This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
15-20 years ago, during the great internet atheism wars, it was popular to argue that morality is 'obvious' and that any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines. Is anyone still arguing this?
I was an atheist then and people kept referring me to Harris's The Moral Landscape. So I read that. His argument seemed to be roughly the same: we all sort of just know what's right and don't need reference to any kind of overarching moral framework. He intrigued me by granting that some people clearly just don't see things the way the rest of us do, e.g. psychopaths, but that he'll address this problem later in the book. AFAICT he never actually does, though.
Found it disturbing then and I find it disturbing now. Ran into a guy on reddit quite a while ago who suggested that atheism is best classified as a 'moral parasite'; that it relies upon existing metaphysical systems to generate a socially-agreed upon moral framework, at which point of course an atheist can conform to that and 'be a good person' according to whatever their society thinks that means -- but that atheists also tend to work to undermine the roots of that system itself, resulting in moral collapse.
No real point here; just musing.
ETA:
Is /r/bandnames still a thing?
FWIW that isn't remotely close to what he argues. He claims that apropos of nothing, we could/should define "bad" as the worst possible misery for everyone. Any step away from that lowest valley is in the direction of "good". He argues that this is the overarching moral framework we need. Many consider several steps in this to be bad philosophy.
I'm not sure how atheism itself could be a moral parasite any more than not collecting stamps could be parasitic hobby.
The implication, I think, is that sustainable morality is necessarily downstream of religion.
That's kind of how I interpret it, but as written its nonsensical as is it misunderstands or misuses the term 'atheism' at a very basic level. Atheism doesn't necessitate any specific moral stance. Moreover, some religious are atheistic.
That's the point. If you think a shared, mostly rigid moral framework is necessary for societies to hold together (you don't need to be religious to think this), and that atheism can't really compellingly argue for any moral stance in particular, the obvious conclusion is that a society of atheists will reliably fragment and struggle working towards any meaningful shared goal. Which means that if a society holds together, it is in spite of the atheists in it. As an atheist, I consider the fate of the early atheism internet wars and the atheism plus fights clear vindication of this theory.
The counterpoint is that there are nowadays a decent number of non-religious ideologies that can hold atheists together. The counterpoint to that is that once you spent any time around ideologues, it becomes clear that ideology serves a function and form near-identical to religion for them, including the archetypical esoteric, nonsensical and/or unprovable assumptions and claims.
De Maistre argued that a fully rational basis for society would always undermine its own stability because people would disagree over the implications.
More options
Context Copy link
My point is that atheism doesn't preclude (or necessitate) "a mostly rigid moral framework". It need not even interact with morality at all. It's the wrong word for what is being argued. Atheism itself does not compellingly argue for a moral stance. It can't parasitize something doesn't interact with, and it isn't liable for something it never claimed to do.
To the extent I see what people are trying to say, I actually agree. I especially think that a shared somewhat rigid moral framework is necessary for a society to hold together. An all atheist society could have a shared moral framework, and could even be based on religion. The A vs A-plus schism didn't say anything about atheism itself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is pretty clear to me. Science cannot by nature decide what “Good” is. It can tell you how to do things you decide are good, but it cannot tell you that some goal is actually good. A lot of that framework comes in, often unconsciously, from the personal beliefs of the individual. Those beliefs would be absorbed from the culture and the dominant belief systems of that culture.
In the West, Christianity has colored western concepts of truth, Justice, rights, laws, and ethical values for nearly two millennia. We don’t think about it because even today, it’s still in the water we swim in. But the concept of individual rights and liberty comes out of the Christian idea that only a person’s own beliefs can save them. We don’t see the point of forcing people into Christianity because especially in Protestant Christianity, you have to decide for yourself to believe. Other systems have absolutely no problem with holding a knife to the throat of an infidel and saying “declare yourself a Muslim or your head comes off.” Or “just obey the emperor and all will be well.” We believe in restraint in war and in mercy. Watching the Israel/Gaza conflict, it’s clear that this isn’t a universal virtue. Nobody wants to show mercy, so it’s a constant revenge fest.
More options
Context Copy link
Sam Harris would not agree that:
His book was focused on countering the argument that science cannot inform morality in some objective way as nonoverlapping magisteria, not outlining a moral framework in any real detail beyond "well-being of conscious creatures." Harris is a consequentialist and very influenced by Derek Parfitt and the overall liberal/humanist tradition. Given the state of the world, no one should argue that liberalism/humanism is humanity's default and indeed Harris's original project was pointing out how badly Islam is opposed to that moral framework.
Atheism by itself is no moral system. Communists were atheists and had/have a moral system quite different from liberalism/humanism. Western atheists today see a big split between classic liberals and post-liberals (i.e. progressives and "Atheism+") split along Culture War lines.
But this begs the question, does it not? Given that we arbitrarily establish some kind of objective quantifiable framework for evaluating well-being (which I'm sure I don't need to tell you is itself difficult and unsolved to say the least), sure, science can definitely be of use there. Doesn't help with the first part.
Well not begging that question is one of the main points of the book, so no it doesn’t. (Many disagree that he succeeds in the philosophical grounding of his moral frame, but he does try.)
Of course, many people take issue with even the second part where you agree science can help. The “how” as opposed to the underlying “what/why.”
Any moral system requires some axiom to start from and Harris explains how we can use reason to arrive at that rather broad one. The lack of other sensible contenders helps here (for those with proper priors, anyway). Of course, there have been materialist contenders, such as communism and whatever we want to call the anti-human environmentalist ideology.
