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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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But everyone is non-consensually born into a particular environment that they absolutely could not have chosen/affected (because they weren't born yet) and inevitably strongly influenced by it (affecting their later choices) before they develop much of a capacity for true reasoning/genuine choice at all. How do you account for that?

I can not account for it, nor do I need to in order for my ideology to make sense. I guess you could use something along those lines as an argument for antinatalism but that is a different story.

So let's say you have Bob. Bob's parents, who are also obese, instead of just giving him normal milk bottles, would sweeten them with heavy amounts of sugar and cream. They also let him drink Mountain Dew at mere months old. Bob becomes a chunky baby, kid, and later adult with a major sweet tooth and issues controlling his diet, which he feels major angst about, lowering his self-esteem, harming his health, etc.

Was it just in the nature of Bob to be obese then? And when he reaches for a donut after another dejected moment of looking at himself in the mirror there's nothing other than his comprehensive free choice driving it? And he's better off than he would be in a world where things were arranged to lead him down the path of being healthy and powerful? He's just lying to himself when he says he'd prefer to be thin?

If I offer Bob donuts thereby tempting him to indulge in his gluttonous habits, I am not coercing Bob in any way, because it is ultimately him and no one else that makes the decision to take a donut. As to the notion that Bob would be better off if he had not been an excessive eater from an early age, yeah Bob is not wrong to think that and he is not necessarily lying to himself, but it is his parents fault for raising him with bad habits. And yet his parents did not necessarily do anything coercive to cause this outcome, so there is no warrant to prevent parents from feeding their children in unhealthy ways. Apart from such measures being uncalled for by liberal morality, it sets a dangerous precedent to allow authorities to control the way people raise their kids, even if there is widespread agreement among other parents that they are doing it wrong.

For a supposed libertarian absolutist you're sure not sounding like one here. "You don't actually know your true preferences as well as my political ideology does!" People making "choices" they regret and didn't really want to on many higher levels than that of basic, animalistic temptation is one of the most documented phenomena in human psychology (and is also the whole reason the word "temptation" exists), but it don't real because of your political beliefs?

You can take a Darwinian "If you don't have the strength to resist your temptations then you don't deserve to be free of them." view, but don't pretend that's protecting people's freedom.

You can never know if you are going to end up regretting a particular choice, and even if you could, if you go ahead and make the choice anyway it shows that at least at that moment you believed that the benefits outweighed the costs. I don't think I agree that living in an environment where you can not avoid being faced with certain unwanted temptations that you are unable to resist means that you are less free. But I think it is clear that the alternative would be a violation of freedom, preventing people from displaying certain images, messages, or products on their property, and thus also preventing those who would like to have those things made visible to them from having this desire fulfilled.

??? People have the right to a "freedom" to tempt others? So if I took chemical castration pills to erase my sexual desire, that would be violating the "freedom" of all of the people I'd otherwise be sexually attracted to? If Bob above undergoes hypnotherapy to change his dietary preferences, then he's violating the "freedom" of the Hostess brand to tempt him with Twinkies? That sure doesn't sound like even orthodox libertarianism to me.

That is not what I meant, the freedom to tempt is emergent from and bound by the law of property rights. If you alter yourself in a way that makes you no longer under the influence of those temptations, you are not denying the freedom of people to tempt in general, which is what I meant, not that they have a right to get you to notice and submit to those temptations.

And after they're addicted? They're still just choosing, just like you might choose to learn Japanese or the piano? Neurology is fake?

Yeah, its not like they unconsciously find themselves consuming heroin, or that somebody is coercing them to consume heroin.

Right. That's why ideally they would be enabled to make better choices the first time.

If by enabled you mean something like warned of the dangers of trying heroin, then I agree with that, and I don't think I would necessarily have a problem with it being required, within reason, to make sure that heroin buyers are aware of the potential harmful side effects of heroin use before receiving it.

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