tcl33
1yr ago
This is bizarre to me. To whom do you think your bear the responsibility of providing progeny that are better than average? The first responsibility you have is to yourself, then your family, then your neighbors, and so on in expanding concentric rings.
What are these "responsibilities" you speak of, and from where do we get them?
If literal welfare queens feel no guilt at providing for their children by extracting wealth from the productive, an average man should surely not feel guilt in creating more average kids that will go on to do average, productive things.
Again, from where does this "should surely not feel guilt" come from?
While it may be unusual for someone to care a lot about the world that will be left behind after they and their children have passed, I don't understand what is particularly bizarre about it. And people who do aren't necessarily even thinking about it in your terms of "responsibility". It may just boil down to their personal values—what they subjectively want, i.e., it's important to them to help build a better world for future generations.
Lots of people have voluntarily given their lives in war for this very reason, even if it amounted to a dismissal of their more immediate "responsibilities"(i.e., their family) per your ethical logic. They're trying to build and leave behind a better world. This is completely understandable and not at all bizarre.
If you're sincerely concerned about the potential for the world to decay into a dystopian idiocracy, there is nothing bizarre about thinking about how we as individuals may contribute to it, and prioritizing that concern over these proximate concentric circles of so called "responsibility".
tcl33
2yr ago
The article seems to undermine itself. The only way the author can comment on the utility of believing untrue things is by providing examples of untruths the author knows are untrue and are only believed to be true by others. In other words, in every provided example, the author is apparently an exception to his own rule because he is capable of apprehending these benefits without actually believing untrue things.
Which leads me to think that this enlightened state of knowing what we need to do to create a better is possible without believing untrue things in the first place. And if we can get there, it seems like we should.
And if your retort is that some/many people are not capable of that enlightenment, then just be honest about what you're really doing here: you're promoting the noble lie for the rubes.
It's always been the case that most of the people doing real philosophy are relatively privileged people. Practically speaking, I don't see how it could be any other way. That doesn't mean that the philosophy doesn't need doing. We would hope that the most well-intentioned people with the best ideas have the most success in propagating them, privilege notwithstanding.
The very real-world philosophy of ethics, politics, science, and tech that gets discussed here matters to the long-term well-being of humanity, and I don't have a lot of patience for dismissing those discussions as preoccupation with "boring first-world problems".
To be clear, I don't have any problem with someone interested in rationalist takes on more "down-to-earth" topics. That's fine. But just don't denigrate the more abstract "boring" stuff.
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