t enough data for them. They don’t venture to use a new construction till they’ve heard it many times and know how to use it.

> A nice confirmation of this: children learning inflectional languages don’t learn the six person/number combinations at the same rate. They first master the ones with the highest frequency in adult speech– e.g. 1st person singular, rather than 3rd person plural. Again, they’re learning by imitation, and it takes a huge amount of repetition for them to learn something. They also seem to learn each verb paradigm separately– it takes a long time before they start generalizing.

I think he's making two slightly related points.

1) That while it's possible to talk about moral relativism in the abstract, nobody in their own life is a complete moral relativist, which is to say that they will have _some_ moral system that they live their life by, even if they completely recognize the arbitrariness of it.

2) Moral systems have large degrees of freedom, but they _are_ constrained, and he thinks some of those constraints might be innate. For example, while all forms of violence can be approved of in some society, it's always _conditional_. You could _imagine_ a moral system where arbitrary extreme violence against anyone and anything including yourself and your family would be perfectly moral, but you won't see that in any real society. There are always some conditions under which violence is acceptable.

Regardless of whether there exists any underlying universal morality, why would shifts along cultural and/or time axises preclude it?

Here's my take on the problem.

Say there's are a pair of cultures, each celebrating a celestial event like Equinox or Solstice. In culture A, the tradition is that at solstice you should wear red shirts. Suppose they're not extreme about it, but they may look at you concerned or disappointed that you're not respecting their tradition for wearing a red shirt on that day. In culture B, the tradition is to wear a blue shirt instead.

If you go to culture B (from culture A), and wear a red shirt at the day, people will find it strange and be disappointed.

Does that mean one of those cultures is right in an absolute sense, and the other is wrong? I think at least in a "good enough" sense, maybe not. I think in many cases it comes down to non-unique solutions -- more than one culture can be good. Either case may be fine.

However, I think we can with progress in philosophy, science, etc.. critique cultures as a whole: we can try to define what is good. Not only that, but I think in the sense of what is good, then yes: I think we should converge on common, more or less universal principles. Within the same principles, a universe of cultures can exist; furthermore, variety itself is arguably part of goodness. If everything is the same, then we might be missing out in serious ways, both in immediately practical terms of different viewpoints fostering new innovations (if everyone thinks exactly the same... everyone has mostly the same ideas), and also in a cultural, aesthetic sense of life being more interesting with more than one 'cultural way', so to speak. Yet cultures should mostly agree on common universal principles (at least in some 'assymptotic', aspirational sense -- principles should be agreed more and more, and disagreements ought to become more minor).

You may observe 'Ok, but those principles are just the product of the culture you started with!'. I think that's somewhat fair. But I think universal principles are kind of 'natural' in a certain sense -- I think there is a unique set of principles that is capable of unifying concepts like science, truth, morality, sustainability, art, culture -- as far as reason can go. If you look at mathematics, it is universally agreed whether a statement should be true or not. And we don't expect a different culture to find it differently. It's really surprising, I think, that reason should be able to tell anything about culture, but, although it's in some senses extremely difficult (specially if you're thinking of proving anything practical/concrete, like whether an art piece is beautiful or not), those things should all be accessible to reason. This is in no small part because the processes that happen in our own minds can be studied -- and the study of mental processes is in the end what can provide a great unification of all sciences and arts (although in practice like I said it's too difficult in the near term). We can understand the nature of happiness, unhappiness, beauty, motivation, and so on, in a very solid way, in the same way we can study the behaviors of particles, control systems, processors, materials, knots, and so on (there are some important details to this study that are too long for this discussion[1]).

(I think both Chomsky and Focault would probably agree on this point eventually)

That's not to say you can't have cultures that refuse all that, potentially until they 'die'. It's also not to say you couldn't have some weird culture that does mathematics in a different way and they try to persistently live with grave inconsistencies. This would make their mathematics fragile, and probably far less useful -- the point where we call it 'totally unreasonable, pointless'. But it doesn't seem impossible that they could be totally unreasonable. This seems to undermine the notion of universality. If universality doesn't mean all cultures share the values, not even that all cultures would converge or even agree on those values, what could it mean? I think universality only means (in the context of ethics) that a culture with a sufficient set of tools/principles, procedures and systems do eventually converge on common principles. It's basically a basin of attraction of principles (and practices), that needs a minimal set for bootstrapping.

So what is this minimal set? And critically, do we even have it?

I think it can be summarized as consistency, or truth. By requiring that language be logically consistent, and enforcing the notion of truth (across reason[2], individual and collective decision-making), plus of course being sentient beings ourselves (that allow us to recognize and understand truths related to sentience, which I think are at the root of all that matters[3]), we get science, we become able to talk with each other reasonably, we become able to agree, we become able to investigate, etc.. By demanding that ethical principles have some (and eventually rigorous) consistency, we can get to moral truths: if my (literal) brother and my neighbors are both human beings, why should I only help my brother and not my neighbor? How am I fundamentally different from others that I should be more important? (egotism), etc.. What makes it hard, fundamentally, is that sometimes those demands come into conflict with our instincts, or even major aspects of our society, so we can dangerously veer off this path.

I think we have it, and another name for it might be Enlightenment, both in the sense of western culture, and eastern cultures (e.g. in buddhism). Are we enlightened yet? :)

(I would say we're mostly on the path to enlightenment, although we haven't yet been able to discover and agree on some principles and truths that are very important to our lives -- we are on the path but still far from the ideals)

This is such a beautiful and important notion to me, I think it might be worth it to call this God (i.e. this enlightenement, this path to truth/science/everything that is good that can be known) -- with capital G, and why not worship and protect this notion.

[1] The difference is that you need sentient beings and our experiences of ourselves to be able to understand truths about sentience. In a way we are, and have to be, both subject and scientist, and this is a little different from strict views of science.

[2] I've talked so much about reason/truth that I think I should mention intuition too. Intuition is the practical means of thought. Intuition can be thought as large leaps of logic that may be uncertain and/or non-trivial. Most of our language statements don't actually follow from one another immediately in the sense of logic, instead they tend to jump many steps at once, or we even make propositions that are unproven (in mathematics we tend to use intuitive leaps to find proofs and then fill in the gaps with formal statements). Many things in life are actually not so important that we need to prove an ideal solution, usually good enough is enough. Still, this process and language itself relies on the infrastructure of logic, truth and consistency to work; and in many cases, involving important decisions, we can reduce uncertainty and improve decisions by refining our steps, and giving more solid arguments (approaching truth with greater confidence).

[3] Just to be clear, I'm far from proposing we become naive logical machines. Those would probably be both ineffective, and neglect taking into account the experience of being itself. Even fantasy is important in this sense, but I think we should be careful to keep fantasy separate from reality as much as reasonable (phenomena like 'Santa Claus' and psychological quirks notwithstanding). Fantasy is good and reasonable in a way! Same goes for things like arts, games, sports, leisure. Should be made from self-sustainable good feelings.

The main question of the second essay is the ethnocentrism often criticized in my anthropological perspective. Those who protest against "Western ethnocentrism" willingly imagine that they owe nothing to the West since they vehemently attack it. In reality, their perspective is the most Western that has ever existed, more typically Western than that of their opponents.

The revolt against ethnocentrism is an invention of the West, nonexistent elsewhere. Its first great literary success is the famous essay by Montaigne on "The Cannibals," which is already over four hundred years old. The author's anti-Western rhetoric, not always in good faith, is the starting point of a long war against only one ethnocentrism, of course, that of the West itself. This endeavor produces its most beautiful masterpieces in the 18th century and resurfaces, more virulent than ever, after the Second World War.

What characterizes the most recent phase is the abandonment of the elegance and humor of the great ancestors, in favor of very 20th-century neologisms, such as the word "ethnocentrism" itself. The rococo trinkets of the Enlightenment era are covered with a slightly thick veneer. Where Montesquieu said, "How can one be Persian?" our contemporaries roar "against Western ethnocentrism." The essence of the debate has hardly changed.

"This debate is, moreover, legitimate. Western culture is ethnocentric too, it is obvious, as ethnocentric as all the others and in a more brutally effective way, of course, because of its power. It is not a matter of denying this, but why not also recognize an irrefutable historical evidence at the same time? Unlike all other cultures, which have always been straightforwardly and unapologetically ethnocentric, we Westerners are always simultaneously ourselves and our own enemy. We are the supreme Majesty and the opposition to His Majesty. We condemn what we are, or believe to be, with often ineffective fervor, but at least we try. What is happening today is another example of the passion for self-criticism, which only exists among beings touched by Judeo-Christian civilization."

Excerpt from "The One by Whom Scandal Comes" by René Girard

That doesn't sound like Irish culture at all. Or Hebridean. Or Icelandic.

By Western, does he perhaps mean "almost Western but then a little bit East, and not all the cultures obviously" or something?

I’m not educated in philosophy, except my interest in natural philosophy, so I may be completely confused here.

My sense is that morals are based on values that were instilled in humans in the evolutionary milieu. Half a million years of living as bands of Hunter gatherers. But these values are not completely consistent. For example, we think that stealing from others is wrong, but we also think that not sharing is wrong. These are rules of thumb that evolved in Hunter gatherer societies.

So we have inconsistent values, and which values are most preeminent differ depending on what society we are in.

On top of this are sex roles and sexual morality that were developed because of the needs of agricultural societies, which were very different than what was needed to survive as Hunter gatherers.

So there are a wide variety of moralities that individuals can settle on as they try to make sense of all these contradictory impulses.

I don't believe morals have much to do with an inheritance of values, mostly because mankind, from civilization to civilization, has largely kept the same set of basic morality regardless of where they are or what religion they possess.

Sure, some things change, but theft, murder, lying, etc... they're pretty universally seen as wrong. And in the instances where they AREN'T seen as inherently wrong, it's usually a class-based stance that still sets them apart. Even if you steal from other groups, don't steal from OUR group.

Even if you wiped away all knowledge but the very basics on survival, these would come back in short order as societal hierarchies are redeveloped.

> mankind, from civilization to civilization, has largely kept the same set of basic morality regardless of where they are or what religion they possess

> murder ... pretty universally seen as wrong

I have no idea how you could be even passingly familiar with societies like the Mongols or Aztecs and believe this to be true.

Religions require people to do stupid and harmful things all the time. They are extant to proper morality. People weren't just wandering around those societies and murdering other people in the same group without justification or punishment.

It's interestingly how you silently show that 'group' classification of humans allows any person to do any action they want to another person as long as they can find a means of putting them in a particular group.

I didn't "silently" do shit.

I explicitly pointed it out because it's been a part of human history since humans had a history. Declaring something exists is not the same as justifying that they've done it. We have Memorial Day to honor people who died to go overseas and kill people, and Veterans Day to honor the people who didn't die to go overseas and kill people. Would I consider that to be a gap in morality? Sure, but it exists AND it's not specific to the United States either.

I find it troublesome to listen to the person who claims that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in their wars

[https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fight...]

Maybe this is because you are ignorant to the extent of American war crimes?

Such as?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

Or just a top 5:

- Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

- Battle of Okinawa (and just the habit of American soldiers on Okinawa to rape and kill the locals in general)

- No Gun Ri massacre, Korea

- The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam

- My Lai massacre, Vietnam (really, most of the Vietnam War and Korea. Americans really do like killing Asians in the most violent and horrible ways it seems.)

- Haditha, Iraq (and arguably the entire Iraq war, which was waged under false pretenses to redirect American bloodlust after 9/11 towards the neocons' existing goals to "democratize" the Middle East and distract the public from Saudi involvement in the attacks.)

- Abu Ghraib as a runner up just because stacking pyramids of naked, tortured prisoners of war is just kind of banal compared to everything else.

Now does any of this mean other countries also don't commit war crimes? No. But the US has arguably committed more war crimes than any other country, going back to the continent-wide genocide against the natives. Is this because the US is more evil than all other countries? Subjectively, yes, but I would argue that the US as a nuclear superpower simply has no external limit on its capacity to commit war crimes and therefore commits the most simply because it can get away with it. If other countries were in America's shoes, they would probably be committing war crimes just as often.

Grasping at straws using the A-bomb and Battle of Okinawa as examples. The carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia would have been better.

