SSCReader
2hr ago
But then why pretend to value freedom most of all when you are ultimately a pragmatist?
When did I say I valued freedom most of all? And saying no means I don't value freedom of association at all, I value it, just not exclusively. So my answer would be Yes, but.
Kant is wrong about many many things and this is one of them. It may be the devil's position but if it is, he inherited it from God. The bible explicitly supports justifiable lies. God rewards the midwives who lie to save male children for example. Because they were not lying for themselves but to save lives, and this showed they "feared God" i.e. correctly valued some of His laws over others. God is is not a Kantian.
There is a difference between something not providing ALL the moral content of your decision making and not providing ANY moral content to your decision making that you seem to be struggling to grasp.
SSCReader
3hr ago
What you are missing is that there is a spectrum which runs from principles should never be compromised (the one that never works in the real world) to principles have no value. Indeed my experience is that Chinese lradership are less likely to compromise principles than me, they just have very different principles. In that regard they are closer to you than me.
As to how the US was founded, thats kind of my point. In the real world their Libertarian principles lasted all of about 5 seconds or their fledgling nation would have fallen apart. They suddenly were the ones crushing rebellions and imposing taxes. It turns out just like communism, Libertarianism is utopian but actually unworkable. I think Libertarians are fine principled people, and i have some close friends who are, but it is about as naive about human behavior as the communists. And the history of the US shows that perfectly. All men are created equal, except those its profitable for us to enslave, men should be free to rebel against governments they disagree with..until its our government. Those principles are corrupted immediately by self-interest.
SSCReader
16hr ago
To be fair, I am 1) Not American, 2) Not a Democrat and 3) A Mottezin so how much you can extrapolate from me to the people you are talking about is an entirely different ballgame.
If you want to say SSCReader is an inveterate liar, then certainly yes for much of my career I was. But of course, I also worked for both Right and Left wing parties. So as much as I am an exemplar for Democrats it is also going to implicate Republicans.
SSCReader
19hr ago
Come now, the idea that principles may need to be traded off against each other in the real world is nothing new, even for Libertarians. Thinking that means people who do that don't actually have principles is just No True Scotsmanning. You see the same thing where people say Christians don't really believe abortion is murder otherwise they would be working harder to stop it. You don't get to decide how other people choose to instantiate their principles.
I love freedom. That doesn't mean I love freedom at any cost. Libertarians who believe a Libertarian nation should have a defensive military funded by taxes certainly understand that. Taxes may be theft but that is cold comfort if your neighbor who does fund their military rolls over your borders.
As for you comment about China if that is some kind of vague swipe about preferring communism, do better. As it happens I have spent significant time in China and it is definitely not a reasonable government by my metrics.
SSCReader
1d ago
Eh, as an atheist veteran of the great online flame wars of the past, I have been called a servant of Satan before. Just a demonstration that the more things change the more they stay the same I suppose.
SSCReader
2d ago
No, which is why some lies are anti-social. We call that fraud, or perjury and the like. Just like some killings are murder, and some are not. Notably we don't criminalize things like lying about how much you can afford, or white lies about whether your wife looks good in her new jeans, and so on. We recognize that not all lies are a problem.
Killing is conducive to a functioning society, whether that is killing in self-defence, execution, war, and so on. So too is lying. Depends on the types of lie and the reasons, just like with killing.
SSCReader
2d ago
Those are not conductive to a functioning society.
History begs to differ. Every society has dishonesty and distrust. Whether individuals like or dislike it is besides the point. They do it. All the time. They lie about how much they drink, how much they eat, they lie about why they can't make it to work, why they have no money. Not everyone and not all the time of course, but enough that you simply cannot operate without taking into account if the other person is lying to you. And that is what our societies have evolved to function with.
SSCReader
2d ago
You want the vegans not to be able to write up a simple contract that says "anybody renting this land must forego meat on penalty of being kicked out".
