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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26077 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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There's no inherent contradiction between moral relativism and considering your own morality to be better.

You can claim "By my own standards, my morality is better" but you can't impose your standards on the past, because you have no idea what future generations, with their standards, will say about things you think neutral or even innocuous. If there is no objective standard but "what we think best at the time" - yeah, maybe we know more about some things now. But if they didn't know that back then, then they can't be blamed for not holding the same standards. You wouldn't burn a witch because you don't believe in witches. What would you do if you did believe in them? What do you do now, when you do believe some thing or person or cause is not just wrong, but actively evil and harming humanity?

You can claim "By my own standards, my morality is better" but you can't impose your standards on the past, because you have no idea what future generations, with their standards, will say about things you think neutral or even innocuous

I don't dispute that at all, I simply don't think anyone can do better, or if they claim to do so, they're grossly deluded or lying.

Maybe one day we invent or discover a hyper-compelling form of morality such that almost all people adopt it. Or we become better at memetic engineering and find some that sticks. They still won't be objective, but that's an impossible objective in the first place.

You wouldn't burn a witch because you don't believe in witches. What would you do if you did believe in them?

Burn them. If it was today, you'd bet I would do quite a bit of research to make sure I wasn't killing innocent people, which would hopefully dissuade me, but if I was evidently convinced.

I think I have better epistemics than average, but I'm not so full of myself that I think that if I were a medieval peasant, I'd immediately form the Enlightenment.

What do you do now, when you do believe some thing or person or cause is not just wrong, but actively evil and harming humanity?

Like so many people around today, that I can see with my own eyes and interact with online? Live and let live, evidently. The only people I've ever burned are pregnant women, which sounds really bad until you realize it was in the context of cauterizing surgical bleeds.

In the limit:

[To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati religious funeral practice of burning widows alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.]

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.

-Charles James Napier

So you agree to let widows be burned, so long as it's online and you don't have to do anything about it?

Oh I prefer to be the one doing the hanging of those who would burn widows, but everyone needs hobbies I guess!

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