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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I happen to recognize the legitimacy of Abrahamism as the moral doctrine of at least three distinct human civilizations, so I don't find any difficulty there, both sodomy and dressing provocatively are "sins" in those places for reasons that are both practical and internally consistent.

This sounds like moral relativism to me: dress according to your religious community standards (whether it is a burka or just non-provocative western clothing), follow your community's sexual norms (whether you have three wives or one, and how old they have to be when you marry them), follow your religious communities dietary restrictions (especially regarding pigs, cows, humans, shellfish) and so on.

And you must recognize this because that is indeed why we deny children autonomy. Why then not do it for the mentally ill?

[...] insofar as one recognizes that delusions are a thing, you need to confront the fact that consent is an ill suited tool to attack this moral issue.

The fact of the matter is that humans did not evolve to be perfectly rational agents. As the sequences teach us, we are all loaded with our own biases. We treat the median adult as sane not because they are a rational actor whose map matches the territory who try to maximize some utility function, but merely because all the systems which did not engage in the polite fiction that people are sane have had much worse outcomes as the people who would take paternalistic charge of mankind are not sane themselves.

That being said, while I might deny that there are sane people, I will concede that some are way more insane than others. A demented person starving while wandering through the woods is likely lacking the coherence that we can apply the fiction of sanity, and we should institutionalize or MAID them per their living will.

Young people have two handicaps: first, their map is often even less accurate than that of adults simply because they lack experience, and second they are probably even more impulsive. As a crutch, societies have decided to lock certain autonomy behind age limits. This is manifestly unjust -- a tenth percentile 20 yo is likely less sane than a 80th percentile 10 yo, and yet the former can vote, consent to sex, enlist in the military, take on debt, immigrate to Saudi Arabia and so on. But until we find something better, age is a Chesterton's fence we should keep.

Still, I think that recognizing that our system is somewhat arbitrary and unfair, we should try to respect the choices of those whom we deny autonomy whenever their choices seem sane.

  • An 8 yo who wants to wear a red t-shirt instead of a blue one should get their wish, all things being equal.
  • A 10 yo who wants to get a facial tattoo should be denied -- presumably, there is a broad consensus among adults that they would have regretted getting such a tattoo at that age.
  • A 14 yo who wants to enter a relationship with a sugar daddy should likewise be denied, as there is a broad consensus that this will be harmful to their development.
  • A 14 yo who wants to quit school and live in the woods should be denied, but if they want to quit school to start a trade apprenticeship that is a different matter.

As a moral toy model, give the minor a minority of votes over their life and distribute the rest to adult society. At a very young age, they have little voting power, and only get autonomy to do stuff which a majority of society supports. At age 18 (or 21 or whatever), they gain majority, and have 51% of the votes, which means that they can do whatever they want, no matter how ill advised. Morally if not legally, it would make sense to have a continuous increase of their voting power in between these two points. Perhaps at age 17, they have 40% of the votes, so they get to do whatever at least 1/6th of the adults considers age-appropriate. Just because we don't give them full autonomy, we should not disregard their opinion entirely.

Likewise, mentally ill adults. Generally, I am against involuntary commitment of anyone who has not run afoul of the law (otherwise, sentence them normally, then give them the option to serve their time in a ward instead) unless it is very likely that they will die on the outside within a year. Plenty of people locked up in psych wards object to being locked up for entirely rational reasons orthogonal to any mental illness they might have.

I could understand being afraid of people using "sluggish schizophrenia" and the like against political opponents

I think there was recently some MAGA legislation trying to make Trump Derangement Syndrome and official medical diagnosis.

This sounds like moral relativism to me:

It is in that sense, I am not a universalist. I believe morality is meme evolved by and suited to a particular ethnocultural substrate.

merely because all the systems which did not engage in the polite fiction that people are sane have had much worse outcomes as the people who would take paternalistic charge of mankind are not sane themselves

I disagree that this is true and regard modern societies as much worse for human flourishing than their pre modern counterparts, despite recognizing the advantages of modernity.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

That's obviously crossing the line, but I'm tempted to still consider the idea given how demented I've seen people I know become from 2016 onwards. There's something to the idea that his smashing of post-Obama bourgeois certainties shattered the psyche of some people. Sam Harris never recovered from it.