Yup, in a tension between rights there has to be some level of reasonableness. To be fair I also think a meat eater commune couldn't do the reverse. I think if a Native American on a reservation wants to sell his house to a white man he should be able to. You can contract that they can't damage your land, you can contract they don't unreasonably annoy the neighbours with noise et al. But you can't contract restrictions on eating meat or that they can't make any sounds at all for example. Some things are simply not reasonably contractual. What those things are will vary culture to culture, and in the US situation given their history of as you pointed out enslaving a race against their will, the ensuing Civil War, and then further decades of various discriminatory laws they are very sensitive to racial issues like that. In a different place or a different location it might be different. In Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant balanced rights have to be considered more than Jews or whatever, in Germany they are sensitive to antisemitism instead.
In some hypothetical nation where vegans were hunted nearly to extinction, there might be carve outs like Native American reservations or peace walls or what have you, as a practical matter, for vegans, to protect them from attack and harassment, but it wouldn't be because they have a fundamental right to bar others, just that nations are complicated and sometimes it is necessary to compromise for the greater good.
SSCReader
2d ago
And I don't see you particularly miffed that non compete clauses or HOAs exist, despite them being clear violations of your conception of freedom of association.
Oh I hate HOA's with the burning passion of a million fiery suns! It's just not a topic that comes up here very often.
A vegan can ban meat at his own Thanksgiving dinner, but he cannot ban it at his neighbors is my point. And he can set up a vegan commune! Those exist! But what he can't do without violating someone else's rights is ban his neighbor from being a carnivore, any more than the neighbor can ban him from being vegan.
In general you cannot give up your fundamental rights. If you were a vegan and signed a contract that you would never eat meat again, I think most courts would find that unenforceable. You can't give up your own right to self-determination. If you join a cult you must be able to leave, even if a prior version of you thought you never would want to. There are some things you simply cannot contract away.
SSCReader
2d ago
In effect you’re just lying out of social cowardice, you don’t want to say ‘I’m cheap’ so you say ‘I can’t pay more’.
No! That's the point it isn't cowardice, it is a rational choice as a negotiating strategy. If I am willing and able to pay 45,000 dollars cash, but would prefer to pay as little as possible (the position of most people buying a car, I would suggest). Then if I tell him that, that is what I will pay, he isn't going to drop the price because I am honest! But if am tell him, I can't go any higher than 40,000 and he counter-offers me at 43,000 I have materially benefitted. It isn't about being cheap, it is about getting the best deal you can.
I can pay 45,000 dollars but I would rather not. But as soon as I tell him, I can spend 45,000 dollars what rational reason does the salesman have to come down? He knows exactly what I am willing to pay. I have given away information in our adversarial transaction. We are opponents here, not friends. Likewise if he is honest and tells me, "Hey the sticker price is 48,000 but I will take 40,000" then I am going to offer 40,000, no more. I'm not going to pay more than I need to right?
The fact we hide information from each other, is because we do not have the same goals. We are opposed. I lie because saving 3000 dollars is good and he lies because earning an extra grand in commission is good.
And that is my point, Dishonest(buyer)/Dishonest(salesman) sets the price at 43. Honest/Dishonest gets 45, Dishonest/Honest gets 40, Honest/Honest gets 42,250 (as they honestly split the difference between their max and min prices). Do you see what happens there? We are socially evolved to lie. Not because it is good or bad, but because it seems once you are dealing with groups bigger than just family size (where iterated tit for tat trust rules), that it facilitates the social fabric and allows hundreds of thousands of people to work together, even when their individual goals are not aligned. Now I am happy because I paid less than I would have and he is happy because he got more than he would have taken. The social good is divided between us. Even when we did not trust each other!
Now if he was my uncle and the only car dealership in town so he knew I would be back next year, and would have to face me at Thanksgiving if he scammed me, then it would make sense for us to say end up at 42,250 by being honest and splitting the difference between what the max I was willing to pay, and the minimum he was willing to accept. But that is no longer the situation most people are in, once you scale beyond Dunbar numbers. Unlike in a prisoners dilemma both people choosing to be untrustworthy is very nearly the same as both being trustworthy where you cannot be certain of how trustworthy strangers are.
At scale, when you are no longer iterating with the same people over and over, and you don't know who to trust, both people being somewhat selfish and untrustworthy, paradoxically results in a good outcome. Because we do not have perfect information about each other. That is how capitalist societies have become so successful. It harnesses our inherent distrust, and greed and selfishness. Contrast with scenarios which assume utopian versions of humanity, like communism, and clearly one is more successful than the other at scale.