I don't think either is grasping at straws, but fine. It's a sizeable list however you choose to sort it.

It's not a war crime, but slavery and the genocide of Native Americans was not super great either. Doesn't count if you do it within your own borders!

Outside of strictly defined "war crimes", we have a very long history of interventionism, imperialism, support of coups, installation and support of dictators, overthrow of governments, military actions with foreign nations to install our own form of government / economy / morality. We've destabilized whole regions and nations, birthed massive terrorist organizations, overthrown countries, annexed territories and sovereign nations, and we continue to invade any nation that doesn't have nukes with our special forces (or to support foreign special forces) to attack targets of value.

Stalin was a mass-murdering fuckhead, for sure. But the USSR's actions look a whole lot like the New Imperialism every other major nation has been practicing since the 19th century. Putin is a new Stalin, for sure. But in the time between Stalin and now, we, the USA, have pulled wayyyyy more heinous shit on the world than Russia has.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_United_States_for... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state-sponso... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Use_by_the_Un... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

Of course if one is to learn about war crime denialism, who better to learn from than Cambodian genocide denialist Noam Chomsky?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

Here we have a person denying eyewitness testimony of Genocide. Surely we all have to learn from such a great individual

And don't forget about Srebrenica too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial#Denial...

He is garbage!

EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCcX_xTLDIY

I didn't know this. I'm in shock right now. I already knew that "America bad" was a blind spot for him, but this is another level.

> Maybe this is because you are ignorant to the extent of American war crimes?

I think you may be ignorant to the extent and type of crimes that Russia is committing in Ukraine.

>> “There are examples of cases where relatives were forced to witness the crimes," he added. "In the cases we have investigated, the age of victims of sexual and gendered-based violence ranged from 4 to 82 years."

US has been responsible for similar and worse at a much larger scale, even just in my lifetime. All war is a crime, and the US is always at war.

Come on, Choamsky is the ultimate "america bad" man. He practically invented it.

"America bad" people are also "Russia not so bad" people. These are highly valuable people for Russia propaganda, of course. They're literal useful idiots.

Is he a moral relativist?

He is definitely not a "moral absolutist" in that he can avoid his own biases and habits. That too is a non-existent kind of individual / moral system that no one really is.

Seriously. I am actually quite a fan of Chomsky, but he is reflexively America bad. You always always have to take what he says with the massive pillar of salt that his default position on everything geopolitics/IA related is "America Bad".

A lot of academics are. It’s incredibly stupid and shows a blind spot.

Not really relevant to this tho, it’s a question of philosophy. His naïveté in foreign policy isn’t really relevant

Out of interest, why would you be a fan of a person who is that flawed? Don't you think that their other stuff could also have shortcuts and dishonesty in there?

I do not think there has been anybody ever who doesn't take such shortcuts in their thinking. (that includes me!) As such it isn't a useful criteria for deciding if I should be a fan. Some people do it a lot more than others, and so I will eventually stop listening to those people as I realize I cannot stand it, but it isn't an automatic deal breaker to see it.

I'm definitely "America bad", and have observed the Russian government as absolute trash. I am far from alone on this viewpoint.

Do you dispute his claim, or do you simply find it distressing? It appears to be an accurate one, so I'm curious to hear a contrary take here.

i dispute it because fundamentally the entire notion of some war being fought in a noble way relative to another is heinous. as though there are good wars which aren't so bad and the soldiers behave themselves. chomsky perpetuating the harmful myth of comparative "goodness" of wars alone is enough to indict his capacity for real thought and compassion, however in the context of the life he's lived and his personality, it goes a little deeper than that. he's using this fantasy of there being "worse wars" as a vessel of reactionary rhetoric. he has taken the worst thing man does and appropriated suffering as leverage for academic blustering. he's far from unique in this aspect, but that's not the point, now is it? this level of soulless disregard for the horrors of reality and willful naivete in an effort to maintain appearances of trite political dogmas is certainly precluded from having any kind of meaningful opinion on morality or ethics, full stop. it's an indication that he simply lacks the intellectual capacity along certain dimensions to even come to grips with the fundamentals.

Do you propose to not oppose evil with force?

Though this topic's domain is beside what I wrote; what is on the other end of said force does not matter. The moral burden is not alleviated because it stands in contrast of goodness from the same action. To kill is to kill. To enact terror through rape, pillaging and demolition cannot be washed away. They exist simultaneously to any hypothetical goodness and the two of them taken together cannot be reduced to a single value.

A life of no evil cannot be perpetuated from will alone. It can be lived, and possibly perpetuated in extremely narrow likelihoods, but not through force of will. If you would like to complain that this suggests it is unfair if you are to survive in this world, yes. Though I wouldn't call it unfair. Consider this, if it's a function of luck, it is truly the most fair thing of all. Far more than if it were simply left up to will, which gives a discriminatory advantage to those with better skills of utilizing and applying their will.

But everything is grey. If you can't compare goodness then you can't make any choice, because you can't find greater good.

You simply need to accept that through your actions, you will not just be performing good things. You can certainly pursue a higher good, however if done carelessly this entails higher evils shifting into lock-step behind you.

I like to think of it like a system of feedback loops. A naive pursuit of lofty moral heights naturally creates a vacuum in its wake, where whorls of moral lows collect and aggregate. The reverse also holds true. Should we accept evil being done because it will spawn a great good to balance things out? Paying the cost up front. I find the idea no more absurd than the supposedly logical inverse. Perhaps the ultimate good was not to fight a war, but to recognize its increase in likelihood and defend against evil's manifestation in the first place in a less reactionary way. Failing to do this, we are left with a moral debt to pay. Playing games of gods and devils so to speak, it's like a finger trap puzzle. The more you struggle, the tighter you become bound.

This is only one of the outrages claims he made with regards to russia's war in Ukraine. He no longer has any credibility as far as I am concerned.

Regardless of whether it's true or not, the fact that this is what he has to say about this invasion is what I find troublesome. Is it so hard to condemn it? Sounds like a diversion, to get away with not condemning it. But he doesn't have to choose, it's just bad faith. How long will we hear "but, what about Hiroshima?" any time a dictator goes for a land grab?

> Chomsky explained that he was not only referring to the fact that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in Iraq: "I am not only referring to this, it is obvious." UN inspectors had to be withdrawn as soon as the invasion of Iraq began, he says, "because the attack was so severe and extreme ... This is the American and British style of war." Chomsky adds: “Let's look at the victims. I only know the official numbers… the official UN numbers are about 8,000 civilian casualties [in Ukraine]. How many civilian casualties were there when the US and Britain invaded Iraq?”

The implications here are clear what he meant. Everything else in that headline is spin. This feels exaggerated IMO

He’s wrong and full of shit. America is responsible for like 5% of the civilian casualties in Iraq, Russia’s killed like 500,000 people, and they rape everyone they can see.

Moral relativism with geopolitics is cheap pseudo-intellectual play. America may not be perfect but we are definitely the good guys compared to Russia or China

He’s right on that though. I lived through desert storm and the invasion of Iraq. The US targeted our civilian infrastructures in the first two weeks of the war. Virtually we had no electricity for nearly 5 years until the “food for oil” was agreed in 95. I have worked on the Haditha documentary for Nick Broomfield, you can watch it to witness the brutality of the US. Russia is bad, but when compared to the US, pretty much a saint.

> I lived through desert storm

Oh you’re talking about the First Gulf War started by Iraq invading and conquering Kuwait and the bombing campaign freed Kuwait as an independent country, destroyed Iraq’s civilian massacring Scud missiles, and left Iraq intact?

There is also the Iran–Iraq War with 1-2 million casualties. That's also on Iraq.

Resorting to ad hominem is not a good look either.

All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling.

For example - there is no such thing as "Europe", unless enough people get together and agree that this thing that doesn't really exist, does exist and shall be named "Europe". "Europe" isn't a physical element, it isn't a naturally occurring substance - it is instead a human cultural construct which only persists for as long as the word continues to be used as intended.

Chomsky, who I think understands this very basic principle very well, nevertheless seems to dance around this fact because its not very savory - it implies that all human life is fiction - and nobody gets paid large sums to make that observation by those cultures inclined to make their own lies persist longer than others - even if its true.

"Perhaps we do have the freedom to speak, think, and act however we wish — but that very freedom, if Chomsky is correct, emerges only within strict, absolute, wholly un-relative natural boundaries."

Essentially, our freedom is expressed as the ability to choose which cultures to perpetuate and which to deny persistence, by simply ceasing to perpetuate the lie that is that thing, in the first place.

Yes, all human experience is a fiction. It may not be obvious now, but I would wager it'll be obvious to every single one of us, one of these days, right in the last seconds of our own lives, when our own individual fallacies cease to persist... if only there were a way for Chomsky to confirm this, when his time comes.

> All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling.

This seems wrong. It's not a lie to give something a name. Why not say "All culture is a truth which only persists in the re-telling", given it is true we call Europe Europe?

This is a much better take, and elegantly expressed by that flip.

Going further: Europe is a dynamical system that is stable enough relative to human experience to have a name. The feedback loop that maintains the system that is Europe includes human behavior, which includes thoughts and speech.

Chemical elements are also dynamical systems, held together without humans in the loop. Everything we have a name for is like this. The truth and reality of helium and Europe is the same at this level of description.

A problem with this level of description is that it is kind of overpowered: if everything can be considered a dynamical system, then we aren't saying much about the differences between things. Analogously, it's true that evolution explains biology. But there's still a useful science of biology - we don't just point to living things and say 'evolution made that' and call it a day.

Hence while I'm pretty confident about the dynamical systems stance being fundamental, there's plenty of room to slice things up further with other concepts. They just need to bottom out successfully into dynamics. Evolution does this, for example. Can morality bottom out this way? Perhaps the theory of iterated games is a connection?

Europe doesn't exist anywhere in the world except in the fallacious minds of human beings.

Gold exists. The sun exists. Gravity exists. Elephants exist.

Europe does not.

We cannot conjure up gold just by saying "gold shall exist!" - we can, however, lie to ourselves and say "Europe exists!", and - as long as the human mind is around to perpetuate it, this lie will persist.

Gravity doesn't need the human mind to making it work. Neither does fission. These things exist in the universe whether humans like it or not.

The moment humans are unable to perpetuate the fallacy of "Europe", it ceases to exist entirely.

>Its not a lie to give something a name.

Yes actually, it is. You are not your name. Your name persists only as long as others help you make it persist.

This is not true of the ground under your feet or the air you breathe or water you need to survive.

America is a fiction that only persists for as long as there are human beings around to say "that fiction exists and we shall refer to it as America and in so doing, make this thing that doesn't exist, a reality which persists - but only for as long as we state it does".

And therein lies Chomskys' dilemma: he cannot tell his audience that one culture is less of a lie than another, because: they are all lies. They don't really exist, except as human constructs - and these are arbitrary, requiring a decision - an ability which we humans, by all reading of the natural laws of the universe, shouldn't really have...

Well no, gold does not exist. Gold as we know it is a concept created by humans according to your argument, we call it 'gold' and define what is 'gold' purely by our own cultural experiences. There's nothing stopping us from calling lead gold and gold lead other than our own cultural experience.

If you want to take the idea that human culture is a lie and nothing exists, then empirical reality as we know it does not exist. The concept of 1 + 1 = 2 isn't based in reality but rather something humans made up.

I think you're mistaking an arbitrary or relative concept with a lie. Culture is relative and amorphous, but it's not a lie. It shapes our worldview and it's a framework we can apply to our understanding. Just because it is not the unified worldview as everyone has doesn't make it false.

From the perspective of the natural world, all culture is a lie that humans tell themselves in order to create something that doesn't exist.

We conjure these things into existence by telling ourselves - and hurting those who don't agree - that the thing is real, even if it isn't.

>Just because it is not the unified worldview as everyone has doesn't make it false.

This is demonstrably incorrect: Just ask a Russian to explain American foreign policy. More Americans than Russians believing such lies do not make them true - they just add the force of human attention to the fallacy, which helps it persist in light of other forces of human attention ..

