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Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 - Less Wrong
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When there we have it. To you, and to Phil Goetz, a moral belief implies an imperative to make everyone conform to it, had one only the power to do so. The implication is so unconscious and axiomatic to you, that when you and he read Lewis saying how he thinks people should live (and he would indeed be against gay marriage, prostitution, and polygamy), you immediately imagine him imposing it on everyone, and pointing to the unwelcome result as a refutation of Lewis. Of course, the result is only unwelcome to you and Phil because you do not agree with Lewis on how people should live. But then, how will an army of Jiro clones rule, or Phil Goetz clones?
The briefest acquaintance with Lewis' writing, including the quote in question, would indicate that this is antithetical to both his written views and his life. He was an Oxford don, who once refused an honour in order not to be drawn into politics. But if you do not see a gap between "this is how people should live" and "people should be compelled to live so" then you will not only fail to make any sense of Lewis, you should on no account be allowed such power over anyone.
It's true that Lewis separated religious and secular law, but presumably Lewis would want laws against, for instance, murder. It's hard to consistently believe that we should have laws against harmful things, have a skewed idea of what constitutes "harmful things", and not want laws against them.
One possible response is that the harmful things only harm oneself, but Lewis believed that such things harm society, not just oneself. Another possible response is that as a practical matter, it would be a bad idea to ban such things, but that only lasts as long as it's practical--such principles would not lead to the conclusion "we should not ban gay marriage" but rather "we should only ban gay marriage if we can get away with it".
fnord
There it is again. You think it inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it. Would you ban alcohol?
C.S. Lewis wrote a great deal about how he thought people should live, and why, yet did not lift a finger to compel them. In this, he follows the example of He who Lewis believed the Father of us all. You do not understand this. Well, I do not pretend to write better than Lewis.
BTW, to talk of "banning" gay marriage is tendentious, presupposing that it is and always has been a thing that can only fail of existence by being "banned". What has actually happened in recent years is that there was no such thing recognised by church, state, or anyone, that a demand for social recognition of same-sex unions has developed, and that in various places, secular marriage has been so extended.
I think it's inconsistent to think a thing harmful, and let people do it anyway, given that
1) you don't consider personal freedom good in itself or you don't think the gain to personal freedom balances out the harm, and 2) it's practical to ban it
I wouldn't ban alcohol, because of points 1 and 2. Note that if by "harmful" you mean "harmful, in the net" #1 is equivalent to saying that alcohol isn't harmful.
I am skeptical that Lewis believed #1. I find it hard to think that Lewis believed that divorce is harmful by itself but has enough good effects to more than balance out the harm.
And refusing to ban things based solely on #2 would mean only conditionally refusing to ban them. If you don't want to ban divorce based on #2 and society changed so that you could ban divorces without nasty side effects, you should then ban it.
Lewis actually said he didn't want to ban divorce, but his rationale could equally apply to banning murder--it's incoherent.
I don't think I understand your argument about #1. Surely there's a difference between thinking
and thinking
For instance, suppose someone believes the following things:
That appears to me to be a coherent position; someone whose position it is will disapprove both of drinking alcohol and of prohibiting it. And it seems to me that there's no particular impossibility in supposing that Lewis held a position like this regarding same-sex sex and divorce, or that he would have held a similar position on same-sex marriage if the question had come up and he'd taken it seriously.
(I don't hold such a position regarding alcohol consumption, same-sex sex, same-sex marriage, or divorce, but I think I do regarding lying for small-scale personal gain and callous indifference to the troubles of one's neighbours.)
"Harmful on net" means "after you balance the harm against the good, it is harmful".
The first part of that doesn't work by itself, since Lewis believes in compulsion for, for instance, anti-murder laws.
And the rest of it means that if you became convinced that the side effects of prohibition weren't as bad as you originally believed, you would then support prohibition. The question then becomes "would Lewis think there are really bad side effects to not allowing same-sex marriage". I doubt it.
I understand what "harmful on net" means, and I'm not sure why you think I don't. The point is that there are different things that might or might not be "harmful on net", and you need to not mix them up, and I think you are mixing them up. Specifically, "is drinking alcohol harmful on net?" and "is being allowed to drink alcohol harmful on net?" are very different questions, because of the things I listed that are functions of whether people are allowed to drink alcohol more than of whether they actually do.
I'm afraid I don't understand what argument you're making. It appears to have the form "Such-and-such a proposition about alcohol prohibition is wrong, because C S Lewis believed in compelling people not to commit murder" and I don't even understand how anything of that form could be right -- because there are potentially relevant differences between drinking alcohol and committing murder. (Examples: most people who disapprove of drinking alcohol think that murder is much, much worse; empirical evidence suggests that prohibiting alcohol is liable to result in a very large black market in alcohol, while prohibiting murder results in only a small black market in murder.)
