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JulianMorrison comments on The Sword of Good - Less Wrong
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Extend this beyond fiction. What misdeeds are we shrugging off because they're normal?
having to kowtow/kiss-up to bullies because they're part of a hierarchy (eg in business), rather than being treated with respect as a human being. Further - being expected to also treat your subordinates badly and thus perpetuate the hierarchy.
Apartheid based on age that replaces the previous versions based on race and sex.
The morally indefensible and insanely self-destructive attempt to mitigate drug addiction by banning drugs.
Religion. Schools. Television. Not caring about people remote from you. Spending effort on trifles. Akrasia. Irrationality.
Some would say, having political beliefs different from mine.
Burial/cremation.
Loss of time to work. Loss of utility to unemployment.
The way children get so few civil rights they're used as excuses for removing rights from adults.
I am aware of the poor state of affairs re: children's rights, but I'm not sure what you're getting at by citing consequences for adults. Can you elaborate?
Just think how much legislation that restricts adults has been sold on the premise that it "protects children", especially from non-harmful things like porn and homosexuality.
Thanks for saying it
As far as schools, do you mean something about the specific way that we have schooling set up currently (and do you include universities in that?) or do you mean more generally?
I had in mind the education of children in school, as done in, I think, all of the developed world and a lot of the rest, and critiques like this one.
Universities may also have their faults, but not on the scale of misdeeds being considered, and, anyway, the people in them chose to go there.
Aaaah, okay. Yeah, I agree that that's a nasty aspect of our system.
Eating mammals. More generally; non-vegetarianism.
Who says it's a misdeed?
User:betterthanwell, I presume.
I think being non-vegetarian is less evil than being a morally inconsistent non-vegetarian. If you would have moral trouble being introduced to your food (or raising it) then you shouldn't be eating it.
I've never understood this argument. I have a visceral reaction against surgery (even the sight of blood can set me off); I certainly couldn't stand to be in the same room in which surgery was being performed. Does this mean that for consistency I'm required to morally oppose surgery?
I don't see why. For clarity, since we probably agree it's wrong, imagine you're making the same argument for cannibalism instead. One person says, "I'm fine with eating and farming humans but if I get to know one first, doing it would make me feel bad." Another says, "Screw that, I'll eat anyone, even if I know them and their children!"
The second person is more morally consistent and also more callous. Even if there's no difference in the way they live their lives, trying to end the holocaust of humans for food would be easier in a world full of the first type than the second.
Just as I would prefer the opposite of rule of law when the law is uniformly terrible, I prefer the opposite of moral consistency when a morality is terrible.
The consistency difference seems minimal. The most obvious moral rule in play is "Don't do harmful things to those people who are socially near" combined with a moral indifference to cannibalistic farming but acknowledgement that it is undesirable to be so farmed and eaten. This isn't a complex or unusual morality system (where arbitrary complexity seems to be what we mean when we say 'inconsistent').
Specifically, most people assert that animals are sentient; yet most people are not vegetarians, even though eating meat is no longer necessary for survival. There is an inconsistency between these positions.
You missed the step where you assert that most people assert it is wrong to eat sentient animals, which is what would create the inconsistency, were most people to assert that.
You also need the word sentient to mean the same thing in both premises, otherwise it's like “feathers are light, what's light is not dark, therefore feathers are not dark”.
Okay, but if offered the opportunity to kill and eat a human, or an elf, or a Wookie, most people would recoil in moral revulsion, and if you asked them "is that because you think it's wrong to kill and eat sentient beings" would probably say yes, so I think most people do assert that.
Actually, "Would you eat a Wookie?" is probably a helpful distinguishing question here. For me the answer is obviously "No!" and occurs with the same fleeting nausea as "Would you eat a human being?" But I grew up reading SF books like Little Fuzzy that teach personhood theory in a very visceral way. Other readers claimed they weren't bothered by the Babyeaters because the children eaten weren't human!