>arbitrary

Lies are arbitrarily persisted as a result of the _decisions_ of human beings, which don't have any force, weight or energy other than what we say they have, and that force, weight and energy only persists for as long as we, humans, say it shall - and not a moment longer!

"Gold is real. Europe is not."

Shelley was onto something ... the fiction of Ozymandias is one lie from which we all will learn, whether we like it or not.

My favourite ice cream is vanilla. My wife thinks I like chocolate. Is my preference a lie?

Depends which one of you persists longer: you or your wife.

What do you mean by "doesn't really exist" or "fiction" though? We use words to describe things and there is always some abstraction involved (when you say "this is a rock", by rock you mean a complex combination of other substances that I do not describe, but have these general characteristics).

When talking about cultures, cultures are represented by the people and their actions and both the people and the actions do very much "exist". Describing it "exactly" seems something impossible (same way you don't include in the definition of the word rock how many molecules it must have).

So if your point is "language is fuzzy", sure. But saying "culture is a lie" seems just beyond reasonable fuzziness. The definition of culture implies a lot of summarization which in my opinion excludes an exact definition.

The word you're looking for is ideology.

https://bigthink.com/the-present/slavoj-zizek-ideology/

There’s a class of truths whose source is our belief in them, i.e. they are true, because we believe they are true. E.g. in most countries there is right-hand traffic, which is true based on people’s belief that it’s true. Of course it’s written down in law, but the only reason this law has this much power is because people believe in it. Similarly Europe exists, because people believe it exists. But none of those things are lies. They’re no less true than the fact that water boils at 100°C. In case of traffic you may even check the full power of human belief by driving in the other lane. ;)

(There was some clever Latin/Greek epistemological name for it, but I’ve forgotten it.)

Agree. probably morality is deep rooted by evolution, is basic for -survival-, even today, is a necessary tool to build social structures where we can live better. skepticism is shallow, can express only in a more limited contingency, and in small doses serve to build deeper knoveledge, and maybe a deeper morality.

Different cultures appear to differ at surface levels, having different habits forged by different local environments, but being stables (or slow changing/adapting) this set of ideas/knoweledges reveal a wide similarity at deep level: this deep level is not relative, is just on top of levels like dna, cells, anatomy, is the ability to develop knowlewdge, can be the language, the walking, the relation is a group..

relativism is shallow in the big perspective of evolution, a deep relativist probably is an extinct one. But today extintion come from the opposite direction, not nature but ourselves.. but this is another story.

I disagree. Moral relativism is very much a thing. But it's just a muddled matter.

To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined.

Pretty much any moral rule you can name has been proudly broken. Eg, torture? Take Abu Ghraib for instance. Not only was it done, but it was done proudly, with selfies taken for remembering the "good times" later.

I find that on the long term the discussion tends to coalesce towards children. Well, in most wars out there children suffered from it. Even in WWII, you can bet that there was an American or Russian bomb that killed a German child, and you won't find a lot of either feeling all that conflicted about their actions. The atomic bombs are a tad controversial, but still find plenty proponents of that the horrific slow deaths they inflicted on quite a few people (including children) were in the end for the greater good.

So far I think about the closest to an effective "objective moral rule" I've heard is that it's immoral to torture children for fun. But when I think of it that's almost a tautology -- It works out to "It's immoral to cause harm without a good reason", more or less.

Or, if the objection here is that a given individual finds their own code as rigid and unyielding, I don't think that's really true either. Amazing horrors are committed by soldiers in wars even well outside of their own direct duty, and moral compromises of all sorts have been made for the sake of diplomacy.

> To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined.

That’s just a sociological trick. You redefine X to mean “what people think X is” and come to “profound” conclusions. That’s like saying that the laws of the universe has changed when Einstein invented relativity.

Moral relativism is, for example, when you think that being a slave owner in 1800 in the US wouldn’t be bad but being a slave owner in 2023 in the US is bad because of specific cultural background that is different then and now. It’s not about people disagreeing on what constitutes bad actions or conditions per se. Everyone understands that people disagree on stuff. It doesn’t make one a moral relativist in any useful notion of that word.

> That’s just a sociological trick. You redefine X to mean “what people think X is” and come to “profound” conclusions. That’s like saying that the laws of the universe has changed when Einstein invented relativity.

That's exactly what you get under "objective" morality though. Everyone agrees "murder" is bad. Not everyone agrees on what "murder" means exactly. You don't have to try very hard to find people apparently just itching to kill a home invader in righteously retributive justice, or announcing the desire of going to the border to shoot trespassers.

> Moral relativism is, for example, when you think that being a slave owner in 1800 in the US wouldn’t be bad but being a slave owner in 2023 in the US is bad because of specific cultural background that is different then and now.

In a lot of circumstances, yes, that's indeed how the world truly works. Morality indeed can change over time, for instance using a lot of water on watering your lawn has very different moral scores depending on whether there's a drought going on or not. So it was perfectly moral 3 years ago and now it suddenly isn't.

Regarding slavery, you have to recognize that international deals involve quite a lot of interaction with countries where people have far less rights than we do -- and this is one of the underlying reasons why we buy stuff from them.

> That's exactly what you get under "objective" morality though. Everyone agrees "murder" is bad. Not everyone agrees on what "murder" means exactly.

I don’t see how it is exactly what you get. It doesn’t matter what everyone agrees or disagrees on. The point of moral objectivism is that doesn’t matter what people think morality is in general just like it doesn’t matter what you think about the laws of physics—they are still out there.

To oversimplify it:

Moral objectivism: laws of morality ~ laws of physics: something that exists regardless of what you think about it

Moral relativism: laws of morality ~ rules of football: it is good or bad to do something only by nature of social conventions and views

Using lots of water to grow cannabis instead of crops during a drought is bad because it could be allocated more efficiently to feed the poor — moral objectivism

Using lots of water to grow cannabis instead of crops during a drought may be good or bad depending on whether people around you care about the poor — moral relativism

Rules of football all the way, yeah.

By this analogy, rules of Monopoly. Everyone knows the game, but everyone seems to have slightly different house rules for it.

It's worth clarifying the somewhat ambiguous subject and object of your moral relativism example.

"Bob using lots of water to grow cannabis instead of crops during a drought may be good or bad depending on whether people around Bob care about the poor — moral relativism

Because there is confusingly similar, yet orthogonal concept, ethical subjectivism, which argues that ethical statements can be universally either true or false, but that the truth value of such statements is tied to one's subjective reality. Whereas moral relativism says that the moral nature of one's actions should be judged by the moral culture they are acting within, ethical subjectivism concludes they should be judged by the ethics of the person doing the judging.

This avoids the key pitfall of moral relativism: "One should be judged on the basis of the moral culture they are embedded in" is, in of itself, a universal claim.

>Pretty much any moral rule you can name has been proudly broken. Eg, torture? >Take Abu Ghraib for instance. Not only was it done, but it was done proudly, with >selfies taken for remembering the "good times" later"

Sure, can happen, but THIS was recognized as a CRIME by the -culture- we have, and some individuals forget/broken/ignored! And a decadent society/culture can be flooed with this also, and loose the capacity to condems this.

I don't mix single fact/events with the main argument, the organized/ritual/specific use of the -force- is universal in quite al cultures, is buiding some kind of order in the chaos, the uncontrolled violence is a crime in quite same every culture, because is disrupting the order.

Recognizing that different cultures have different morals isn't moral relativism; that is simple observation. One must also believe that more than one set of morals can be right or that no one is right or wrong.

> One must also believe that more than one set of morals can be right or that no one is right or wrong.

Exactly. There is no universal right or wrong, it's all relative based on hierarchical system of values in every society.

Morality is a mechanism that helps with following some rules within a society without spending excess resources on enforcing them. It evolved in small groups (in comparison to the size of societies today).

If you accept this view on what morality is then it's pretty obvious there ought be some universal rules as human groups have a lot in common and some rules universally help with survival of a group. "Don't kill your peers" is one example. "Don't take their property without their consent or some process" is another although it can only arise in groups advanced enough to come up with the concept of property. Then there is a whole set of rules related to sex and reproduction which are again pretty universally needed for the group survival but can be established in various way - there more than one solution giving a chance for group's survival unlike in "don't kill your peers" case.

I am yet to meet a fundamental moral relativist who claims we can adopt any rules we please but a position that there are many set of rules that arised to help with the purpose of group's survival is both common and imo obviously correct. There is in fact an underlying mechanism for moral rules (group survival) which those rules stem from in one way or another. There might be better or worse set of rules and they might be different depending on environment a given group exists in. "Don't kill your peers" is going to be there but "Don't kill the weakest members of the group so the resources can be saved" not necessarily so.

It seems to me that Chomsky is arguing against a very narrow and strict definition of moral relativism here or I am not getting his point.

> He draws a natural comparison between this process and that of language acquisition, which also depends on “having a rich built-in array of constraints that allow the leap from scattered data to whatever it is that you acquire. That’s virtually logic.” And so, “even if you’re the most extreme cultural relativist, you are presupposing universal moral values. Those can be discovered.”

I'm not saying Chomsky's conclusions are wrong, but I don't see any evidence for them in this article. It seems predicated on the above: drawing a "natural" comparison between acquiring language and acquiring moral values, but there's no basis stated for that comparison. What's "natural" about it? They may be similar processes but how are we assuming that out of hand?

Chomsky is a linguist & honestly this seems like a protection of realities within his own primary field of knowledge, onto separate fields, with scant justification of the similarities.

Again, the fields - and processes - may well be comparable, but nowhere does this seem to be interrogated.

I've read that Chomsky can be pretty nasty to his debate opponents, but he's amazingly congenial in this video. It really makes me wish I could spend hours and hours chatting with him.

I've run across a handful of philosophers: Chomsky, Peter Kreeft, etc. who can stay really chill during a debate. It's seems like a superpower for keeping discussions productive.

He's very dismissive and disrespectful to anyone who isn't fawning over him. If you interview him and interlace praise and admiration for him, yes he's gonna be congenial.

Dismissive and disrespectful to people who are dismissive and disrespectful of him... what a monster.

Not being a sycophant is not the same as being dismissive and disrespectful.

Have you watched any of these debates? In all that I have seen him participate in the other party was gracious and patient, assuming good faith even when there was little evidence of such, generally far more polite than I could manage.

I havent seen any debates where he wasnt equally polite.

I'm familiar with tone policing as a concept though, and Im not surprised it has been applied to Chomsky.

His debate opponents seem to be pretty nasty with him and come out the gate swinging. Why blame him for doing the same?

For me, it's because you expect a mature discussion when it's philosophy and not some immature US-News shouting contest.

Philosophers can be pretty vicious.

LLM language learning has showed that many of the "strict rules" of modern linguistics are both contrived and unnecessary.

Reminiscent of the famous (if apocryphal) story of Ludwig Wittgenstein challenging Karl Popper to mention a moral rule:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_Poker

I must not be getting it.

"how does a person acquire his or her culture? You don’t get it by taking a pill. You acquire your culture by observing a rather limited number of behaviors and actions, and from those, constructing, somehow, in your mind, the set of attitudes and beliefs that constitutes culture."

If you grew up in a different culture, you would have different attitudes and beliefs.

That's...moral relativism, as far as I understand it. What am I missing?

Nothing much. There's lot of extrapolation done and that "rather limited" is doing a lot of work here, as if one is not embedded in his own culture daily.

"There are no valid absolute moral positions" is itself an absolute moral position. We don't need to appeal to language or darwinian survival characteristics or whatever to refute it, a reasonably educated 12 year old can understand why it can't be true.

Say what one will about "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", at least it is internally consistent.

This article really sucks at actually engaging with the really extraordinarily interesting debate between Foucault and Chomssky. I mean, even the introduction is a giant leap of logic (the premise that Chomsky was refering to Foucault as an extreme moral relativist).

I think as time goes on, it's been interesting to see more of what Foucault was saying as becoming more and more interesting. The ability of power to generate the field or domain (what he called an "episteme") which defines the unconscious rules for research is something I think still being exposed regardless of any innate morality.

