Beyond the Pale
What are the rational grounds for deeming someone or something beyond the pale and dismissing them or writing them off?* We will say things like, He is a racist, She is a Nazi, They are a bigot, He is [____]-phobic, but these are very often more excuses than reasons. In that case we merely use a label as an excuse to dismiss or ostracize a person.
In this thread I want to stay focused on the rationality of deeming someone beyond the pale. So instead of, He is a racist, we might say, He thinks people with black skin are inferior to people with white skin, and instead of, She is a Nazi, we might say, She thinks all Jews should be exterminated. Vague pejoratives should be avoided, as they are akin to saying, She is bad.
The central questions here are:
Q1. What rationally justifies a dismissal of this kind?
Q2. What manner of dismissal is rationally justified or rationally justifiable?
It will probably be worthwhile to consider different reasons for deeming someone beyond the pale, but maybe we can start with the farcical proposition, All kittens should be decapitated. For convenience, let the person holding to this proposition be named KK (kitten killer).
The first thing to note about KK is that we know very little about them. We know that they hold to a position, but we dont know why, and we dont know anything else about them. Lets call this sort of standalone, opaque position a material position. A sub-question is as follows:
SQ1. Is a material position sufficient for deeming someone beyond the pale and dismissing them?
For example, at first glance we might deem KK beyond the pale. But if we learned that they think all kittens should be decapitated because there is a serious infectious disease that many kittens are carrying, and the only way to neutralize the disease is by severing the kittens spinal cord, then we might change our mind. Only in going beyond the material position were we able to evaluate the person differently.
If we decide that we must go beyond material positions, then what exactly is required before we are rationally justified in dismissing someone?
Regarding Q1, some of the options I have in mind are as follows:
The most interesting and prevalent case is the overtly moral case, where KK is construed as evil in one way or another. Very often we are invoking moral blame when we assess someones beliefs in this way, and this is a curious phenomenon. Is it rationally justifiable? Do we have to downgrade our moral dismissals to non-moral dismissals? At what point is a moral dismissal justifiable?
Again, in this thread I want to explore the question, What is it about this type of person that justifies dismissal?*
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For a kind of addendum to the OP, see <this post> on page 2.
* I am going to talk about dismissing someone, but we could equally talk about ignoring, excluding, ostracizing, canceling, banishing, harming, destroying, killing, etc. What is essential is that we act negatively towards them, but this can be done in many ways.
In this thread I want to stay focused on the rationality of deeming someone beyond the pale. So instead of, He is a racist, we might say, He thinks people with black skin are inferior to people with white skin, and instead of, She is a Nazi, we might say, She thinks all Jews should be exterminated. Vague pejoratives should be avoided, as they are akin to saying, She is bad.
The central questions here are:
Q1. What rationally justifies a dismissal of this kind?
Q2. What manner of dismissal is rationally justified or rationally justifiable?
It will probably be worthwhile to consider different reasons for deeming someone beyond the pale, but maybe we can start with the farcical proposition, All kittens should be decapitated. For convenience, let the person holding to this proposition be named KK (kitten killer).
The first thing to note about KK is that we know very little about them. We know that they hold to a position, but we dont know why, and we dont know anything else about them. Lets call this sort of standalone, opaque position a material position. A sub-question is as follows:
SQ1. Is a material position sufficient for deeming someone beyond the pale and dismissing them?
For example, at first glance we might deem KK beyond the pale. But if we learned that they think all kittens should be decapitated because there is a serious infectious disease that many kittens are carrying, and the only way to neutralize the disease is by severing the kittens spinal cord, then we might change our mind. Only in going beyond the material position were we able to evaluate the person differently.
If we decide that we must go beyond material positions, then what exactly is required before we are rationally justified in dismissing someone?
Regarding Q1, some of the options I have in mind are as follows:
- I dismiss KK because they are evil (because anyone who thinks all kittens should be decapitated is evil).
- I dismiss KK because I probably wont get along with them.
- I dismiss KK because entertaining them and their viewpoint will lead to harm.
- I dismiss KK because they are irrational and dialogue will be futile.
- I dismiss KK because I have limited time and other uses of my time win out.
The most interesting and prevalent case is the overtly moral case, where KK is construed as evil in one way or another. Very often we are invoking moral blame when we assess someones beliefs in this way, and this is a curious phenomenon. Is it rationally justifiable? Do we have to downgrade our moral dismissals to non-moral dismissals? At what point is a moral dismissal justifiable?
Again, in this thread I want to explore the question, What is it about this type of person that justifies dismissal?*
---
For a kind of addendum to the OP, see <this post> on page 2.
* I am going to talk about dismissing someone, but we could equally talk about ignoring, excluding, ostracizing, canceling, banishing, harming, destroying, killing, etc. What is essential is that we act negatively towards them, but this can be done in many ways.
Comments (210)
The key is probably negligence, the idea that they should know better. We have a tendency to prejudge negligence even in a complete stranger, given assumptions about their cultural education.
But the strange thing about our current culture is that strong tribalism has mixed with an environment in which everyones content consumption is unique in an unprecedented way. Or in other words: we are assuming that we are all on the same page precisely when we are least on the same page. For this reason we tend to impute fault without sufficient justification.
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Another observation is that being at cross purposes seems to play a fairly significant role in dismissal. Some kind of communal short-circuit occurs. For example, if someone tries to exterminate Jews and another tries to stop them, they are not at cross-purposes in the deeper sense, because they are engaged in a common pursuit of practical execution. Similarly, when two football teams face off, they are not at cross-purposes given that they are both engaged in the same genus of activity, even though they are opposed within that genus.
Writing off or dismissal seems to occur when the actual genus of activity differs between two people. For example, if someone comes to TPF to advertise their newest invention, they will literally be dismissed by the moderators because they are not engaged in the requisite kind of activity. Or if a musician aims only to make money rather than art, then her fellow musicians will dismiss and ostracize her in a way that they wouldnt dismiss or ostracize a technically inferior musician who possessed the proper aim. Or if one person is engaged in a practical activity such as anti-racism, and another is engaged in a speculative activity such as studying racial characteristics, they will tend to dismiss and oppose one another. Other examples include the philosopher and the sophist, or the pious and the charlatan. It would seem that in order for moral indignation to fully flower the genus of activity must differ subtly, and in such a way that the second genus could be reasonably mistaken for the first. It may be that moral outrage occurs because someone is seen as an impostor, pretending to be what they are not and in danger of fooling and misleading onlookers. The more intentional, subversive, and potent the imitation or likeness, the stronger the moral outrage.
If this is right, then much of the trigger-happy moral outrage probably has to do with the impostor! reaction. At the most fundamental level is probably the idea that someone is selling the irrational or the harmful under the guise of the rational or beneficial. Even a material position, when proposed, is liable to raise the ire of someone who opposes it, for it is only the impostor who would propose what ought to be opposed.
Whats interesting about this is that its not altogether wrong. For example, the taboo against anti-Semitism has a rational undergirding, particularly in places like Germany. The cultural consensus balks at non-conformity, and this is rooted in both harm and a form of reparations. On the other hand, our cultural moment is one of false assumptions of unity, of faux-taboos, without foundation in reason or consensus. To label everything one dislikes Nazism is to mistake the cultural consensus regarding [insert political fad here] for the cultural consensus regarding anti-Semitism, and that is a facile equivocation.
Yet even if the trigger-happy moral outrage has to do with the impostor! phenomenon, it nevertheless holds that well-founded moral outrage is also often rooted in the identification of an impostor, both because the impostor is dangerous and because the duplicity or incongruence is inherently ugly and disagreeable. Maybe this goes at least partway towards answering the OP.
Okay, good. But we could still pare down that word "liar" in the way I pared down "racist" or "Nazi." What is a lie and why is it bad? We could do the same thing with "treachery" or betrayal.
Quoting tim wood
So what punishments fit the crimes that Dante depicts in the last circle of Hell? What punishments fit a liar? Or a betrayer?
Quoting tim wood
Speak to whichever one you prefer. I used the word because the two things you distinguish need not be separate. For example, "Betrayer" is a type rooted in actions.
Think not first about "moral disapproval", think first about something that would be clearly illegal by current legislation. How about a site that gathers funds to Al Qaeda and Isis? Or a discussion not about kittens, but about certain human beings. Would you participate there? Would you be totally OK that some would have these thoughts and spread them publicly... because we have freedom of speech?
The rational grounds are simply things like public security and safety, for starters. Far later come things where would have a discussion about if the issue is morally right or wrong.
Okay, so you think we should dismiss (or act negatively towards) a site or person that gathers funds to Al Qaeda and Isis? And you think we should do so on the basis of "public security and safety"?
I think it is well-accepted that when someone overtly tries to harm us we attack them (and I don't see how this would be unrelated to morality). Perhaps in the OP I am more interested in forms of exclusion which do not involve overt violence. Shunning, excluding, dismissing, etc. But you could also take the thread in the direction of self-defense if you wish. Principles of self-defense are probably somewhat related to principles of exclusion or dismissal.
(I don't want to step on the toes of moderators, but a paradigm example of the question of the OP would be to ask about criteria for banning a member from an internet forum. It is not the motivation behind this OP, but it is the example of "dismissal" that TPFers would be most commonly familiar with.)
American society doesn't have anything to compare with that. You can't set yourself beyond the pale because no matter how bizarre you are, someone has you beat.
So the answer to the OP is: use the quaint terminology however you like.
Questions about the breadth of the moral sphere aside, it seems clear to me that when someone wishes to dismiss or exclude someone with a charge like, "Racist!," they are almost always involved in a moral judgment. The implication is that the racist has done something (morally) wrong, and as a consequence of that wrongness they are being dismissed, excluded, etc.
This thread is meant to tease out exactly what is going on in that sort of phenomenon. If we had to break it down rationally, what is it about a racist, or a Nazi, or a bigot, or a liar, or a betrayer, or a troll (etc.) that rationally justifies some form of dismissal or exclusion?
From the OP:
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes. Leontiskos, you and I go to jail if we gather funds to terrorists. Being OK with that happening wouldn't be good for the administrator of this site.
If this site has moderation rules like the following: "Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them.", then something that is considered far more dangerous than hate speech (described in the moderation rules) surely isn't allowed.
(In fact, the US pushed this legislation so much here in Europe that lawyers here not that giving financial aid to Al Qaeda would get you longer prisoner terms than first degree murder.)
Quoting Leontiskos
Behavior in the social media has come to this. It's one way to silence people. And as I noted the moderation rules of this site, it's obvious what kind of accusation it is here to charge another member of being a racist here.
Calling someone racist is actually very much an American phenomenon, which has then spread especially through the Anglosphere. This is because segregation is something that the US hasn't gotten over and racism is still an issue in the US. In other countries these issues can differ. For example in Germany the accusation of being a Nazi can be pretty serious: denying that the Holocaust happened can get you five years in prison. Germans, who do have this painful history, do take it quite seriously.
My point here is that moral judgments start from things that universally are considered not only being unmoral, but even criminal. Us not tolerating them doesn't mean that we are against free speech. Even if we put here "question about the breadth of the moral sphere aside" as you said, we shouldn't forget them. It's similar to talking about the Overton window. We understand that when there is a window, there's also part which isn't in the window, but perhaps "the Overton Wall".
For me, it's when certain moral lines are crossed. When one side condones or mitigates the deliberate murder of innocents, I tune out and ignore them. Civilians have always died in war, but the question is always whether they've been intentionally targeted or were collateral damage. If someone is downplaying or supporting the intentional targeting of civilians because they belong to a certain nationality, that person is wicked. I don't know how else to put it.
"It's illegal, therefore you can't do it. Don't ask any more questions."
I don't find that to be a reasonable stance. We know of all sorts of things that were illegal and yet should have been done, such as freeing slaves.
Quoting ssu
Right, as I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
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Quoting ssu
It sounds like you have no answer to the OP, or that you want to discuss a different OP. Do you have answers to Q1 or Q2 of the OP? Or are you saying that cultural taboos and laws are unquestionable and rationally opaque, and cannot be inquired into?
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Okay, but why? The OP is asking, "Why?"
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Okay, but why should wicked people be tuned out and ignored? Is it supposed to be self-evident, such that no real explanation is possible?
I think @ssu must be reading the OP as tendentious, but I gave my own earnest answer in the second post. I am sincerely interested in the rational grounding for the various varieties of dismissal or exclusion, and I am in no way claiming that dismissal/exclusion is never appropriate.
You can continue; it just turns into a different type of discussion. Now, you're trying to curb them from their view rather than engaging in objective philosophical discourse.
The example of attempting to prevent a sickness from spreading by decapitating kittens, while perhaps valid with respect to the proposition that all kittens should be decapitated, has no parallel among phrenologists, for example; to be a phrenologist is to engage in harmful, pseudoscientific bullshit for the purposes of rationalizing white on black racism no matter how you cut it. No phrenologist has ever claimed that a certain dimple or feature associated by the phrenologist with people of color somehow indicated some positive trait relative to the white man. This is to say that there are some positions that cannot be rationally or morally justified in a larger context by digging deeper into motives or whatever you might do in moving beyond the material position because there are only a few plausible reasons for adopting that position. In light of this, I dont think that we need to litigate every single seemingly odious and/or controversial assertion or position to find out some sort of deeper, justified reasoning. Racists, for instance, are often stupid or misinformed and, quite predictably, parrot certain talking points, bits of pseudoscience, or misinformation/disinformation such that they can be easily identified. I dont think you have refuted that some positions cannot be explained except by explicitly racist, bigoted, etc. reasoning or appeals to pseudoscience or other notable falsehoods, and, thus, sometimes one is justified in classifying someone merely based on their professed "material positions" - be that as a bigot or a misinformed person or both. So no, I dont grant that we must always go beyond the material position - or at least not in the way you propose.
I mean, a material position, as you define it, could carry just about any content, as the only condition you seem to put on it is that it is a proposition that one adheres to. It could contain an entire antisemitic conspiracy theory of whatever variety one might imagine - if that is what someone is putting out there. We dont need to go beyond such a statement to justify writing them off as an antisemite, as they are saying something explicitly antisemitic; at least some of the statements people are concerned with deeming evil put out there by other people are not nearly as opaque as what KK says. I think that answers SQ1.
Overall, I think you are conflating people that can be dismissed with those that should not be on the basis that people should limit their use of moral language when faced with a certain amount of uncertainty - which is somewhat reasonable. My problem with that is that you have not addressed anything about the relevant thresholds for dismissal or the specific cases in which the material position implies or explicitly states bigotry or something else morally undesirable.
Quoting Leontiskos
Isn't that it is recognized as a war crime enough? Aren't war crimes pretty much as universally understood to be bad as anything else? Are you saying we need to provide moral facts in support of our stances such that we believe we can justifiably dismiss terrorists? If that is the case, then I'm not sure anyone can dismiss anyone on any grounds.
Well let's keep these two distinct:
1. You should not (deliberately) harm the innocent
2. Those who (deliberately) harm the innocent should be dismissed/excluded/shunned/etc.
The thread is primarily about (2), but it may well be that (1) must be considered in the analysis.
So if I were to take a stab at your example, I would say that the one who deliberately harms the innocent is unfit for society, given the liability they pose to societal peace and wellbeing. Therefore, for the sake of the society's health, they are to be excluded from society at least until they have accepted (1).
That is an attempt to replace your "wicked" with a reasoned explanation. I think that explanation is sufficient to justify their exclusion, even if it is not a complete explanation of (2). It may not be complete given that it makes no mention of culpability.
I altered my post. The discussion can continue but in a different capacity. You become like a priest to them, trying to get them to see the light. It's no longer philosophy so much as moral reformation.
Dante's Inferno makes me nervous. The Nine circles of hell are: Limbo (unbaptized and virtuous pagans), Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery.
The only one which I could not, under any circumstances, qualify for is Limbo. One way or another, I fit the rest. Hence, my concern.
Just for those who aren't familiar with the term, "The Pale" of Settlement was the area restricted for Jews created by Catherine the Great. The Pale of Settlement included all of modern Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Poland, and small parts of Latvia and the western Russian Federation. The only way to legally move from the Pale of Settlement into other parts of Russia was to convert to Orthodox Christianity. Or one could emigrate.
People living "beyond the pale" (in gentile areas) had a higher social ranking than Jewish people within the Pale of Settlement. So, paradoxically, being "beyond the pale" might be a good thing.
What puts Socialists either "within the pale" or "beyond the pale", depending on how you want to slice it, has nothing to do with kittens. It is that we want to take your real property away from you. We're not interested in your crappy furniture from Target or your cheap clothing from Walmart. We're going to take your wealth-producing property--that apartment building you rent to people; the jewelry store you own; your factory producing widgets... If you are a billionaire, you'll probably be stripped of everything down to and including your shoestrings.
The deliberate murder of innocents can sometimes be understood as a form of resistance. A popular slogan today you'll see at protests is "You don't get to choose how we resist," i.e., the oppressed ought not be bound by such restraints when throwing off their shackles. You really don't have to look far for such thinking.
Quoting ToothyMaw
It sounds like you guys don't believe that opposing murder or terrorism is a rational act. That in opposing murder or excluding a murderer we are acting like "priests," not "philosophers," and that there is no rational justification for opposing murder or terrorism, or dismissing/excluding those who engage in these acts.
Is that right? If so, Aquinas would find this quite amazing.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think that's right. I see fighting terrorism as instrumentally rational in that it preserves Western civilization and our religious heritage.
Aquinas is not a part of my religious tradition.
We were talking about terrorism. Yet you say then later:
Quoting Leontiskos
Make up your mind.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think you didn't understand my point.
My point is that for Q1 and Q2 you can get definitive answer and everything isn't just a rhetorical game. These accusations aren't just insults that someone hurls at others when they disagree with them. Yet there has to reasonable evidence for this, because far too much these accusations are hurled on others as a way to win a debate / silence others.