Now to be clear, it can still be true that lying and being dishonest can be morally wrong, even if they result in a better society overall. But that entirely depends on your moral framework. A utilitarian might judge it good based upon societal outcomes as above, while a rule utilitarian might not, a Kantian would definitely still see it as morally wrong, and a virtue ethicist would also see it as wrong, I would imagine.
SSCReader
2d ago
You cannot setup a village of only your group and only hire people who are part of it.
Correct. Because to do so is to step over someone else's right to free association as I pointed out in my example. What you can do is move to an all white area. What you can't do is stop a black person moving in. Nothing stops you moving to another white area and another. Because your neighbors have the right to associate with black people even if you don't want to, and black people have the right to associate with them. That is the part you must come to grips with. Your neighbor has the right to sell his property to anyone including a black person. Therefore you are the one who must take steps if you have this particular belief. Like a vegan going to a Thanksgiving dinner, you have a right not to eat the food, you do not have the right to demand other people also stop eating turkey.
SSCReader
2d ago
I argue we DO tolerate lies in our current society. And not just in politics. And it is not clear that those lies are always a bad thing, or even if they are a bad thing that it is possible to change it. So in out current situation, yes it makes sense to tolerate lies. But that is independent of whether lies are moral or not.
Consider another profession not known for trustworthiness: the car salesman. They want to sell you the cheapest vehicle for the highest price. Why? Because they get commission. Why do they get commission? So that their incentives are aligned with the owners of the lot, to get most money for the least outlay.
Are there honest car salesmen? Sure. some. But in general the incentives they have, pushed by the people who have most to gain is going to mean honest salesmen are outcompeted by dishonest ones. So if your friend is going to buy a car, you should make sure he knows the car salesman and himself are in an adversarial relationship, and both sides have incentives to lie. You say, I only have the budget to pay X, he says he cannot possibly sell it for less than X +10. You both know, you can actually pay X+? and he will accept X + ?? and you negotiate around to find where X + ? and X + ?? overlap. You can imagine a world where they both rock up and you say I will pay X+3 and he says I will accept X + 2, but that is not this world. To get to that world, you would have to change people. That you want to keep as much money as possible and he wants to get as much commission as possible. The incentive to lie is is built in. It is part of our moral intuition as you call it. You both want to get the best deal for yourselves. Any actions which do not understand and recognize that (like say communism) are doomed to fail.
Is it wrong to lie to a car salesman about how much you are willing to pay to try to get a lower price? If it is, is it still wrong, if you know he is lying to you about what he can sell it for?
SSCReader
2d ago
The increase in wealth controlled by the US government is probably a factor. A senator has influence over billions of dollars. Very few individuals will have that level of influence outside of it. One with a professional machine behind them, to be organized will outcompete those without generally. Even Trump benefited from thousands of workers for the Republican party in each state for ads, flyers, get out the vote etc. Though it's possible we'll move into a more celebrity based era going forward. Social media is a significant amplifier, for at least the getting elected part of the job.
But politicians believing one thing and doing another is as old as politics itself. Power attracts the ruthless and ambitious.
SSCReader
2d ago
There is no right to be associated with. Blacks had much more solid grievances in the systematic destruction of their own institutions, or indeed the original source of this whole mess in being imported as slaves.
Well sure there is we were just talking about it. The right to free association. And of course that wasn't the worst thing done to them, but if you think segregation shouldn't have been done away with without consent then their right to free association should not have been removed without consent. You can't have it both ways. And it doesn't matter what they wanted collectively does it? If a single black or white person did not want segregation then their rights were removed. And therefore when their rights were restored with the removal of segregation they were just going back to the status quo.
As for voluntary segregation people can do that today. Many areas in the US are either exclusively or almost exclusively segregated. You just can't use race when offering services, and you can't have legal segregation that the government will enforce. It is now up to you to avoid black people (or vice versa), and if that means you have to move rather than them, then that is the right you have. You just can't legally force someone else to move. Your beliefs, you have to be the one to make the effort to abide by them. You want no black people in your neighborhood, you have to move neighborhoods, you can't make them move. Otherwise, you are trying to force people to act a certain way to accommodate your beliefs. You are not entitled to force people to change their behavior. You are entitled to move to rural Montana or Amish country or wherever you can find that meets your criteria.
