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buybuydandavis comments on Thoughts on moral intuitions - Less Wrong
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I didn't think you were particularly trying to do it - it just came out.
People keep saying that this is what you were trying to do. I think that misses the punchline, which is something else:
Basically, you're encouraging liberals to enforce their moral beliefs on others. And in that argument, even if you hadn't slipped into unfair characterizations, choosing the most extreme beliefs of your opponents gives the implicit options of liberals force their morals on others, or these crazies do. That false alternative clearly serves the quoted thesis.
And while you paint your opponents in the worst light, you inaccurately paint liberals in a rosier than life hue:
In a previous comment, I pointed out that it's just not true that liberals limit use of coercive force to what is "seriously wrong". Force will be used for the most minor and trifling issues. Half of New York Democrats were in favor of a ban on sugary drinks over 16 ounces, while the vast majority of other New Yorkers were against it.
Perhaps the general avoidance of politics (though no one complained when you did it) likewise puts a damper on metapolitical talk, barring the real world data points from which one could generalize.
That was mostly just intended to make clear that, well, I didn't think that we should accept conservative arguments as being just as good as liberal ones. Since most of the post was (intended to be) quite sympathetic towards conservatives, it would have been easy for people to get the wrong impression.
True, though liberals do think that they do. But yes, that could probably have been worded more accurately. Which really just strenghtens the thesis of the post - that even though the liberals claim to only want to restrict things that they consider really wrong, most of them want to impose just as much control on the lives of others as the conservatives do...
Notice how this statement sidesteps another alternative - that liberals want to impose more control than conservatives do?
That has always been my perception as a libertarian in the US, and I think it is shared by most US libertarians, who tend to lean right because of it.
An even more unfavorable comparison that you don't discuss is the obvious one - that liberals certainly want to impose more control than libertarians do.
The essay was not using the framing of "wishing to impose control", but "wishing to push one's morality on others". These are somewhat related, but different. E.g. libertarians are pushing their morality on others when they say that everyone should be as free as possible, when both liberals and conservatives are likely to say that everyone shouldn't be as free as possible.
I got the language of imposing control from you in the quote I gave:
One of the issues that I never got to was how you used "pushing morality" in two fundamentally different senses: 1) persuading others to adopt your moral values (as immediately above) and 2) using coercive force to impose your moral values on others, and you do when referring to numerous cases of using the force of law to impose moral values on other people.
But I wasn't as clear as I should have been. It's not just that liberals want to impose more control, it's that they attempt to impose more control, and are too often successful at it.