Okay, but how far does this extend? Are you comfortable with the inference that no course of action is more or less rational than any other course of action? For example, that killing your own daughter is no more or less rational than killing the intruder who is wielding lethal force? Or that excluding racists from the town hall meeting is no more or less rational than excluding 41 year-old women with 6-inch hair from the town hall meeting? Or that killing the innocent is no more or less rational than killing the guilty? Is it only priests who would make these distinctions, not philosophers?
I want to be careful about going too far out on this tangent, but we can explore it tentatively.
I posted a poll awhile ago about whether Churchill would have been justified committing war crimes (e.g., using poison gas) to repel a Nazi invasion. The majority of respondents here were OK with it.
When I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
...I was saying, "Yes, obviously we oppose terrorists." Again, the question of the OP is, "Why?"
Quoting ssu
Then give a definitive answer. Answer the OP. That's what it's there for. I gave my answer in post #2.
(1) has to be considered. Is it even true? What if the innocents are factory workers making bombers to be used against you? What if they're a bunch of scientists working feverishly on enriching uranium for a nuclear bomb to be used against you? What if they're a bunch of chemists at a mustard gas plant? How many innocents are you allowed to kill while going after a military target? Is nuking Berlin OK if it means taking out Hitler?
We need to distinguish between different types of rationality. Regarding instrumental rationality, certain decisions are definitely favored over others. Once we agree that Western civilization or our religion is worth preserving, we can talk about rationality towards that end. Rationality absent an end is a different matter...
If the innocents aren't innocent then (1) would of course not apply to them. As far as I understand, someone working in an arms factory is not considered an innocent or a simple civilian.
Getting back to the OP, do you think it is ever rationally justifiable to dismiss or exclude someone, particularly because of some action or set of actions they have chosen? If so, when and why is this rationally justifiable?
This isn't even true. What about hypothetical Jewish terrorists in Germany during WW2? Suppose German Jews had adopted a policy whereby Jewish suicide bombers blew themselves up in popular German places (restaurants, theaters, nightclubs, etc.) until the Holocaust stopped. Should we oppose that?
If someone is a flat earther, I don't engage with them. What's the point? Same with neonazi's, Qanon, electiondeniers, etc. They're not immoral, but they're not fun to talk to.
Okay, good. You've answered the OP:
1. I don't engage those who are not fun to talk to
2. Flat Earthers are not fun to talk to
3. Therefore I do not engage flat Earthers
That's a good example of a non-moral answer to the OP. :up:
There is no rational basis. It's a question of values - what is important to the people who make the decisions about what is allowed. Using the forum as an example, there is a written set of rules for what is acceptable and what is not. Those rules were established by the administrators and moderators and are updated from time to time. By participating in the forum we accept those rules. Our hope is that they will be reasonable and fair. In general here, they are. When members don't like the rules or the manner in which they are administered, we whine and complain. Sometimes the moderators will change a decision based on feedback, sometimes not.
So that's the answer to your question. Who decides what is beyond the pale? Them what's in charge based on their values.
Okay, that's fair enough as far as it goes.
At the risk of derailing my own thread, are you comfortable with the inference that anger or moral indignation is never rationally justified if there is nothing beyond instrumental rationality?
So you think that there is no rational basis to any rule regarding dismissal/exclusion, and yet you also hope that the rules of an internet forum will be reasonable and fair? It sounds like you are contradicting yourself.
Also, I would prefer speaking about "internet forums" in the generic sense, as I don't want this thread to become a thread about TPF.
On my view racism (thinking that one race is generally superior or inferior to another) is false, and therefore irrational. The OP was taking this for granted, but maybe that was a mistake.
But the kicker comes in the fact that we shun/exclude/dismiss racists, and yet we don't shun/exclude/dismiss everyone who is irrational. So why do we shun racists in particular? At a societal level, it is almost certainly because we fear they will reenact a societal mistake of the past. And that's fine - it's a bit like telling your kid not to play near the fire to decrease the probability that they will be burned. Yet even that account is insufficient given that deterrence does not require shaming/shunning/excluding. In any case, there is nothing particularly moral about what I have said thus far. Culpability has not yet entered into the conversation.
But we do view racists as immoral. Are we wrong to do so? Should we just treat them like innocuous children who have wandered too close to the fire? On my view the moral attribution has to do with some form of obstinacy, malice, or negligence, which layer atop the foundational irrationality. But on this view some racists will be immoral and some will not be immoral. This moral judgment also accounts for the shift from deterrence to shaming/shunning/excluding.
I don't know where your view would take this. Maybe you would say that racists are immoral but not irrational? I don't really understand accounts of morality that distance themselves from rationality.
Definitive answer to What is it about this type of person that justifies dismissal? or "At what point is a moral dismissal justifiable?" That's your question in the OP?
When one's statement really can be harmful to others. Not when those statements are just annoying, incorrect or wrong. One can have moderation and then have real dismissal/banning etc. Something that becomes a legal matter.
Dismissing / banning someone for one's ideas and beliefs shouldn't happen lightly as we understand how important freedom of speech is for our society to function. The reasoning for dismissal / banning should be to prevent harm to be done to others. The intent should be clear. Naturally people will have different views on just what is reasonable evidence for dismissal. Every case is likely unique.
Yet the question really should be: does this or can this truly harm someone? Because people can indeed have different views, think about the World differently and come to different conclusions. That's inevitable.
We can argue that "sticks and stones can hurt my bones, but words can't" or think that "Hate Speech" rules have gone too far, but we shouldn't forget that there is the actual threat of harm done to others.
Here the example of how the Islamic State franchises it's terrorism shows how dangerous this can be. One can get the materiel of the organization from the net and one can simply say to be a follower of the Islamic State, make a terrorist strike and the terrorist organization will happily take credit for one's actions. One doesn't have to get in contact with the organization. This strategy from the IS makes it totally understandable that various police and intelligence services do try to survey the net and social media and find possible sites and people who help or create a place for terrorist organizations to spread their message.
I read this during a rainy November vacation on the east coast not too far from the setting of the book. Grey days looking out on a grey ocean, thinking about Hawthorne's message: that when rationality is pitted against nature, it will lose.
Okay, thanks for answering.
The idea here is apparently that we should ban, imprison, or deport someone whose ideas and views will cause a sufficient level of harm, such as a terrorist or someone who aids and abets terrorists. This is similar to this option:
Quoting Leontiskos
Now, do you see this as a moral or non-moral move? Presumably you see it as non-moral, and might view it as I described here:
Quoting Leontiskos
Or in other words, we are going to deport the terrorist, and we need to undertake no moral evaluation of their intentions before doing so. Maybe the terrorist was acting in good faith or was a victim of poor education - it makes no difference to the decision. The police and the terrorist are not at cross purposes in that deeper sense. They are playing the same game, in different directions. If this is right then they are deported but not excluded in the deeper sense, and I will say more about this below.
I think some people do view terrorists that way. Others attribute moral blame to them. In any event, this is a case that I agree to be more or less non-moral. We move terrorists out of our country, or perhaps even kill them, in the same way we move or kill rodents that have infested our home.
If we want to look at this thread in light of international issues, then perhaps a traitor is a better example than a terrorist. I wouldn't quite say that a terrorist is dismissed or excluded, given the fact that they never sought incorporation in the first place. We are not denying the terrorist anything that they intrinsically desire; only something they desire instrumentally. The traitor, on the other hand, is someone who is dismissed or excluded and who is also judged morally. I recently watched the film Breach, which is about a traitor in the FBI, and in that film those qualities are on display to a remarkable degree.
Do you think treason differs from terrorism in this moral sense? Do you think a country is rationally justified in imputing moral blame to a traitor?
Fairness and reasonableness are procedural rules, not rules for deciding what will and won't be sanctioned. Fairness means whatever rules there are are applied to everyone the same. When I said "reasonable" I meant that they are not applied or interpreted rigidly and there is no cruel and unusual punishment. I probably wasn't clear enough about that.
Quoting Leontiskos
My reference to the forum was a specific instance of a general rule and was not intended as a comment on the forum itself. It is the institution of this sort with which I am most familiar. As such it is a reasonable example.
I stand by my claim that deciding what is beyond the pale is not primarily based on rational criteria or processes. We can leave it at that since it doesn't seem to be the direction you want to take the thread.
Okay, but "cruel and unusual" is a non-procedural constraint. I mean, if there is a cruel and unusual rule that is applied equally to all, would you have a complaint? Would there be something wrong or irrational about the rule?
Quoting T Clark
That's fair. I just want to try to avoid the scenario where this becomes a referendum on TPF or something weird like that.
No, and I think the examples you gave of the kinds of attitudes which you say are deemed to be beyond the pale are generally attitudes which are not rationally justifiable. You could even define "beyond the pale" as "not rationally justifiable".
Okay, good. I would even go so far as to say that they are irrational. Is that the same as what you are saying? Or are you making a more conservative claim?
Note that many here are claiming that something like racism is neither irrational nor rationally unjustifiable. For example, let's take 's concession and place it in more direct relation to the OP. Consider this statement:
Quoting Leontiskos
The thesis of the moral non-cognitivist* requires that there is no rational connection between any of these types of person and dismissal. For example, there is no rational connection between a bigot and the act of dismissal, such that it is no more or less rational to dismiss a bigot than it is to dismiss anyone else. "Some people dismiss bigots; some people dismiss grandmothers; some people dismiss gardeners; it's all a matter of taste. One is no more or less rationally justified in dismissing a bigot than in dismissing a gardener." That seems wrong to me, and apparently you would agree.
* I believe this is the proper descriptive term for those who would divorce morality from rationality, but others might quibble with it.
In that case, at most, the moral indignation would be only instrumentally rationally justified. Of course, there's rationality beyond instrumental rationality; Logical reasoning exists.
When I originally read your I thought you were joining the many moral non-cognitivists in this thread, claiming that we do not have rational justification to say that racism is immoral, and therefore we cannot say it.
I now see that you were not saying that, but there is a wrinkle along these same lines. If we are only permitted to assert things that are rationally justifiable, then in order to say, "Racism is immoral," or, "Racism is not rationally justifiable," we must ourselves be able to rationally justify these claims. So if we hold to that premise then I think "not rationally justifiable" may need to be transformed into "irrational."
Presumably your hesitancy would come in the religious realm, where you want to say that a religious tenet could fail to be rationally justifiable without being irrational. I think this may end up splitting too many hairs between holding a proposition and "giving air to an assertion." On my view a religious tenet can have a characteristically different form of rational adherence, but it nevertheless requires rational justification. In any case, this is opening a whole new vista and can of worms for the thread.
Right, but it seems to me that moral indignation is by its very nature not instrumental, and the force of my question comes from this premise. I don't find moral indignation to be localizable in the way that an instrumental reality is. In most cases it erupts spontaneously, much like laughter does.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
You edited your previous post at the same time you wrote this line, didn't you? :wink:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I don't think the existence of logic entails that there is non-instrumental rationality. Logic is basically a framework for instrumental rationality. But in any case, what is at stake here is the question of whether there is a non-instrumental rationality that could ground moral claims, making them more than merely instrumental or hypothetical.
If I were to ask you to give your fundamental reason why murder is wrong, what would you say? For me, it's probably because God/the Bible/the universal lawgiver says so. I'm inclined toward divine command theory, and my outlook is fundamentally biblical.
When you think about it, the murderer could have possibly done the victim a favor. Perhaps the victim gets a better afterlife because they were murdered. Or perhaps being dead is better than the pain that awaited the victim had they stayed alive. There are just so many unknowns, yet we all fervently believe that murder is wrong. We don't know the 30,000-foot view but still cling to the rule.
I rejected Kantian attempts to account for morality years ago. I suppose murder could be irrational in the sense that committing murder is often terrible for the mental health and life (soul?) of the murderer. That's fair to say.
Interesting question! Let's take racism; if someone thinks a person is to be shunned, dismissed as inferior or even vilified on account of their skin colour, it is obvious that there is no rational justification for such an attitude because there is no logical or empirically determinable connection between skin colour and personal worth, intelligence or moral rectitude.
So, shall we say their attitude is irrational or simply non-rational? I'd say that if they concocted some completely bogus supposed connection between skin colour and personal worth or intelligence then their attitude would be based on illogical or erroneous thinking, and it would then be fair to say they are being irrational.
If on the other hand, they said they just don't like people of whatever skin colour then perhaps we could say their attitude was simply non-rational or emotionally driven. Then again it seems unlikely that their emotional attitude would not be bolstered if not entirely based on some kind of erroneous thinking,
Quoting Leontiskos
I think there is a valid distinction, somewhat along Kant's lines, between pure reason and practical reason. For example, in regard to justice, to the idea of all people being equal before the law and being equally subject to it and equally deserving of rights. I think this is not so much positively rationally justified as it is negatively, and by that, I mean that there is no purely rational justification for treating one person differently than another tout court.
On the other hand, perhaps there is a practically rational justification for treating the POTUS differently than the rest of the people. Not to say I think that's a good idea, mind. I'm not a moral non-cognitivist, I'm more of the persuasion that morality is objective in the sense that it evolves out of the needs of the community. So, murder is objectively wrong because it is not something a functional community could condone ( at least when it comes to its own members). Obviously, communities may have practical reasons, at least in some cases, war for example, for not considering the killing of non-community members to be murder. It's a messy business this morality!
The second reason not to engage, is when the other party doesn't abide by logic and/or truthfulness. Since productive discussion is futile and since your opposition isn't confined to the truth, your ideas will be viewed by third parties as erroneous or incorrect inappropriately.
The problem which I see with the idea of 'beyond the pale' is that it is culturally and historically relative. Also, it may depend on situational contexts.
For example, I am aware of how what is considered appropriate or not varies on a written forum to face to face groups which I attend. On the forum, certain remarks are unacceptable, such as racism but in philosophy discussion poor or low quality argument are key issues. In face to face interaction, factors like racism and sexism are also unacceptable but the focus is more about sensitivity rather than formulation of arguments.
While there are unclear markers of ''beyond the pale' vs 'the unacceptable', one possible measure which holds up to rationality is the idea of respect for others in general.
It's also possible to rationalize disrespect for others in general. I think that's why morality isn't based on rationality. People naturally rationalize whatever they're doing. Rationality is kind of like fashion.
I see your argument as possible logical but questionable from a deeper philosophical point of view. Here, I am wondering about philosophy as being about the pursuit of wisdom for living. After cultural relativism and postmodernism there has been a shift to philosophy as rhetoric, alongside a fragmentation of values.
This is the crux of the matter. There isn't just one kind of life. In some environments, you'll have to be racist to thrive. In other environments, racism will get you ostracized. As Nietzsche pointed out, your tribe's morality is relative to the kind of society they have created.
Why does it have to be discussed as if there's a universal truth behind the will to ignorance? I dismiss people when I know they're an absolute waste of time.
Like discussing the Bible with people who aren't familiar with it. They've never taken a discerning eye to it. It's why most Christians dont know wtf they even believe. It's why they follow the apostles rather than the most Christian of Christians: Christ. If you follow Christ, then you don't get to see others as sinners or as beneath you, which is what most Xtians bank on. The objective slave morality that allows them to deny the lives of others is their poppy and poison... but all these quacks don't realize:
11 Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake.
These idolaters of the apostles end up blessing us, as the Beatitude goes.
Dissing the obstinate as beyond the pale is fine because they're only looking for the answers the satify their confirmation bias. Thus they're not actually here to learn anything, and thus a waste of time in general.
I do not deny Nietzsche's argument or the issues of relativism. Nevertheless, what may be happening is a 'fashion' or slippery rope argument whereby the right to express hatred is being justified.
That may be true, but such justifications tend to be supremely rational. Rationality is not a guide to moral behavior. If anything, rationality is something to be wary of.
A sound bridge between rationality and emotive morality may be useful. That is because without the rational, we may end up with 'herd instinct'. Morality based on rationality or emotion alone may too narrow in scope.
I agree. Maybe a person works better as a whole: letting the mind temper the heart.
's example of dismissing the flat Earther is very helpful in getting at the sense of the OP. Now RogueAI used the notion of "fun" to dismiss the flat Earther in a non-moral way, but I want to look at a different way in which one might dismiss the flat Earther:
1. Stupid people are to be dismissed/ignored
2. The flat Earther is stupid
3. Therefore the flat Earther is to be dismissed/ignored
This is largely descriptive, as it is a very common experience. If someone asks, "Why did you walk away when he started claiming that the Earth is flat?," a common response would be, "I don't engage that level of stupidity."
Now the judgment of stupidity could be moral or non-moral, but I think it is often a moral judgment with the flat Earther. It is something like, "Shame on you. You should know better" (negligence). Or after talking to them for hours the stupidity is thought to become culpable via obstinacy. Or perhaps we might begin to suspect that they have an ulterior motive, and are intentionally at cross purposes with uswe might begin to suspect that they are trolling us or goofing around.
At this point 's notion of instrumental rationality and morality as a set of hypothetical imperatives comes into play. It seems to me that moral indignation is not instrumental, and this is because it involves a "non-hypothetical ought judgment." Thus to dismiss someone or judge them beyond the pale also involves such a (moral) judgment. Kevin Flannery's, "Anscombe and Aristotle on Corrupt Minds," is a good entry point into this issue from an Aristotelian angle.
(An ambiguity arises here, where the moral judgment could be seen to undergird one's own act of walking away (i.e. "At this point it is better for me to walk away"). That is a non-hypothetical ought judgment, after all. But when I call dismissal a moral act what I mean is something else. What I mean is that we are entering into moral judgment upon someone else. The question of whether a dismissal is a moral dismissal depends on this question of whether we are entering into moral judgment upon someone other than ourselves.)
Nevertheless, this thread is not primarily a speculative debate about hypothetical vs non-hypothetical moral systems. Instead it is rooted in experiences we commonly have, experiences of dismissing, excluding, or judging someone to be beyond the pale. We can approach these experiences both descriptively and normatively. That is, we can ask why people tend to think their dismissals are (rationally) justified, and we can ask what is required in order for a dismissal to be (rationally) justified. Of course someone might also argue that we are never rationally justified in dismissing someone on grounds of morality or culpability.