We're not talking about the NHS by the way holy or otherwise. That is healthcare not housing and feeding, which is administered by entirely different bodies, primarily local governments. The right to healthcare is a relatively modern invention. The right for people in England to be fed and housed if they could not do it themselves is hundreds of years older. It is heavily framed within English common law AND statutory law. Whether people would fight to the death about it is not the definition of a right, otherwise the right to bear arms or the right to freedom of speech both of which have been restricted are also not rights.
SSCReader
3d ago
Yes I think, there is a clear incentive driven change. Part of it is also an increase in wealth and power, a senator today has influence over huge amounts of money, power and prestige. It would be surprising if that did not attract the ruthlessly ambitious. It does have benefits, I think many politicians today are actually very competent. Just not very honest.
SSCReader
3d ago
Killing is a social technology and not always evil. See soldiers in war, self-defense and executions etc. Murder is a subset of killing which is defined by not being just, so it isn't a social technology, its an anti-social technology almost by definition. Lies can be social or anti-social depending on purpose.
Likewise with rape, sex is a "technology" to propogate the species, rape is the anti-social version.
Gandalf knew the value of political lies to accomplish his vital tasks. Bilbo would not have been at Erebor, had Thorin know he wasn't a burglar for example. And Gandalf of course was literally on the side of the angels...
SSCReader
3d ago
For most people whether politicians are decent people personally is irrelevant. And never to trust them is just based upon their incentives and behaviors. They lie because we reward them for lying. But we can still be aware of that fact.
Thete is no point in condemning them. They are what we have chosen. Our politicians are downstream of our tolerance (and reward) of lies. They are a symptom not a cause.
If you want to get a more truthful and honest society that may be a worthy goal, and then you will get more truthful politicians. But you can't do it the other way round. Its the wrong way to look at it.
SSCReader
3d ago
Lies are a social technology with a purpose. In and of themselves lies are neither good nor bad in my opinion.
Trump doesn't really lie more than your average politician but he does lie differently. More the lies your boastful uncle tells than the more crafted non lie lies politicians generally aim for.
At a population level it doesn't matter if some individuals don't vote for liars, if the majority do.
SSCReader
3d ago
I am neither confemning or condoning. There are incentives put in place by our actions, those incentives lead to where we are today. A principled political consultant gets out competed and replaced. Politicians who are truthful and humble are outcompeted buy those who are not.
Those are the outcomes of our actions as voters and our actions as voters are downstream of the psychological make up of humanity.
Whether that is good or bad is irrelevant really. It simply is.
There isn't anything any individual can do about it, its a massive coordination issue, and there is no-one outside of humanity that can coordinate a better outcome.
The good news is this equilibrium is still better than the alternatives. Political engagement ebbs and flows and people are always very good at tricking themselves into thinking this time it will be different. This time the politicans will be better.
We had terrible disengagement in the 70s and it came back. No reason to think it won't happen again. Our ability to fool ourselves is one of our greatest strengths.
SSCReader
3d ago
I loathe to see your reply that the Democrats just need to lie better,
Not just Democrats, this is politics and we get the politicians we deserve. We vote for liars and the ruthless, so we get more liars. Nothing to do with Democrats vs Republicans.
SSCReader
3d ago
They do not. They respond (sometimes!) to the carefully curated appearance of authenticity. Because they can't tell the difference. And that is much easier to fake than having actual authentic politicians. Your idea shows weakness and would not have galvanized her base it would have done the opposite. Why support a loser?
Believe me, we get the politicians and the political processes we do because they work (at getting people to vote for them, not necessarily at governing). People didn't vote for Trump because he was humble because he isn't and he doesn't even try to be! Trump understands that. Trump played the Harris is a lunatic communist card and he won. Not because of that, but it didn't make a negative difference and it made him look strong to his supporters.
