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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Open Thread May 16 - May 22, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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One very important question a moral system has to answer is: how do you deal with people who won't adopt the moral system? Here are three basic answers:
Are there others? Which one of these options seems the best to you?
Interacting with those people in limited settings. Using different systems in different settings. A system doesn't have to encompass all human interactions.
Use rewards instead of punishments. Similar to your second point, but feels differently.
By the way, your third point is a special case of your second one.
I feel strongly that there is a qualitative difference between fence-building and compulsion, especially if the fenced area is small.
Your first suggestion seems like fence-building in different domains (social, financial, etc).
That's a weird definition of compulsion in this context. Others want to make choices. Sometimes those choices impact things you value. Sometime they doesn't.
But preventing people from acting on choices seems like the common thread. Privileging whether things you value are effected seems relevant to whether the prevention is morally justified, but from point of view of preventing the implementation of another's choice, the idea of compulsion seems identical.
In short, I assert the morally neutral description of an action ought not to vary based on moral judgment about the action.
I agree. In crude terms, compulsion is forcing other people to change; fence-building is yourself withdrawing.
This distinction is blurry. Which side do boycotts fall on?
Public, organized boycotts are compulsion since they have the clear goal of changing the others' behaviour. If you just quietly stop buying products from Acme without telling everyone (including Acme) about it, that's withdrawal.
Another one is (non-compulsive) persuasion.
Note that compulsion requires you to have governmental (or quasi-governmental) power and exclusion ("fences") requires a certain degree of autonomy and, basically, property rights.
However the question as asked is too high-level. Moral systems' responses critically depend on how acceptable the other moral belief is. Minor things are usually tolerated and major things are subject to compulsion or exclusion (given sufficient power). For example the US government doesn't care about the Mormons' conversion of deceased (indifference) but does care about polygamy (compulsion).
Specialized vocabulary and language in general can work well as a fence without needing property rights. Our community is perceived to do this via using terms not used outside of LW.
The Esperanto community does this and Esperanto speakers are more likely to do favors for fellow Esperanto speakers than for other stangers.
They certainly can help with exclusion, but they are not very useful for including people with specific morals and excluding people with different morals.
Language creates a barrier to entry. Willingness to learn the language then filters for certain values. To the extend that you can control the teaching of the language you can also add additional filters.
There are free online resources for Esperanto such as http://lernu.net/ or http://purl.org/net/voko/revo/ so now it can spread beyond control mwahahaha...
It's true that there are free resources, but for example you can't take the Duolingo course without also getting at least a bit indoctrinated with veganism.
That factor likely isn't strong enough to turn someone by itself into a vegan but having many of such prompts does nudge the community in a certain direction and people who are really opposed to it won't have as much fun learning the language through those resources.
Yes, e.g.:
submit and cooperate - this is one of the staple of Christianity in its concept of martyrdom, also hinted in the Sermon of the Mount, when Jesus talked about turning the other cheek;
submit but do not cooperate - for example in the doctrine of non-violence.
thoughts:
I think you mean ethics and not morals.
There are many ways to persuade people. You can control information flow. You can nudge people and optimize the nudging.
There are physical changes that affect moral behavior. A lot of variables from temperature to diet have effects on moral decision making in certain instances.
You can convince people through arguments.
Those terms are synonymous under standard usage.
Depends on your standards. Under my standard usage they are not synonyms. Morals specify the value systems (what you believe) and ethics specify practical decisions in real life (what you do).
Morals is definitely the right word here! The generally-recognized difference between morality and ethics is that the first implies either some kind of inner tendency in individuals (a 'moral core') or an expressly-given 'moral code'. By contrast, ethics refers to the problem of how moralities can play out in practical settings and even interact with each other - ethics does not pit "right versus wrong", but balances "right versus right", as Rushworth Kidder would put it. Although people will also use "ethics", or more properly "normative ethics", as an easy way of referencing values that are so widely shared among human societies that they can be considered near-universal - such as the values of honesty, fairness, good knowledge and a fully thriving life. But this is a derivative meaning and theoretically a less important one. (Anyway, yes, ethical argument is definitely one key way of balancing values, so you're on the right track there.)
Thus, OP's question is itself one of the key problems in ethics; on a larger scale, it also explains the origin of politics itself, as dispute resolution in complex societies becomes reliant on government-like institutions and broadly-acknowledged formal rules of 'fairness'.