Is Misanthropy right?
What would you count as evidence for and against misanthropy?
For could be: War, inequality, greed, sexism, shallowness, animal abuse and so on.
Against could be: Types of altruism, charity work, campaigning, welfare and so on.
For could be: War, inequality, greed, sexism, shallowness, animal abuse and so on.
Against could be: Types of altruism, charity work, campaigning, welfare and so on.
Comments (58)
But I think we have the capability to acting otherwise and having good intentions. A lot of misanthropic beliefs stem from conceptions of humans as being selfish and egoistic, always out for themselves and ready to stomp all over everyone else if it comes to it. That is empirically false and ethically repugnant and the fact that we recognize it as ethically repugnant means we aren't secretly egoistic turds.
Evidence for or against misanthropy would have to be things universally found in Homo sapiens sapiens.
Therefore, hierarchies, sexism, inequality, etc. could not be evidence either way because there have been cultures that were egalitarian.
How can misanthropy, a dis-like, be right or wrong? 'Subject to evidence'? People will like or dislike as they find themselves in the world through their experiences. It doesn't seem to me an ethical matter.
This issue is around whether the beliefs causing Misanthropy are false. I am not talking about a matter of taste here. Someone might dislike humans regardless of their conduct. I suppose also I am asking here about what hope we can have in our species.
I have done CBT and part of that is challenging your thoughts so you have to evaluate whether you are responding appropriately to situations or something like that. But if you have negative thoughts and they are valid then what?
I think you could dislike any species. I think the problem with humans though is that they can act with the most deliberation and knowledge so their behaviour can't be solely attributed to instincts in my opinion..
I don't think I would be misanthropic if I thought all behaviour was just instinct and hormones but I think that would be a poor analysis or gross reduction of the whole of human culture.
It seems like misanthropy begins as a reaction by the individual.
It depends what sort of negative thought.
'I feel miserable' is a negative thought and it can be valid, but CBT teaches us how we can change our thinking so that it becomes invalid.
'Life is misery.' is a negative thought but it cannot be valid, because for some people life is mostly misery and for others it is not.
'Donald Trump will plunge us into nuclear war' is a negative thought, which may or may not turn out to be true. But what CBT, and the Stoicism from which it evolved, teach us is to accept that we cannot control that (unless we are one of those rare people that is in a position to influence the POTUS), dismiss it from our mind and focus on making the most of the life we have in the meantime.
What evidence have you for this? My own experience is I have always had low self esteem I was bullied throughout childhood, abused by my parents among other things. It took me quite some time to become misanthropic.
How much respect should we proffer for slave traders, racists, sexist and warmongers? There is a mass of cruelty in human history. You can have a low opinion of humans without thinking you yourself are exempt from negative traits.
A lack of misanthropy seems like a symptom of unwarranted optimism and rose coloured spectacles.
One person's aberrant personality is less reason to worry than a whole group of dysfunctional people constituting a society.
I responded by asking a question, because I don't have a theory about how people become misanthropes, misogynists, misandrists, or Christ-like, for that matter. I'm would guess it is some kind of reaction. Your situation is one kind of reaction among several possibilities.
Even if a whole society is dysfunctional (which is most probably not the case), you can still choose to persevere and strive for excellence (or so a Stoic would usefully say, I think).
Interestingly, one of the biggest misanthropists of all time, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, is said to have dedicated much time to medically treating poor people (for free, by some accounts).
Except when a handful (just a few) are able to instigate a nuclear attack. (That might not end up being an all-out nuclear war, but it would still be a bad thing).
You seemed to go straight for the Misanthropes are arrogant position. Does that say something about your personality type that you would prefer to reject misanthropy and preserve a positive view of life?
Like you want to see misanthropy as a symptom of an individual not society.
I want to challenge my misanthropy but things in the news and on the internet undermine that. Some misanthropists might delight in a sense of superiority. But that seems a bit implausible because misanthropy is a dislike (or disapproval/distrust etc) of ones own species which embraces the self
Imagine a scenario where you are off work ill for a couple of months then you read an article criticising people who take long sick leave as idle scroungers and underneath a segment of people agreeing. How Would you feel about that? Knowing that at least a segment of society was ignorant and hostile towards you? Or If you read on line racism and so on. Even if these people are a small minority it is hard to put a positive spin on it or be uplifted.