The interesting thing about the dismissal of the flat Earther is that it appeals directly to rationality, for stupidity is a synonym for irrationality. , "All of our various pejoratives seem to signal irrationality, but we do not deem all forms of irrationality to be immoral." In much the same way, we might call the racist or the bigot stupid. Nevertheless, the uncertainty often comes home to roost with the flat Earther, given that there are always portions of the conversation when one begins to question one's presumption of stupidity.
Yes, exactly.
We should put the bar very high. Naturally there is a lower bar, typically dealt with civil lawsuits, exist where for example I ridicule you and you go to court because of slander. But it's still the same reason.
We should notice from the terrorism example just how extremely rare this should be. There are huge numbers of people that are suicidal, but only a minimal amount who would harm people when killing themselves or take on such lunatic ideas that terrorists in Western countries promote. However, if we want to keep these rare events at a minimum, then government do check what basically is otherwise "free speech".
Quoting Leontiskos
Preventing harm to others is a moral move. How could it be non-moral?
Quoting Leontiskos
Laws have to have a moral basis, don't you think?
Terrorist see themselves as having a just moral cause, naturally.
The terrorists might be non-legal combatants, but they truly feel their cause is justified. For example, the West German RAF (Red Army Fraction) thought that West Germany was still a successor state of the Nazi Germany, and they had total reason to fight it. Their objective was to "wake up" the real Proletariat, which would be woken up when the workers would feel how the German (Nazi) government would attack them. With the Islamic State the dedication is even more convinced as they see themselves fighting for God and the Ummah.
In the end, the morality is just a numbers game. If you and me believe that the state of Switzerland is actually the reincarnate of Nazi Germany and we should join a fight to liberate the Swiss from nazism, then we are seen as lunatics. If millions of people, including many Swiss people and foreigners would think that present Switzerland is this reincarnate, it wouldn't be just lunacy. Usually when millions of people think somehow of reality, then we have to respect that view.
Sure. Among the many things that occasioned this OP, one thing was an old dustup between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein in which Klein is critiquing Harris for platforming Charles Murray, who is involved in racial IQ research for the sake of policy proposals.
That exchange is highly complicated, but Ezra doesn't think Harris is a racist. I don't know that he even thinks Murray is a racist. But in a build-up to that discussion he called Harris a "racialist." I'm not really sure what he meant by that, but it might mean something like, "Someone who provides a platform to people who are espousing ideas that could be used as fuel for racism." A simplified version of Ezra's position would be
Questions of platforming and of "the possibility of this being read in the wrong way by other parties" are interesting because they subordinate speculative reason to practical reason. It's like saying, "You aren't allowed to discuss that topic, because something bad might happen," or, "You aren't allowed to perform that scientific research, because something bad might happen." If moral non-cognitivism is true and there is no ultimate connection between speculative and practical reason, then there can be nothing wrong with this approach.
On Harris' view Ezra is involved in a highly irrational and unrealistic form of political correctness. At 1:45:11 Harris says that every single male finalist of the Olympic 100m dash since 1980 has been of West-African descent. In effect he asks, "Are we racists or 'racialists' if we notice such a fact? Or do we have to avoid noticing such facts for the sake of political correctness?"
Platforming is a complicated debate, but one way of approaching the OP would be as a search for a rational basis for eschewing racism. This rational basis would provide a way for us to both eschew racism while also being intellectually honest about the 100m dash finalists.
But the broader issue is rational justification for dismissal/exclusion in general, as highlighted in cases like the flat Earther.
I am not a divine command theorist. I think murder is wrong because it involves killing the (legally) innocent. On this view the prohibition against murder is just a particular variety of the prohibition on killing the innocent.
So with reference to the OP, we might exclude someone who kills the innocent. You yourself claimed that this is beyond the pale. We might ask the OP's question, "Why?" I gave a general answer <here>. A more fine-grained answer would delve into the notions of guilt, innocence, and desert. To kill an innocent person is to give what is not due; what is not deserved. The irrationality arises from this disproportion of desert.
Okay, and I am wondering if we can simplify this a bit. I would want to say that if someone asserts a proposition then their assertion can be either true or false. If someone provides reasoning for a proposition their argument can be sound or unsound, and valid or invalid. So there are two basic categories: true/false and sound/unsound, where validity is presupposed by soundness and invalidity is a particular form of unsoundness. Everyone will agree that an invalid argument is irrational, but there are disagreements about whether things like false assertions or unsound yet valid arguments are irrational.
In any case, I think we are on the same page with this.
Quoting Janus
Okay, interesting. It's as if we are open to the possibility that one person ought to be treated differently than every other person, but it would have to be shown that this is true, and we doubt that it will ever be shown.
Quoting Janus
Yes, I tried to say something similar <here>.
There is a live question in this thread about whether self-defenseboth personal and communalis rational. It is instrumentally rational in that it preserves a need, but many are undecided on the question of whether someone who decides to die for no reason is being irrational.
Let's use a different example. Let's say agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency detained and deported a legal US resident without due process of law. I would call that unreasonable, procedural, and cruel and unusual.
As I said, let's leave this here. I don't want to distract from where you want the discussion to go.
Okay. Incidentally, how do you see the issue of speech impinging on the question of terrorism? Are you thinking of cases where we inhibit a terrorist's forms of expression?
Quoting ssu
I added this to a previous post after I saw your question:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting ssu
Yes, but the question here is whether there is an specific need to evaluate the perpetrator's culpability. If we do that, then we are involved in a moral judgment of the person, and we don't always do that. In the case of the terrorist I don't think we really care about their culpability. We don't care if they acted in "good faith" or "bad faith."
Quoting ssu
Is there a moral difference between a terrorist who believes he has a just moral cause and one who is acting in bad faith, say, by desiring excessive and disproportionate revenge?
Is there a moral difference between a terrorist and a traitor?
Well we were discussing procedural vs. cruel and unusual by separating the two, so that we can see each in its own light. When you combine them all together and decline to consider them separately there is no possible way to have a philosophical discussion about whether the "cruel and unusual" value judgment possess a non-procedural nature.
Quoting T Clark
I don't see that procedural vs evaluative is off topic.
The age-old answer to this claim is that rationality can be used or misused, much like a gun. "Rationality can be used for rationalization, therefore it is not normative," is a lot like saying, "Guns can be used for murder, therefore they are not good." There are accountants who use their accounting skills to embezzle funds, and there are accountants who use their accounting skills to account. Using the art of accounting to ensure that others make accounting mistakes (and overlook your embezzlement) is a perversion of the art of accounting.
Else, if rationality was nothing more than rationalization, then different levels of rationality would have no non-social effect. But that's obviously false. The person who is more rational will be much more skillful at navigating nature, and nature doesn't care a whit about rationalizations. Similarly, cultures that are more rational will succeed vis-a-vis nature in ways that cultures which are less rational will not.
What tells you if it's being used or misused? A rational argument?
To inhibit the expressions of terrorist should be understandable.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think we should always evaluate the perpetrators culpability. Many times it can be easy, when it's someone that uses violence to instill fear. Sometimes it's difficult. I'm not sure why you insist that we wouldn't care about the culpability of someone. In politics and legislation there are always moral question that we try to answer to the best of our knowledge.
Not really. "Terrorist organization sues Finland over free speech rights," isn't exactly a common headline.
Quoting ssu
For example, the law distinguishes manslaughter from murder, but with terrorism there is no such distinction. The law does not distinguish terrorists who were acting in good faith from terrorists who were acting in bad faith.
You've ignored the question about the traitor twice now.
Why do you ask questions or post on TPF at all if the only answers you will get are rationalizations? If you didn't think your interlocutor would answer honestly rather than rationalize, you wouldn't ask them a question at all, and you wouldn't log in to TPF.
I said morality isn't based on rationality because it supports both good and evil.
You said that if it supports evil it's being misused.
I asked how you know when rationality is being misused. You don't have an answer.
Sorry, I don't understand your point. :sad:
Quoting Leontiskos
OK, now I understand what you were after.
Well, do notice that when "terrorism" isn't confined to a tiny cabal of people who we would call homicidal maniacs, it becomes a totally different thing. I already mentioned here the power of numbers. Just think of an insurgency: the insurgents are still terrorists, criminals, but an insurgency isn't just a string of terrorist attacks. Then the case is that the terrorists are "illegal combatants", but usually insurgencies eithers succeed to win the war or there is a political settlement, and the terrorist become people who you can negotiate with (even if at the start this was an impossibility). In a political settlement the terrorists become politicians themselves. There are so many examples of this in history that I don't know where to start.
Traitor and a terrorist are quite different things. To be prosecuted about treason is really different from terrorism, so here I'm not sure what you are thinking about.
I think one could kill the innocent and not be wrong. Anscombe's paper on the doctrine of double effect really hammered home this point for me. She'll use an example, e.g., a bomber flying a mission against a weapons factory who incidentally ends up killing innocents.
Bombing ports or weapons factories is necessary for war, and Anscombe holds that what is necessary cannot be evil.
Murder is a specific type of killing, one that is uniquely wrong. It involves making the innocent one's target.
What about Trolley Car? The innocent is the target (or, you're slapping a big target on the innocent when you throw the switch which seems like a distinction without a difference)
Right, 'rational' is not strictly definable. You could say a rational argument is an argument consistent with its premises, in other words a valid argument. On the other hand, valid arguments can be utter nonsense. So, then we might want to say an argument needs to be valid and sound to count as rational. The problem is that premises are never justified by the arguments they justify, assuming the argument is valid. I think there is a normativity at play. Premises must be consistent with human experience and the overall human understanding of reality. Maybe they must be supported by either empirical observations or logical self-evidence, as with mathematics. But now we've ruled out much of metaphysics, at least as it is traditionally understood. We can thank Kant for that. But then his own purported synthetic a priori knowledge is not immune to critique.
But to the earlier point:
Quoting Janus
...One can do an intersubjective thing and call that rational, even with respect to morality. So one might say that racism is not objectively irrational but it is intersubjectively irrational. That could perhaps constitute a point of more general agreement within the thread.
I myself think racism is objectively irrational, in much the same way that "3 > 3" is irrational. Or as you imply, any implicit argument for racism will seem to be unsound, given that the conclusion is in fact false. This doesn't mean that we can beg the question and assume ahead of time that everyone's argument is unsound, but it is a basis for a judgment that the position is irrational.
Nothing that one does by accident is wrong per se, and this of course includes accidentally dropping bombs on the wrong people. Whether or not we call such an accident an act of killing is arguable, but it doesn't much matter.
For example, if you and I are running a race and our legs get tangled up as we round the corner you might claim that I have tripped you. Whether or not we want to say that
But coming back to the point, do you think that intentionally killing the innocent can only be seen to be wrong via divine commands? Or do you think that one can understand that intentionally killing the innocent is wrong even without the help of divine commands?
No, I think you misunderstood my point here.
Naturally those who fight the insurgents will likely call them terrorists. Even to admit that there is an insurgency is an admittance that give the other side justification of being an "enemy combatant". Enemy combatant isn't your ordinary criminal. Best example of this is Northern Ireland. In the UK the time is simply called "The Troubles". Yet in fact in it's official history the British military has written that what happened in Northern Ireland was an insurgency.
Yet naturally this wasn't ever acknowledged during the time. Hence the provincial IRA members fighting the British and the Unionists were treated as criminals, not enemy combatants. This lead to IRA members holding hunger strikes in prison.
In the end the British did seek and get a political solution, and people like Gerry Adams became a politician, even if he was in his earlier life the Officer commanding (OC) of the 2nd battalion of the Belfast Brigade from 1971-1972, became the adjutant for the brigade in 1972, and had become the OC of the brigade by 1973. So here you have a leader of a terrorist organization becoming a respected politician.
Best example how "terrorists" can become accepted politicians is the case of the friendship of Winston Churchill and the South African president Jan Smuts. When they first met, Churchill was a British prisoner-of-war and Smuts his Boer interrogator during the Boer war. (This friendship also shows that a good interrogator doesn't torture, but creates a confidential and trusting relationship at best with whom he interrogates.)
Quoting Leontiskos
It is related to the OP in the way that just what is accepted and what isn't changes. I assume that you are thinking of the question from a philosophical perspective and assume there would be a fit for all occasions answer. Yet the simple fact is that when issues are political (as they usually are), just what is acceptable and what isn't changes through time.
Even if the bomb is dropped intentionally on a legitimate target with the knowledge that innocents are inside and that death will likely result, it is permissible under double effect. It is not the same as murder.
Quoting Leontiskos
For me, the overriding force behind the prohibition is DCT. I agree with you that the murderer does not belong in society (so I do see merit in other reasons). Perhaps the murder occurs where there is no society, though.
All I'm saying is that if I had to pick the main reason, it would be DCT although I do see merit in others. I'm sympathetic to the idea that murder really damages the psyche or soul of the murderer. And as mentioned, I agree that the murderer is unfit for society.
An unwillingness to engage in a rational discussion.
I'd say the fact that a person is being irrational is grounds to write off their views, their arguments, their thought processes, their senses of the facts. You may get the the point that conversation is impossible.
But this still is never grounds to write off the whole person. No grounds for any basket of deplorables, or any other simplistic caricature of something less than a person.
We are all on the same earth, so if we find someone in our midst who is "beyond the pale" we should ask ourselves, "how is it that I am standing right next to them?"
Quoting Leontiskos
Ending the conversation is justified. Preventing them from causing harm in their irrationality is justified. Teaching others about the rational and the irrational, using the irrational opinion as an example of such irrationality is justified.
Quoting Leontiskos
Never. We are mistaken every time we equate a whole person with any one thing they say or do, or even the many things they say or do. We are mistaken for identifying ourselves or others, with some group or ideology. It's is just not the case that people are so simple they can be known completely by other people. Personhood, is an ocean. Opinions, ideologies, life's work, these are rivers, creeks, puddles. (The only scenario where the simple identification of a person with something outside that person is someone who identifies with Christ, who lives in Christ, but this would not pose a question of writing them off - it would be more like they wrote the entire universe off and joined Christ, but I digress.)
In my view, if you think someone else is a person, but that person has immoral, destructive beliefs and behaviors, and that person is always irrational, then that person is beyond you. You are justified in refuting everything they say, disengaging in any conversation, telling them they should stop, stopping them when they assault or worse. Such irrational immoralists do not cease being persons because they are buried in confusion, irrationality, immorality and destruction. And it is the fact that they are always people that forecloses both the ability to truly write them off, and forecloses the possibility that it can be justified that I write them off. Such a person should be our goal to assist in their salvation.
In my view, anyone who writes off another human being is condemning themselves with them. How much better is a saint than a Hitler? Who among us can accurately measure the distance between them? Is there enough of a gap between them that would permit the saint to write Hitler off? Is that what saints ever do when faced with Hitlers?
___
I think the point of you posing these questions is to demonstrate just what I'm saying - writing off people is a mistake in itself. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Writing people off who are otherwise trying to be rational and discuss their views, whatever they are, is weakness. Once we identify another person as a person at all, it is too late for us to be in a position to write them off.
When we have to shake the dust off of our sandals and turn our backs on people, we shouldn't think of this as foreclosing all hope for such people. We just foreclose our individual ability to reach them, today. Who knows how and whether reason and truth will penetrate their hard hearts some other way, some other time? They are people, just like me, who grow. We should hope and pray hardest for those people who we cannot even fathom how they think and do what they do.
So my short answer is, there is no criteria for ever writing people off as beyond the pale. Perhaps only criteria for writing off my own ability to reach them. Perhaps criteria for writing off other people's ability to help themselves, but then, they only beg for more of my attention, not less of it.
I'm fairly confident you're misreading Anscombe, as a side-effect is not intended. But Bob Ross and I beat this to death a year ago, and the topic will take us too far afield.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Okay, so then you don't think, "Do not kill the innocent," is a rational statement? There is no reason not to kill someone just because he is innocent?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Okay, so maybe you think the statement is rational because it harms the murderer.
Sure, but I think we want to talk about philosophers, scientists, sociologists, etc., rather than journalists. Journalists are constrained by the Overton window in a special way.
I don't think rational is a property of statements. It's about the way a person believes or behaves. You believe P rationally if you have a decent reason to believe it. But the bar doesn't have to be particularly high. If you believe P because experts agree that P, then you're behaving rationally, and your belief is rational.
Okay, good.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Sure.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Agreed.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Okay, but is a material position sufficient to deem them irrational?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Okay, good points.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Maybe that's part of it, but another part is to provide sound criteria for different forms of dismissals, so that we do not shade too far into excessive dismissal. Dismissal of personhood would be an extreme example of that, but there are also ways in which we tend to dismiss someone as irrational when they haven't actually shown themselves to be so. Only if we know what it actually means to be irrational or racist will we have a starting point to make proper judgments regarding these matters.
Quoting Fire Ologist
This is sound advice. :up:
In your case the question would be: Okay, so then you don't think, "Do not kill the innocent," is the conclusion of a sound argument?
If you believe X because experts attest to it, but you simultaneously deny that the experts could have any sound arguments to hand, then you are being irrational. (This is precisely why faith is only rational if the guarantor is thought to have access to knowledge.)
Is your definition of "terrorist" just "enemy combatant"? Do you disagree with the proposition that all insurgents are terrorists?
Quoting ssu
I think political scientists also have to reckon with logical validity. Suppose, as seems reasonable, that a terrorist is not merely an enemy combatant; and it is not true that all insurgents are terrorists. If this is right, then it looks like your arguments are invalid.
Edit: This is the puzzle for me. You have wanted to talk about terrorism since your very first post. Thats fine, terrorism is obviously on topic. And we have talked about it in the intervening posts. I think weve hardly disagreed at all: terrorism should be opposed, terrorists can be dismissed, exported, censored, etc. So it doesnt seem like a fruitful topic. What more is there to say about terrorism? But just because we have covered terrorism, that doesnt mean we have covered the notion of dismissal. This is because there are all sorts of forms of dismissal unrelated to terrorism. I think the most interesting ones involve using a moral judgment of the dismissed as part of ones rational grounds for dismissal. I suggested the topic of treason, since it is also related to international relations but gives a fresh, non-terrorism topic. Again, I'm not sure what else there is to say about terrorism.
