= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
handoflixue comments on On Being Okay with the Truth - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (71)
I would think that this is usually referred to as "taxation", and is actually practiced on a fairly regular basis?
The extreme point where we try to make sure everyone receives according to their needs, and provides according to their ability, is "communism", and seems to be widely considered as a failure state.
"Socialism" seems to have emerged as a compromise between the goal of taxation, and the desire to avoid the communist failure state.
I feel like I'm obviously trivializing something complex here, but I'm genuinely not sure what I'm missing.
One difference is that "Perplexed" is talking about anger as an individual emotional response, and you're finding it analogous to taxation which is something that happens in society, rather than individually, and generally doesn't have strong emotions with it.
I'm always inclined to classify things like this as psychology. "Perplexed" has an emotional response, that's fine, we can ask a psychologist to explain it, but I don't see an useful role of metaethics in that, perhaps because I don't really know a referent for the word "metaethics".
Uh, no I'm not. I haven't even mentioned anger. I'm talking about punishment. Which, as a moral realist, I'm claiming is a moral issue. And, given my particular flavor of moral realism, that means that there is a closely related practical issue (involving deterence, etc.).
I am not interested in explaining anger as an instinctive signal that it is time to punish - though I'm sure evolutionary psychologists can do so. I'm far more interested in explaining punishment as a moral and practical response to some particular class of actions - actions that I call "immoral".
As to what handoflixue is missing, I would say that he probably wasn't paying attention in school when communism and socialism were defined, or else he missed the fact that exhibitions of political "attitude" are not appreciated here. Compared to that, his suggestion that redistributive taxation is something like the kind of punishment I claimed doesn't exist, ..., well that suggestion seems rather innocent.
Yes, you're right (in the sense that you're making a true statement about what you said before), and I'm wrong. I misunderstood your position.
After acknowledging that I misunderstood you, I'd like to make use of my now probably-correct understanding of what you meant, but unfortunately I have nothing useful to say. I'd need a definition of "moral reality" to start with, assuming that's what you think you are perceiving as a moral realist.