Admittedly it's been a dozen years since I read it but I mainly remember him vaguely gesturing at the possibility in a very unconvincing way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For the most part, the internet atheism wars have just died, so it doesn't come up much. Scott's relevant explanation suggests:
When it was 'obvious' and 'any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines', a good chunk of folks up and decided that the New, Obvious rough outlines were just wokeness. There was a bit of a schism, and I've found that many of the folks who were disaffected by the schism and went anti-woke instead have mostly rejected the idea that it's so obvious and such. If it was so obvious, then why are so many of their former brethren getting it so wrong? The most common result I've seen is a form of naive relativism, sometimes sprinkled with moral error theory or even just power politics dressed up as game theory (if you don't agree with "society", then we have reason to suppress and even kill you, moving the population toward some sort of 'equilibrium').
But for the most part, aside from a few old hats who went anti-woke, I'd really say that the question just mostly hasn't been considered by many of the masses. They're just not exposed to the concepts; it's not even a meaningful question to them. As Scott says, they're in it for hamartiology, not meta-ethics. They just don't even really conceive of the idea that there is meta-ethics to be done prior to hamartiology. It's just not a question that they would even think to ask, so they mostly don't care whether various schools have a position on it one way or another deep down in the theology. Yes, if you ask a queer theory prof, they can probably tell you the sect's doctrine, just as surely as if you ask a priest whether the holy spirit flows independently from both the father and the son or just from the father through the son, they can probably manage to dig up the doctrine... but who's asking? Who cares? No one thinks they can gain adherents by trying to distinguish themselves on this issue.
More options
Context Copy link
The thing with existing metaphysical systems is that they, too, evolved from something at some point - unless you are one of their proponents who believe that moral knowledge was literally passed down to [First Human] from [Divine Authority]. What is the source? All I know points to "animal intuition", which I expect to only differ from person to person as much as other animal aspects of us do: not that much.
I think the key advantage existing metaphysical systems have is that they've proven themselves to be capable to be followed by a civilization that survives longer than one generation (or X generations, depending on whatever new metaphysical system you're talking about). Past performance isn't a guarantee of future performance, especially in what appears to be a particularly volatile time like right now, but lack of past performance is even less of a guarantee. And certainly, with the power of our intelligence, we could fast-forward through the trial-and-error of tradition and get to a superior system that's equally based off of animal intuition but more refined and "better" for some meaning of "better," but it's also true that hubris is one of the most powerful forces known to man, and the empirical proof of this system at the very least allowing civilization to survive, even if not thrive perhaps, is a huge advantage compared to any new system. Probably not insurmountable, but certainly a huge one, given how many ways there are for civilization to crumble relative to how few ways there are for it to continue forward.
More options
Context Copy link
This appears obviously incorrect. Pretty much the entirely of traditional western morality (and a good chunk of eastern morality) seems to be oriented around reigning in or redirecting our "baser" (ie more animalistic) impulses and intuitions.
More options
Context Copy link
Society? Going backwards modern western morality is basically reformation, germanic conversion to christianity, roman conversion, greek + judaic philophy, fertile crescent society, etc. Thousands of years of iteration that animals don't have?
Animals do iterate, they are just slower about it because their memory is strictly genetic as opposed to civilizational.
Also, what was the first society then and where did it come from?
Well I think the most advanced societies that we know about that existed the earliest were in the fertile crescent, presumably they have some kind of lineage going back. I agree animals iterate but the question is whether they have some kind of upper bound which our lineage surpassed, which I'd argue we did, probably around when we learned to make fire and passed that knowledge on to our descendants
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sort of. I'm a Christian now and as I understand the Christian perspective it's a bit different. Christianity posits that God is apparent in nature, modulo the Fall; that creation is fundamentally good (i.e. in alignment with God's good nature). That humans can perceive much of divinity simply by observing nature and ourselves. And then, on top of that, there's direct revelation of the type to which you seem to be referring, e.g. divine entities directly communicating with humans.
Actually something which surprised me is that in my church there's a strong sentiment that Taoism is ~Christianity sans Christ. That is, Taoism is as far as human beings can correctly discern the nature and order of things without the direct revelation of Jesus. There's even a pretty cool book about it which definitely changed my perspective on a lot of this. The Tao <-> Logos connection is sublime.
I don't know about that. If the Fall did subtract from nature, it subtracted quite a lot, to the point where most of creation we can access is far from fundamentally good.
Which is to say, the order of things in nature absent our, the humans', vigorous actioned disagreement, does not always seem very good for us.
That take requires all sorts of assumptions which I not only think are unwarranted from any standpoint but definitely don't match up with the broader picture of Christian philosophy.
For one, do you imagine that most humans who have ever lived would have considered it evil for a fish to be eaten alive? Indeed there are plenty of extant cultures which eat live animals habitually. The real question is why it seems evil to us.
For another, it conflates evil with suffering, or pain, or even unpleasantness. This is often a locally-useful conflation but in the big picture it doesn't make a lot of sense. Neither does it make sense to equate platonic goodness with pleasure.
It assumes that animals are having the same sort of internal experience as we are. While they certainly have minds like ours, it's not clear that they have consciousnesses like ours. Indeed one take on Eden and the Fall is that the 'Garden' was a state in which we existed just like we do now but for awareness of such evil; that we weren't intended to take on the burden of temporal sapience until some future point at which such problems would have already been solved.
But what really bugs me about it is that it assumes that anything ought to be other than as it currently is, which implies telos, which implies a creator. Only by standing on the shoulders of God can one conceive of making moral complaints about the universe, and deciding that we see the full picture and are capable of independently evaluating such things occurs to me as downright conceited and petulant. Prideful, would be the Christian term.
What ought Man to be? Is a future in which we're all reduced to constantly-euphoric sludge a worthy one? I consider the Super-Happies of Three Worlds Collide. On the other hand, if Man is intended to become divine and unite with God, reducing morality to avoiding pain and enjoying pleasure would seem to be contraindicated.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link