Besides, I think Chomsky's argument regarding "advancement" of morality to be so value-laden as to be sort of meaningless. There are more slaves in existence now than any other period of human history, and this "advancement" is still barely all that stable enough given the politics of Western countries which still maintain large (millions of people) cultural groups who absolutely would stop or even reverse this advancement given the chance.

Also its kind of ironic that Chomsky brings up Turing, because what we're talking about here is a scientifically-driven field which saw homosexuality as an illness and identified medical procedures as the cure which led to Turing's death.

Why is it that every decade we continue to identify fields of science, (which in his framework should be at the forefront of discovering this innate human nature and morality) that are the vanguards of extreme oppression? Why is it that science is consistently, across cultures and political systems, a domain that is almost always intrinsically tied to the justification and defense of the power structures of that culture? Soviet lamarckism, American global electronic surveillance, Western pathological views of homosexuality and psychology are all examples where science was twisted into merely a domain of power, exactly like Foucault described throughout history. Most would hand-wave these away as "not real science", but what even is real science then?

I mean god, we're still discovering new gaps in scientific knowledge that are so large and incomprehensible that we can barely even begin to know what outcomes they have lead to. The reproducibility crisis in medicine, psychology and other domains is portrayed as a sort of minor inconvenience rather than the shattering of one of the core and principal tenets of science in its production of knowledge.

Well, as long as Noone ascribes agency to the unwashed masses of eastern Europe, who rejected the antipode to American imperialism. That would be quite unmoral-relativistic. Honestly Chomsky political stances are by now casting in my eyes doubt on his academic works. How can someone who blatantly engages in American - diabolism be expected to produce differentiated results in linguistic research? The Chomsky hierarchy might have layers missed by him , for all I care.

All societies worship life differently, all death cults are alike.

Seeking absolute consistency logically leads to worshipping Shar

tl;dr "the body works a certain way so morality works a certain way" / "morals are advanced now because we're more tolerant"

Basically what he's saying is we are biologically wired to have certain morals and they are converging on some kind of ideal position.

This seems so obviously false that I must be missing something. Human civilization and society has to do with biology, for sure: we get hungry, scared, envious, hateful, desireful, etc; we need protection so we gather together and help each other; when we gather together a form of competition arises along with a form of collective. Clearly humans do certain things because of how our bodies are wired. But within those structures (the "limits" Chomsky was talking about, I imagine) we have an almost infinite capacity for imagination that dictates our behavior (morality being an idea that inspires behavior). You can come up with almost any kind of reason to justify your own kind of morals and what actions are the result. "I need to eat your child's still-beating heart so the imaginary man in the sky will bring rain for my crops!" There's no biological narrative behind that, this dude just made some shit up and everyone went along with it because collective behavior.

Human civilization and society isn't relative, but morality is.

Alasdair MacIntyre set me straight on this issue in his book "After Virtue".

There almost certainly isn't a universal moral code. For every abominable act you can think of - murder, slavery, even genocide -, we can find examples of human groups that glorified them, usually by evoking religion, group affiliation or a mix of both.

How do human groups glorifying immorality imply that there is no universal moral code? If the universal moral code exists outside of those groups, then it can be applied to their actions, and we can call them wrong for the thing they glorify.

Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong. By which standard do you know them to be wrong? Such a standard must necessarily exist outside of the groups that glorifies the things you correctly call abominations.

Edit: typos

If there are states/governments where Murder, Slavery and Genocide are fine, can you say it is universal if it cannot be applied in that place?

What are the conditions for a universal morality?

What do you mean by "cannot be applied"?

Of course it can be applied. We know that those states and governments are wrong by the universal moral code condemning murder, slavery and genocide. We would have no grounds to condemn these things, if it wasn't for a universal moral code.

With that definition any moral code can he universal.

I can support legalized murder and condemn everyone who doesn't, therefore creating the grounds to condemn anything else.

Some religions practice human sacrifice, including of children.[1]

My opinion is we're better off arguing there's a better moral code based on a number of arbitrary parameters (freedom, resource creation, comfort, longevity, equality, merit, envy management, violence management, respect for tradition, respect of minorities, etc). I can't see how you can declare a universal code of conduct, I can see how you can declare a technocratic liberal one.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cul...

I'm not denying that civilizations use different moral codes. I am trying to say that we must have appeal to a universal moral code in order to judge whether a culture's moral code are in fact moral or not. This would apply to our own moral code as well as for those of other civilizations.

I am saying that if we are too say the Ancient Mesopotamians was wrong for sacrificing their children, we have to appeal to some kind of universal standard outside of them to do that. This logic also applies to the Aztec human sacrifice, and to the way the Nazi's treated the Jews. We need a universal standard to say they were wrong.

To make this more actual: You are advocating for a technocratic liberal moral code. Many people are advocating for a historic Christian moral code. How would you even start debating the Christians without appealing to a universal morality? You'll have to assert that your moral code is universal. If you don't, you have no basis to require other people to behave according to your morality.

So what fraction of dissenters are allowed before the universal code ceases to be universal?

If a universal moral code exists, it wouldn't cease existing even if 100% of people dissents from it. The whole point of a universal moral code is that it exists outside of us.

> How do human groups glorifying immorality imply that there is no universal moral code? If the universal moral code exists outside of those groups, then it can be applied to their actions, and we can call them wrong for the thing they glorify.

Those groups would also call us wrong. If groups of humans tend to display very different and incompatible moral codes, that's a strong argument against a universal morality. Another argument against it is that most people in groups that glorified what terrifies us lived and died without showing an ounce of remorse for their actions.

> Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong.

Not at all. I used those examples because I know that most contemporary readers would agree. The fact that there is no universal moral code does not mean we can't have a moral code.

> Those groups would also call us wrong.

Wouldn't they then also be appealing to a universal moral code in order to call us wrong? If there is no universal moral code, nobody gets to call anybody else wrong (in the moral sense) at all.

We are rightfully condemning chattel slavery. However we can't do that if we are not appealing to a universal moral standard. We have no right to claim that the Southern states were wrong, if slavery in the way existed back then wasn't universally wrong.

This also applies to all the other examples people are giving in reply to my comment. People doing things that we consider to be morally wrong does not imply that there is no code. It merely implies that one of us is wrong.

> If groups of humans tend to display very different and incompatible moral codes, that's a strong argument against a universal morality.

I don't think is is a strong argument at all. People are wrong about things all the time. If a whole civilization of people consider earth to be flat, and a whole other civilization considers it to be round, it doesn't follow that earth has no shape at all. It follows that one of them are wrong.

> Not at all. I used those examples because I know that most contemporary readers would agree.

Fair enough. I misunderstood you. I didn't mean to strawman your argument.

> We are rightfully condemning chattel slavery. However we can't do that if we are not appealing to a universal moral standard. We have no right to claim that the Southern states were wrong, if slavery in the way existed back then wasn't universally wrong.

I really don't understand why you think there is a need for a universal moral truth in order to have a self-consistent moral code. We didn't believe that every human being has certain rights, which is why our ancestors did not perceive chattel slavery as immoral. We now do, and the actions of our ancestors are appalling to our modern perspective, but we cannot at all believe that this means we are "right" and they are "wrong" by appealing to a universal moral code. We can point out that certain moral codes lead to better outcomes (golden rule and all that), we can reason that society is better off enforcing stricter moral standards and we can build societies that enshrine some of these moral rules as laws, all without a universal morality existing at all.

The comparison to physics does not help here. Morality is entirely dependent on a set of subjective beliefs, such as the one I mentioned above about human rights. Physics is not. The world is either flat or it isn't, but two different groups of humans can have diametrically opposed beliefs about, say, veganism and neither of them is necessarily wrong.

You use your time machine to travel back to the year 1350 and make contact with a Mesoamerican society that just loves to capture, torture, and execute their neighbors en masse, because doing this is a Good Thing. It pleases the gods or whatever. You think it's a Bad Thing though. You are now outnumbered 100,000 to 1. How do you prove to them that your moral code is the Universally True one, and not theirs?

By collapsing their civilization with a few thousand Conquistadors as you rally their neighbors who were the regular victims of that capture torture and execution because they've lived there for centuries if not Millenia unlike the men in boats who just showed up and have no such historical grievance

If there is a universal moral code, we can never know it for certain. Moral knowledge, as well as all other kinds of knowledge, is always open to criticism and being proven wrong. But nevertheless we can make moral progress, just as we make scientific progress. We can find good explanations for why killing and enslaving people is wrong, even whilst we can point to countless examples where killing and enslaving people has been glorified. This is David Deutsch's principle of optimism: "All evils are due to a lack of knowledge".

Commitment to solving problems entails a commitment to knowledge growth, which in turn involves a commitment to certain values, such as valuing truth and being open to error-correction by debating and criticizing ideas. Killing and enslaving people is the opposite of this.

There is a big difference between morality and science though. The physical reality around us does not depend on our opinion of it, and we can design experiments to test it. You cannot "prove wrong" a set of moral rules without agreeing to a set of subjective principles first.

Can we agree that solving problems = good? If you grant that, the rest should follow.

I don't believe it does, at all? How do you "solve" the moral problem of, say, whether we can breed and kill animals to eat them?

What I mean is: solving problems is good. Solving scientific problems is good, solving moral problems is good. If you do not think solving problems in general is good, you will not think solving the killing animals moral problem is good.

The only way to solve problems is to create knowledge. We need to create good explanations of what is there, what it does, and how and why. The only we know to create knowledge is through creatively guessing things and checking our ideas against criticism.

To solve the moral problem of whether breeding and killing animals to eat is wrong we need a good explanation of consciousness, and whether animals are conscious, and if they suffer. We do not have a good explanation of consciousness or suffering yet. Any ideas we do have we can improve upon, endlessly.

Edit: I should emphasize that we can never be certain that we've really 'solved' any given problem: we could always be wrong. This is why we should always be open to criticism and better ideas.

> What I mean is: solving problems is good. Solving scientific problems is good, solving moral problems is good. If you do not think solving problems in general is good, you will not think solving the killing animals moral problem is good.

Not necessarily universally: one can have a philosophy / worldview where dealing with your problems is a way to spiritual enlightenment and getting rid of the problems / suffering prevents you from achieving higher spiritual / intellectual levels.

> Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity (sometimes associated with the God of the Hebrew Bible)[1] who is responsible for creating the material universe. Consequently, Gnostics considered material existence flawed or evil […]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

Any worldview (Buddhism? Hinduism? that treats the material world as 'bad(-sh)' or an illusion would be 'susceptible' to this line of thinking.

Even gnostics have problems they have to solve in their day to day lives, and the only way to solve them is by creating knowledge.

Appeals to the supernatural or dogma are bad explanations, and they should be criticised and improved upon. They are bad explanations because they are not hard to vary, and can be easily modified or replaced by any other supernatural or dogmatic entity or force without affecting the phenomenon they are supposed to explain. They are essentially arbitrary and unfalsifiable assertions that do not increase our understanding of reality.

Also note, you never get rid of problems, there are always more. New knowledge creates new and better problems. Running out of problems would itself be a problem.

> Can we agree that solving problems = good? If you grant that, the rest should follow.

What do you mean by "problems"? And whose problems? My solution might be the source of your problem, and why should I care if it is?

> What do you mean by "problems"?

In David Deutsch's terminology, a problem exists when a conflict between ideas is experienced. It is worth reading his books to understand more on his view. He builds on Karl Popper's work, which is also worth reading.

> And whose problems?

Everyone has their own particular problem situation. Here's some relevant things Popper has said about problems and solving them:

> All things living are in search of a better world. Men, animals, plants, even unicellular organisms are constantly active. They are trying to improve their situation, or at least to avoid its deterioration... Every organism is constantly preoccupied with the task of solving problems. These problems arise from its own assessments of its condition and of its environment; conditions which the organism seeks to improve... We can see that life — even at the level of the unicellular organism — brings something completely new into the world, something that did not previously exist: problems and active attempts to solve them; assessments, values; trial and error.

And lastly

> My solution might be the source of your problem, and why should I care if it is?

How to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for me is itself a problem that we can create knowledge to solve, perhaps e.g. by creating a legal system that discourages you from doing the thing that made my life worse.

>>> Can we agree that solving problems = good? If you grant that, the rest should follow.

>> My solution might be the source of your problem, and why should I care if it is?