I believe that time slows down (relatively) near a black hole. I don't have a sound argument for it, though. I just know that's what experts say. Most would consider my belief rational. I have a good reason to believe it. Other rational bases for belief would be things like direct observation, some use of logic, or that everybody believes P. Believing P for emotional reasons isn't usually considered rational.
Quoting Leontiskos
I guess. Experts are expected to have evidence, though.
So if you can only rationally accede to an expert if you presume that they possess sound arguments, then you cannot accede to an expert regarding the proposition, "Do not kill the innocent," while simultaneously claiming that such propositions are not rational (i.e. cannot be the conclusion of a sound argument).
More simply, if you continue maintain that the only possible support for a proposition like, "Do not kill the innocent," is rationalization, then you would be irrational to assent to that proposition on the testimony of an expert. Indeed, if some field is full of nothing more than rationalization, then there are no experts of that field.
Having sound arguments is only one kind of acceptable justification. There are others.
If you believe P without justification, your belief is irrational.
Rationality is not a property of statements or propositions. It's a property of behavior and belief.
If you believe P without justification, your belief is irrational.
Quoting Leontiskos
I've never maintained that.
I think you're nitpicking. What does the expert have that you don't?
(Evidence is not had independent of argument and reasoning.)
Quoting frank
Your earlier posts seem to tell a different story.
Having sound arguments is only one kind of acceptable justification for belief.
What do you think counts as acceptable justification for belief?
Hence, I think part of the issue might be that, since we rely on social norms to survive, we have an intuitive aversion to norm breakers, and obviously moral norms will be particularly salient. If the response is akin to fears of contagion (which has a certain logic, norm breaking tends to spread), it would make sense to quarantine the infected through ostracism.
You could probably go deeper with that thought using the idea of memes as being akin to viruses. Some ideas are seen as infectious agents. They need a host to thrive. You don't want the hijacking the faculties of a fellow citizen with good oratory skills, social capital, status, wealth, etc., else they might spread the disease.
Perhaps this also explains why people often feel more comfortable with marginalized groups being racist, sexist, etc. They don't fear contagion from those groups. "Let them hate Blacks in the trailer park, or talk about killing gays in the ghetto, it won't spread here," but if the same thing shows up in campus discussions, it becomes dire.
I think that's right, as long as you meant something like "disapprobation" rather than approbation.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think what you say is exactly right, but I think the explanation needs to be taken a bit farther.
Not all viruses are pathogens.* Some are in fact beneficial. Therefore we are not actually concerned with virus contamination per se, but rather with pathogenic virus contamination. What this means is that we need a way to determine whether a virus is pathogenic or beneficial, otherwise the disgust/disapprobation phenomenon can never get off the ground in the first place.
The term "social norms" has the same bivalent nature as "virus." To merely pass on norms for the sake of passing on norms, or to merely avoid virus contamination for the sake of avoiding virus contamination, is not rational (at least unless we have reason to believe that norms/viruses are good/bad either per se or at least on the whole). So someone who has no justification for determining whether a virus is pathogenic or beneficial is not rational in trying to avoid contamination; and someone who has no justification for determining whether a moral norm is true or false is not rational in propagating that moral norm within society. If we can't assess the particular then we can't assess the aggregate, and pointing to the aggregate is not a real solution until we can also point to the particular (translated into virus language: "If we can't assess the virus then we can't assess the question of contamination, and pointing to the disgust/disapprobation phenomenon is not a real solution until we can also decide whether the virus is pathogenic or beneficial"). This is precisely the same problem that runs up when he leans so heavily on faith that he falls into a vicious circleas fideists are also wont to dofor faith in a scientist who cannot discern a beneficial virus from a pathogenic virus is otiose.
In other words, it seems to me that what basically happens in these cases is that we forget to distinguish viruses from pathogenic viruses, or matter from form. For example:
But when you run this algorithm day and night without keeping Aristotle's mean in mind, what you end up with is the excesses of intersectionality and a culture where victimization (or its appearance) is the ultimate prize. When the culture reaches that extreme everything flips, and the virus becomes beneficial whereas the social norm becomes pathogenic.
Jonathan Haidt follows some of the disgust research. His conclusion is that conservatives tend to avoid contamination whereas liberals tend to seek contamination (or cross-pollination). The societal pendulum swings to the left when excessive conservatism pathologizes good viruses, and it swings to the right when excessive liberalism greenlights pathogenic viruses. Nevertheless, the point I want to emphasize is that we must be able to determine which viruses are beneficial or pathogenic and why. This is the task set before us by the OP, at least insofar as social norms are concerned.
* I realize that I am here altering your negatively connoted sense of 'virus', but bear with me...
Yes, the side effect (deaths of the innocents) is unintended; therefore, the innocents are not murdered by the bomber, but rather killed.
Quoting Leontiskos
It functions fine as a general rule, but it's unserious when said to, e.g., a navy captain preparing to attack a port or a bomber pilot preparing for war.
Morality must be practical/doable; otherwise, it is useless, if not worse than useless.
Quoting Leontiskos
Sure, we could say that - it would be true as a general rule. Perhaps there are some hardened killers out there to whom one more death would mean nothing.
Okay, so it sounds like you now think there is something other than divine commands which support this prohibition.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
That something is morally wrong does not mean no one would ever do it.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
...Continuing, we might say, "It functions fine as a general rule, but it's unserious when said to, e.g., Hitler preparing to exterminate the Jews." Hitler killed innocents, but it does not follow from this that it is not wrong to kill innocents. Whether or not the navy captain is right is not determined by what he does, as if the killing is made right by his doing it.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Anscombe does not hold that everything which is necessary for war is permissible. That is in fact her broader point regarding the nuclear bomb.
I don't want to take the thread off-course, but I just want to say that I cannot see how metaphysical speculations can be either empirically or logically confirmed or disconfirmed.
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm not sure what "intersubjectively irrational" could mean regarding racism. In the case of something like murder, it seems to work insofar as virtually no one would think murder is a good thing. But perhaps you are working with a different idea about what "Intersubjectively irrational" should be understood to mean.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think this is more along the lines I was thinking. There simply are no sound criteria for considering one race to be, tout court, inferior to another. And since such a claim could be the only justifiable premise for a rational defense of racism, it would seem to be objectively indefensible.
I don't think there's a good answer other than "I have limited time" for non-theists. Most theists have a weak argument, anyway. I don't think there is anything but a rational justification for dismissing one on the basis of what they're saying. Is it a waste of your time? Fair enough. But you can't use morality to justify your own morality, which is what must be informing your actions. Its just instrumental rationality that would have you not 'waste time' or some such.
But unfortunately, that says absolutely nothing about the other person, and only about you and your views. I don't think many people front to that. Therefore, most people interpret their dismissiveness/discontinuance in such circumstances as morally justified. In some sense, it is. Their moral views justified the action. But it seems to me this is, prima facie, just toddler-like over-emotional behaviour. It isn't moral. It's "I'm right, you're wrong". So we're left with the practical consideration of whether or not its helpful/beneficial/worth it to continue the exchange/relationship.
For me, the only time I genuinely feel justified in dismissing someone is when they clearly are not listening. Their views never make me feel justified in shutting them down.
My views do, though, at times, because I think practical considerations are in play and not moral ones.
Thanks! I wrote the OP late at night when I was tired and it has gone in all different directions, which is great.
Quoting AmadeusD
Okay. I think limited time is an important non-moral means of dismissal (in the sense that we are at least not making a moral judgment about our interlocutor). As you imply, the word "dismissal" may not even be the right word for this sort of thing.
Quoting AmadeusD
I agree. I was going to ask if you ever feel this way, but you yourself provide one exception:
Quoting AmadeusD
First, I agree that one's own morals are implicated in the judgment that, "I have limited time; I must depart." In that sense this is a moral dismissal. Nevertheless, let's save the term "moral dismissal" for the situation where you dismiss someone based on a moral judgment of their own actions or behavior. Ergo: "I am dismissing you because of such-and-such an action of yours, or such-and-such a behavior of yours, and I would do so even if I had ample time to engage you."
With that groundwork laid, when you dismiss someone who is not listening are you engaged in a moral dismissal? In your head are you saying to them, "I am dismissing you because you are clearly not listening, and I would do so even if I had ample time to engage you"?
"Not listening" can seem like a small exception to the rulein this case the rule that dismissals pertain to time constraints. Nevertheless, I think "not listening" dismissals are actually very substantial, important, and common. I think it would be worthwhile to explore the idea that we dismiss someone who is clearly not listening to us.
Quoting AmadeusD
From this it sounds like you would reject the idea that a material position is sufficient grounds for dismissal.
I actually don't know what it means either. I was just trying to throw a bone to the people around here who talk that way. :sweat:
Quoting Janus
Okay, good. I agree.
But here's a question. Let's supposeas you seem to implythat claims must be susceptible to empirical data or logic. With that in mind, consider our claim, "There simply are no sound criteria for considering one race to be, tout court, inferior to another." What justifies this claim empirically or logically? Specifically I want to explore the question of whether this claim is empirically or logically falsifiable. If it isn't empirically or logically falsifiable, then must we say that it is a kind of nonsense?
Quoting Janus
I suppose the easiest answer is that metaphysical speculations could be logically disconfirmed by the principle of non-contradiction, no? Beyond that, I will leave the topic to the many other threads that cover it. (Although I suppose it is worth noticing that my question above is asking whether our claim is "metaphysical" in your sense of the word.)
I don't think you understand my point here at all.
Who is defined basically just a troll or a crackpot, a criminal, a terrorist, an illegal/legal combatant depends on the political situation and the general acceptance of the issue. I've tried now to explain with examples that for a long time.
Quoting Leontiskos
Legality of a combatant is defined by the Geneva Protocols and Hague Regulations. What also here is crucial is what the response is. Some Anders Breivik doing a deadly terrorist attack in Norway was a criminal case and Breivik is in prison for his action in Norway. The UK engaged with the provincial IRA in Northern Ireland was a de facto insurgency, but the UK government kept it as an de jure criminal case against the IRA members, however reached a political solution in Northern Ireland, which has held. The US invading Afghanistan faced a de facto insurgency against the Taliban, and basically negotiated peace directly with the Taleban turning the back on the Republic of Afghanistan, which then the latter simply collapsed with the Taleban offensive.
In all cases from Breivik to the IRA and to the Taleban, at some stage they were named to be terrorists, yet the end result was totally different.
Quoting Leontiskos
Dismissal works actually the same way. If one person holds a view that everybody else thinks is wrong and false, we will dismiss him either being a troll or some crackpot. Yet if there are many people who hold this view, then comes issues like is it a proper thing to say, is it acceptable in the Overton window of our society. If it's something that millions of people hold a similar view in our society, then we will likely give respect to the view, even if we personally oppose it.
lol, the word I was searching for was "opprobrium."
I agree with you, and we could stretch the analogy to say that overly aggressive conservatism is like an autoimmune disease that attacks the proper ordering of the body. It's like anaphylaxis. Perfectly healthy food sources become downright fatal, depriving the organism of what would otherwise be healthy food. Whereas the liberal pathology might be something more akin to AIDS, an inability of the immune system to recognize pathology, or in the more advanced forms of Wokism that lead to Cultural Revolution style struggle sessions and the destruction of institutions and history, it becomes like MS, the immune system actually attacking the body because it sees it, and not the pathogens as threats.
But of course you are right, we can and should exercise rational discernment in such matters. Whether we always do is another matter. A lot of this stuff is habit so overcoming pathology means intentional training. The problem is that the disease can also involve efforts at intentional training (e.g., some tolerance and DEI trainings have been shown to have the opposite of the results they are intended to have, or to be supported by pseudoscience, and yet they remain common practices because to challenge them is seen as being against "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and who would want to be against that?)
Lets use your notion of divine commands to take a step back. Why does the OP care about rationality in the first place?
The OP is thinking of cases where we invoke some rule or law that binds both of us, for the sake of dismissing someone who has transgressed that binding rule. What this requires is something that has binding force, whether we like it or not.
1. He did X
2. X is beyond the pale
3. Therefore, I dismiss him
Note that dismissing someone (i.e., 3) is not generally permissible or justifiable. We cant just go around dismissing people for no reason at all. We must have a good reason to do so. Now the reason given must be something which binds them (and also us, of course). The X in (1) must be sufficient to justify (3), and the justification must be something that the dismissed can themselves recognize. If they cannot recognize it, then morally judging their action to be culpably wrong is irrational.
4. The transgression of a law is only applicable if the transgressor is accountable to the law
5. Everyone is accountable to reason and rationality
6. Therefore, if a law is derived from reason, then it will be generally applicable
The OP cares about reason because reason provides a binding law or norm. If there is no binding norm then, I dismiss you because you are guilty of pedophilia, is no more justifiable than, I dismiss you because you breathed on my goldfish. If there is no binding norm then we have no reason to tell others not to kill innocents. In that case everything is just a power game.
The trouble with divine commands is that they are local to a subset of people. A divine command can be used to dismiss someone who accepts the divine command, but it has no force over someone who does not accept the divine command. It does no good to tell a would-be murderer about Gods command against murder if he doesnt believe in God.
This may all be obvious, but I think it bears mentioning. If there is no binding norm which undergirds our dismissals then, on pains of irrationality, I think we simply have to stop accusing people of racism, pedophilia, murder, dishonesty, unkindness, etc. If there is no binding norm then the accused murderer should say something similar to the accused goldfish-breather, Whats at all wrong with breathing on goldfish!?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Perhaps because the correlation amounts to a circular argument. The choice of words like cheater and violator has already decided on condemnation and blame, which emerge out of the affectivity of anger. One could say, then, that it is a well documented fact that people have particularly strong reactions to people who make them
angry.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, it seems to be a contradiction in terms to indoctrinate for diversity, equity and inclusion. But the urge to yoke aspirational goals to a sovereign principle is a secularized holdover from the long-held belief in a divinely-anchored sovereign material and ethical nature, which the use here of pathological and unscientific depends on.
Very welcome!
Quoting Leontiskos
I think this is the right way to think of a 'moral' judgement in this context.
Quoting Leontiskos
This probably happens, but in terms of habit, no, this isn't the case. What I'm thinking internally is "I have other things to be getting on with, and this is not satisfying enough to overturn my commitment to the other things" or something similar. I often engage in hilariously dumb conversations when I have the time (I find it relaxing, in some way, so there's no sort of sacrifice happening there).
Quoting Leontiskos
To be fair, I think its a dismissal of the event, not the person. I think this is a crucial difference between some practical constraint, and some psychological constraint (the oft-repeated "I just can't..." among younger socio-political commentators). Leading to...
Quoting Leontiskos
This one is a bit more complicated. What do we mean by "dismissal"? Are you dismissing the person, as a whole, from your entire worldly purview? Are you dismissing that view of theirs? Are you dismissing their expertise on a topic they're woefully unqualified to profess on?
In the case, that i take from you OP, that we're wanting to morally condemn the person in a way that means something like "they are a bad person, and I won't engage with them", then no. No, I don't think I've had that happen in the last decade at least. Views are views. People are people. People hold views but do not become them.
I've already said that I see some merit or legitimacy in other reasons to not, e.g., commit murder, but the only one that truly gives murder the quality of moral wrong or evil is DCT - at least in my view.
Quoting Leontiskos
Sure, but what I was getting at is that there are fringe cases (of murder, for instance) where the murder may occur outside of society, or the murderer's psyche truly wouldn't be affected by it.
Quoting Leontiskos
The difference here is that the navy captain and bomber pilot are necessary; Hitler murdering all the Jews is not. What is necessary cannot be evil.
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't think she viewed the nuclear bomb as necessary for the war.
Haha, that makes more sense. :smile:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, those are good analogies.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, and thus some are intentionally creating bad habits of mind and society. That's where I think the OP and a focus on discerning pathogenic from beneficial viruses is helpful. We have to get down to giving actual reasons for moral opprobrium (including ).
I think the claim is supported logically by the fact that no purely logical reason for considering races to be inferior or superior seem to be possible. If they were possible, it should be easy enough to find them, or they certainly should have been found by now, and yet they have not been, and seemingly cannot be, found, hence the conclusion that they at least do not seem to be possible.
The same goes for empirical reasons. Even if, contrary to the actual situation we find, some races could be empirically demonstrated to be stronger or smarter in general than others, being stronger or smarter does not logically entail being superior tout court. That humans generally have considered themselves to be superior, tout court rather than just in this or that context, to animals is itself not a rationally defensible view.
This is sort of like saying, "The racist has the burden of proof, not me." We've agreed that it is probably right, but it's not a very rigorous argument, and its conclusion is not very strong. The racist would just tell you that it has been found and you're not paying attention.
I think this sentence is really the important one to answer:
Quoting Leontiskos
What could falsify our claim?
What could falsify our claim? If someone could come up with a logical proof or irrefutable empirical evidence for a racist claim.
See, but that's just not how an argument for falsifiability works. Suppose a scientist comes up with a theory that seems unfalsifiable and you ask him how his theory could be falsified. He responds to you, "If someone could come up with a logical proof or irrefutable empirical evidence for a claim that contradicts my theory." Of course, if someone could do that, then it would be falsified. But we are asking him to provide evidence that it is falsifiable. We are asking, "Can someone do that?" To ask the scientist the question is just to ask him, "How could someone, in principle, come up with a logical proof or irrefutable empirical evidence for a claim that contradicts your theory?" His answer is really nothing more than, "If someone falsified it then it would be falsified." Of course. But we are asking how that might be done in principle.
For example, suppose someone proposes the thesis, "The Earth is flat." I then ask, "What could falsify your thesis?" Now consider two answers to that question:
Do you see how Answer 2 is not an answer to the question at all?
Okay, great.
Quoting AmadeusD
Okay, fair enough. :grin:
Quoting AmadeusD
I think you may have misread the sentence, or that instead of "reject" you read "accept."
Let me press you from two angles, first analytically and then experientially.
