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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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This seems like a good time to bring up Resident Contrarian's piece on escapism:

I once heard about a thing called “philosophy”, which is a sort of scavenger hunt game combined with literary critic role-play. You read all these books that talk about how humans should live, and how they should think about concepts like “good” and “virtue”. Each book has an at least slightly different take on how you should think about these things, and there’s millions of them to sift through.

Some philosophies are drastically different than others, but there’s absolutely no consensus on which is right or wrong - you can pick one that says that nothing you do matters or one that says that every waking moment should be spent in service to some concept of good, and each choice is exactly as legitimate within the context of philosophy as the other. You get to say you are a philosopher (or that you appreciate their work) in either case.

The most common way to interact with moral philosophy is to collect a bunch of favorite moral positions, then to sit around arguing with people about how correct you are in your opinions about what you theoretically could do with those moral philosophies. Nobody will ever check to see if you actually put them into action, and you will look very smart.

By their fruits ye shall know them.

Modern philosophy I’d agree with. Most philosophers are so far removed from anything like a normal person’s existence that they cannot possibly hope to create a moral philosophy that anyone would be able to live by.

I find myself much more impressed by the Stoics, Confucianists, Buddhists, and so on who at least attempted to create philosophy for the world people actually live in and dealing with the suffering that goes along with it. Peter Singers declarations that animals are exactly equal to humans is not based in the real world where people go hungry and in some parts of the world animals are still the best way to move yourself and other objects about. Pacifism is silly in a world where wars happen regularly. Stoics believed in morals and created a good system for masking good moral decisions and for not being attached to outcomes. Confucius came up with the laws of reciprocity and self cultivation. Buddhists came up with the 8-fold path. You might have a hard time doing some of those things at times, but they were based on real life, and written by people who lived a real life in a real world.

I don't see what salience that really has to the value of a moral code.

There is no reason that a "perfect" moral code (not that I think that's even possible, I see no reason why morality isn't anything but subjectivity and the occasional illusion of objectivity where ~everyone ended up with similar stances, usually for strongly convergent evopsych reasons, such as even monkeys and dogs prizing fairness) should be instantiable by less than perfect humans.

All it has to do is be directionally better than the alternatives, even if nobody alive can claim to embody it perfectly. If you're a utilitarian, then imperfect utilitarianism beats everything else. If you're a vegan, tben occasionally being tempted into trying a burger beats not being vegan.

Moral philosophy is a vector with both direction and magnitude. Directional correctness is not sufficient on its own, one also needs to execute, which means decision theory, coping/motivational strategies, societal organization, etc. Devout Hindus probably do more for animals than vegans (perfect or not) despite being directionally less correct. Philosophy just has a lot to it besides picking your axioms--there's all sorts of tradition associated with how to best live up to the ideals any given philosophy espouses.

The absence of such traditions is evidence of greater failings. If you actually believe something you should strive to change yourself into someone better able to execute on your beliefs. That's why the Stoics, Confucianists, and Buddhists are more impressive--they seem to have decided upon values, then taken the execution seriously, even to the point of designing powerful social technologies to help others execute too.

Imperfect obedience is one thing, but at some point people's actions stop looking like "earnest people trying and failing to follow their values" and start looking like "duplicitous people lie about what their values actually are, maybe even to themselves." Singer's actions obviously aren't utilitarian, nor does it appear he made any serious effort to reign himself in. This matters because it's evidence that he does not truly believe in his life's work.

"Bentham was a hedonist who really believed he was a philosopher. Rawls was a hedonist who hoped he was a philosopher. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the West would be guided by hedonists who were only pretending to be philosophers."

...With apologies to Spufford, and likely to Bentham and Rawls as well.

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