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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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This is the reason why you shouldn't base your moral opinions on what you think "the right side of history" will be. You'll probably be wrong.

It's kind of like trying to fully max out utility, only not only do you have to account for all the pleasure and pain that exists everywhere in the present, but you have to develop actual clairvoyance too.

"The right side of history" is an insane justification for any moral stance, because of its uncertainty. When religious powers made eschatological predictions, they at least did so with the justification that omnipotent, omnescient powers made an infallible prediction that certain moral stances would lead to ruin. When secular people talk about "the right side of history," their argument rests on the authority of social opprobrium (which, for every reason in the book, you'd think lefties would be less likely to think of as reliable) and on utterly unreliable predictions of the future, as every such prediction will be.

Fools base their opinions on what people around them think they should believe. And it stands to reason that even greater fools base their opinions on what they think maybe people will believe at some unspecified point in the future.

I’m just saying, I a hundred percent agree with you. Which is why “Wrong side” is in scare quotes, I absolutely don’t frame this that way.