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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.
I don’t understand what’s so hard about condemning lies. To be clear, you think that Trump’s, above average tendency to lie, is morally perfectly fine, even required of a politician.
I don’t accept the responsibility of ‘us voters’. I don’t vote for liars generally. Some politicians lie more than others, and in different countries, at different times, politicians’ lies are more or less normalized.
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.
Murder and Rape are social technology with a purpose, still evil, no matter your goals.
Go back to the abyss! Fall into nothingness that awaits you and your master!
I prefer "back to the pit" for a more modern feel.
I'm sorry to make you feel old, but I'm not sure this qualifies as modern any more.
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I'm not sure we've had someone literally accused of being a minion of Satan before. So, that's a first. Also antagonistic and non-constructive. So don't do this.
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.
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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...
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When you say that politicians are not decent people and should never be trusted, that’s not condemnation, or normative in any way?
A society’s tolerance of lies, or politicians’ moral status in that society, are not all-or-nothing propositions.
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.
You argue for tolerating lies, which you say is upstream of politicians’ tendency to lie, so by that logic you cause lies. You defend the dishonesty of politicians even though you are clearly bothered by it. You choose to ignore your moral instincts for this sophistry.
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?
No, that’s all immoral and unnecessary. That whole class of workers that used to be so numerous, the used car, the door-to-door salesman, the commercial : I was glad when they mostly died, courtesy of internet comparisons and other things. So were most people. Even them, presumably. I was once in a position where my incentives were to be be less than completely honest with clients, and when I fell into that temptation, it was a soul-sucking experience.
Aside from being unpleasant for all concerned, it’s just not a good long-term strategy to lie to people.
Yeah, it’s wrong. It’s not necessary to lie, you can say ‘I don’t want to pay more than X“”. 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.
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for 95% of politicians if they did not lie they would immediately lose the next election, the average person is just not very intelligent and get swept up by charisma easily* so lying is a dominant strategy. And they can't just all agree to cooperate in the claimed prisoner's dilemma, there are a lot of people who want to be politicians who would happily lie and win anyway. The most obvious lie politicians tell is that they personally support policies because they have good effects, when those policies are actually ones that they think will get them elected. Trump probably doesn't actually like medicare and social security, and doesn't actually think abortion should be left up to the states. Kamala is not proud of being a border prosecutor.
*originally phrased as 'stupid and gullible', which I think is literally true but just saying that seems antagonistic
Some of your theses I disagree with:
Every lie is the same. It’s one thing to imply you’re just a regular guy by pretending to love fast food or a popular policy, more than you really do. It’s another to knowingly tell straight lies like ‘I grew up poor’, ‘The election was stolen’, ‘Our poll says Kamala wins’.
Evil always wins, who lies more wins more. A society where ‘lying is dominant’ would be more like Mao’s China, or even worse. There’s far too much truth and negative feedback on lying in our society for this to be our situation.
the cafeteria tray theory of morality. I don’t believe that if you refuse to eat the baby, the next guy will eat the baby.
I need to steal this and use this in the future, thank you.
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Isn't the first kind of lie worse? It's about the actual policies you'll implement, what they will do, adn why you believe in them. The second kind of lie doesn't have any similarly direct impacts.
I'm specifically talking about electoral politics. There's less tolerance for lying in other areas. The reason we have representative democracy is that the politicians can be smarter than the voters, and lie less in private.
No i am making a direct empirical claim about people who actually exist in the world. If you start saying stuff like "I am voting for this policy because my constituents want it even though I think it's wrong", you will be replaced by someone who doesn't do that
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I don’t think Trump has strong opinions on any of these, but they’re probably not too far away from his actual opinions.
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