> How to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for me is itself a problem that we can create knowledge to solve, perhaps e.g. by creating a legal system that discourages you from doing the thing that made my life worse.

I think your use of "we" presumes some value of universalist cooperation (I'm no philosopher, so I'm just throwing around words to express what I'm feeling), which I don't think can be assumed. I think the more accurate statement is: "how to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for me" is a problem for you.

My gut feel is the only way to really to prioritize concern for others is a moral framework that says so (and offers a compelling reason to follow it), or some kind of finely-balanced anarchy where no person or group really has the power or opportunity to force problems on others (which seems impossible to maintain in practice).

Also another reason I think I can't agree that "solving problems = good" is there once was a problem labeled "the Jewish Problem" and the "final" solution to it is literally the epitome of evil.

I put ‘we’ because institutions like legal systems are fundamentally collaborative, unless enacted by a total dictator.

Popper’s grandparents were Jewish and he wrote one of his major works which explores these topics, The Open Society and Its Enemies, as an urgent response to the totalitarian ideologies and atrocities of WWII. Totalitarian ideologies do not permit open, critical pursuit of the truth, and so they cannot create knowledge to solve problems in an unbounded way. Free, open societies can, where ideas can be freely exchanged and people have the freedom to criticise institutions without fear of violence. The values of an open society are the values needed for knowledge growth. And the reason we want more knowledge is to solve our problems.

I am wondering if it would have been better if I had written ‘solving problems is on balance a good thing’? Or do you think solving problems is on balance bad, or perhaps neutral?

> I am wondering if it would have been better if I had written ‘solving problems is on balance a good thing’? Or do you think solving problems is on balance bad, or perhaps neutral?

I don't think the "solving problems" angle escapes subjectivity. It seems like just obscured subjectivity.

It sounds like we both want to say that the holocaust is objectively wrong, not merely subjectively wrong. I don't know where best to start but I do think knowledge and problem solving are key to the answer.

There is objective truth about the physical world, and we work towards it by error-correcting and replacing our bad explanations with better explanations. Errors and bad explanations cause us problems, and we create knowledge to solve them.

Moral problems like the holocaust also require knowledge to solve. With more knowledge, we could have stopped the holocaust sooner. We can't just embrace ignorance and unreason and hope for the best, we need to create a continuous stream of knowledge to solve the continuous stream of problems we face.

You can't just commit to any subjective moral values you feel like and hope to have continual success in knowledge creation. Unbounded knowledge creation requires commitment to moral values such as tolerance, openness to criticism and change, and respect for truth. Blind obedience to authority, rigid acceptance of dogma and commitment to infallible final solutions are all morally bad and limit our ability to make continual progress.

The idea of moral progress implies that there is objective morality, and that we can improve our knowledge of it. Progress implies a destination, it implies a standard against which the progress is measured, at least in principle.

That is correct. In this is view, all evils are the result of a lack of knowledge, and so moral progress is achieved through the growth of knowledge. All knowledge is fallible and therefore uncertain, so even if we stumbled on objective truth (the destination which we are error-correcting towards), we could never know it for sure.

I don't think moral progress necessarily implies an objective morality. We can't be working towards something we can't know about. We just happen to be walking towards it, or not. What we feel to be moral progress isn't a statement about our discovering an objective morality but rather a social consensus based on, as you say, greater knowledge and altered perspective. Moral progress is the idea of an expansion of collective understanding and acceptance of moral beliefs/axioms.

"Chomsky offers facile counter-argument to a much more nuanced take by Foucault, who he'd never be able to really grasp because of his continental mindset"

Why are we talking about Foucault anyway? Anything written about ethics before 1859 was missing a piece so crucial, it's garbage.

I don't think Chomsky is so old to have debated that Foucault on Dutch television.

Ok just found on wiki. Paul-Michel Foucault. Never heard of him.

Thanks for the correction.

The video is linked in TFA.

Moral relativism is the most absurd form of moral realism, which is itself an absurd position. I'd be more interested in an explanation for why so many otherwise intelligent people, who are more than capable of reasoning for themselves and holding well-defended, sensible positions, find themselves attracted to moral realism, a truly mystical belief that offends science, reason, and grade school grammar.

Why do you think it is absurd? I'd think a moral relativist could support science, reason, and grade school grammar while also believing it's due to cultural factors that are not inherently true.

> believing it's due to cultural factors that are not inherently true.

Moral relativists are moral realists, meaning that they believe that moral truths are dependent, in part, on the culture in which the truths are being evaluated. So I don't think what you're talking about is moral relativism but rather, the fact that different cultures may have slightly different moral beliefs, which is obviously true.

For actual objections to moral relativism, aside from the usual objections to moral realism that undercut all of these: https://iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#H4

You're right, I assumed moral relativism meant something else. Thanks.

I agree that moral relativism is absurd, but I don’t see any problem with moral realism. I think many intelligent people understand the boundaries of our knowledge in the domain of consciousness, cognition and agency and thus they don’t jump to conclusion that morality doesn’t exist on the grounds that there is no equation for it in string theory.

Can you please not post in the denunciatory style, but rather make your substantive points more informatively?

I understand the temptation to put down a view and/or people that you think are wrong, but a comment like this doesn't help the rest of us understand anything; it's just a sequence of boos.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell.

But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes).

Everybody sees faces in rocks because we have brains fine-tuned for seeing faces. Does it prove that there's something universal in looking like a face or even worse - being a face? Some objective "faceiness"?

Or just that we have overfitted neural networks in our heads?

You can get hit in a particular way and stop recognizing faces. Or morality.

What Chomsky is saying is that if you include only the people who are "healthy" according to some subjective criteria and take a crossection of their moralities - the result isn't an empty set. Well duh.

What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective sense there is such a thing as “faciness” that our brains recognize. In the same way, I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red—even accepting that it’s the structure of our optical and neural systems that are the basis for this fact.

Does that relate to Plato's world of ideas?

To his doctrine of the Forms, yes I think it does. He seemed to think that when humans gain knowledge, they do not generate it, but rather discover it. For knowledge to be discovered, it must have already existed - in the abstract, non-material world of the Forms. Plato had an involved epistemological argument for why the human process of gaining incrementally less partial knowledge of a subject fundamentally must be a process of discovery - but I would fail to do it justice.

Chomsky seems to imply that in a moral context, similarly, as humans learn abstract concepts and boundaries from sparse data, we are also carrying out a process of discovery. He seems to skip over the epistemological reasoning.

The only definition is "most people recognize it" and there are people who disagree about it or don't recognize it at all.

How does it differ from something that exists subjectively then?

I'd say arguing that colors are like morality is pro-relativism stance.

> I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red

We don't. For starters there are colourblind people, for seconds there is no specific colour that can be called "red". There is a large and fuzzy category of red-ish colours like blood-red or rose-red.

Even if there is some academic "these light wavelengths are the ones" definition of red that is arbitrary. Aliens might have drawn the lines elsewhere.

This is exactly Chomsky’s point. Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact.

To pick an example closer to the morality case: Hunger could equally be called a subjective phenomenon. Aliens may not experience anything like hunger. A rare genetic condition might produce a human who experiences escalating hunger as an escalating degree of pleasure.

But as humans making our way through the real world, we are forced by physical and anatomical reality to see the causes and consequences of human hunger as objective truths.

> ... Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. ...

You didn't consider what I wrote - colourblind people get through life without considering the colour of traffic lights at all. They have to. They are colour blind. The colour of a traffic light as a practical matter is a subjective fact. In fact, the practical colour of a traffic light is more subjective than the philosophical take because at least philosophers can be convinced with a wavelength argument.

Hunger is subjective. Starvation isn't.

Hunger is pretty objective if your body isn't malfunctioning (and it never is logically, "malfunctioning" body isn't yours). If your body works correctly, you are not free to choose whether to consider yourself hungry, and this is what I understand as objectivity.

What I consider hunger someone else can consider the norm or vice versa. If you define something that depends on the person as objective - then subjective loses meaning.

I improved my definition of feelings so that they can easily be objective.

I define hunger as the ideal signal that corresponds exactly to the extent of starvation. 'Ideal signal' is almost like sensation or feeling, except it may not be always or in full precision accessible by consciousness. It is a physical signal, or a function from the physical state. Extent of starvation seems objective (after fixing its definition), and so hunger seems objective too (correspondence is exact). By this definition, if you are starved, but don't notice a feeling of hunger, it's that, you still are hungry, just don't notice it.

> What I consider hunger someone else can consider the norm or vice versa.

How can that be? Do you mean definition, or something else? What do you consider hunger?

> I define hunger as the ideal signal that corresponds exactly to the extent of starvation.

If you redefine words how you please you can prove anything. What's the point tho?

> What do you consider hunger?

The feeling I sometimes get that I should eat something. It's VERY subjective (for example when I'm fasting I can go a few days without it, but when I'm not - I get it just cause I'm bored and haven't eaten a breakfast).

We universally agree that it is at least "the wavelength produced from a well-calibrated display when asked to render #ff0000'

I mean, ok. But that isn't objective. That is a subjective judgement of the display calibration standards body, with no reference to what most people think "red" means.

At least they can reliably compare society's idea of red to their own but I'm pretty sure people's ability to think of red as things outside the rgb gamut is likely diminishing over time.

If you insist on a definition in terms of physics, there may be a universal standard way of interpolating all distributed ideas of red into a main definition, even if extremely high-tech.

Otherwise, this question comes down to whether the meaning of the term 'red' is generated objectively or subjectively, which is related to philosophy of language and mind. See article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... .

It's odd to me that you chose color as an example of something objective, since so much about perception is subjective.

Even if we think about it in more quantitative terms, with red being defined as having a dominant wavelength approximately 625–740 nanometres, it's a bit of an arbitrary definition isn't it? If we observe a wavelength of 624, objectively we might say it's not red, but someone may still observe it as red considering how close it is to red. Or someone with protanopia won't see anything in those bounds as red either.

Color relies on ostensive definition. It's a public part of language whether someone is color-blind or not. When we say "that car is red" we are, in a sense, pointing to something and then using the concept and rules of color in our language. We might see something as a particular color through perception, but when we see "that --->" we are, in a sense, "seeing" in language (including body language, for instance. You could ask me which one is red and I could simply point).

We, of course, might disagree, but color-blind people learn which traffic lights are red, green, or yellow, regardless of their perceptual faculties. Because the color is not just what you see, but what you say.

I use f.lux - it changes the screen color temperature through the day to make it easier to sleep.

If I sit late at night my desktop walpaper (which is a regular photo with a lot of blue sky) becomes basically all red if you look at rgb values. But I still perceive the sky in it as blue because other things are "more red" so it looks blue, and because I know sky is blue, and because I remember how it looked before and the change happened slowly.

All of these scream "relativism" to me, in fact the mapping to common moral fallacies is surprisingly direct :) When law changes around you you might not recognize when it got evil. Obeying the law is good because it's the law. When everything around is evil - small evil seems good.

As for language and law - these are arbitrary. "Yellow pages" can be any color, so can "blue screen of death". Green traffic lights are actually blue in some countries.

Chomsky is one of the most internationally-known intellectuals. Most people in my country (Argentina) know him for that, rather than his work in linguistics.

... So I think it's very unfair to say he's speaking "outside of his niche" here.

I guess one could phrase it like this - his work in linguistics was important and somewhat falsifiable. The rest, not so much.

Is anything in philosophy or politics falsifiable? If politics is not his field, then whose field is it? Are only polsci majors allowed to discuss politics?

"Peace for our time" by Chamberline and Germany's dependence on Russia are as falsified as you can be in politics. Chomsky would probably support both :)

Fair point, and definitely a valid refutation of his position on Russia-Ukraine.

My point should have been that everybody is entitled to their opinion on politics and philosophy, but you do have to take facts into account when available. They're not always available, and it's not always obvious how relevant they are to a new situation, but you obvious shouldn't ignore facts completely, and that does happen way too often. In every corner of the political spectrum.

Is Karl Popper's theory on falsifiability as a scientific criterion itself falsifiable?

I don't believe that. I have traveled the world and very few people I know know about Chomsky.

