Here's another example of "failing to notice the subjectivity of what counts as social convention". Many people are annoyed by aggressive vegetarians, who think anyone who eats meat is a bad person, or by religious people who are actively trying to convert others. People often say that it's fine to be vegetarian or religious if that's what you like, but you shouldn't push your ideology to others and require them to act the same.
Compare this to saying that it's fine to refuse to send Jews to concentration camps, or to let people die in horrible ways when they could have been saved, but you shouldn't push your ideology to others and require them to act the same. I expect that would sound absurd to most of us. But if you accept a certain vegetarian point of view, then killing animals for food is exactly equivalent to the Holocaust. And if you accept a certain religious view saying that unconverted people will go to Hell for an eternity, then not trying to convert them is even worse than letting people die in horrible ways. To say that these groups shouldn't push their morality to others is to already push your own ideology - which says that decisions about what to eat and what to believe are just social conventions, while decisions about whether to kill humans and save lives are moral facts - on them.
Hobbes uses a similar argument in Leviathan -- people are inclined towards not starting fights unless threatened, but if people feel threatened they will start fights. But people disagree about what is and isn't threatening, and so (Hobbes argues) there needs to be a fixed set of definitions that all of society uses in order to avoid conflict.
It feels like most people have a moral intuition along the lines of "you should let people do what they want, unless they're hurting other people".
I seem to live on a different planet where the generally overriding moral intuition is that "people should be forced to do good", and people are only left to do what they want when no particular opposing good has been identified. For utilitarians, every action but the optimal action is "harm".
I once saw a picture of a bumper sticker that said this:
"Don't like slavery? Don't own one!"
The person who posted the picture did not like it.
It feels like most people have a moral intuition along the lines of "you should let people do what they want, unless they're hurting other people".
If it feels like that, you probably have a very provincial understanding of human moral intuitions. Haidt identified 6 moral foundations, only one of which is harm-based.
- Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
- Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions (He has also referred to this dimension as proportionality.)
- Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgments in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
- Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
- Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
- Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)
I happen to live in a small eastern European country...
Examples of big local policy debates: should a predominantly Polish community be allowed to keep street signs on the buildings that are in both Polish and Lithuanian, or should those be replaced, at a considerable expense? Another policy debate: should Polish people be allowed to use the letter W in their names in the passport?
How do you think opinions about the above questions correlate with the views on abortion?
Now, it seems to me that in the policy debates concerning something like abortion, ethics is only a part of the motivation, in only a fraction of people who are against abortions.
Does this have anything to do with racism and fakes? Because while reading it I kept swapping them and trying to second-guess what your point would be and now my brain hurts.
I'm pretty sure "facist" is a misspelling of "fascist", not of "racist". Also, it would seem that the word "rake" has some colloquial meaning that I've never heard before. From context I assume it's something like "willfully evil person", but I don't actually know.
Also, it would seem that the word "rake" has some colloquial meaning that I've never heard before. From context I assume it's something like "willfully evil person", but I don't actually know.
It's an early modern-era term for a man accustomed to vice, especially sexual misconduct. I particularly associate the word with "A Rake's Progress", a series of paintings depicting a young aristocrat's descent into debt and insanity by way of all the dissolution you'd probably expect to find in a story like that, but you needn't limit it to that.
Crap, yes, that's fascist, thanks. Edited. (It's so obviously wrong now that you've pointed it out...)
Rake is actually kind of an old-fashioned word. I'm not very happy with it, but I couldn't think of one that I liked better. It's not so much willfully evil as indifferently evil: "I eat tic-tacs because I like the taste and don't care about their suffering". "Amoral" would have worked, but I wanted a noun. Possibly I should not have wanted a noun as much as I did.
Edit: I've inserted a working definition in the post.
Many people have proposed this model with respect to animals but it isn't true. This old post covers a particular saliant time it came up in the rationalist community. https://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-i-feel-about-emotional-appeals.html
Vegans: If the meat eaters believed what you did about animal sentience, most of them would be vegans, and they would be horrified by their many previous murders. Your heart-wrenching videos aren't convincing to them because they aren't already convinced that animals can feel.