Despite what feel good movies and shows might tell you, decades of working in politics have taught me that being a humble, truthful candidate is not a positive. It is a negative. And so that is why we get the politicians we do. Because there are very few people who vote for that. They vote for the people who attack their opponents and look strong doing it. And that should not be a surprise, we have to have a whole plethora of rules here to try and get a space where people will simply not attack their opponents, and there are not many like it, and quite often we fail at that even here. That is the norm.
For what it is worth, I wish you were right. I likely would not have burned out in the political arena to the extent I did.
SSCReader
3d ago
Personally, I'd also say that, given that Democrats are supposed to be better than the Republicans,
And here is a great example of a political success. There is very little difference between Democrat politicians and Republican ones when it comes to being a "better" person. So if they have managed to convince you there is (and of course many Republicans will believe the opposite), then people like me have been successful.
To be clear, we get the politicians we do, because we deserve them, the lies, the obfuscations, the techniques to divide, work. We vote for the people that use them successfully. Never trust a politician, left or right. In my decades in politics there are perhaps a handful I would say were actual decent people.
SSCReader
3d ago
despise you as an amoral sociopathic gaslighting liar who can be trusted only to manipulate everyone around him to serve the current party line.
As I said, politics. Political aides are not there to be moral, they are there to win elections (or try). I can assure that in my time in politics whether working for left or right wing parties never were they particularly interested in the truth of whatever campaign slogans or claims we were working on, just whether they could be made to stick.
SSCReader
3d ago
But to go even further, mocking Trump's internal polls (which agree with yours) that say he has the election almost in the bag, like that's a sign of how deranged he and his followers are.
That is exactly what you should do. If your polls show you are losing and you believe them, then one of your only chances is to convince your opponents supporters that actually they are losing in the hope they decide not to turn out on the day, and to convince some people that maybe he is actually really bad. That's why biased polls are useful. Because the polls can influence what people actually do, that is why there is so much argument about them. So yes, you absolutely should lie and mock your opponents polls even if you are certain they are correct. If you can convince enough people that Trump is a threat to democracy then you can retrospectively make the fake polls true. It's a high risk tactic and does not have a great success rate, but if you are sure you losing, then it is worth a shot.
It isn't political malpractice, it is just politics. If they didn't try it would be malpractice. You can lie about your opponent being a communist or a Nazi why shouldn't you be able to lie about their poll numbers, and that them attacking the poll numbers shows they are a Nazi in the hope that convinces people?
Reason and intellect. I prefer people to tell the truth, I also prefer people to be alive. The murderer at the door scenario covers this perfectly. Sometimes one of those is more important than the other. Entirely depends on the scenario in question. I prefer people to be able to act freely, I also prefer people not to murder other people. Therefore some level of balance needs to be there given that some people do want to and will murder others if they are not prevented. They cannot have full freedom, otherwise they undermine others rights to life. So we try to cobble together some kind of set of rules that acknowledges that.
It is not a perfect process by any means, and of course it is open to bias just like anything else. But rigid adherence to principles is simply not how we are built. There are vanishingly few Kantians in the world as far as I can tell, and I think that is simply because it does not work. In some circumstances lying is the more moral thing, in some circumstances it is not. Applying your principles to the circumstances and working through what that means is part of being human. Perhaps you might decide that telling the truth to the murderer at the door is best and I decide to lie. That doesn't mean I necessarily think lying is good, just like doing the opposite doesn't mean you think murder is good.
That's why we have multiple competing schools of moral and ethical thought, because the world is complicated and deciding what is the right thing to do is not necessarily straight forward. Principles can clash, and you have to have some way of deciding which is most important, in scenarios where it is impossible to fulfill them all.
Now of course we are also very good at rationalizing our choices to ourselves and to other people, so it is very difficult to know if people are legitimately trading off their principles and beliefs to try and get the best possible outcome that meets as many of their principles as possible, but that is part of the deal, until we invent mind reading, we are alienated from each others thoughts. We cannot truly know each other, only the outward faces we wear.
But it would only be a whim, if I had no principles at all, and wasn't trying to at least reason through how to satisfy them as best I can in any given situation.
I suppose the question is, if you were in a position where your principles clash, how do you deal with that? If fulfilling one of your deeply held principles means breaking another and vice versa, how do you decide?
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