Suppose you are standing in the hall at a philosophy conference and you can hear two speakers giving two different lectures in two different rooms. You are listening to what each speaker is saying, trying to decide which lecture to attend. You can either go into the first speaker's room and listen to them, go into the second speaker's room and listen to them, or do something else entirely. Suppose you go into the second speaker's room, and let's call this the effect. On my view, a necessary cause of this effect is that you found the second speaker more interesting or time-worthy than the first speaker. So if we consider both speakers as causes, then you judged the two causes and judged one better than the other (i.e. more interesting or time-worthy). I am not here supposing that you have morally judged either of the speakers.
This is meant to demonstrate that even if we are concerned with our time, we are still judging others as causes and deciding which causes of dialogue or information are time-worthy. So far, so good? But now consider that people such as these speakers are often aware that others are judging them for time-worthiness. Switching now to comedians rather than philosophy lecturers, a comedian might think to himself, "This is going poorly; the audience is getting restless; therefore I am going to switch over to some of my older, tried-and-true jokes." He does this because he is aware of the fact that the audience is judging whether he is time-worthy, and he is adjusting his comedy routine in light of his interpretation of the audience's judgment.
Now suppose that two comedians are performing tonight in different locations but at the exact same time. You like both of them, but one of them is much better at this sort of reflexive adjusting of his comedy routine depending on the audience's reaction. He knows how to "read the room" better. Because of this, you decide to see him instead of the other comedian. At this point I think it is much less clear whether you have morally judged the two comedians. This is because you are judging the comedian's behavior, habits, abilities, and particularly his ability to be self-conscious and conscientious. At this point has your "time-worthiness" judgment of the "cause" become moral without ceasing in any way to be a judgment of time-worthiness? If not, then what would you actually have to do in order to morally judge a comedian or some other person?
(For Aristotle this is surely 'moral' (although that word is anachronistic), and there is no reason why a time-worthiness judgment must be a non-moral judgment.)
Now the experiential angle. Have you ever had a significant other? Because it is fairly common for a woman to say to her boyfriend, "You aren't listening to me!" Usually moral judgment is involved. Do you see that as irrational, given that it doesn't really seem to be a matter of time-worthiness? Could she ever be rationally justified in morally judging her boyfriend in this way?
Sure, but that's just a societal observation. It avoids all of the crucial questions of the OP. My post <here> addresses the things you are talking about, in a thread where they are relevant.
Check out <this post>. You are focused on what people, or majorities, or societies, deem to be beneficial or pathogenic. All you are really saying is, "If the society thinks the virus is pathogenic, then the virus will be treated as pathogenic in that society. And if the society thinks the virus is beneficial, then the virus will be treated as beneficial in that society." Of course. This is obvious. It sheds no light at all on the question of whether or why the individual or the society composed of individuals has formed a correct judgment about the virus. This form of circular reasoning has been very common in this thread, as if no appeal to the rationality of the virus-judgments is necessary. That sort of circular reasoning is just a recipe for societal tyranny, where everyone apes the societal trends and no one is able to think through the societal judgments rationally.
I didn't, but reading back I can see exactly hot it comes across that way. Just had more to say about it, because a rejection would intimate i accepted the premise. Which was a bit shaky. Sorry for that. Should've been much clearer in what I was tryign to convey. I reject it.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think I'm judging myself in making that decision. What do my values purport to press me into? If I value the Hard Problem over the problem of Infinite Regress, I may go to speaker 2's lecture because I think my existing levels of value are secure and worth maintaining (i'm sure the implicature is clear here). That's a judgement on my own notions of what's worth my time.
Lecture 1 may have pushed me out of that, by being more interesting that my existing judgement and thus creating a new judgement about only that speaker (well, their speaking rather than the speaker). I'm not convinced this is right. But it gets me around the idea that I actually care what either speaker is doing in their respective rooms. I already care about X or Y in varying degrees. The efficient cause might be the literal speaking, but the final cause of any decision of that kind is one about myself, I think. Where I want to be, and what do I want to be doing?
Quoting Leontiskos
No. Whether or not I like Comedian A better than Comedian B is not moral (I do, for argument sake). So far, so good. My existing preference is the reason for the choice, not an active judgement. Now you've entered the issue of conflicting elements of these comedians. Interesting...
But I still am under the impression my existing preference for a Comedian who can do such things is probably already built into my preference for Comedian A. I'm not gaining any new position on either comedian in making that decision. It's based on an assessment as against a rubric, and so I'm not actually making any judgement. Just looking at whether it fits the rubric. A does, B doesn't.
I get the distinct feeling this is missing your point though. Either way, I agree its less clear. I currently am comfortable with the above, but its an immature response to your TE so I might realise its nonsense.
Quoting Leontiskos
I am married. We often say this to each other. It is almost always a way to end a conversation without hard feelings. "I don't blame you personally, but this isn't getting anywhere. Lets try again another time" or some such. Perhaps we are weird.
The moral judgement you're talking about I think is just misplaced but it is moral. I think what a person in that scenario means is one of a few possible things that aren't just a complaint about time. It's possible I am somewhat unique in not using the phrase that way.
Some possibilities for an underlying implication could be:
- You are not adequately hearing me;
- You are are wilfully misinterpreting me; or
- You do not care about what I am saying.
Recently rereading Grice's Logic and Conversation recently I might just be being pedantic on how people use their expressions. But, it seems to me, no one could rightly be implying you're literally not listening in those situations. Therefore, the moral judgement (which seems to be there, i admit) is certainly not about it being a waste of time. It clearly isn't, if the complaint is that you're not being listened to. In my case, when i'm not being listened to (properly, rather than implying something else) I disengage. It isn't practically helpful (i.e productive). Again, not entirely sure here but it looks like there is a moral judgement which is not about time-wasting.
Okay, understood. I think I see what you are saying.
Quoting AmadeusD
But when you say that the efficient cause is their speaking, you are getting at my point. Namely:
Quoting Leontiskos
If you were merely "judging yourself" while making the decision, then you would have made the same decision even if you were entirely deaf. But that can't be right, and this is because you are also judging the audible content coming from the speakers' mouths (and this audible content is not coming from yourself). That is what I mean when I say that you judged the two causes (e.g. causes of sound waves) and judged one to be better than the other. Your own predilections also come into play, but they are not sufficient for the decision apart from the speakers.
Quoting AmadeusD
I agree, and I am not claiming that you are gaining new positions with the comedians or with the philosophy lecturers.
Quoting AmadeusD
But why isn't it moral? Why is it not a moral judgment to judge someone's ability to read the room and reflexively adapt their comedy routine? I am thinking specifically of the definition of "moral judgment" that we earlier agreed to.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think assessing against a rubric requires judgment. If you need a 10-foot pipe and you examine two possible candidates, you are inevitably involved in judgments, no?
Quoting AmadeusD
Okay.
I suspect that what you are really doing is trying to deny that such a moral judgment is objective. I have said that when you decide between the two philosophers you have judged them, but perhaps not morally (we could investigate whether that judgment is moral). And I have said that when you decide between the two comedians you have morally judged them. But I haven't said that either of the two judgments is objective.
Quoting AmadeusD
Okay, good work. :smile:
Quoting AmadeusD
I certainly agree that the phrase can be used/intended in different ways.
Quoting AmadeusD
Good - I agree.
Quoting AmadeusD
Let me expand on this idea of morally judging another:
It seems that to morally judge someone else is really just to judge their culpability. I would say that judgments of culpability are eminently rationalat least some of the time. If these three jointly sufficient conditions are fulfilled then a person is culpable:
1. They were able to act otherwise (and better) than they did act
2. They should have acted better
3. They know that they should have acted better
Similarly, for a praiseworthy or morally appropriate act:
1p. They were able to act otherwise (and worse) than they did act
2p. They should have acted as they did
3p. They know that they should have acted as they did
If it ever happens that 1, 2, and 3 are all true at the same time, then at least one culpable act has occurred. Do you agree with this, and if so, do you think it ever happens that all three are true at the same time?
It seems to me that sometimes when a spouse tells their partner that the partner is not listening, it is a moral judgment, and therefore the spouse holds 1, 2, and 3. Your suggestion of "willful misinterpretation" is a great example. We could substitute that term into the three conditions:
(On my view in order to say that (some) moral judgments are rational, we need only say that this sort of common and mundane phenomenon is rational.)
This is also why, for example, the comedian who can read the room is better and more praiseworthy (ceteris paribus). He knows that he ought to be reflexively attentive to his audience, he has developed the capabilities to be reflexively attentive to his audience, and he fulfills the requirement when necessary.
Of course, a simple claim about the form or other characteristics of an object, in your example, the Earth, can be falsified by an irrefutable observation. Scientific theories are a different kettle of fish. There are those who claim that just as scientific theories can never be definitively confirmed as true, they can never be definitively confirmed as false. So it is not a matter of scientific theories being true or false, but of their being coherent with the observed facts, and useful insofar as what they predict obtains.
So your points actually support the idea that there is no way to confirm or falsify a racist claim since there is no imaginable way to falsify or confirm it because it is simply not amenable to either logical proof or empirical evidence, and that is essentially what I've been saying. It is true that my claim that such is the case is also not falsifiable, but that is simply an observation, which in principle could be falsified if the racist could indeed come up with either a logical proof or definitive empirical evidence to support their racism. But we know they can't do that because it is impossible in principle anyway.
So your response is to say that scientific theories don't need to be falsifiable? That doesn't seem like a promising route.
Quoting Janus
If you are making an unfalsifiable claim, then I would say that is a problem. On your view such a claim would seem to be "metaphysics."
If the racist mirrors your claim then this is what they would say:
Is the racist's claim falsifiable? Here is what a historical U.S. racist might have argued:
1. Black people are not intellectually capable
2. Those who are not intellectually capable are, tout court, inferior to those who are intellectually capable
3. Therefore, Some race is, tout court, inferior to another
Now even if this is invalid it still looks to be falsifiable. Specifically, (1) could be falsified by producing evidence of black people who are intellectually capable (and this is precisely how opponents answered and eventually persuaded many of these racists or their progeny).
But the invalidity issue is the crux, and it is what makes your claim unfalsifiable.* The invalidity issue arises from the ambiguity of the qualification "tout court." If you don't know what it means for some race to be tout court inferior to another, then the reason the claim is unfalsifiable is because it lacks a real sense or meaning. In order to claim that such an assertion is falsifiable one must explain what it would mean for one race to be tout court inferior to another, and how we could ever come to know such a thing.
(Note too that one could choose to question the racist's claim without asserting the contradictory claim. They would do this by saying, "What you say lacks coherence," or, "I don't know what you mean by tout court." If one wanted to take a "burden of proof" stance, that would be the way to do it, but I think that approach will fail. In short, it fails because the anti-racist is more committed to the tout court claim than the racist is. For example, a strong Darwinian could be a racist without a care in the world about any tout court claims.)
* At least given secular premises.
You seem to be distorting what I said. I said some think that scientific theories are not falsifiable, I didn't say I endorse that view. Simple observations are definitively falsifiableyou just need to lookyou gave the 'flat earth' example. Scientific theories are falsifiable only insofar as their predictions fail to account for observed facts.
My claim is that racists cannot come up with definitive empirical proof that supports their case, and that their case is not logically self-evident. That claim is falsifiablesomeone would just need to come up with an empirical or logical proof.
I don't think this is right at all. I think the word "falsified" would make your claim true. It is not only inaccurate theories that are falsifiable. The very best scientific theories are also supposed to be falsifiable.
Quoting Janus
That's just a burden of proof claim, as I mentioned <here>. And again, if one is banking on the burden of proof, then they cannot make the claim that you have made about no races being inferior. said that it is irrational to "give air to assertions which are not rationally justifiable."
Quoting Janus
It is only falsifiable in the sense that the , "If someone falsified it then it would be falsified," shows something to be falsifiable. But this is a vacuous sense of falsifiability, as I explained. The racist could say the exact same thing to you, "My claim is that Janus cannot come up with definitive empirical proof that supports their case, and that their case is not logically self-evident."
This is good progress, though. First, note that no one else even tried to rationally defend their opposition to things like racism. Everyone else said that is has nothing to do with rationality. So I think your attempt is more than anyone else has done. But you've run up against a wall. You aren't giving legitimate reasons for why your claim is falsifiable, or rationally justified. I think that's normal, namely that we forget how to rationally justify our societal taboos. It is much harder to remember how to justify something that has come to be taken for granted, than something which is an object of discourse.
My suggestion would be to think about a vegetarian who confronts you, "No species is, tout court, inferior to another." Do you have to stop eating meat? Is their claim falsifiable? Does "tout court" have a discernible meaning in that context? If we cannot enslave those of a certain race, can we enslave those of a certain species?
(Of course it is possible that this suggestion will only confuse you - haha. Still, if natural reason can make these sorts of judgments about species, then at least some "tout court inferior" claims are not nonsensical or unfalsifiable. Note too that racism only came to an end with substantive answers to the falsifiability question. Racism would never have come to an end if we just claimed that the racist had the burden of proof (because the burden of proof is culture- and time-relative).)
The question boggles me, too. Thoughts and verbal or written expressions are perhaps the least consequential and harmless actions a person can make in his life time. So it is a conundrum why people get so worked up about beliefs and words and often respond with some very consequential and harmful actions, like censorship, ostracization, or even violence.
Can such an inconsequential act, like the imperceptible movements of the brain and making articulated sounds from the mouth, be evil? I dont think so. I believe the reactions to acts of speech, though, undoubtedly are, and represent some sort of superstition of language, though I no argument for it yet.
I think you are reading what I said in a different way than intended. Scientific theories can only be falsified insofar as their predictions fail to account for observed facts. It means that they are never definitvely falsified, or at least that they can never be definitively falsified is a defensible claim, and if you look at the literature this counter claim to Popper-s idea of falsification has indeed been made.
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm saying the claim that some races are inferior certainly seems to be unsupportable on the grounds that no one has been able to show any cogent evidence for it, and it seems impossible to imagine what cogent evidence would even look like.
I don't have time to say more right now.
Sure, we can use other reasons to try to convince the non-believer. We could even appeal to his moral system, assuming he has one. Even in that best-case scenario (where the nonbeliever has a secular system that he follows), he might not care or have some other overriding concern that trumps the system. The question of moral motivation is a different matter from moral philosophy.
I heard a statistic yesterday that around 1 in 5 young people condone stealing from large corporations, depending on the circumstances. We can use non-religious reasons to try to deter them. For instance, we can tell them that stealing from grocery stores leads to higher prices for everyone. There will always be those who just aren't motivated, though, and for those, we unfortunately need to lay down the law and ensure this type of behavior is disincentivized.
We are talking about falsifiability, not falsification. Scientific theories can be falsifiable even if they are not falsified.
Quoting Janus
Again, in that case it sounds like both you and your interlocutor are making unfalsifiable claims.
Again, "No one has been able to show evidence for it," is not a real argument. It is a kind of burden of proof claim. You and your interlocutor can keep telling each other that for all eternity. It goes nowhere. It is not a rational justification in any substantial sense. A good rule of thumb is to note that if your interlocutor can justly mirror back to you your "argument," then it isn't a substantial argument. See also:
Quoting Leontiskos
In other words, if you really wanted to limit yourself to burden of proof jockeying then you would need to give up your claim, "No race is, tout court, inferior to another" (paraphrased). You would need to stop asserting it, believing it, thinking it, defending it, etc. But I think the most honest way forward is to simply admit that you/we do believe that claim, and then to ask whether we have any rational justification for the belief (and burden of proof jockeying does not really count as rational justification).
To see how weak the burden of proof claim is, one can simply place it in a syllogism and recognize the logical invalidity:
It doesn't require a moral judgment. I am at pains to understand how this question arose.
Quoting Leontiskos
Feel free. I don't consider that judgment. If i'm marking a student's exam against a rubric of which out of A, B, C or D is 'correct' for each question, i'm doing no judgement at all. I feel the same applies here.
Quoting Leontiskos
AS above, it should be clear I am not. Though, I agree, It couldn't be even if it were moral/ethical.
Quoting Leontiskos
That would be judging their moral culpability. Again, finding it hard to understand how these sorts of things arise. Do you not see that there are any other kinds of judgements going on in life?
"Scientific theories can be falsified insofar" means "scientific theories are falsifiable insofar" so I am talking about falsification. We won't get far if you keep presenting distorted readings of my posts.
Quoting Leontiskos
The claim that no evidence for or logical proof of a racist claim is falsifiable if such proof or evidence is possible. It would be falsified if someone produced such empirical evidence or logical proof. The further point is that no such evidence or proof is even imaginable, and I think that's why you keep saying my claim is unfalsifiable. But the fact that no such proof or evidence is imaginable only strengthens my position.
Why did you switch to talking about falsification rather than falsifiability? Here is what you said earlier, when you were still on topic:
Quoting Janus
(Again, this claim is simply false. Accurate theories can still be falsifiable even when they have not been falsified.)
Remember that the topic has always been falsifiability:
Quoting Leontiskos
The attempt to discuss falsification apart from falsifiability is a kind of red herring, one which helps your case but which is in fact beside the point. (Note that one can discuss falsifiability via notions of falsification, or they can discuss falsification as a way of avoiding the question of falsifiability. You seem to be engaged in the latter.)
Quoting Janus
Well yes, if there is no imaginable evidence for your claim or the racist's claim, then both claims are unfalsifiable, are they not? It seems like you are on the verge of simply admitting that your claim is unfalsifiable, and such an admission would not imply that the racist does not have the same problem. If I just look at the two claims it seems obvious that both claims are unfalsifiable.*
* At least on your conception of reason
I've already addressed your misinterpretation of the intended meaning of this sentence. Perhaps it wasn't expressed in the clearest of ways. Why bring it up again?
Quoting Leontiskos
My claim really just consists in the observation that there is no imaginable evidence for racist claims, and that they should thus be considered to be irrational. If you agree that there is no imaginable evidence for racist claims then why are you continuing to argue with me?
Isn't it just false?
Quoting Janus
Because it seems to me to be the last point in the conversation when you were clearly on topic, namely the topic of falsifiability.