Indeed, one thing that surprises ethicists their first time teaching is that in ordinary English, 'person' and 'human' mean the same thing - so most intro students, when asked 'is Yoda a person' will answer 'no', even though they'd answer 'yes' to 'is Luke Skywalker a person'.
Maybe you need to ask, "Would you eat Yoda if his species were tasty?"
I was just the other day lamenting how many people, even largely intelligent and conscientious seeming individuals, answer "Yes" to the OkCupid match question "If you landed on an alien planet where the local intelligent life form tasted unbelievably good, would you eat them?"
I'm TAing discussion sections for the first time today, and based on some of the nonsense the students spouted in lecture yesterday, I'm going to need to cover what those words mean.
Update: I had one person say she would be fine with barbecuing Yoda because he wasn't human. I used this to segue into my explanation of what it means to bite the bullet.
I begin to wonder if your students are people.
Part of what bothers me about the idea of eating an elf or Wookie is that they don't feel like prey -- they feel like peers. When I see a fox, e.g., it doesn't make me hungry -- the fox doesn't seem like it's below me on the food chain. When I see a rabbit or a pigeon, it does make me hungry -- I can imagine what it would be like to hunt, clean, roast, and gnaw on it.
On the other hand, I wouldn't hesitate to kill 5 foxes to save one elf or human or Wookie.
I would not, however, hunt a rabbit or a fox for sport; that seems unnecessarily cruel.
One way of accounting for all these moral intuitions is that rabbits, foxes, and Wookies are all sentient; one should not cause pain to sentient creatures for amusement. Foxes and Wookies are ecological peers; one should not eat ecological peers. Wookies are people; one should not trade off the lives of people against roughly comparable numbers of lives of non-people.
I imagine that would be because most people don't understand that sentient beings includes chickens, lobsters[1], and unborn fetuses (not that many people would agree with eating fetuses). If you asked "is that because you think it's wrong to kill and eat beings that are capable of perceiving stimuli" most would probably disagree with you. Now, if you asked "is that because you think it's wrong to kill and eat beings that are capable of doing algebra," you'd probably get a different response.
The reason people wouldn't eat an elf isn't because it's a sentient being, it's because it's a human equivalent sentient being. So you need to reach beyond sentience to find your inconsistency.
And of course, the reason people wouldn't eat a Wookie is because it probably would taste like an old boot.
[1]Research in recent years suggests that crustaceans may be capable of feeling pain and stress.
Pain and stress in crustaceans? Source: Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
No more prawn cocktails or shrimp sandwiches for me.
Is there really a place where both 'prawn' and 'shrimp' are used? What's the difference?
You probably looked it up a long time ago, but for any future readers: They're different groups of species. Both are soft-shelled crustaceans, but that's where the similarity ends.
Any morphological similarities are probably down to converging evolution.
Ha... actually, I didn't look it up at all. According to Wikipedia, you're right, but 'shrimp' is the common name for a lot of things that get called 'prawns' outside of the US.
I think I'm among the few who after realizing this, as well as how icky the sources of most foods are when you think about them, and that most danger from eating stuff is from things that don't seem disgusting, decided that food revulsion is not a part of me and that I should be perfectly fine with eating human flesh or drink [self-censored]. I haven't actually tested any of this, so I'm not sure if my brain would go along with it.
I think Joshua Greene, among others, has investigated these sort of things (moral intuitions, and the justifications people typically give, which may be a sort of confabulation).
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/
No there isn't. It implies that they violate another norm that you value but it is not inconsistent.
It's striking how different our cultural response seems to be to political assassination by knife or political assassination by airstrike.
I don't think this is the right distinction. Osama bin Laden for example was killed in person by American special forces, which probably isn't that unusual a type of targeted killing but rarely makes it into the news, and the method didn't seem to attract much mainstream comment.
I think we're looking at more of a tribal distinction, or possibly a cultural feeling that different rules apply in engagements among states than between states and non-state actors. (Compare the death of Chris Dorner, the shooter targeting LAPD officers a few months ago.)