I know a lot about Chomsky as someone who has studied parsers and natural languages a lot and I usually ask people I talk with if they know Chomsky so I can explain something I do.

People in Argentina knows Chomsky because he has always been Communist and an apologist of marxist dictatorships and regimes while a harsh critic of the West values and institutions.

Argentina has been a Marxist loving country for a long time. I was born in Spain and lived in Mendoza for some time. Argentinians also love to feel victims about everything that happens to them so they don't have responsibility on it so Chomsky message is powerful there.

I am not criticising Argentina, but describing it.

Chomsky is not a communist, he's a syndicalist. His views are more nuanced than you give him credit for.

Yeah I have to say he's always seemed like he made up his mind about the world by the 60s and hasn't really adjusted since. His Ukraine takes are right in line with his awful takes on the Cambodian genocide, which he still claims didn't happen.

which he *never* claimed didn't happen. You are another of those quickly educated on PragerU and similar Youtube channels but who never go to original sources?

No he definitely made the claim.

He was quoted saying “tales of holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda.”

He went on to say that refugees were making up the stories to please the west. It’s in the 1977 article on his own website.

Chomsky apologists never seem to be able to admit that he carried water for the worst regimes of the 20th century.

To be clear there are nearly 24,000 confirmed mass graves accounting for nearly 1.3 million dead. Fully 60% of the examined remains showed clear signs of execution with the most common method being a pickaxe. Chomsky said the refugees made it up. He’s never taken that claim back.

Due to little info coming out of Cambodia at the time, from what I read, Chomsky said he underestimated the immensity of the genocide, not that he denied it. Later he acknowledged it, you make it sound he's some sort of Holocaust denier. Funnily Chomsky gets a lot more flack for incorrectly assessing the gravity of the Khmer Rouge killings in the late 70s while the US foreign policy which was intstumental in keeping Pol Pot in power at certain points where it was convenient geostrategically are considered par for the course.

This is bullshit. He unequivocally said that the refugees were lying for the benefit of the US. Chomsky is always quick to shout that anything short of the literal Holocaust isn’t genocide and doubly so if a leftist regime is doing it. He was then and always has since minimized crimes against humanity in one direction.

"Always minimized crimes against humanity in one direction". You haven't read much Chomsky have you? The one key point that comes across from his thinking is how much we (westerners) minimize our crimes even when they are comparable or larger then the enemy. His whole manufacturing consent book is about such examples.

And that if you criticize someone it better be your own side, where you at least have a slight chance of changing something even if democracy is a thin veneer over something shady, rather than bravely criticising totalitary regimes where your chance of having an impact is really negligible. Just like if you have kids you'd better make sure you correct their faults instead of gossiping about the neighbours' kid's mischiefs.

Chomsky and his cohort was criticizing the Vietnam war at a time it was very unpopular to do so at home, today you get western people criticizing Putin and Xi as if this was some act of bravery and not the pointless navel grazing that it is in fact.

Until the West has a shitty foreign policy, and increasingly shitty domestic one as well (see surveillance, making terrorists of activists or journalists) totalitarian regimes can use this a valid excuse to shake off any criticism on their part.

I've read quite a bit of Chmosky's commentary, that how I knew to reference the old article from his own site.

It's perfectly valid to criticize US foreign policy and double so as a citizen. But Chomsky is jut full of shit and a liar. In Invasion Newspeak[1] he claims there was never any American Danchev with respect to Vietnam. Early coverage was actually critical[2], and after the Tet offensive it really went south. Chomsky just totally ignores this, it's inconvenient to his narrative. Moreover, you don't need to call refugees liars to criticize the US. You don't need to "well actually" what happened in Bosnia. Chomsky is a liar and piece of shit.

[1]https://chomsky.info/198912__/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20091211102035/https://www.museu...

He’s also a genocide denier.

That's not true.

He is pretty open about it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial

I don’t know why people still defend Chomsky’s horrible positions on this stuff. Moreover his claim that Leninism is distinct from Stalinism was absolutely disproven when the soviet archives were briefly opened and scholars could read Lenin’s letters and memos, but Chomsky holds to the claim.

My main problem with Chomsky is that he's intellectually dishonest. He picks his positions, then redefines words and picks facts or parts of facts that support his position and ignores others. He twists narratives dismisses anything that contradicts with his position as conspiracy. I used to like Chomsky when I was initially introduces to him because I agreed with a lot of his leftist ideologies. But being so intellectually dishonest in supporting them makes him no better than an Alex Jones of the intellectual left.

> My main problem with Chomsky is that he's intellectually dishonest

He also routinely cites "the archives," and every single time I've checked the source he's referencing his grossly misstating things (if I'm feeling generous).

> an Alex Jones of the intellectual left

This gave me a good chuckle.

> He also routinely cites "the archives," and every single time I've checked the source he's referencing his grossly misstating things (if I'm feeling generous).

Can you give an example? I've never found a gross misstatement when checking his citations.

As an example he claimed in 2022 that in 1970 Soviet Citizens could access the BBC, citing historical records of broadcasts in Russian. He neglected to mention that the Soviet government jammed the signal.

This is just one example.

"However, jamming was never totally effective, and listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia."

“a Harvard University study in the mid-1970s estimated that 28 million people in the Soviet Union tuned in [to US-funded VoA] at least once a week.’”

Far from a "gross misstatement".

https://fair.org/home/factchecking-the-factchecker-on-chomsk...

He was technically correct that some could, but it was obvious that he meant the USSR allowed it, which was a lie. This is a dumb argument.

The point he was making was that 1970s Soviet Russians had more access to information in practice than Americans today, which has nothing to do with whether or not Russia allowed it. I don't think "both countries tried to censor but only the US was successful at it" is the gotcha you think it is.

On another note I don't know exactly what you are trying to say in your top-level comment; Chomsky has said "when [Lenin] became the leader he didn't waste much time and Trotsky helped him in instituting a uh a pretty repressive regime which wasn't Stalinism but all the basic elements of Stalinism". Is that what you are referring to?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q_2A_RoonI&t=304s

He tried to make that incorrect point by lying, because Chomsky lies constantly. He only turned around on Lenin because the archives proved he was full of shit.

its true. Straight outta wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Noam_Ch...

That's not what "genocide denial" means. This was perhaps wrong judgement in hindsight.

Calling this or other things "genocide denial" and similarly extreme terms is a common tactic in order to craft an ad-hominem attack to divert from anti-imperialist criticism.

I'm in part Bosnian, so American intervention has had a very real impact on my family's well being and even survival. So I'm at least ambivalent if not opposed to some of Chomsky's views on anti-imperialism, even though I respect his principled stance.

But calling him a "genocide denier" is incredibly cheap. If you read the rationale behind his early assessments of the situation, it becomes clear that it was based on (well founded) mistrust of American reporting. As the author of "Manufacturing Consent" he has been very consistent in that view.

So, based on your views, socialists are incapable of genocide? Since it could be an imperialist smear campaign?

Every instance of genocide denial I know of also follows this line of reasoning.

> So, based on your views, socialists are incapable of genocide? Since it could be an imperialist smear campaign?

That doesn't follow does it. Why would you try to assume that I don't understand basic logic?

Whether you live in this or that empire, it's people at the top telling you what to believe, what is right and wrong, while committing the most atrocious crimes.

Socialists are very much capable of genocide and other forms of mass killings. In fact, they seem to typically start with killing other socialists, especially the democratic, libertarian left. That's no coincidence.

> Every instance of genocide denial I know of also follows this line of reasoning.

Genocide denial doesn't _follow_ this line of reasoning. It presents itself as such in order to hide the true intent. It is ultimately a propaganda instrument.

From my understanding, this is not what he did. He openly and repeatedly denounced these regimes. Look at what he actually said and wrote (sensational YT videos don't count). I can't speak for him.

'I'm in part Bosnian, so American intervention has had a very real impact on my family's well being and even survival. So I'm at least ambivalent if not opposed to some of Chomsky's views on anti-imperialism, even though I respect his principled stance.' That does not matter. It doesnt make your opinion more valid.

'Calling this or other things "genocide denial" and similarly extreme terms is a common tactic in order to craft an ad-hominem attack to divert from anti-imperialist criticism.' It is very normal to judge based on other areas that someone said. He denied the Cambodian genocide and never changed his view since 50 years! What does it say about him? And why is it ad-hominem? Do you even know what does it mean?

You're lying. It is true and a repeated decades long offense. He denies, when asked, each and every genocide that harms the reputation of socialism.

[https://youtu.be/VCcX_xTLDIY?si=v99y8DiJidzYOJES]

I have a bachelors in Linguistics. We were taught what Chomsky believes, but our professor also made it clear that many linguists, including himself, didn’t believe it was right or true. Though, this was 30 years ago. I haven’t kept up with the field to know what professors of linguistics think today.

The concept of an innate, universal language that Chomsky came up with is almost certainly true, now whether that universal language contains information regarding what we call ethics, that is an open question

> The concept of an innate, universal language that Chomsky came up with is almost certainly true

It's important to clarify that Chomsky's argument about universal grammar, in that there is an innate universal base human language, is not remotely certainly true. The existence of a human capacity or ability for language is true, but that's not a really amazing finding. People have been talking about that for hundreds of years. There's very little actual evidential basis in neuroscience or brain research for Chomsky's claim. It also frequently falls into private language fallacies, which is a logical blackhole he can't really climb out of.

His editorial on ChatGPT definitely read like "sour grapes"[0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

ChatGPT does feel a bit like a refutation of his life's work.

Because whether or not ChatGPT can think, it certainly has a good command of language without starting out with an inborn sense of grammar. It learns grammar by copying. Just like kids do, I suspect.

I suspect not. Children are exposed to far less text than LLMs. LLMs are parlour tricks that teach us nothing about how humans do it.

>without starting out with an inborn sense of grammar

I'm not so sure though, because it starts by being fed sentences assembled by people.

Sort of how we wouldn't say that a book itself has a "good command of language", but that the writer has one, and put it in the book.

So you might need a seed with "an inborn sense of grammar" to create language first and a training corpus second, but once that's available in huge volumes you can mechanically train an LLM to appear to have a "good command of language" just by brute force.

Would an LLM gain a "good command of language" if it was just fed all the taling a human hears and the words it reads in its first 18 years of life?

> Would an LLM gain a "good command of language" if it was just fed all the taling a human hears and the words it reads in its first 18 years of life?

Depends on what its starting weights are ;)

Aaaaaaand we're back to inborn sense.

Kids learn grammar by copying, but a group of kids with no language will invent one (see Nicaraguan sign language), and empty transformer models will not do this.

Kids raised hearing a mix of French and African languages will also invent a new language (Haitian creole) and a LLM will not do this, it would alternate speaking one or the other.

ChatGPT proves that language is not so complex that it can’t be modeled, but the core Chomsky arguments are unaffected.

I haven’t looked into the alternative perspectives (emergent grammar, etc) in the discipline since undergrad so I’m not saying Chomsky is right, just saying LLMs don’t disprove it.

> empty transformer models will not do this.

Do we have evidence for that? Of course those kids did have a real world to communicate about, and that creates the need for a language. I think if you had AI models that had a world to interact with and other models to communicate with and learn from, they might be able to develop their own language too.

But this does get to another of Chomsky's points: the need to have a world model. To current LLMs, the only world model they have is text they read on the internet. And they only communicate with us, and I don't think they learn from their communication with us. So that's unavoidably limiting them. But I think it would be a very interesting experiment to give them a world to interact with and other similar models to communicate with, to see if they develop some sort of language (which would be completely incomprehensible to us of course; that's another hurdle).

I agree that LLMs don't disprove his inborn grammar argument, but they don't support it either. I think more research is needed.

I suppose I can grant "feels a bit like", but unless I'm missing something (and to be fair I have not rtfa...) it hasn't actually reached refutation. The observation that there is enough information to determine grammar rules in the training set for an LLM is only very weak evidence that there is also enough information in the much smaller training set for a typical human.

I think it's pretty obvious that there is more than enough information in the training set of a typical human to learn grammar. Because we do. And people in different countries learn different grammars.

Also keep in mind that people get more feedback over their control of language ad grammar while they're learning. We don't just listen, we communicate.