Quoting Janus
Well let's look at some of your claims:
1. "There simply are no sound criteria for considering one race to be, tout court, inferior to another." ()
2. "No race is, tout court, inferior to another." (my paraphrase)
3. "there is no imaginable evidence for racist claims" ()
Since we are talking about falsifiability, what is your opinion? Is (1) falsifiable? Is (2) falsifiable? Is (3) falsifiable? The claims are all laid out in front of us; this should be a simple matter.
I think we agree that if some proposition is falsifiable then there must be a concrete possibility which would falsify it, such as the concrete possibility provided in <this post> by the flat Earther. So if you think any of these claims are falsifiable, then I would ask you to provide that "imaginative" possibility.
I think (2) is much clearer and easier to assess, but if you really want to look at (1) then I would say that (1) implies that there are no sound criteria for considering one race to be, tout court, equal to another. It precludes rational opposition to racism just as much as it precludes rational support of racism. It functions as a kind of nuclear option, and I don't see how that nuclear option could possibly help repel racism if it places the racist claim and the anti-racist claim on a par, as both being irrational (and ultimately unfalsifiable).
Quoting Janus
Because I want to see if you are, "giving air to assertions which are not rationally justifiable."
I don't think the whole racist debate is just a sinkhole of unfalsifiable claims on both sides, akin to an astrological debate.* I agree with (2), but I don't think (2) or its mirror contradiction are unfalsifiable. In particular, I would not use a term like "tout court inferior" if I did not know what I meant by it.
* Feel free to substitute some other pseudoscientific candidate for 'astrology' if you like
1. would be falsified if sound criteria for considering one race to be, tout court, inferior to another were found. Do you disagree with that? If so, on what grounds?
2. would be falsified if definitive proof or evidence that one race is inferior to another could be found. Do you disagree? If so, why?
3. would be falsified if you could imagine what sound evidence could look like. Do you disagree? If so, on what grounds.
Quoting Leontiskos
It seems you do agree that 2. is falsifiable. So how about you tell me you tell me what such falsification evidence could look like? And then tell why it would not also falsify 1. and 2.
Yes, the same old disingenuous answer, "It would be falsified if it were falsified."* Your intellectual honesty dried up many posts ago. I guess we're done here, Janus. Good luck with these unfalsifiable, "metaphysical" claims of yours. :roll:
* The logical conclusion of this form of sophistry is that there are no unfalsifiable claims, for every single claim without exception would be falsified if it were falsified, and is therefore falsifiable.
Also, you say you agree that 2. is falsifiable, and yet won't say how it could be falsified, presumably because there is no imaginable way other than the way I have laid out.
Quoting Leontiskos
No the logical conclusion is that a claim would be at least possibly if not actually falsifiable if we can imagine how it could be falsified, if we can say what falsification would look like, which is what I have done.
What you are missing is that the general criterion for falsification is the possibility of either empirical evidence or logical self-evidence (as in mathematics, for example). Now it obviously is not logically self-evident that any racist claims are true, so we can rule that out as a possibility. So we are left with the possibility of some new empirical evidence for the claim that some races are superior to others. As far as I can tell it is impossible to imagine how empirical evidence could support a general claim of superiority, even though it might support a contextual claim, for example that some race is generally physically stronger than another. But the problem is that any evidence of particular superiority cannot support a claim of general superiority as far as I can tell.
So, when I said those 3 claims as you set them out could be falsified if definite proof or evidence of superiority could be found I was not claiming that such would be possible. In fact, I don't believe it is possible for the reasons I've outlined, and that impossibility does seem to be logically self-evident to me.
with the way I described a moral judgment, namely:
Quoting Leontiskos
I elaborated on this idea <here>.
So let me quote the whole context of what you responded to when you merely asserted that it doesn't require a moral judgment:
Quoting Leontiskos
We are judging an action or behavior, and we agreed that such a judgment is a moral judgment, so it seems that the judgment of the comedian is a moral judgment. Do you have any argument to the contrary?
Quoting AmadeusD
Then give your definition of 'judgment.' It seems to me that looking at the rubric and determining which answer is correct will require a judgment, namely judging which answer is correct. Why is that not a judgment? It seems ad hoc to exclude that sort of act from being a judgment, just as it seems ad hoc to exclude the judgment of the comedian from being a moral judgment. What principled definitions are supposed to exclude such things?
More simply:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Janus
Do you think there is such a thing as an unfalsifiable claim? If so, try to show me one, and I will show you why my quote holds. I think you have used a clever trick to write the concept of unfalsifiability out of existence, in order to make your unfalsifiable claim falsifiable. I already explained the problems with that tactic earlier in the thread.
My statement that they can have no logical proof or empirical evidence simply follows logically from the assumption that racist claims are unfalsifiable. If they are falsifiable then my claim that they are unfalsifiable would also be falsifiable, in fact it would be false. That's all I'm claiming. I don't think it's a trick.
You ask me to show you an unfalsifiable claim. If a claim can have no logical proof or empirical evidence to support or refute it then it would be unfalsifiable. We can never be one hundred percent sure that particular claims are unfalsifiable, though and that's why I allow for the possibility.
Two well-used examples of what are often characterized as unfalsifiable claims are the Multiple Worlds Interpretation in QM, and the Multiple Worlds hypothesis in cosmogony. They both certainly seem to be unfalsifiable because we have no access to those posited other universes or worlds.
Yes, and I am still waiting for you to do that.
Quoting Janus
So what is the claim that you purport to be unfalsifiable? Give me an actual assertion/claim. I am trying not to put words in your mouth given that you keep accusing me of incorrect interpretations, but you need to provide some clarity. Here is Wikipedia:
Quoting Many-world Interpretation | Wikipedia
Is that the claim you hold to be unfalsifiable? If not, what is the claim?
I said it is often criticized as being falsifiable and that, for the reasons I gave, it does seem to be unfalsifiable.
Argumentum ad populum?
Here we go:
4. "There are many parallel, non-interacting worlds."
Quoting Janus
"4. would be falsified if definitive proof or evidence that there are not many parallel, non-interacting words could be found. Do you disagree? If so, why?"
So on your approach the many-worlds interpretation is falsifiable. As I said, on such a facile approach every proposition must be falsifiable. This approach says nothing more than, "It would be falsified if it were falsified, therefore it is falsifiable." The fact that you've been running with this facile approach for so many posts is rather crazy, and it's very hard to believe that you are being intellectually serious here.
The word "even" makes me think that such an appeal is not necessary, which makes me think that there are suitable reasons which do not specifically leverage the non-believer's moral system. If that is so, then the issue must be amenable to reason and not merely to divine commands. If it is not amenable to reason then we couldn't use other reasons, and there could be no .
If that's not right, then I think you need to replace, "We could even," with, "We could only."
There are lots of people I would exclude or, perhaps more to the point, not invite into my life. I tend to avoid people whose views or behaviours limit conversation and commonality and I avoid people with views I find ugly or unpleasant. Betrayers, trolls and liars would seem to be fairly good to avoid as there's a good chance we (or others close to us) would become victim of their behaviours. I've generally avoided people who are into sport, fashion and pop music. Things I don't like I avoid.
Okay, but it looks like you have two different categories. The first category has to do with commonalities and excludes people who are into sport, fashion and pop music. The second category has to do with behaviors that you do not want to fall victim to.
What would you say is the rational justification for excluding, dismissing, or avoiding victimizers? What precisely is it about the victimizer that makes you oppose them? A specific example may be helpful here, and it could even be one of the three you mentioned (betrayers, trolls, or liars).
I guess my angle here is that I exclude a range of people because of an intuitive feeling about them, and a range of preferences that I don't think I have conscious access to. Attraction and repulsion are not always easy to explain. In this way, I don't differentiate between the sports lover and, say, the proselytising Marxistboth of whom I would avoid, perhaps because to my taste, they seem unpleasant and dull.
At the more extreme end, I imagine I would avoid Nazis because I think their views are ugly and actively seek harm, and I don't want to contaminate my life with such malice. I also dislike totalising metanarratives like Nazism, which seek to dominate and eliminate others. I guess I prefer openness and less cruelty. Life is short, and I want to spend it with things worth caring about.
Sorry, I forgot about this reply.
For my part, I am not convinced that speech is an inconsequential act. This is why free speech always becomes a difficult issue. If speech were inconsequential then no one would worry about free speech and we would need no civil right to free speech.
To give a very blasé example, suppose the captain orders his troops to kill the women and children. That is a consequential speech act, albeit a command. Its causal power is manifest. Other acts of speech, such as persuasive speech, can also be consequential. If someone traveled back in time to kill Hitler, they may very well aim to off him before he starts giving his big speeches, given what a powerful orator he was.
Quoting RogueAI
Sure, and the trolley problem is a fringe but interesting case. We can play around with the number saved. It leads us to other questions like: Is murder OK if there's a greater net benefit to the community? It's a thorny issue; no easy answers.
Q2: Irrelevant due to first answer.
My point being rationality does not really have all that much to say about how to act. We simply act as we act and believe what we believe. Rational justification for what cannot be factually measured is to abscond from ownership of our actions.
At best rational analysis can guide our hand but at the end of the day we move it. Those paralyzed into thinking they need rational justification for past, present or future actions are looking for a way to avoid responsibility.
But that's the very thing the racist denies, they will point to decades of studies on intergroup IQ scores, peer reviewed studies on rates of violent crimes when controlling for income, historical differences in regional development, etc.
The "race realist" (like the "gender realist") often comes armed with a wealth of scientific studies. And they can also point to no small number or cases where people have been persecuted for, or driven out of the sciences for daring to contravene the "social construct" or "no differences narrative," hence casting aspersions on "scientific consensus" as being manufactured by fear of accusations of "racism."
Stephen Pinker has some good stuff on this. The most common response to this issue, something like what you're saying, implies that: "if there are actually meaningful differences between races, then racism actually wouldn't be bad and maybe we should even become racists." It forces anti-racists to have to litigate the interpretation of expert data like IQ studies, behavioral genetics, etc. and get into debates about statistical controls, etc. because they have already accepted premises like: "if there is intergroup variance in anything other than the 'physical' (i.e., the mental) then racism is actually acceptable." Indeed, the "meritocracy" imagined by modern liberalism would tend to suggest this.
This is a problem that is very widespread and I think it stems from an inability to ground human dignity and worth in anything in post-modern liberalism. So racism has to be opposed on the grounds that is a transgression of the liberal ideal of individuals getting proper deserts for their actions. The transgression of racism in neo-liberalism is not the dehumanizing and alienating circumstances of the urban and rural underclasses afterall, but rather that membership in this "lower class," and more importantly membership in the small, and ever shrinking "winner class" are not evenly distributed across racial categories, implying that some exceptional individuals are not receiving appropriate desert.
For instance, a common position for both leftist elites and guys like Charles Murray is that automation, AI, etc. will deprive a vast underclass of work and make them dependent on "the state." And while both argue that standards for this underclass should be improved (they have instead been declining by many measures), they think its existence is inevitable. Racism then, is about the relative rates of people of x group making it to the upper class, whether we should expect that this is proportional to population statistics or whether we should expect between group variance in attainment to this class. The problem is not the "meritocracy," but only whether the meritocracy is effectively sorting winners from losers based on the "right" criteria, and not depriving would-be exceptional individuals from exceptional individual status.
The racists' case is thus made easier, since it becomes an argument about proper sorting. The wealth gap between white and black Americans is now larger than it was under Jim Crow (and the Arab-Jewish gap in Israel). Yet if this can be shown to result from proper "data-driven decision-making" and meritocracy, so much the worse for equality. Hence, we get debates over whether credit scores are "structural racism," because they are an example of a mechanism effecting such outcomes.
Race and sex, being highly visible and biological, are the preferred identities of analysis here. They are "constructs" but they are the focus precisely because exceptional individuals cannot yet transcend them if they choose to. Whereas class, religion, ethnicity, regional background, etc. tend not to be a focus, because the upwardly mobile individual is responsible for transcending (and really abandoning) them.
Ding ding ding. :up:
See also:
Quoting Leontiskos
One thing I am interested in understanding are the cross-purposes involved in more minor dismissals. When people arent engaging rationally, what exactly is it that they are doing instead? What is their purpose or telos? (I have noticed that the number of people who restrict themselves to rational inquiry is incredibly small, even on a philosophy forum.)
In the U.S. Trump provides a good example. He dominates political discourse, and there are lots of people who say they want to discuss politics, but what they actually want to do is beat the anti-Trump drum. Rational discussion of a political issue strikes them as a distraction, and sooner or later they find their way back to their telos of beating the anti-Trump drum. One is then presented with the simple choice of either providing the person with the anti-Trump catharsis that they desire, or else finding an interlocutor who is able to engage in more interesting activities.
That sort of thing is a type for what happens in so many pseudo-intellectual dialogues. There is a feigned interest in X while the true interest lies in Y (and it is precisely the dissimulation which is frustrating). Soon enough focus is lost and the person falls back into the rut of their pet thesis or their pet modus operandi.* That shift is most readily apparent when one is faced with ones own cognitive dissonance, and thus flees into safe, familiar platitudes. In severe cases the persons whole approach becomes bound up with justifying that flight from genuine philosophical discourse.
In these more minor cases we should try to work through the problems, but how is that done? One way is by enforcing <standard Socratic principles of dialogue>. Another is by becoming painfully clear about what thesis the person is arguing for and what arguments they are relying on to support it (i.e. a move towards formalized argumentation).
Yet the root problem is a bit deeper, and regards a rectification of the sub-philosophical telos. This is where Socrates really shines, and he usually preempts the whole issue by asking his interlocutor if they want to engage in dialogue at the outset. The general idea is to somehow persuade or encourage ones interlocutor to engage in real philosophy instead of simply regurgitating the half-baked thoughts that have been floating around their heads for the last 15 years.
* This is precisely the age-old problem of <rationalization> or subordinating reason to the passions.
No we haven't. Your quoted exchange (assuming I agreed) doesn't show this. It shows that a "moral dismissal" results from a "moral judgement". That moral judgement is not assessed.
Quoting Leontiskos
Then computation is judgement. I reject this. Deliberation is judgement (assuming it results in something). Marking the exam without a set rubric (i.e I must know hte answers and judge whether student has gotten it right) would be this.
Quoting Leontiskos
This could be right, ubt I'd have to review the discussion and I'm not in place to do so right now. I cannot remember exactly what I excluded there.
Quoting Leontiskos
Perhaps I should have used the term 'schedule'. An actual, written schedule of right responses.
Okay, let's look. Here is the exchange laid out:
Quoting Leontiskos
You responded:
Quoting AmadeusD
Note that your response has to do with a moral judgment, not merely a moral dismissal. The idea here is that to morally judge someone is to judge their actions or behavior. If you want to propose a different definition of moral judgment, then you can of course do that.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes, I think computation involves judgment. If I give you a math problem you will require judgment in order to solve it.
Here is a definition of judgment that seems fine to me:
Quoting Judgment | Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
(I would say that judgment already involves affirmation, but that's a minor difference.)
Quoting AmadeusD
<Here> is the post where I spoke about a comedian's ability to read the room.
Quoting AmadeusD
Whether rubric or schedule, I think both involve judgments. It's just that they involve simple or relatively easy judgments.
If I give you directions to my house you will still be involved in judgments. "Drive north on Central avenue, take a left on 22nd street, and arrive at the third house on your right, which is green." You are merely following directions and rules, but you are still involved in judgments. For example, the judgment of whether this street is 22nd street.
To the fictional quotation. In that context that is the right way to think about a moral judgement. I am unsure that you could say i've agreed to the moral judgement being made. No, I don't mean on the facts - I mean, i would not take it as given that the conception in that quote is a moral judgement. In the event, I do think it is - so, I've probably just been unnecessarily confusing in this part of the exchange. To be clear: I think that is the right way to think about moral judgement in the context of dismissal - I am unsure a moral judgement is occurring in the quote.
Quoting Leontiskos
That would include machines 'judging'. That does not currently seem at all open to us.
Quoting Leontiskos
I would not want to say that recognition alone (which a schedule requires, and naught else) is judgement. Perhaps I need a better 'version' of 'judgement' to support this. But it seems to be pretty obviously the case that machines do not judge in the way we want to say humans do (or, higher animals in general). It may be that an adequate definition of judgement has to include literally ever act (given every act is a version of "this/that".
Quoting Leontiskos
No, that's not up to me. Either when i get there there's a 1:1 match between you directions and my location, or there is not. I do not judge whether that is the case - it either is or isn't and I observe which it is. However, that analogy doesn't hold with my point - if you gave me an active, working Google Maps. I closed my eyes, followed the directions(pretend for a moment this wouldn't be practically disastrous lmao) and then the Maps tells me i've arrived - that's what I'm talking about. I am literally not involved in any deliberation - I am, in fact, still taking instruction. It would have been a judgement whether to actually engage this course of action, though, to be sure.
Hmm, okay. Well maybe the rest will help clarify some of this.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, I don't think machines "judge," hence the scare-quotes on both our parts. Thus when we talk about a human "computing" and a machine "computing" we are talking about two different things. One difference is that human computation involves judgment whereas machine computation does not.
Quoting AmadeusD
I want to say that a schedule requires following, no? If I am to keep a schedule then I must recognize what I am to do, and then do it, no? Else, a schedule that no one is following is apparently not functioning as a schedule at all.
But I think the act of recognition involves judgment too. "This is 22nd street," or, "This is not 22nd street," are both acts of recognition and also judgments.
Quoting AmadeusD
Good, and this is perhaps one of the more foundational places where we may be disagreeing, because I think every choice involves judgment. Still, I am happy to distinguish speculative from practical judgment.
Quoting AmadeusD
My point was that judgments must be leveraged in order to follow the directions. But is your claim here true? When you get to the end of the directions do you observe whether you have arrived, or judge whether you have arrived? In either case it would seem that you must decide whether you have arrived at the destination, no?