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo in the foregoing paragraph.]
Yes, or at least almost. (Well, not me because as I said above I wasn't describing my own position on alcohol. But someone who holds that position would indeed switch to approving of prohibition if they decided that the side effects of prohibition and the badness of the compulsion itself didn't outweigh the harm done by drinking. The bit in italics is why I say "almost" rather than an unqualified "yes".)
I don't know what Lewis would have said about same-sex marriage if the question had been put to him in such a way as to get it taken seriously despite his society's general presumption against the idea. For what it's worth, I think he probably would have opposed same-sex marriage (perhaps arguing that it is simply impossible for two people of the same sex to marry, and that calling anything a same-sex marriage is an abuse of language), but if not then it would probably have been on grounds of freedom rather than of bad side effects of prohibition. (You can prohibit certain classes of marriage without needing much intrusion into individuals' lives; it's hard to see how there'd be scope for a big black market in same-sex marriages; any precedents established by the prohibition would probably also be ones Lewis would have been inclined to approve of.)
It may be worth noting that I am not Richard Kennaway and am not necessarily arguing for the same position as he is.
Nevertheless, I agree with all of what you just said. To it I would add that Jiro is still unconsciously assuming (I say unconsciously, because everything he is saying presupposes it, yet he never says it) that laws and punishment are all about adding up the good and the bad and seeing how the sum comes out. This is the very theory that Lewis was arguing against.
Of course there are differences. But the differences lead into my other objection, which is that, as the old joke goes, now we're just arguing about the price. If he supports laws against murder because murder does a lot of harm compared to compulsion and stopping it has few side effects, then if he were to be convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few side effects, he would support laws aganst divorce.
Then consider why Lewis believes that divorce (etc.) is harmful. It's arbitrary--if his religion had said something else, he'd have believed something else. And likewise, his belief in the degree of harm done by divorce is arbitrary. His religion happened not to say that that particular sin was harmful enough to justify banning. But it could have said that. And given a long list of sins, it would be a pretty big coincidence if it didn't say that for at least one of them, just by chance.
(I suppose there's another possibility: Lewis doesn't want his religion to tell him something is bad enough to ban. His interpretation of his own religion is biased by this desire, so he'll always interpret his own religion as saying that a sin isn't bad enough to ban. In that case, I need not fear Lewis banning anything. I guess that's a defense of Lewis, but I would then note that this kind of bias seems to be pretty rare among religious believers who don't like divorce, gay marriage, etc.)
For me, part of the humour in that story is that the person who says that is wrong -- there really is an important difference (even if only a difference of degree rather than kind) between willingness to have sex with a stranger for $1M and willingness to do it for $100.
Anyway: I'm now not quite sure what argument you're making here. I originally thought it was something like "Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it's tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance, so he's being hypocritical". But tyranny, like prostitution, comes in degrees. Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal, so "If C S Lewis were convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few bad side effects, he would support laws against divorce" gives basically zero support to the idea that Lewis was or would have been any more of a tyrant than, say, 95% of the population. Could you clarify what your point is and why you're making it?
...wrong?
The canonical exchange, IIRC goes as follows:
-- What kind of woman do you take me for?!
-- I think we've already established that, now we're just arguing about the price.
You are assuming without proof that the claims of Lewis's religion are arbitrary. Of course they are not arbitrary, even assuming that his religion is false.
We're on LW. I'm assuming something that just about everyone here assumes anyway. Or at least close to it.
(I'm sure some people would argue that Lewis's religion's claims aren't arbitrary because competition between memes ensures that religions which say extreme things about sins won't last until the modern era. If so, fine, it's not arbitrary in that sense.)
This is a universal argument. "Given a different history, you would have believed something else, therefore your actual belief is groundless." You can apply it to anyone, saying anything; which is to say, that it carries no force ever.
bong!!! But thank you for playing.
This is Bulverism, and not even Bulverism about a real characteristic, but about one you have just made up.
No, it isn't. Religions tell people arbitrary things. Reasoning processes do not.
The question is "would there be reason to worry about a person like Lewis banning sins". Figuring out why he believes is not, in that context, Bulverism because the question is not about whether his beliefs are correct, it's a question of what he would do. Furthermore, it's not Bulverism anyway because I have no need to prove his positions false--we're on LW and it can be taken for granted that everyone here thinks gay marriage should be allowed and nobody here thinks divorce and polygamy should be illegal.
Also, Lewis adopted his religion an adult; if it had said something different, he might not have adopted it.