That's the point, though. As you say there is obviously enough information to learn grammar given our starting point, but Chomsky's point is that there's not enough information to distinguish between all possible languages, so (paraphrasing from a decades-old recollection and probably very much putting my spin on it) learning a (first?) language as a human is probably a matter of figuring out how to apply existing "machinery" that imposes some of its own structure rather than operating entirely from the information provided to the senses.

I'm not saying it's necessarily correct, but it does seem well formed, and LLMs only undermine it in a very weak sense (so far?). To defend the conclusion itself I would have to know a whole lot more about how he estimated information content (needed and available).

I think his importance to linguistics is not so much due to being he's correct, but due to moving forward the way the field thinks about language and grammar.

> But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes).

Chomsky was always like this. He is an unapologetic hypocrite, constantly criticizing the U.S and "the west" while defending "socialist" country for the exact thing, and often even worse, than he was criticizing the U.S for. Even going as far as denying the existence of genocide during the Yugoslavia civil-war.

Manufacturing Consent was a very good book, but for me it won't change the fact that Chomsky is a genocide-denier tankie.

You seem to mix things up?

He has been very critical of "socialist" countries, especially towards their underlying political ideology.

Happy to learn otherwise, but everything I've seen follows the pattern of briefly paying lip service to the fact that some enemy of the US is not perfectly innocent, but well we're all human, and here's five pages on how the US is the worst.

“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2014/04/01/why-criticize-your-o...

Calling for introspection is all well and good, but there's nothing ethical about actively denying the reality of what is happening abroad.

In the end, it is just an attempt to shore up weak arguments with weaker falsehoods.

That's interesting, I'm a millenial aged leftist so I don't have the political baggage from the 70s-90s that older people have on Chomsky.

And so I find in a globalized, hegemonic world, Chomsky's first reason is just as important if not more so than the second: Seeing what the larger component is is crucial, as a prerequisite to doing something about it.

Yes, fair enough, it is more that he systematically downplayed the violence of the "red" side whenever there was a conflict with the U.S. Like how he basically tried to deny the Cambodian and Bosnian genocide.

Can you cite him exactly on any of your points or are you paraphrasing what you have heard second hand?

You could just go to his wikipedia article.

Anyway, he tried to downplay the genocide and the violence committed by the Khmer Rouge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

He, in the same fashion, downplayed the bosnian genocide: https://www.dw.com/en/dissident-intellectual-noam-chomsky-at... https://books.google.fr/books?id=7Bl9KT9NME0C&pg=PA142&redir...

And said that the Russian was acting "with restrain and moderation" in Ukraine: https://archive.is/EJp7e

That is how he operate. Whenever there is a conflict involving the U.S, even remotely, he is systematically downplaying the opponent violence and insisting that everyone focus on the U.S and ally violence. This way he can always look like the reasonable man, while basically defending massacre and dictator. How can he do this when criticizing (rightfully so), the U.S for the Vietnam War or the Contra, and not see the hypocrisy, is beside me.

He tried to make sense of numbers, as a point that it serves the US geopolitical goals at the time to have a distraction from their own atrocities.

"We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered."

Calling it downplaying genocide is a nice strawman. In any developing situation the media wants to jump yo a conclusion, that's his point overall.

He wasn't denying or downplaying just stating, if its happening how can we know to what degree when we have unreliable sources?

> he tried to downplay the genocide and the violence committed by the Khmer Rouge

The US carpet bombed Cambodia just like it did Vietnam, and Chomsky condemned this.

This nebulous "Khmer Rouge" you refer to was armed by the US starting in 1979 and even more so in subsequent years. The US worked to put them back in power and put economic, military and diplomatic support behind it. As reported in the New York Times, ABC News at the time. Chomsky was against this.

The US establishment was anti-Khmer Touge until 1979, then began arming and supporting them in 1979. By the late 1990s they began going out of favor in the US establishment. Chomsky's opinion hasn't changed, he was against the US bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Chomsky is a provocateur. The currency he measures is attention. There’s some interesting things that he has to say, but ultimately, not worth getting your blood pressure up over.

It’s good to critique the US or the west - you cannot improve without dissent. Fortunately, Chomsky is in the US and enjoys unimpeded speech and academic freedom.

> It’s good to critique the US or the west - you cannot improve without dissent. Fortunately, Chomsky is in the US and enjoys unimpeded speech and academic freedom.

That I can fully agree with. My issue is that he often criticizing the U.S while downplaying the other side violence.

Saying something like "France should not have had a military intervention in Lybia" is fine. But saying this and then adding "and Gaddafi repression of the Arab Spring was exaggerated by the media" is when I know what you really wanted to say.

I think this is hardly the genocide-denial you think it is. In the Gaddafi case, I doubt he really sides with a military dictator.

His critique has always been how the West intervenes, but mainly for economic security and superiority. We don't give much of a rat's-ass about installing a fair democracy, if that's even what these countries want, so much as installing someone who agrees with us (see: Reagan in South America)

Yeah. Not like Snowden or all those other provocateurs forced into exile.

Since people keep saying he's a genocide denier, I'll drop this link here https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol14/iss1/8/ which explains that it's more a matter of semantics. He hasn't denied mass murders have taken place. He would probably also object to using either "terrorist" or "freedom fighter" since using these words emotively serves to obscure what's really going on.

He argued against stopping it. I don't care how he calls it.

Two for one here: calling him stupid and a straw man.

Well, at least it reduces the problem to the criterium of "health". At least you can individually decide it and use it to accept or reject relativism, treating it as a subjective belief itself :)

Hence, why debate relativism at all?

The problem with ethics is that if you take almost any two different moral rules, there are always moral dilemmas where it is, for a large minority, unacceptable that we apply one rule over the other. So the moral rules of society as a whole form a logically inconsistent system, which appears to be only consistent within certain boundaries.

Since it is inconsistent system, every moral position can be logically invalidated. Therefore, the sensible positions, compromises, are also the least rationally defensible.

Now, Chomsky has a humanitarian angle, according to which no harm to other people is justifiable to make the world better. This means he rejects notion of justified war (which is anonymous killing of humans). And from this comes his position on Ukraine.

Chomsky is a mixed bag, on multiple fronts. He's very strident, and especially many his recent takes on geopolitical issues are unable to understand the new polarities at work in the world. He's been an important critic of American foreign policy, but it has blinded him (and his followers) to the absolutely more terrible nature of e.g. Russian hegemony. (I actually think this turn began for him around the conflict in Serbia.)

But I find him a useful and important antidote to the dominance of total relativism postmodernism/poststructuralism on the "left" and respect him for doubling down on the important of reason, rationality, and an empirical method.

These days, especially in American academia, most people preposterously labelled (by conservative opponents) as "cultural Marxists" or "Marxists" generally are anything but. Marx and many other people in that vein in the 20th century were committed materialists -- attempting to ground their analysis in rather cold hard economic analysis -- you can debate whether they were right or not or using the right tools, etc but this was their philosophical position, what they were trying to do.

The bulk of today's apparently-left wing intellectuals are effectively idealists (in the epistemological sense, not the moral sense). They fundamentally believe in the primacy of ideas over the material world, but they've done a slight of and instead of referring to it as Forms ala Plato, or Idea as in Hegel, etc. it's now the "Narrative" etc. I think it is having a destructive effect, and has in large part discredited this line of though about the people it's supposed to be liberating. It's a middle class movement for middle class academics, and has little to offer the working class.

Chomsky is a refreshing antidote to this. I can't speak to his linguistic analysis, though.

He's also very very old at this point.

> Marx

> cold hard economic analysis

Haven’t heard something like that in awhile. Maybe you missed how much of his writing was more about how a Hegelian spirit force overtaking the world was inevitable, disproved by the Soviet Union.

+1 - I got off the Chomsky bandwagon decades ago.

Language is a loose encoding of thought, nothing more or less. Want proof? Spend some time with ChatGPT4.

I don't entirely agreed, as there have been cases where my thought has changed because I learned a new word for something. I started to see that thing everywhere, where before I wouldn't notice it as much, just because I learned the word for it.

interesting point - but was it the word? or the concept?

Are the two different? What is a concept without a word?

multiple words! :-)

I'm arguing that it's an obvious optimization to assign short tokens to commonly used concepts.

I'm arguing that many people had the thought before society agreed on a given token for that thought.

Chomsky is yet another person, who gained public "fame" for expertise in his initial field. And who then went on to believe that his newly gained recognition, and expertise in one field, qualifies him to reach out into other fields with public comments. And since the internet and society works the way they do, people assign him authority in those fields as well since he's famous. Hence, he became more popular science than hard science. At which point it is almost fair to just ignore him.

I'm sorry but that discredits his wide history as a modern intellectual. He did philosophy and linguistics from the start.

Like it's fine to not agree with him, but he often offers a great introduction to topics like war and labor organizing for folks. His pop science is at least based on real science and his own reasoning.

And who would you suggest instead? If you say anyone before the 1960s but filtered through the likes of Jordan Peterson or Steven Pinker I'm going to have a hernia. THEY are pop science crap.

Personally, I have a peoblem with all those "intelectuals". Most of the time they were never top of the crop in their field to begin with, and then switched over to general intellectualism using top notch rethoric skills. Peterson is living, or already fell off, the extreme end of this spectrum. People like Chomsky occupy places on the same spectrum so.

And spare me philosophers.

Laymen need people who can synthesize the works of academics/researchers.

If someone like Chomsky wasn't talking about "faciness" and the ethics of ChatGPT, would anyone really bring that up? In an academic setting or otherwise.

This again also discredits his work as an academic for coining and bringing to light topics like CFGs.

Or in another similar vein: Bill Nye helps to distill scientific concepts for children (and adults too). There is something to be said for him helping to engage some students more in science, AND for whatever interpretation and analysis of Creationism vs. Evolution he did at that debate with Ken Ham, for the lay people. To a degree, it doesn't matter if he got every one of his points 100% logically sound, it can be a springboard that hopefully gives theists some food for thought on why Evolution is the best we empirically have and that the Bible isn't a primary source for citing.

So I again ask who you would rather speak to me about these topics, or am I supposed to just dig through thousands of scholarly articles and hope the ones I discuss and cite have the "correct" opinion and rhetorical skils?

Bill Nye condenses scietific facts, true. And he does that very well. What he does not is selling his own ideas on everything.

ChatGPT, well, everybody brings those issues up. But who really cares about "faciness"?

Also, evolution is as much a fact as gravity. Pretending there needs to be a discussion being had, especially one not between biologists and other experts, just gives credit to opinions that don't deserve it. But since there are people denying gravity, well...

This is absolutely not the case. His political writings and interventions got publicity the same reason as for many other people who were in academia in the 1960s: public opposition to the Vietnam war. This was a fulcrum in American (and western) culture and opposition germinated strongly on college campuses, so plenty of people in academia got a bit of "fame" as a result of this.

Most people I know who have read Chomsky have read his political writings only, and barely know him for his linguistics, and he almost never in any of his writings blurs the distinction between the two or mentions one in the context of the other.

I'd say rather his linguistics career has been mostly something that ran parallel to, not intersecting with, his interventions in debate about foreign policy etc.

And he if he wouldn't have been an linguist at university during Vietnam, just how many people would have read his thoughts on policy?

> What Chomsky is saying is that if you include only the people who are "healthy" according to some subjective criteria and take a crossection of their moralities - the result isn't an empty set. Well duh.

Where do you get that statement from? I don't think he says that at all.

He says that the idea of morality is bound, i.e. it isn't infinite. I think that is easy to agree.

He also says that you can argue morals. So he doesn't argue for a cross section of morals at all, quite the opposite: he hints, in this short video, that you can analyse sets of morals for their consistency.

He uses the example of labour under slavery vs labour under a wage contract and how these different arrangements lead to different attitudes to labour. Implied is the idea that Chomsky is against slavery, but considers certain arguments slaveholders made valid.

Are you sure you aren't, accidentally, putting up a straw-man?

1 - His Ukraine stance is simply that we have had a Cold War paradox in our American minds since the 50s, Russia is both too strong a foe to ignore and a paper tiger working off of shoddy USSR tanks and being beat by some farmers with lock-on missiles.