Quoting AmadeusD
I actually meant to include that scenario, but forgot. :up:
Quoting AmadeusD
I don't think closing your eyes helps you avoid judgment. To decide to obey (Google Maps) is a judgment. To decide when to turn your steering wheel with your eyes closed in relation to the instructions you are hearing is a judgment. I think auditory directions involve judgment just as visual directions involve judgment.
Yes, nice. So far, so good.
Quoting Leontiskos
In this case, it seems one of my later comments will come in handy.. Let's see...
Quoting Leontiskos
b-b-b-b-bingo. Nice. Always good to find the niggle.
Quoting Leontiskos
No. I decided to trust the app. It tells me - I obey the relayed information. Note that I could be in Guam. But i judged the app to get me to wherever you live.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yep, as above. That I have arrived is no longer up to me. I don't have the ability to judge it otherwise on the assumption I will hold to the jdugement about Google maps.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, I can see why too. But I think jdugement should be a little more circumscribed to capture how it is used. Quoting Leontiskos
Nah, that's input-> output in this scenario. If I crash, I crash.
Sure, you can decide (judge) that the app is to be trusted. Sort of like how you can trust a taxi cab driver to get you to your destination. Still, at the end of your journey you still have to judge that the app or cab driver is telling you that you have arrived (even though you are trusting them at the same time).
A case where no subordinated judgment occurs would be when you go under general anesthesia for surgery, simply trusting that you will wake up on the other side. Waking up is not a judgment, and so in that case there is only one act of trust-judgment. You are trusting that the judgments of others will cause you to wake up.
Quoting AmadeusD
Similar to "moral," philosophical definitions of "judgment" are going to be more precise and encompassing than colloquial definitions. That's why I used the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. If we go with colloquial definitions then we will run into things like the Sorites paradox mentioned earlier, and the reasoning will not be watertight. We can do that if we like, but then we no longer have a warrant to complain that the reasoning isn't watertight. If we want watertight reasoning then we must abandon vague definitions.
Quoting AmadeusD
It would be rather strange for someone to try driving somewhere and not care if they crash. To crash would be to fail to achieve your goal, and therefore you are generally always trying not to crash when you are driving somewhere.
This flows back to whether or not you require every mental action to be a judgement. I do not - so, on my view this is a recognition only. I have simply taken what I've been told "We're here!" and run with it. I've not assessed it in any way (other than to pick up which words were aimed at me... is that hte judgement you mean? That's what Im calling recognition, to be clear).
Quoting Leontiskos
This is analogous: I judged my condition, the surgeon and medical advice, and the prognosis to go under the knife (or, anaethesia as you note). In the former, I could literally be unconscious, and be schluffed out of the car, and I'd still be wherever I actually was, regardless of whether it was 'correct'. Is it just that I am conscious you're wanting to hang something on, in that example?
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't quite think this is available to us, so I'm happy with that. Although, I think the problem is actually that people have different ideas of what's captured by the concept (even on the definitions given by x or y source).
Quoting Leontiskos
Correct. But I've designed a scenario where I am not engaged in the prior activity, in terms of judgement. I can judge that hte crash fucking sucked, but I made no attempts to divert, or incur a crash.
I require every judgment to be a judgment, and I gave my definition of judgment <here> by following the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Nowhere in that definition is the claim that every mental act counts as a judgment. I noted that you are free to offer a different definition of judgment.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think we're circling back to this and the conversation that followed:
Quoting Leontiskos
You can say, "Oh, I only recognized that the first pipe was 10 feet long and the second was not," but in no way does this fail to count as a judgment given the definition I have laid out. The same holds with, "Recognizing that I have arrived at my destination." How did you recognize that if not by judging that the Google Maps voice told you that you arrived?
If you think recognizing that X is true involves no judgment, then you are denying the Oxford definition I have provided. Do you have an alternative definition?
Quoting AmadeusD
I raised the example because I believe it to be disanalogous. In the Google Maps scenario you must judge that you have arrived. In the anesthesia scenario you need not judge that you should wake up. In that case you are literally woken up by someone else. In that case no volitional act is required, judgment or otherwise.
I agree that there are differences between recognizing that you have arrived at your destination, and deciding to take a taxi cab. But both are judgments given the definition I have provided. I don't think it makes sense to say, "I knew that I arrived but I did not judge that I arrived." When philosophers talk about judgment this is what they are talking about.
Quoting AmadeusD
Okay, but it seems that many of your complaints have to do with a lack of watertight reasoning due to vague definitions (e.g. "moral," "right," "judgment," etc.).
Quoting AmadeusD
It seems like you are saying that you might get in a crash and regret the crash, and then when someone asks you why you got in a crash, you could reasonably answer, "Oh, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to crash when driving. I make no attempts to avoiding crashing." That seems patently unreasonable, no? This all goes back to my claim:
Quoting Leontiskos
The process here is something like, "I hear the instruction telling me to turn left, and then I turn left." For some reason you want to remove all judgment from that action, as if Google Maps turns the steering wheel for you and you do nothing at all. Or as if you put yourself on autopilot and cease to be an intermediating agent between Google Maps and the car. None of that seems reasonable. It seems pretty straightforward that when carrying out instructions one is engaged in judgments, even if they are subordinated to a proximate end and infused with an intention of trust.
This absolutely ignores what I've said. You haven't addressed it. I can wait, but its also not entirely needed - your definitions are your definitions. They don't matter much to the discussion. I made a point about your definition which has been glossed over. That's fine. But not my problem.
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm going to ignore this section - it is absolutely pointless. I told you my view was otherwise, and explained something from that view point. We disagree about there being a judgement at that precise moment. This is not interesting.
Quoting Leontiskos
By recognizing it and making no judgement. If all that happened was a green light lit up on a HUD, all i've done is seen something and exited the car. You'll not get me to say this is a judgement. This is what I wanted to avoid - I thikn your definition sucks, you probably think so about mine.
Quoting Leontiskos
I gave you several. I also gave my own. This particular response of yours is uncharacteristically ignorant and uninteresting.
Quoting Leontiskos
Nope. We've had that game. Moving on..
Quoting Leontiskos
This isn't in any way relevant to judging to go under the knife, which was in question. No sure where this came from. Uncharacteristic.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yep. Its a shit definition, in my view, and I proceeded on that basis. I've been explicitly clear and you're running over dead horses ad infinitum.
Quoting Leontiskos
You really, truly need to re-read everything I've said because this aint it chief.
Quoting Leontiskos
I do not have the patience to correct this utterly insane take.
Quoting Leontiskos
Ok. Disagreed.
What point have you made? Spell it out. Here is what I see:
I said:
L1. To judge is to affirm something as true or false {Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy}
L2. To believe that I have arrived at the end of my trip I must affirm as true that I have arrived
L3. Therefore, to believe that I have arrived involves a judgment
You responded:
A1. Suppose every mental act counts as a judgment
A2. If so, then L3 would be true
A3. But not every mental act counts as a judgment
A4. Therefore, L3 does not follow
And my response was that I have never claimed A1. A1 is a strawman. Thus your counterargument failed, and now you must decide whether to accept argument L1-L3 or else offer a different counterargument.
Quoting AmadeusD
You haven't given a definition at all. You want to say that you see a green light lit up on a HUD and determine that you have arrived at your destination, but that you in no way judge that you have arrived at your destination. That doesn't make any sense, and you have provided no definition of 'judgment' to make sense of it.
Quoting AmadeusD
Where is it? It would have been much easier to simply quote yourself giving the definition rather than write a long post of nothing-burgers.
I dont mean to interrupt, but it seems like you both may basically agree on what a judgment is, but are finding fault with the application of the definition to the scenario, or various scenarios.
If I am not mistaken, I think you both would agree that the bolded part above speaks to a moment of judgment. Amadeus said it, and it seems to reflect a moment Leon is describing as judgment.
So you must be agreeing on something basic/essential/definitional about judgments.
Amadeus seems to be saying no more judgment is needed to carry out the course of action.
Leon is saying there are more pivotal moments requiring more judgments.
This may mean you are disagreeing with some underlying definition of judgment, but then I dont think Amadeus would have made the above bolded statement if there was some glaring conflict between you regarding the nature of judgment.
I happen to agree with Leon, and dont see how you can follow directions blindly, and skip adjudicating between when a step is completed and when the next step begins. When I am following directions, I know that I could misunderstand the direction and go astray and end up lost and not at my destination. I also know that Google maps is wrong and has led me to the wrong destination. So at each step, I have to decide Is the last step completed yet? Can I move on to the next step? Is where I am driving what is meant by this next step? Is Google still correct of should I switch to Apple Maps?
Often these interim judgments are easy and immediately made, but that doesnt mean they arent judgments.
On the contrary, your input seems like it might be helpful in making progress.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think that's right. I tried to get at the difference by talking about a "subordinated judgment" <here>.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes, these are good points. :up:
Pointing out the fact that error can occur both in our own judgments and with navigation applications is quite helpful.
I am happy to distinguish between, say, hard judgments and easy judgments, but I think both are judgments.
No.
Quoting Fire Ologist
That's not a judgment.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I have already conditioned these out of my example.
So I think you have done the same mis-understanding as Leon has. There is no room for judgment in my examples, unless the definition is highly irregular. I designed them that way to pick up whether Leon wanted "judgement' to mean something other than deliberation. I don't think it does. Leon seems to (but wont quite say that).
This should actually clear up any answers to Leon's last reply too.
Would you do me a favor and show me your example and how you conditioned these out of it?
There was then a question about being conscious. I do not think merely being conscious changes anything (just to cover that, quickly). I cannot remember Leon's take, but he wants to say all mental activity is judgement, from what I understand. That's fine - just not a framework I recognise either in practice, or the definitions given.
To be brutally clear: In my example, I may be woken up, get out of the car, have the cabbie drive away - and then start judging things. Relates similarly to the maps thing, but that wasn't the greatest version of the TE.
That's just false, AmadeusD. Here is the example:
Quoting AmadeusD
I gave the example of "waking up" as an explicitly different example:
Quoting Leontiskos
You've literally lied about the example given, which was never about a taxi driver waking you up. You are resorting to this because you have no good arguments to support your strange case that no judgment occurs when you respond to the Google Maps app or the taxi driver telling you that you have arrived. Note that the lie does not help you at all, because after the taxi cab driver wakes you up, you still have to form the judgment that you have arrived. Your new example in which the taxi cab driver wakes you up in no way answers the question of how you know that you have arrived without any judgment.
Quoting AmadeusD
More nonsense:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
You've stopped doing serious philosophy in this thread. You have resorted to, "The Oxford definition sucks and I refuse to give my own definition." You then went on to consistently mischaracterize what you and others have said in this thread. :roll:
(@Fire Ologist)
I reworked this, twice - to be to do with being asleep, and to do with a driver. I do want to engage over you misrepresenting a rather long, arduous conversation over the particular verison you wish to critique. My responses are my responses. I would prefer you either drop this, or engage with the full conversation rather than your chosen issues to crtique (in this case, misleadingly).
Quoting Leontiskos
Nope. Not, at all. You can just go back and see that you're cherry-picking. Not my issue. I explained the relevance of being conscious to the issue, and at that stage I pulled you up on that being the difference. So, yeah, I acknowledged this and responded in my terms. Nothing wrong with that. You can be upset if you like. I cannot understand many of your responses, as I've said all along - you clearly don't understand what's being said. Yet claim you do...
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
The link isn't a definition. Its a discussion that gives us nothing.
You said you require every choice to be a judgement. That is tautological. It means every mental act is a judgement, because it is not possible to carry out a mental act without choice to do so. You have said as much, in trying to critique my account. Either cop to that, or don't. Not my issue, again.
Quoting Leontiskos
Is this like.... an actual joke?
Quoting Leontiskos
Nope. That is entirely fucking false to the point that you have finally actually upset me. Wont respond again unless you stop being an asshole.
When you misrepresent the conversation my answer is always the same:
Quoting Leontiskos
You claim that you have said something, but you can't quote yourself saying it, because it is nowhere to be found. Fire Ologist asked:
Quoting Fire Ologist
You failed to answer him. You failed to point to the quote or even the post where you said, "that I am in a cab, having told the driver where I'm going and to wake me up when we arrive." Why did you fail to point to it? The answer is simple: because it doesn't exist. You are trying to rewrite the past in your favor.
Quoting Leontiskos
That is an interesting question because I believe it is frequently how people act (ignoring reasons associated with deeming something beyond the pale), but it is not necessary to do so, and indeed, if we abandon rational illumination, we abandon community and the possibility of morality.
We are talking about strong rejection, and this highlights the passion and emotion in it. To recognize what is beyond the pale draws with it an emotional response. Someone decapitates a kitten and an emotional revulsion is instinctual. But to recognize what is beyond the pale is also a specific judgement, a deeming, and these specific determinations can be rationally illuminated. Taking a breath and being rational about a strong rejection, will take some of the passion out of it in favor of dispassionate reasoning that can illuminate. And so in a sense, rational illumination undermines passionate strong rejection. And when passions alone or primarily drive the deeming of something beyond the pale, someone might also deem reasons may undermine the determination made from emotion.
But I am not sure this emotional/psychological analysis takes your question far enough.
As we all at times think, the depravity of some actions is so obviously beyond the pale, to even ask to illuminate the grounds for such judgments is to call something already obvious into question, and thereby potentially undermine its obviousness, which in turn undermines whether it is truly beyond the pale in the first place. This all means someone might judge that, when faced with what is clearly deemed beyond the pale, there is no reason to resist ones passionate response nor is there reason to seek the illuminating details that justify ones judgment. And further, as we are fallible when seeking rational illumination, we may undermine our own intellectual confidence by failing to reasonably illuminate what we have already strongly rejected and passionately deemed beyond the pale. (Like we just know 2+2=4 is beyond the pale, but if we cant show our math, we may force ourselves to question something we passionately already know is true.)
But seeing rational illumination as undermining what has been deemed beyond the pale, seems like intellectual cowardice. And in my estimation, an unwillingness or inability to engage in rational illumination and discussion of ones grounds for ones determinations is part of the essence of behavior that may be beyond the pale. A determination of what is beyond the pale is not merely the product of strong emotion (or it is often based on reasons as well). Maybe the person who says beheading kittens is always wrong so any person who did that or does that should be written off as beyond the pale is being purely emotional about their esteem of kittens, but reasoning and logical inference and sound observation remain available for discussion. Kitten killers are beyond the pale is like any other determination, subject to rational scrutiny. And whenever one chooses to ignore rational scrutiny, or one cannot control ones emotions enough to allow room for rational scrutiny, one is flirting with what I see as the most basic component of behavior that is beyond the pale, namely the avoidance of reason.
To apply what I am saying, Charlie Kirk said things many folks believed were beyond the pale. He wanted policy that many saw as harmful beyond the pale. But, to me, he did what he did in a debate forum, in the public square, inviting challenge and seeking rational grounds and illumination in every subject matter. Someone else deemed his very act of talking to be beyond the pale, that Kirks words did actual harm, and had to shut those actions down by killing him. Do I write off the shooting as beyond the pale without giving the shooter a hearing? No, as I would be treating the shooter the same way it looks like the shooter treated Charlie Kirk. But if the shooter will not or cannot rationally illuminate his grounds for shooting Charlie Kirk, then I have reasonable ground to deem the shooting as beyond the pale. And if the shooter asked me what I thought before he shot Charlie, and the shooter couldnt or wouldnt provide a reasonable basis to justify killing Kirk, I would tell him that shooting Kirk will be beyond the pale.
The pale, it seems to me, is reasonable discussion. What is beyond the pale is always in part beyond discussion. So, in any debate, nothing can be said that is beyond the pale. (In a debate is key context here - one can do tremendous harm beyond the pale with words, but not so in a debate among adults).
I still dont have grounds to deem the shooter himself as beyond the pale. I cannot write him off and bury him in a ditch just because I saw him shoot Kirk. We must have faith, and find hope, and forgive, and love, and use reason and our words and our example to change hearts. Dont get me wrong, shooting people for their political speech alone is always wrong and beyond the pale, but it is precisely the silence and foreclosing of discussion that makes it wrong, and so we must interrogate the shooter, seek his rational illumination and then judge the nature of his crime. I suspect he will not be able to justify shooting a man like that. But it would be beyond the pale to judge the shooter without hearing him out. (And this has nothing to do with criminal judgement and punishment - we all have a law against assignation, and if we catch someone cold in the act of assassination, they go to jail or get the death penalty - present the facts and apply the law; but we dont judge them evil, or find their soul or whole being beyond the pale without a hearing. Such judgment may be further beyond the pale then the motivations behind the shooting.)
Yes, good points. :up:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Okay, interesting.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Okay.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Okay, and this relates to things like the paradox of tolerance.
I suppose one inroad into this topic is Elizabeth Anscombe's comment:
Now if Anscombe's interlocutor thinks that procuring the judicial execution of the innocent is a live option, and if such a person is to be deemed beyond the pale, then at some point or another they must be "written off." Or in your words the discussion must be "foreclosed." The interlocutor will want to keep talking and arguing, but at some point he must be written off.
Indeed if judging someone beyond the pale involves writing them off, then to write off or "foreclose" cannot itself be beyond the pale. This is the paradox.
I myself was thinking more along the lines of the idea that something which is beyond the pale inherently lacks rationality, and therefore is going to be more or less opaque to rational scrutiny. If this is right, then something which can be rationally and transparently proscribed cannot be beyond the pale; and therefore the object of evil that is beyond the pale will always remain fuzzy. For example, we can rationally and transparently proscribe a particular mathematical error, and hence such an error is not beyond the pale. Because the error is "understandable" it is able to be formally/rationally corrected (and because it is able to be formally/rationally corrected, it is understandable).
Ultimately, though, I think proscription necessarily prescinds a bit from the intelligibility of what is proscribed. For example, we say, "Thou shalt not murder," and even though murder is itself an endlessly confusing or privated act, nevertheless the proscription itself remains rational and intelligible. Of course, whether it does remain rational and intelligible is an interesting question. Can, "Do not ?," be transparent if ? is opaque? Presumably the condition must be drawn "materially" rather than "formally," and this may be precisely why an act like murder always retains a certain degree of ambiguity (and why, for example, someone might claim that capital punishment is a form of murder, or that fining a thief is a form of theft).