It seems to only take a small or moderate group of people to bring society down. But maybe it is actually more what with overpopulation, climate change and so on.
It is hard if you're not thick skinned.
In an ironic way it seems that misanthropes are interested in humans but being stoical might entail blocking out negative input to not confront the full spectrum of society.
I am a negative person but I find positive people I meet have limited interest in world news, inequality etc. It is not that they don't care at all but they are selective. I think sometimes you need to face a situation in stark detail however unpleasant to change it.
It is one thing say to give money to charity but then to never have seen a photo of a starving child. But yeah I probably over expose myself to misery lol..
But some of these people were voted in by millions of voters.
I am depressed when dangerous or callous people get voted in but that also means people did support them.
I think there is a problem with shifting responsibility onto one person because it then means possible apathy or transference and so on. Scapegoating is a classic political ploy as well. How many leaders will say "You the people are the problem!". They are more likely to say "The work shy are the problem" or "I support the hard working majority" or "If you want me to fight against Gay marriage I am your servant"
I don't know to what extent North Korea is controlled by a few and to what extent it is group hysteria or something. I don't see it as representative of your average society though.
Of course, Trump didn't get elected all by himself. But the thing is, every since 1945 control over the use of atomic weapons has pretty much always been lodged in the presidency. And while his predecessors haven't been as fast and loose with emotional eruptions as Trump, the narrow control has always been something of a problem. We came close to using nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis (well, they were actually Russian missiles) in 1962, and there have been a couple of incidents involving misinterpreted radar signals which could, conceivably, have led to a first strike order.
NPR carried an interview with a general who was explaining why attacking North Korea effectively would be difficult. The rockets and bombs are scattered around the country, and they are buried in tunnels. We don't have maps of the tunnels, so... where exactly is the missile hiding?
Second, if we attacked NK using surface detonations, the load of fallout passing over Japan (immediately to the east) would be heavy. Very bad.
Third, NK has a lot of chemical weapons, like Sarin, and Seoul is very close to NK guns. (There are about 20 million + people living in Seoul.) So, it wouldn't take NK very long at all to kill off a few million South Koreans, even if we blew up all their atomic bombs--which we probably can't do. For that matter, NK might be able to nuke Seoul, even after our initial attack.
My guess is that Kim Il Sung will not launch armed, or even unarmed, missiles at Guam. He might launch a couple of missiles out to sea to make us nervous, but that we can live with. The upshot of it all, the general said, is that we will probably have to accept a NK which is a nuclear power capable of hitting the US, and that there won't be much that we can do about it.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't know why you feel that way -- I was only responding to what you said. You don't sound arrogant to me, and I wasn't trying to suggest that you were.
I don't think misanthropy is a society-wide phenomenon -- just because most people aren't that way. Maybe they should have darker views of human nature than they do, but they don't seem to. I don't know why, either way.
Just leave them alone that is what they prefer. Dont try and be nice or to act altruisticly, they dont care.
And why am i misathropic?
Certainly nit because of war, inequality, greed, sexism. Shallowness perhaps
And your arguments against misanthrope a poor. Why?
My dogma arises from moral nhilism, rejection of good and evil which leads to a veiw of indifference. Humanity and life i general is indifferent. So that is how i am, indiffernt.
But indiffernce is differnt from "a dislike of humankind". well indiffernce is offten mistaken for disike it is not that i wish people to be unhappy so to speak im merely indifferent to wheter they are happy or not
That is my dogma
I was going to salute you for being a true nihilist until I read this:
Quoting Allthephilosophersaretaken
You need to follow your nihilistic feelings to their logical conclusion if you really wish to be one, it would seem to me. If you can't do so, it would be wiser to pull back from the brink.
I do not folloow, sorry. Perhaps you could elaborate for me.