This article helps clarify his points, he absolutely calls Russia's invasion barbaric, but he has always vehemently stated the West's bloodlust and policing has never helped our case as peacemakers: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/noam-chomsky-interview-russia-uk...

2 - Sometimes philosophy is about stating the obvious "well duh". Because if you can't establish solid axioms, then how can you try to prove a higher-level thesis?

And if the linguistic stuff is over your head, I'm not sure the philosophy stuff will be easy for you to grasp either. Unless you have a major/minor in dialectics I don't know about.

The problem with the Ukraine stuff is that it falls easily into the same crap position as Varoufakis and others on the left which is basically a) some kind of "realism" about what Ukraine should do [basically surrender] and b) gives credence to much of the crap that Lavrov has put out on the public stage about this war being somehow about American imperialism.

Well, duh, everything is about imperialism, but what's missing from Chomsky's analysis is that: Russian imperialism is far far far worse.

I am not so much distressed by Chomsky's position on this issue as that of many of his followers/fans who seem to lack nuance entirely

Lefteast had some good articles on this topic and the crappy role many western "left wing" intellectuals have been playing. I will try to dig them up.

Why is Russia's imperialism far far far worse?

What about the us invasion of Iraq is "better" than the Russia invasion of Ukraine?

1.) Iraq was never annexed by USA. 2.) American govertment never claimed there is no Iraqi culture. 3.) There was no large kidnapping of Iraqi kids. 4.) There are no mass rapes made by the American military. 5.) Iraqis were never forced to forget Arab and learn only English. 6.) Hussein used poison gas on Kurdish people and used Zyklon B filled rockets (yes, same gas like in Ausschwitz) to attack Israel. Hussein occupied Kuwait and attacked Saudi - Arabia. There is no remotely similar thing the Ukraine goverment did in the past.

Lots of these are paper arguments. Yeah so Iraq was not "annexed", but the west installed a puppet government to do what they want, and they attempted to brainwash the population with western values. They did the same in Afghanistan, but fortunately they failed miserably and left in a humiliated manner. Maybe the kidnapping wasn't as bad as ukraine, but the hundreds of thousands killed and millions displaced and sick and poor and left without anything would like to have a word with you. I'm not defending Saddam's atrocities, but let's not pretend that the US didn't nuke Japan or use napalm in Vietnam. Fact of the matter is that the western hypocrisy is now more exposed than ever. You think they really care about Ukraine? All they see is more room to expand their influence and power in the globe.

>Iraq was not "annexed", but the west installed a puppet government to do what they want, and they attempted to brainwash the population with western values.

This is a lie. There was a legitimate democratic election in Iraq in January 2005 with 58% voter turnout. Because of the Shia majority of Iraq they voted into power a pro-Iranian Shia-dominated government which is the very opposite of a US "puppet government".

If you believe that the west didn't have a hand in the outcome, I have a bridge to sell you. Plus, we don't believe in western style democracy in our tradition, so further proof of western destruction and meddling in other countries' affairs. Quite the hypocrisy when they do it themselves but then cry when another power like Russia does it (and I don't condone what is happening in Ukraine either, but the hypocrisy must be pointed out).

Can you elaborate how a pro Iranian government is a Western puppet government? With credible sources etc.? Also I like to know who is "we".

Wikipedia states: "al-Maliki worked closely with the Multi-National Force (MNF–I), and continued to cooperate with the United States following the withdrawal from Iraq."

And "we" as in Muslims.

This is not a puppet goverment. And interestingly "we" excludes parts of Iraque society, namely Christians and Yazidis. Also ask your local Kurdish (mostly Muslims) people what they think about Hussein. You will be surprised ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_Ukr...

Let's also remember a few millions of Ukrainians were starved to death not 100 years ago by Russians. Ukraine is and was the most fertile soil in Europe. Russians sent soldiers to steal food and to ban people from leaving.

This is what happens when Russia invades you. People in the west have no comparison.

Some interesting responses here but imo these sound like "worse" but not "far far far worse" conditions to me. A war where lots of people are being killed exploded maimed raped generationally ruined or traumatized - is really horrible either way. It sounds like Russia has somewhat worse intentional practices than us but I don't see what the us did as okay in any sense.

Russians on their TV openly argue for killing "every Ukrainian".

The fact we are even arguing about this is the best evidence that morality is relative...

And that's just the start. They openly advocate for nuking western nations. Imagine if Anderson Cooper spent tens of minutes ranting about how we should just nuke Russia and China because fuck them

I'm no apologist for Russia, and you can see that from where I started this thread, but...

You act like there aren't actually dozens and dozens of Fox-news style commentators on US media and talk radio who haven't said similar things before, about various enemies of the USA?

The asshats on Russian media saying these things are basically the Russian equivalent of that crap. Demagogues etc

Some of the shit I heard coming from American right wing media after 9/11 was downright scary.

> I'm no apologist for Russia

false

> dozens of Fox-news style commentators on US media and talk radio who haven't said similar things before

show one

> The asshats on Russian media saying these things are basically the Russian equivalent of that crap.

Yeah. Read this channel. https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/170716092435045600...

Then repeat your lies.

The U.S. could do better about prosecuting troops who commit war crimes, but it does prosecute them.

By contrast, Russia openly condones war crimes. Not in the debatable "enhanced interrogation" borderline kind of way. In the kidnapping children to wipe out an entire cultural history and intentionally bombing civilian targets kind of way.

Why prosecute just the troops and not those in command who ordered the war crimes? Starting with Bush sr, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and the rest of the gang and all the way down the chain of command.

Ok, let's put it another way so we don't play whataboutisms, which this is what this is veering into:

Would you rather your country and governance be controlled and dominated by Russia or by the EU & the west?

I think most people here, if they're being honest, know that despite all its issues, political and economic life in the Baltic states, Poland, Czech Republic, etc. is better in most respects than life in Belarus or large parts of Russia, or the Russian dominated states that surround it. We can debate why that is the case, but I think that's basically fact. (Yes, I hear the streets of Minsk are very clean and it's a "well ordered" society, but this is the kind of thing we hear about all sorts of authoritarian countries and it doesn't make up for lack of basic democracy and individual freedoms, etc.)

In other words: We are not talking in this concrete instance about whether "the invasion of Iraq is better/worse than Russian invasion of Ukraine", but whether Russian dominance and control of Ukraine is better or worse for Ukrainians than western.

I think on the whole the Ukrainian people have voiced their position on this.

Now, whether life will be better for Ukrainians in a post-Russian-control world, I can't say, because it seems the Putin/Lavrov regime is doing its best to make that impossible by destroying as much of Ukraine's productive capacity and future success as it can. Russian strategy seems to have transitioned -- about last fall -- from "occupy as much as we can and destroy the Zelensky regime and take over" to "retreat to a defensive line and f*ck up as much of the rest of Ukraine as we can, salting the earth to make it clear what leaving Russian domination looks like"

Clearly the US invasion of Iraq is a historic war crime. It should not have happened, and I agree with others that the perpetrators should be held to account. But this isn't a math equation where we balance the one action with the other. We are talking about the physical real lives of Ukrainians, and their ability to control their own country and trade with who they want, and manage their own affairs -- not Iraq.

In other words, it's not US imperialism in the abstract vs Russian imperialism in the abstract, it's in this instance for this real world situation the case that western/EU/US alignment is better in the long run for Ukraine than Putin's.

Great post.

Chomsky has missed the mark more than once. His response to the NATO campaign against Serbia during the Kosovo war was what clinched it for me. He's come back to apologize about being misunderstood in that he was only opposing NATO intervention because it would lead to a response (no shit) against ethnic Albanians by Serbs...

Talk about missing the forest for the trees. The ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo had been going on for almost a century at that point - not all ethnic cleansing is militaristic. It can occur via political representation, whitewashing of one's history, meaning, presence, through educational systems, sidelined and ignored into oblivion, like so many cultures have been.

I think he's taking a similar tone-deaf view of the Ukrainian conflict.

Agree 100%. FWIW I was in various left wing activist groups at the time and the Chomsky-type position was both mainstream, but one I disagreed with and one thing that pushed me further away from those kinds of groupings.

It's a blind tribal positioning -- NATO / US bad, therefore everything it does bad. But this is in no way a materialist or logical method of analysis. Either you support the oppressed and minorities (e.g. Kosovan Albanians or Ukrainians etc) or you don't, and making abstract statements about right and wrong without having an actual tactical answer is irresponsible when people's lives are on the line.

But, worse, we're finding there's people who not only have essentially abstentionist positions but also there's a large portion of "the left" that is explicitly pro-Russian through some sort of aesthetic and/or cultural attachment to some Russophile past related to the Soviet Union (e.g. "Tankies"), or just raging anti-American positions that push them in that direction (the George Galloway types) etc. etc. These people are... really messed up, but also way more prominent than I realized/feared. There is simply no excuse to support an authoritarian, homophobic, violent, quasi-theocratic, terrorizing gangsterist regime like Putin's... wow

Like you, I've managed to navigate myself through the minefield of various activist groups I also subscribed to, at least in concept...

It appears, to me, that one's alliances are teaching moments (months, years) that lead to a rather enticing, surreptitious, inward analysis of of the logic and values one considers primary.

>>There is simply no excuse to support an authoritarian, homophobic, violent, quasi-theocratic, terrorizing gangsterist regime like Putin's...

Not to pat each other on the back, but we are in agreement. To bring it down to a more simplistic, humane POV, follow the Golden Rule: do unto others etc... Russia has failed at the first 3 words of that written/said idea of reciprocity and is unfortunately, damn proud of it.

Ad 1. There's no paradox. Russia is a paper tiger that barely works. But it has nukes and enough conventional army to fuck up small countries in Eastern Europe. Hence they seek NATO membership. The war isn't about USA, the war is about deciding whether Russia can again occupy about 100 000 000 people living there. Chomsky arguing against west involvement is enabling Russia. This isn't rocket science. If Baltic States didn't join NATO they would be gone by now. Poland would be likely fighting a war as we speak.

Ad 2. I have a lot of people I respect tell me his linguistic ideas make some sense, but for me it's just wrong (see LLMs). It's not my specialty and it's his specialty so I usually resist the urge to speak about it. He doesn't seem to have any problems speaking about Eastern European politicis tho, without knowing much about it. I'd cry "colonialism" but that's cheap.

According to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Noam_Ch...) ' In October 2022, he called on the U.S. to stop "undermining negotiations" between Ukraine and Russia.[137]

In an interview with New Statesman published in April 2023, Chomsky is quoted in saying that Russia was fighting more "humanely" in Ukraine than the U.S. did in Iraq, and that Russia was "acting with restraint and moderation" as Ukraine had not suffered "large-scale destruction of infrastructure" compared to Iraq.[138] Chomsky also asserted that Ukraine was not a free actor, that it was the U.S. and then United Kingdom which refused peace negotiations to further their own national interests, and that U.S. military aid to Ukraine is aimed at degrading Russian military forces.[138] Chomsky also argued that the applications to join NATO by Sweden and Finland had "nothing to do with fear of a Russian attack, which has never been even conceived", but instead was to give both countries new markets for their military industries and access to advanced equipment.[138] ' and that is copying Russian propaganda. Not all he says about the war is Russian propaganda but more than you claim. Chomsky fan boys just start to read the wikipedia articles and stop defending him.

The article is bullshit. He had interesting criticism for imperialist policy in the US, but after the 90s it becames a tiring "west is bad".

Not only he blames the victim with Ukraine, he did it with the Serbian ethnic cleansing and the Cambodian genocide.

Him: On the Cambodian genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

Him: On the Srebrenica massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial

I agree with you. I wish he was a banned subject on hn.

nah, I think a lot of armchair philosopher techies on here could use some alternate opinions and dialectics.

The primary reason for bringing him up (or any philosopher on this forum, really) is the nexus of ethics and AI. Although we haven't particularly let ethics stop us from a lot of high-tech atrocities throughout the past century, in the military field or otherwise (I'm thinking private equity and rampant credit use).

I don't disagree that we could use other useful perspectives.

I strongly emphatize he doesn't bring them.

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