Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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Give me 85,000 people who have been victims of workplace harassment (of any gender), 15,000 more random people, and I've found a group who has suffered more workplace harassment than women. Why do you assign this arbitrary group no moral/political weight?

(Again: there are orders of magnitude more such subgroups of Britain than there are cells in the human body. I don't understand how you pick one to the exclusion of all others.)

However, why are you arguing against...

I'm arguing nothing - I merely asked why CJefferson found a lack of non-royal women on money unacceptable. Then I asked drcongo (and later you and aaren) about your underlying political/moral philosophy. But everyone seems to be ducking the fundamental question.

So I'll ask one more time before I give up. Consider a statistical reference class X, which suffers disproportionately from one or more harms. How do I determine whether X deserves moral/political consideration of the sort you are advocating for? (E.g., we should make sure more of X has their picture printed on money.)

You can only determine which deserves more weight by your ability to change an outcome or your level of devotion to that outcome being changed. Women clearly have a vested interest in reducing negative outcomes for their group, just as furries, latinos, gays, asexuals, etc do for their own groups.

If you're arguing that it's silly to place all our emphasis on a single group rather than trying to make society better by not giving preference to any group, that would be a potentially valid argument however, it's one that likely wouldn't survive outside a classroom setting.

History has shown us that the banding together of some groups (civil rights movement for blacks, women's suffrage for women) has worked to enact change.

I'd assume that a psychological influence towards change may be that it's easy to feel sympathetic to a group when you have a personal connection with one of its members. Having no clear members to connect with (in a world where no groups are given preference) would prevent people who are close minded from feeling sympathetic towards change. That is simply an assumption though. I tend to lean that way because it has been shown that facts don't win arguments(1). As such, I am doubtful that providing evidence to harassers about the ill effects of their harassment or evidence about the potential benefits of them stopping would have any effect on their behavior.

In addition, the problem of harassment, bigotry, and prejudice is one that is both complex and large in scale. It seems logical to break this larger problem into smaller batches (i.e. working on the most populous groups that are affected) in order to promote immediate change instead of waiting for a solution to completely solve the problem (which is unlikely to exist).

(1) http://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-backfire-effect-why-facts...

You can only determine which deserves more weight by your ability to change an outcome or your level of devotion to that outcome being changed.

Interesting. This sounds a great deal like the corporatist aspects of Fascism - in order to achieve your goals (whatever they are), you choose to ally with powerful subgroups and engage in governance based solely on maintaining the coalition of powerful subgroups.

A fairly machiavellian philosophy, and not one that is commonly admitted, but definitely interesting.

(To head off any silliness, let me be clear that I'm not calling your views Fascist, you merely seem to express this one aspect of your philosophy very similarly to them. I have no idea whether you share the fascist belief in a strong central government, the rebirth/decadence myth, etc.)

Corporatism was developed by the Greeks and viewed in a positive light when pondered by the likes of Plato. In such a light, the concept is often viewed positively.

Later, the concept was also used by some fascist states, especially Mussolini's Italy. In this sense, it was used in a more negative light.

As such, corporatism is not necessarily a fascist concept but I can see how you could make that connection.

There wasn't any indication from my side that I wish to maintain a coalition of powerful subgroups. However, I'd be naive to argue that any large scale society has existed without a number of subgroups who either share power within the accepted system, or take power from outside its constraints. This is because society is made up of people who have all sorts of positives and negatives but have also adapted to form groups (families, tribes, states, nations).

The thought was initially posed due to the limited time and effort that any human being has. If you want to go through the list of groups that experience the most harm and reduce that harm and move onto the next group, you need some way to choose which group to start with. Devotion to that group or perceived ability to change their fate are simple ways to select which cause (not necessarily group) to align yourself with.

In no way does that require you to align yourself with only one cause or group or exclude yourself from the same. For example: being devoted to your family doesn't make you not devoted to your country, it simply adds additional complexity to the rules and scope of your devotion to both groups.

The set W of women suffer harms because of their membership of that set. This property is mutable.

You could make a number of other sets like this (non-white, old, young), but the largest one (esp. in the UK) is likely to be W, women (50% population).

We should try and create an environment in which sets of people do not have this property anymore.

A set doesn't suffer anything, only individuals suffer.

Some women (say 80%, for concreteness) have suffered because they are women. Consider the set WM consisting of those 80%, plus a random 20% of men. WM has the same statistical properties as W - it's members have suffered harms due to being a member of the set of suffering women + random people, and this group is also 50% of Britain. Is WM due the same moral consideration as W?

You can't use only the statistical properties of a subset to determine it's moral weight. For nearly any statistic you can think of, there are massive (i.e., 2^bignum >> population of earth) numbers of statistically identical subsets.

WM's members don't suffer harms because they are a member of WM. They suffer harms because they are members of W.

Women are a significant population in the uk. It has been shown that this population suffer some harms only because of their being women. This is wrong.

Is the distinguishing principle you are trying to arrive at merely the motive of the people harming them? I.e., is the principle along the lines of "If a bunch of jerks define and disproportionately harm group X, then we now assign moral weight to group X"?

You can't use only the statistical properties of a subset to determine it's moral weight. For nearly any statistic you can think of, there are massive (i.e., 2^bignum >> population of earth) numbers of statistically identical subsets.

A core part of this disagreement/discussion is that there is no accepted formula for determining moral weight.

It's certainly fine to have a discussion at more of a core philosophical level but I think that your arguments would more accepted by the HN audience if you would provide more context about what level of depth you are choosing to discuss instead of calling the article "ridiculous" and providing a single data point about one of the many thoughts posed by the article.

Most people responding are considering the current state of the world and what incremental actions they would take to improve it, not philosophical questions like "what is a harm?", "which harms are worst?", "should we eliminate harms?", "is it right to eliminate harms from one group over another?"

There are many tough questions that need to be answered before you can even discuss selecting or not selecting groups of people and considering their moral weight. Without posing or answering questions like "what is a harm?", "what harms are not permissible?", and "should we eliminate harms?", it's impossible to know whether or not we will be at a philosophical impasse when asking "should one group get additional weight for societal protection from harms over others?".

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