...I think the people who changed m
While this applies to issues like abortion and animal rights, it fails to describe the "fascist" case in many other debates, such as those about homosexuality, marijuana legalization, organ markets, inequality (not absolute poverty, inequality), etc. I don't think most people who are against homosexuality believe that it's harmful, they just have a "Yuck!" response to it, which they think justifies opposition to it.
I think this post would have been stronger without any use of the term fascism, and then you also could have left out the term "rakes."
The title could be "Permissiveness and Harm" or something like that. You only even use the titular terms a few times, more than three quarters of the way through the article.
This post reads like it's going to great lengths not to talk about whatever the thing is it's actually talking about, that inspired it. It's easy to sound reasonable if you generalise sufficiently. And it distracts people from noticing this if you use eyecatching words like "fascist" in the process.
There are not all that many who follow any real permissiveness principle at all, and almost none that claim it wrong to attempt to change the behavior of someone who's hurting someone else. Everyone's BOTH a fascist (in terms of how they try to influence others) and a rake (in terms of self-justification for non-perfect behaviors) on topics they care about.
Couple that with the common (and correct, IMO) belief that use of exclusionary resources is a harm to those who are thus prevented from using the resource, and there's not much principled permissiveness...
My first reaction is thinking that the permissiveness/fascism angle unduly complicates the model.
Sometimes a disagreement is really a moral disagreement -- two people having different values. I don't think something is a big deal but you think it's wrong; or I think that it is the lesser of two evils, whereas you think it is the worst evil. In any case, if I do this thing, you think I'm a rake -- that I just don't care. Sometimes a disagreement is really about someone being a rake. Lots of times people do bad stuff because they just don't care, even they ...
What should happen here is that people try to work out exactly what it is they disagree about and why. What actually happens is that people appeal to permissiveness.
This is a valid political/moral argument. It might not be the most convincing one, but it does hold weight. Moral principles do not override eachother, they fight like soldiers.
I feel like people don't really care about tic-tacs. They get angry, but they don't seem to really care.
Suppose half the country thought tic-tacs were sentient, and half thought life-savers were sentient. What you'd expect to happen is that when a politician runs for president on the platform of banning both, everyone would vote for him. The pro-tic-tac party would dislike that he's banning life-savers, but it would be worth it for the increased chance of victory over someone who just bans tic-tacs. Similarly, the pro-life-savers would vote for him.
If ther...
Since this post is obviously mostly about abortion, you might as well just say so. The only moral dilemmas we currently face in the civilized world that hinge on whether or not something is a moral agent are abortion, and more rarely, whether it should be legal to euthanize humans in persistent vegetative states.
For what it's worth, abortion was indeed the motivating example. But maia's right, I wanted to be meta-level - I wanted to avoid people from seeing that I'm talking about tic-tac sympathisers, talking sympathetically about them no less, and assuming that I'm a dirty tic-tac sympathiser myself and have nothing to say to them on the subject of tic-tacs. (I think LW could have handled it, but I'd like to eventually have an audience larger than LW.)
I think the poster's intent was to invent an example so that this post would be on the meta-level, instead of being about a particular issue.
You may have interpreted it as being about a particular issue, but I don't think that was on purpose, as evidenced by the fact that someone else interpreted it as being about a different particular issue.
I suppose it's about abortion... yes, abortion debate is not between fascists and non-fascists. But plenty of political debates are, e.g. ones having to do with immigration, ones having to do with prohibition (in the past, of alcohol, now of other things), ones having to do with sentencing of criminals, and so on.
On the topic of fascism and the like, nobody really thought nazis would be the net utilitarian benefit; people thought the nazis were good for them. Same goes for most other such debates concerning the issues where voters are able to identify the...
