Burgundy
39
16
Burgundy has not written any posts yet.
Burgundy has not written any posts yet.
What you are describing is my native way of thinking. My mind fits large amounts of information together into an aesthetic whole. I took me a while to figure out that other people don't think this way, and they can't easily just absorb patterns from evidence.
This mode of thinking has been described as Introverted Thinking in Ben Kovitz's obscure psychology wiki about Lenore Thomson's obscure take on Jungian psychology. Some of you are familiar with Jungian functions through MBTI, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverted Thinking (abbreviated Ti) is the dominant function of the INTP type.
It will only take a few quotes to illustrate why you are talking about the same thing:
... (read 695 more words →)Introverted Thinking
My understanding of consequentialism is similar to yours and TheOtherDave's. In a chain of events, I consider all events in the chain to be a consequence of whatever began the chain, not just the final state.
My views on lying are similar to your friend's. Thanks for having a charitable reaction.
After reading some of the attitudes in this thread, I find it disconcerting to think that a friend might suddenly view me as having inscrutable or dangerous psychology, if they found out that I believe in white lies in limited situations, like the vast majority of humans. It's distressing that upon finding this out, that they might so confused about my ethics or behavior patterns... even though presumably, since they were friends with me, they had a positive impression of my ethics and behavior before.
Maybe finding out that a friend is willing to lie causes you to... (read 547 more words →)
Certain interactions with the government (assuming you are behaving peacefully) seem like a special case of dealing with an adversarial or exploitative agent. When an agent has social power over you, they might easily be able to harm or inconvenience you if you answer some questions truthfully, whereas it would be hard for you to harm them if you lied. Telling the truth in that case hurts you, but lying harms nobody (aside from foiling the exploitative plans of the other agent, which doesn't really count).
A more mundane example would be if a website form asks you for more personal information than it needs, and requires this information. For instance, let's say... (read more)
Yes. There are also questions which interviewers are legally prohibited from asking during job interviews, which probably have good moral reasons behind them, not just legal ones.
In my recent comments, I've been developing the concept of a "right to information," or "undeserving questions."
Good questions.
If you know that the other person believes that the information isn't private, then you know that they aren't knowingly doing something which they believe is prying. So they don't have mens rea for being an asshole by their own standards. (Yes, I believe that sometimes people are assholes by their own standards, and these are exactly the sort of people who don't deserve the truth about my private matters.)
If they don't know my feelings about privacy, then they are not knowingly intruding. But if they do know my views on the privacy of that information, they are knowingly asking for information that I consider private. That could be...disrespectful. If my... (read 413 more words →)
The thing is that the prying person likely considers the private affair to potentially involve wrongdoing.
Maybe. There are several scenarios:
A prying person might believe that you might be engaged in actual wrongdoing.
A prying person believes that you are engages in something that they think is wrong, but actually isn't wrong.
A prying person doesn't believe that you are doing anything wrong. They are just trying to get on your case because they are controlling or malicious. Or they think it's fun.
In SaidAchmiz's example of a nosy relative, it's not at all clear that the relative believes he might be engaging in any moral infraction, unless that relative has an incredibly expansive notion... (read 396 more words →)
These are good questions. It seems like deontologists have difficulty reconciling seeming conflicting rights.
In my main reply to the original post, I discuss some of the conflicts between truthfulness and privacy. If people have a right to not be lied to, and people also have privacy rights, then these rights could clash in some situations.
I think this is a great post. I fully agree about accepting other people's right to lie... in limited circumstances, of course (which is how I interpreted the post). I figured it was primarily talking about situations of self-defense or social harmony about subjective topics.
I think privacy is very important. Many cultures recognize that some subjects are private or personal, and has norms against asking about people's personal business without the appropriate context (which might depend on friendship, a relationship, consent, etc...). Some "personal" subjects may include:
Continuing a bit…
It’s truly strange seeing you say something like “Very high level epistemic rationality is about retraining one's brain to be able to see patterns in the evidence in the same way that we can see patterns when we observe the world with our eyes.” I already compulsively do the thing you talking about training yourself to do! I can’t stop seeing patterns. I don’t claim that the patterns I see are always true, just that’s it’s really easy for me to see them.
For me, thinking is like a gale wind carrying puzzle pieces that dance in the air and assemble themselves in front of me in gigantic structures, without any... (read 771 more words →)