(Then, bringing in your points, the interesting question arises of how one is to avoid licensing premature dismissals if the object of dismissal necessarily lacks a certain degree of intelligibility.)
A blow with a baseball bat.
Seriously, arguments from power have a bad reputation in philosophy circles, yet in daily life they are the ones that matter. Mixing philosophy with real life is precarious business.
So if someone says this:
Quoting Janus
And yet they can provide no account of how their claim is supposed to be empirically or logically falsifiable, your response would be to resort to violence, because violence would make the claim empirically or logically falsifiable?
That doesn't seem like a real response. It sounds like "might makes right." It sounds like you need to resort to violence to enforce your beliefs because they are not rationally justifiable. Such is tyranny 101.
Quoting Leontiskos
It's how the real world works. And, what is more, those you call "tyrants" sometimes call their approach "rational" (and "just" and "good").
Not that I am endorsing any of this, but I am skeptical of the way philosophers approach issues, namely, quite dissociated from how the real world works. I am skeptical of the philosophical approach to life, because it's often naive to the point of dangerous (to themselves). Ever tried to reason with a boss of yours?
You are just repeating your non-answer. Tyranny is still tyranny, whether in the hands of the anti-racist or the racist. Same bat, different side: might makes right.
quoted this exchange:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Now I have no idea what, "this is how the world works" is supposed to mean. The claim was literally, "A blow with a baseball bat could falsify the claim in question." That looks to be entirely wrong, irrational, and unphilosophical, not to mention having nothing to do with "how the world works." The world does not work via baseball-bat falsification.
Presumably what is happening here is that yet another person does not know how to justify their belief about racism, and in this case they are resorting to threats of physical violence to enforce their position within society. "I don't know how to reason for my belief about racism, but if someone contradicts me I will hit them with a baseball bat and that should take care of things. 'That's how the world works'."
You're not looking at the bigger picture. Arguments that are in line with what secular academia considers "critical thinking" have a very limited scope of application outside of philosophy classes (and even there, the professor is by default right, no matter what).
In the real world, if you ask a racist to justify their racist beliefs, you will likely be met with some kind of argument from power or an assassination of your character.
Secondly, people with racist beliefs probably didn't come to hold those beliefs via deliberation, argumentation, or scientific enquiry. So they cannot justify them in a way you in particular expect them to. More importantly, they do not care to justify them to you, which you seem to be quite unaware of.
People who are into racism do not care about being philosophical, at least not with just anyone who comes along. Many people who are into philosophy don't seem to understand that.
And shame on you for suggesting I was a racist.
Not so much that there's no use in pointing it out. It's a waste of time, for sure. But more importantly, it can be quite dangerous to point it out. Because people will retaliate. With a show of hands, indicate you want to walk in the footsteps of Socrates ...
This is not really at all how it came across. It's hard to explain why, because your position is totally reasonable. But the way it read to me (i.e I am not even trying to say this is what baker meant - I could just be wrong) is that Quoting Leontiskos
It does. Whether that is a logical position is (not true) irrelevant. That is hte entire point. In the world, this distinction means absolutely fucking nothing. It's a total waste of time and butters no bread for anyone trying to understand these impulses. People do use violence as a 'valid retort' to various positions. They think its justified. They think it's logical.
No one is suggesting there is logic in that. What's being suggested is you are being sanguine to the point of irrelevancy. Ignorance of how the world actually works (i.e how people actually reason) isn't fixed by inserting a (totally reasonable, and valid) position on the logic of those impulses.
Your recent posts provide a great deal of evidence for the thesis that your reading comprehension is very poor. But what's wrong with being a racist? On your view the only problem with being a racist is that you might be hit with a baseball bat. You don't seem to have anything more than that.
Quoting AmadeusD
How so? Give an argument.
Quoting AmadeusD
People respond with violence, yes. What does this have to do with anything? What does this have to do with falsifiability?
Quoting AmadeusD
About what? Name it. Stop being intentionally ambiguous.
Quoting AmadeusD
"Someone thinks an illogical thing is logical," therefore...?
You're simply engaged in the fallacy of equivocation. "In the real world if you deny X then you will get hit with a baseball bat, therefore X is falsifiable." That's an invalid argument. We're talking about falsifiability, not the ability to coercively enforce a belief.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think your reading comprehension is struggling as well.
This is the claim in question:
Quoting Janus
That is an anti-racist claim, and we are asking whether it is falsifiable. It seems that you and @baker have missed the whole point. I am asking whether @Janus' anti-racist claim is falsifiable, given that Janus has said that falsifiability is the key to rationality and claim-making.
Apparently because I have asked Janus whether his claim is falsifiable I am some sort of "sanguine" fool appealing to "irrelevant" canons of logic. Not sure how that's supposed to work.
It's not that anti-racist claims are falsifiable. The anti-racist claim is made on the basis of the unverifiability, the complete lack of supportability ("there are no sound criteria...") of the racist claim.
Good, that's the closest you've come to admitting that your claim is not falsifiable.
Quoting Janus
So consider two charges:
"Your position is unverifiable."
"Your position is unsupportable."
We could simply ask whether such charges need to be falsifiable or not. Earlier you said that rational claims* must be falsifiable. If these charges are supposed to be rational, then apparently they must be falsifiable. Indeed, in general we would say that such charges do need to be falsifiable, and that the unfalsifiability of your anti-racist claim is in fact a problem.
* Or else publicly rational claims. I forget the exact wording.
My position is merely a rejection of an unverifiable, unsupportable position. It is obviously neither empirically nor logically falsifiable because we here are in the realm of values, not of facts or deductive logic. Values are subjective, that is they cannot be rationally universalized.
Think of the claim that red is a superior colour to green. I reject that because it is unsupportable, If I say there are no sound criteria for considering red to be superior to green, is that claim falsifiable?
Why is it unsupportable? You simply ask the claimant what they mean by "superior" and go from there.
-
Regarding the original claim:
Quoting Janus
Or the simpler claim:
Quoting Leontiskos
...I would say that we can make such claims in a falsifiable manner or an unfalsifiable manner. The fact that @Janus cannot give any way to falsify his claim even in principle is proof that he is giving the claim in an unfalsifiable manner.
But we could give the same claim in a falsifiable manner. We could say, "Well, 'tout court inferior' means something here, and part of what it means is that if one race is substantially intellectually inferior to other races then it is 'tout court inferior'."
At that point we would have to decide on at least one condition by which "substantially intellectually inferior" could be assessed, perhaps via some sort of IQ testing along with statistical thresholds that would count as "substantial." At the end we would be able to say, "Okay racist, so if you can demonstrate that some race is intellectually inferior according to the agreed criteria, then your position will be vindicated."
Or for another example, we might argue that it is not permissible to enslave any race. This could be claimed in an unfalsifiable manner or a falsifiable manner. If we wanted to make the claim in a falsifiable (and therefore rational) manner, we might agree that we are permitted to enslave beasts, such as oxen and horses and cattle. Thus if there is some race which is equivalent to a beast, such as an ox, then that race can be permissibly enslaved. We would be able to provide the racist with a falsifiable case, "Okay racist, so if you can demonstrate that this race has no greater dignity than an ox, then you will have proved that it is permissible to enslave them."
That's how you oppose racism in a substantive way, without unfalsifiable claims. You have to make "tout court inferior" mean something. The alternative to your approach is one where we are provided substantive reasons to oppose racism beyond mere taboo. We learn, for example, that the reason we are not permitted to enslave X race is because X race has a greater dignity than the things we are permitted to enslave. Metaphysical knowledge about the race in question provides the grounds by which certain actions are inappropriate, such as slavery. This is usually done with the syllogism,
Any support they come up with will necessarily be merely subjective, while it purports to be a universally valid claim. That's waht I mean by unsupportable.
Quoting Leontiskos
Such a race would obviously not be human. And you are assuming that it is permissible to enslave oxen. What could enslaving a race that itself has no concept of, or sense of, being enslaved even mean? Do we enslave oxen, or merely employ them?
If you are making a claim that says, "no, not tout court inferior," and the racist is making a claim that says, "yes, tout court inferior," and you say that "tout court inferior" is as subjective as the color claim, then both of you are making merely subjective claims, and neither one of you has any rational basis for enforcing your claim. That's the problem with your approach. The racist will just start enslaving people and you will object with a "merely subjective," "metaphysical," unfalsifiable claim. The bottom line is the fact that you have no rational argument against racism. You don't know why racism is wrong, because you don't have any substantive reason to believe that races are equal. You ironically reject all of the rational premises that caused us to reject racism in the first place.
Quoting Janus
See my last paragraph, where I talk about the argument you give here.
On your reasoning if we found an alien species, how would we know how to treat it? Whether to grant it rights? Whether to eat it? Whether to treat it as a beast of burden? Understanding why we treat different animals differently will help one understand the rational grounds for or against racism. And yes, the vegan will be at an inherent disadvantage when trying to understand why racism is wrong - or why human slavery is worse than the domestication of animals.
Not true. "Tout court inferior" is a mere subjective claim masquerading as an objective claim. "Not tout court inferior" is not a subjective claim but a refutation of the masquerade.
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't agree with enslaving any species.
So someone can't objectively identify when X is present because to do so is impossible, but you are able to objectively identify when X is absent? Again, this makes no sense. Is it the unfalsifiable sophistry coming up again.
Quoting Janus
And you have no reasoning whatsoever which would allow you to oppose such enslavement. If no proposition about whether a species is enslavable is true or false, then there is no rational reason to enslave, but there is equally no rational reason not to enslave.
Your whole approach is, "When you say racism is permissible you must be engaged in otiose subjectivizing, but when I say racism is impermissible I am not engaged in otiose subjectivizing." That's a neat magic trick, along with all of the odd rationalizations about why your "subjectivizing" counts more than theirs. It's "might makes right" with an extra layer of disguise.
If they can't show X is present their claim is vacuous. I don't have to show X is absent.
The sophistry is yours.
And you of course say that you don't have to defend claims like this one. You've been begging the question for pages.
Why would I have to show X is absent if the claim relies on X, but does not demonstrate it's presence?
The problem is that you don't think you are required to give a falsifiable reason for why the claim fails to demonstrate the presence of X. You are resorting to unfalsifiable dismissals. Even if you want to say, "Nothing in all of existence could demonstrate the presence of X," you would still have to explain why your claim is supposed to be true and how it could be falsified (i.e. how it is a meaningful claim).
I don't think you're adequately understanding what is being said. You want me to make a logical argument. It is unavailable and not what is being posited. I'll make it clearer, if i can:
The way the world works is not logical. You want it to be. It isn't. The way people reason is not with truth trees. That you want this to be hte case (or at least, that you want to discuss the world in that context) is your problem in this exchange; not mine and Baker's. No one is suggesting a baseball bat is a logical tool. I've tried to make this explicitly clear.
Quoting AmadeusD
If you are still going to go on about "valid logical argumentation" or some such, you are clearly not engaging the correct conversation. This disposes with much the rest of your reply.
So, going back to the question you've posed, with the bold above in play:
Policing. Policing is almost entirely
Police: Accusation
Person 1: argument as to why, logically, such and such couldn't have occurred (or whatever).
Police: to bad *baseball bat*
There's an example that plays out daily, in almost all parts of the world but Antarctica. Probably a better example (and timely) is violent protests. Eventually, those engaging think its 'logical and valid' to take a bat to someone for being in the wrong place, or thinking the wrong thing or whatever. This makes it sufficiently clear that discussing the real world on the terms you are is a waste of time and doesn't come close to discussing the real world. It isn't laden with truth trees and P1,P2, C thinking. Its laden with "I have no argument; baseball bat".
It will be literally impossible to have a conversation with you if all you want to do is talk about how you want the world to be. It is the way it is, and the discussion (this exact one, not the thread) is about that.
Quoting Leontiskos
I have very sufficiently laid this out: People are not logical. You want them to be. That is sanguine to hte point of irrelevancy for the discussion. Bleat if you'd like.
Quoting Leontiskos
Luckily for me, and extremely unfortunately for you, that was never said or implied. That should be sufficiently clear. I literally said:
Quoting AmadeusD
You seem to want me to defend shit I've not come close to saying. Too bad brother.
Quoting Leontiskos
The irony drips like a three week old corpse. I shall take my leave.
Give me an example of a racist claim that does demonstrate X (X being clear evidence, or even a compelling argument, that some race is tout court, inferior to some other) if you think there are such.
If someone gives an argument purporting to demonstrate that some race is inferior I will give reasons for rejecting it if I assess that it does fail to demonstrate what it claims to. I haven't even come across any argument which is not in the form of 'this race is, according to IQ tests, generally less intelligent than that race". Intelligence seems to be the one ubiquitous criterion in these kinds of arguments. Firstly, even if that was true that some race was IQ inferior, it doesn't make them tout court inferior, just IQ inferior. Do you think those people who have the highest IQs are necessarily the best people? Do you think IQ id even an adequate measure of intelligence? What about creativity or emotional intelligence or memory? What about the ability for sustained attention?
Do you know of arguments that take any other form? How would you go about demonstrating general inferiority, as opposed to say inferiority in sport, academic achievement or some such, all of which could in any case be down to standards of training, funding etc.?
Are we to assume that you think some races are all-in-all inferior? If so, why not present your argument for our perusal. If not, then why go on about it?
Again, this is not a principled response if you refuse to tell your interlocutor what would entail tout court inferiority. And this is what you refuse to do. You have set up an impossible, unfalsifiable standard. Among other things, this means that your counterclaim is sheer nonsense, namely the claim that, "No race is tout court inferior to any other race" (because you don't know what "tout court inferior" means, despite the fact that you coined the term).
Quoting Janus
I gave my position and you effectively ignored it, claiming that you are opposed to enslaving animals rather than addressing the substantive issue. If there is nothing about race X that requires us to treat them in a certain way, then they need not be treated in a certain way. I think there is something about race X which requires us to treat them in a certain way; you don't. That's the difference between us. I have a reason to oppose racism; you don't. Your only response is to effectively shift the burden of proof onto the racist. You effectively say, "I don't have to give you a reason why they can't be treated as animals. You have to give me a reason why they can be treated as animals! You must answer to me, I need not answer to you!" That's an effective tactic in a culture that opposes slavery, but it is not inherently rational, and therefore will be wholly ineffective in a culture that favors slavery. It is a form of begging the question.
Quoting Janus
I am demonstrating the way that your opposition to slavery has reached the stage of mere emotivism. You have absolutely no rational account for why slavery is wrong, and you nevertheless hold that it is wrong. It is like a car running on fumes.
Rubbish! If someone wants to claim that tout court inferiority is a thing, then it's up to them to provide a criterial account.
Quoting Leontiskos
No positive reason in the form of an objective attribute can be given as to why a race should be treated or should not be treated as slaves. The reason not to treat animals or humans in ways that makes them miserable is simply compassion. If someone lacks compassion your arguments will not convince them.
Even if someone could prove tout court inferiority that still would not justify treating them in ways that make them miserable.
Quoting Leontiskos
You haven't demonstrated any such thing. You claim you have a purely rational (i.e. nothing to do with emotion) account that shows slavery is wrong. Present it then or stop your posturing.
If you claim that intellectual inferiority constitutes or supports a judgement of tout court inferiority you are simply showing your bias. There is nothing in intellectual inferiority, even if it could be definitively proven, that entails tout court inferiority. If you think there is then you don't understand deductive validity.
Like I said, you're the one who coined the term, initially in <this post> and then more definitively in <this post>. If "tout court inferior" doesn't mean anything, then why coin the term?
Quoting Janus
This is a great example of attempting to shift the burden of proof. "You haven't been able to provide a reason for your position, therefore it fails. I don't have to provide a reason against it."
Quoting Janus
Okay, and this is a new argument that you have not previously given.
That's at least an argument, but it's worth understanding that some of the "racialism" that was pointed up earlier in the thread is compassion-based. An easy example is affirmative action, which is compassion-based racism. Similarly, the case of Charles Murrayat least to my understandingis a case where someone is arguing that certain races are inferior in certain areas and therefore should be compensated accordingly by the social system. This too is compassion-based racism (and part of the question in these cases is whether such a thing should be called racism).
Quoting Janus
Okay, so does your criterion of "tout court inferiority" matter at all, then?
Quoting Janus
.
The reason we cannot treat any race as sub-human is because each race is human. This is an a posteriori claim, not an a priori claim. The reason we treat "oxen and horses and cattle," as sub-human is because they are sub-human. Apparently you are some sort of vegan or vegetarian to whom this makes no sense, but that doesn't mean that I haven't provided an argument against racism. If someone cannot empirically understand the relevant difference between a human being and an ox then they will struggle with such an argument. But most people don't have trouble with that distinction.
People or animals can only be determined to be inferior to other people or animals in precisely measurable ways. My argument was always only that if someone claims slavery is admissible on account of the inferiority of the enslaved, then it would up to them to demonstrate how overall inferiority could possibly be established. And even if, per impossibile, they were able to show that, the burden would still be on them to prove that overall inferiority could justify enslavement. It simply aint going to fly.
If someone says "Fuck you, I'm going to enslave or mistreat someone or some animal", then no rational argument will have any effect on them.
Quoting Leontiskos
No, you didn't.
I won't reply to the rest of your straw-drivel.
Yes, disproving an unfalsifiable claim does not generally fly. So your unfalsifiable claim is secure. It will not be disproved. When you make "overall inferiority" into a square circle you guarantee that no one will be able to show that anything is (or isn't, by the way) "overall inferior," but you do so at the cost of rational coherence.
I think we're done, no?
I'm not claiming "tout court" or overall inferiority looks like anything and that's the pointif someone claims that slavery is justified when the enslaved are inferior in all ways then their claim would seem to be incoherent.
And even if they more modestly claimed that some measurable kind of inferiority justified slavery, I can't see how any argument for that could stand up to scrutiny either.
I'm happy to be doneyou resurrected this argument after 19 days, and I thought we were done then.