I suppose it's about abortion... yes, abortion debate is not between fascists and non-fascists. But plenty of political debates are, e.g. ones having to do with immigration, ones having to do with prohibition (in the past, of alcohol, now of other things), ones having to do with sentencing of criminals, and so on.
On the topic of fascism and the like, nobody really thought nazis would be the net utilitarian benefit; people thought the nazis were good for them. Same goes for most other such debates concerning the issues where voters are able to identify themselves as unaffected by the policy. Nobody actually thought it is net utilitarian benefit to throw people in concentration camps, nobody really thinks today it is a net utilitarian benefit to put people in prison for doing something where no party was harmed. People just know that they themselves get an advantage, if only relative, by voting in such laws which affect negatively other people.
nobody really thought nazis would be the net utilitarian benefit; people thought the nazis were good for them.
Good for their tribe. There were large number of Nazis who thought they might be worse off (e.g., mowed down by machine gun fire) who were still supportive as they perceived a net benefit to their tribe.
It feels like most people have a moral intuition along the lines of "you should let people do what they want, unless they're hurting other people". We follow this guideline, and we expect other people to follow it. I'll call this the permissiveness principle, that behaviour should be permitted by default. When someone violates the permissiveness principle, we might call them a fascist, someone who exercises control for the sake of control.
And there's another moral intuition, the harm-minimising principle: "you should not hurt other people unless you have a good reason". When someone violates harm-minimisation, we might call them a rake, someone who acts purely for their own pleasure without regard for others.
But sometimes people disagree about what counts as "hurting other people". Maybe one group of people believes that tic-tacs are sentient, and that eating them constitutes harm; and another group believes that tic-tacs are not sentient, so eating them does not hurt anyone.
What should happen here is that people try to work out exactly what it is they disagree about and why. What actually happens is that people appeal to permissiveness.
Of course, by the permissiveness principle, people should be allowed to believe what they want, because holding a belief is harmless as long as you don't act on it. So we say something like "I have no problem with people being morally opposed to eating tic-tacs, but they shouldn't impose their beliefs on the rest of us."
Except that by the harm-minimising principle, those people probably should impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Forbidding you to eat tic-tacs doesn't hurt you much, and it saves the tic-tacs a lot of grief.
It's not that they disagree with the permissiveness principle, they just think it doesn't apply. So appealing to the permissiveness principle isn't going to help much.
I think the problem (or at least part of it) is, depending how you look at it, either double standards or not-double-enough standards.
I apply the permissiveness principle "unless they're hurting other people", which really means "unless I think they're hurting other people". I want you to apply the permissiveness principle "unless they're hurting other people", which still means "unless I think they're hurting other people".
Meanwhile, you apply the permissiveness principle unless you think someone is hurting other people; and you want me to apply it unless you think they're hurting other people.
So when we disagree about whether or not something is hurting other people, I think you're a fascist because you're failing to apply the permissiveness principle; and you think I'm a rake because I'm failing to apply the harm-minimisation principle; or vice-versa. Neither of these things is true, of course.
It gets worse, because once I've decided that you're a fascist, I think the reason we're arguing is that you're a fascist. If you would only stop being a fascist, we could get along fine. You can go on thinking tic-tacs are sentient, you just need to stop being a fascist.
But you're not a fascist. The real reason we're arguing is that you think tic-tacs are sentient. You're acting exactly as you should do if tic-tacs were sentient, but they're not. I need to stop treating you like a fascist, and start trying to convince you that tic-tacs are not sentient.
And, symmetrically, you've decided I'm a rake, which isn't true, and you've decided that that's why we're arguing, which isn't true; we're arguing because I think tic-tacs aren't sentient. You need to stop treating me like a rake, and start trying to convince me that tic-tacs are sentient.
I don't expect either of us to actually convince the other, very often. If it was that easy, someone would probably have already done it. But at least I'd like us both to acknowledge that our opponent is neither a fascist nor a rake, they just believe something that isn't true.