But then you've already lapsed into consequentialism, and thus stuck yourself with a mandate to consider the trade-offs between desirable and undesirable consequences.
Yes, and deontologists and virtue ethicists consider trade offs between different principles or virtues.
This is not what deontological and virtue-theoretic politicians actually do.
This is not what consequentialists actually do either. In particular, I've never seen an actual utility function, much less using one to compute trade-offs.
..."Look how morally brave I am for being willi
I would guess that they don't exist in some communist countries.
Yes, and those countries' economies aren't doing to well.
If I understand all of someone's logical arguments for believing what they believe, and I have the knowledge and processing power needed to evaluate those arguments,
Outside of math you also need the relevant evidence, i.e., observations, which requires you to trust that they have been accurately reported.
So by that standard almost no politicians believe in global warming.
Notice how all the rich actors who show up at charity events to "fight global warming" are also lining up to buy beach front property. (They also tend to fly around in private jets, but that's a separate issue.)
Edit: The reason I didn't use politicians in the above example is that not all politicians can afford beachfront property and the ability to do so correlates with other things that may be relevant to whether you want him in power.
Sarah Hoyt isn't quite NRx, but her recent (re)post here seems relevant.
In particular, the old distinction between deserving and undeserving poor.
I'm a virtue ethicist.
Classics is the traditional solution to the latter and I think it's still a pretty good one, but now that we can't assume knowledge or Greek or Latin, any other culture at a comparable remove would probably work as well.
Um, the reason for studying Greek and Latin is not just because they're a far-removed culture. It's also because they're the cultures which are the memetic ancestors of the memes that we consider the highest achievements of our culture, e.g., science, modern political forms.
Also this suffers from the problem of attempting to go from theoretical to practical, which is the opposite of how humans actually learn. Humans learn from examples, not from abstract theories.
To put it shortly, it seems to me we have lost the ability to build new things, and became an online debate club.
Did LW as a group ever have this ability? Going by the archives it seems that there were a small number (less than 10) of posters on LW who could do this. Now that they're no longer posting regularly, new things are no longer produced here.
try creating a new one from scratch, or whatever?
A reasonable case could be made that this is how NRx came to be.
Maybe we should have a meta-rule that anyone who starts a political debate must specify rules how the topic should be debated.
Um, this is a horrible idea. The problem is people will make rules that amount to "you're only allowed to debate this topic if you agree with me".
One aspect of neoreactionary thought is that it relies on historical narratives instead of focusing on specific claims that could be true or false in a way that can be determined by evidence.
I don't see how it does this any more than any other political philosophy.
When you say "X does Y", you must specify gender of X in Y's form.
Nitpick: I believe you meant "X did Y".
Berkeley's explanation that there is no physical world, but God exists and is directly causing all of our sensations is an alternate theory, although a rather unlikely one.
What evidence lead you to this conclusion?
The impression I get from Gardner is that "the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good".
So what does that make the LW sequences?
When the most powerful weapon is the pointed stick…
Skill is an a large premium. Thus those who have the free time to practice can end up dominating.
We just really don't know very much about the roman economy, and are unlikely to find out much more than we currently do.
On the other hand we do know a lot about what happened in 1921, Krugman just wishes we didn't because it appears to contradict his theories.
Generalizing from one example isn't good .. science, logic or argument. But it's better than generalizing from the fog of history.
Um, no. History contains evidence, it's not particularly clean evidence, but evidence nonetheless and we shouldn't be throwing it away.
NRx's are generally not utilitarians.
It seems like half your complaints are that Russian doesn't make some distinction that English does and the other half are that Russian forces you to make distinctions that English doesn't. It strikes me that you're simply more comfortable thinking in English.