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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25779 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Truth > Freedom > Nation and so on.

But you do have to apply that on the fly? As in presumably not all truths are weighted over all freedoms. If you had to tell a white lie, to save all of humanity from being murdered/enslaved, is truth still over freedom?

If you had to tell a white lie, to save all of humanity from being murdered/enslaved, is truth still over freedom?

I'm not sure we mean the same thing by truth in the first place. Being in accord with God/Reality does not preclude deception altogether. In fact sometimes it requires it. I think Taoists have an aphorism for this.

Kant does fail when he attempts to logically ground the primacy of truth because truth isn't wholly understandable of characterizable through logic. As logic itself can demonstrate.

But in any case, I stray closer to virtue ethics than consequentialism these days, so the usual "fuck the pig or destroy the universe" thought experiments are not going to yield the expected results.

I have said true things that might have landed me in prison before, if that answers the question.

For me truth are just things I know (or think I know, more correctly I suppose) to be true. So if someone asks me Is there a God, if I say No, I am telling the truth, and if I say yes I am lying. It's certainly possible I am wrong, and God does exist, but my statement isn't a lie, just incorrect in that case.

I don't myself hold to a specific ethical structure, because I think they all have some useful things to say and some wrong things to say. All of them are groping at part of the unseen elephant as it were. My joke is I am not a consequentialist, I just played one in politics. As in, if you are deciding whether to allocate funding for a new hospital, a new school or an adult social care facility, you kind of have to try and quantify which brings the most "good" to your nation and citizens given you are spending their tax money. So you'll try to quantify emergency department waiting times vs crowded classrooms vs how many care home places you currently have in the region. And because you may be subject to judicial review, you will have to justify your decision beyond I felt that a hospital does the most good. But outside of that I find utilitarianism particularly goes some places I think are incorrect. Virtue ethics is a little wishy washy and deontology can also break down at scale.

Try to be a good person, consider the outcomes, treat people as you would like to be treated, think hard about difficult problems, allow people to make their own choices, are all useful, but I think they all have to be taken as a kind of gestalt where each is shining a light on one particular part of moral thought. I think two genuinely good people can come to very different decisions on the same moral conundrum, even ones they each find in the other to be monstrous and still be good people.

truth are just things I know

I'm a skeptic so I can't use the word in this way. Otherwise examined thoroughly enough it'd be an empty set. It's a fine coherent definition, we're just not talking about the same thing.

Try to be a good person

I can't disagree. But I think our disagreement rests not on this, but on the standard of what this demands of people. How serious and rigorous we must be if we are to embark on the journey of actually trying to hold ideals. I am harsh because I do not trust humanity to do right by itself without an incredible amount of discipline. You only get the overman by MK-ultraing people with criticism and debate.

That's my continental brain really. I do think your more gentle approach is a better embodiment of the English tradition in this case.

Well, your argument in favor of consistent moral principles kinda falls flat when your most important moral principle is something inscrutable in practice.

I am a skeptic. Acatalepsy means nothing is scrutable.

The fact that we're shambling through the dark doesn't suspend us from an obligation to do our best, however.

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