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It sounds like you think it's impossible to know that a change will improve things, that it will inevitably kill tons of people, and we shouldn't try. But you seem to be talking about communism and the French revolution and so on. I'm willing to build things up via incrementalism rather than revolution. I'm not willing to stop moving altogether. I am certain that there are restrictions that most people think of as unthinkable to remove, that will prove worthless and die after the thousandth cut to their necessity. But that certainty is just a prediction. Whether I'm right or wrong will be obvious enough when the time comes. If I go crazy and pretend it's obvious when the opposite is true. Stop me. Sorry for the hassle in that timeline. I aim to avoid it.
I'm not here to tear down the wall per se. I'm here to tear down the thing it's keeping out, then share the good news once that's done. And expect that- at that point someone else will tear the wall down for me.
And the thing I keep saying that I want- for people to focus more on what the wall is keeping out than the wall itself, is a good idea anyway. You have to maintain the walls as they rot. And in order to maintain them you have to know what they were for. You have to know whether it's actually true when someone like me says the thing on the other side is dead. You can't just coast on your ancestors cached outputs and assume they will be applicable forever, because even if you wanted to, you can't make the world stand still enough.
Besides, those piles of skulls were made by people who didn't know what the fence was for weren't they? It seems that at some point or another, the people who don't know why the fence is there overdo things in one direction or the other. And we start seeing revolutions and skullpiles.
It depends on what you mean by "improve"; I think moral progress, in the sense most people understand it, is impossible. We can certainly make ourselves richer and more comfortable though. Being richer and more comfortable is not morally better, but if we can do it without compromising our moral values, why not do so?
On the other hand, I think stable, peaceful, prosperous society is not the normal state of humans, and is actually a fairly rare and highly valuable thing. I don't think it happens by accident. I think it's easier to destroy than most people appreciate. If damaged or destroyed, I think it's much harder to reconstruct than people commonly appreciate. I think we should be very, very careful about monkeying with the social systems that serve as its foundation.
Incrementalism is great when you have stable values and axioms, and use incremental adjustments of policy in an attempt to reconcile what is with what ought to be.
You are incrementally modifying the values and axioms themselves. You don't seem to have a fixed understanding of what ought to be. Scott once wrote a parable about "Murder Gandhi" that talks about why this poses a problem for optimization, but the short version is that your opinion of what ought to be is derived from how things are, so if we agree to your proposed changes, you'll just change your proposals and demand further changes. You've declared that you can't possibly be satisfied, so there's no point in attempting to satisfy you. There's no concrete objective you're actually aiming for, and so for those of us that do have such an objective, our best play is to exclude you from the process because you are indistinguishable from a defect-bot.
On a deeper level, you seem to be arguing that most moral states are good, and we should explore as many of them as possible. It seems obvious to me that most moral states are bad; injustice comes in infinite variety, but justice is boring and regular and repetative, one of those stolid, archaic fences you complain about. Notably, justice loses all coherence if the principles behind it are not stable over time. If we do eye for an eye today when you poked my eye out, and then we do mandatory forgiveness tomorrow when I poke your eye out, that isn't a system of justice that anyone is actually going to accept. Your obsession with change destroys the entire foundation of cooperation between individuals; by constantly changing the rules, you remove any incentive to consent to the game.
Why not? Why should murder and rape and thieving not stay illegal and immoral four thousand years in the future, as they were four thousand years in the past? What is gained by changing our principles on them?
Then it should be trivial to point to basic restrictions that have previously been successfully removed. Certainly there is no shortage of historical examples of such attempted abolitions: take the various attempts at abolishing the family, for instance, or the attempts to stamp out religion, or attempts to radically reshape definitions of justice, or property, or economic principles, or sexual/relationship norms. Which attempts to undercut old systems stand out to you as successes worthy of imitation?
Of course, since you have no fixed position, you are immune to contrary evidence. If your proposed changes result in disaster, well, that would just mean we need to change things even more, wouldn't it?
I complain that someone stole my wallet. Friend A says he saw that guy over there pickpocket me, and look, there he is looking through my wallet, we should go over and take my wallet back and maybe kick his ass. Friend B says that the real problem here is that we live in a society where money is needed to satisfy our material needs, and we should all come together to coordinate a general solution to the problem of scarcity and want.
It seems to me that you are claiming that Friend A is "focused on the wall", while friend B is "focused on the thing the wall is supposed to keep out". I call it "dealing with the actual problem", as opposed to "ignoring the actual problem by focusing on pointless speculative abstractions".
Points for nominative determinism, though.
A task made easier if we restrain people like yourself who are actively trying to rot them.
Suppose I told you that you can't just coast on your ancestors' cached outputs and assume they will be applicable forever, which is why you need to respond to my endless arguments about why 2+2 actually equals 5, and that even if you wanted to, you can't make the world stand still enough. Get with the times, man!
Only, that's not how it works, is it? Math doesn't give a fuck what year it is. Correct sums are correct sums in Sumer and in New York City. I observe that it is the same with morals and values: what humans are and what we want does not change over time, neither what is healthy for us, neither what causes us to grow strong and to wither. I can observe that the principles underlying the Code of Hammurabi are entirely clear and sensical to me, and in fact that my own society is built on largely identical principles, with at most only minor adjustments in weighting despite vastly different material conditions, a temporal distance of thousands of years, and a completely alien culture. The historical record argues against you.
They thought they did, they claimed they did, and they convinced a lot of people that they did. Evidence indicates they were mistaken or lying. I think the nature of the mistake (or lie) can be observed and analyzed, and similar mistakes and lies therefore become easier to detect, which is why I'm objecting when I see you making what seem to me to be similar claims. Society is an intricate, alien machine designed to minimize the size of the skull-piles humans naturally produce. The really big piles of skulls happen when people deliberately break that machine in an attempt to get it to do things it can't actually do. That is why demands for outcomes that seem impractical or impossible should be treated with suspicion.
Murder isn't illegal in Minecraft because it's not really murder.
That's about all there is to say about this. There are reasons murder is bad, and they don't apply in Minecraft.
The thing I am talking about has already happened for murder. It hadn't happened for murder for hundreds of thousands of years, and then someone made video games, and all of the sudden, you could kill without consequence.
If you don't think it has happened for murder, then we still aren't on the same page, because I am talking about precisely this sort of thing, the ability to bathe in aesthetics previously associated with evil, without any of the actual evil.
If you don't think there will be a day when you can get stabbed with a knife and laugh, pull it out and heal the wound instantly, that's understandable, but I think there will be such a day, and in that era, the idea of locking someone up for doing something mildly annoying will seem like disproportionate retribution, so we won't.
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