Since so much of our vocabulary is influenced by concepts of good and evil it is hard to describe moral nhilism. Emotions have the most connotations of ideas pertaining to consepts of emmotion, most things do. This often makes it hard for a moral to describe his point of veiw.
However indiffernce has no connection with morals. Unless indifference is considered a moral stand point in and of itself, that would make things complicated, but i would argue that indifference is not a moral stand point since one is indifferent to morality
If you were not refering to my indiffernce but my dogma, i say that every possible philosophical possition has dogma, no system is free of dogma perhaps the only thing free of dogma is
Sorry typo: emotions have conotations of morality. Love is good, anger is bad etc. most of language has conotations to morality
It's easy: no morals. Except, "moral nihilism" then becomes a contradiction.
Quoting Allthephilosophersaretaken
Yes, indifference as amorality is totally plausible; but it also entails total indifference to all conceptions of morality. Harm done to other persons is necessarily permissible, as an important example, within this indifferent amorality.
Quoting Allthephilosophersaretaken
Agreed. This includes your attempt at hard nihilism, which just comes up as soft nihilism because you still need to appeal to your own dogma. Dogma suggests morals. Dogma means a set of beliefs accepted without question by a given group. Morals are inextricable from dogma as such...nihilism is inherently a-dogmatic then. So...dogma means not nihilism...nihilism means no dogma...etc...
Good points. I shall have to think about them
Given that you seem to value moral nhilism
How do you deal with the paradoxical contradiction i am now faced with?
Or perhaps you have rejected moral nhilism because of it, if so what have you come to favour and why?
Yes, I've rejected nihilism of any sort for those reasons, among others. For now, I've come to accept a few basic principles, while retaining a sense of ignorance: Morality exists. Morality exists because humans exist. Humans are the "noble animal", the "noble dust" of the universe. We are set apart from the rest of it (the original connotation of the word "holy"). Divine love is real. That's all for now.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4774574/Couple-benefits-furious-rejected-landlord.html?mrn_rm=rta-fallback
Hate is never a moral disposition. If the misanthrope hates the above immoralities, then he does not morally raise himself above them by hating human beings. Wrong does not cancel out wrong.
If for instance we all lived in a Cormac McCarthy novel like The Road (societal collapse), or Blood Meridian (lawless wild west) default paranoia and doubt about the intent of others might help you to survive.
Misanthropy is a post hoc rationalization for reinforcing or conserving behavior, that emerges out of any number of painful experiences where trust in others was repeatedly abused or exploited. You learn to distrust others if it generally saves you trouble (but compared to what?).
It seems to me that humans can think abstractly yet concretely about the truth and values.
So for example we have successful scientific theories that describe aspects of the world. So it seems quite possible to have an unbiased assessment of the conduct of humans.
It could be all subjective so that all that matters is one's own judgement of their experiences. However I don't think that when we talk about something like the Holocaust that it can simply be wrong based on personal feelings and otherwise neutral.
If you want a Darwinian account of everything then what is The Darwinian explanation for The Holocaust and Two World Wars.
Undeniably there are some good individuals, and some really good individuals.
Undeniably there's no hope at all for humanity as a whole.
...because of the natural-selection-caused social-animal instincts of most individuals. (e.g. Remember P.T. Barnum's great insight that there's a sucker born every minute.)
Michael Ossipoff
Because it's actions not opinions that are right or wrong? Tough experience makes many a person something of a misanthrope. I don't see why I should hold it against them. I'm not a pedophile, for instance, but I don't think one can blame someone for their pedophilic thoughts: thoughts come to us from who-knows-where? Such people are to blame if they act on those thoughts, not for having them.
This is just the claim that having an opinion doesn't hold a moral value re-phrased.
Imo there are three kinds of "thoughts" (incorrect term but there isn't really a good synonym that I could think of): subconscious, feelings and conscious. Subconscious thoughts/feelings are what we are unaware of. By feelings I don't mean feelings as in your mental state but your feelings or opinions about a subject. Those include random thoughts, the origin of which you are unaware of. Conscious thoughts are what you think yourself because you decide so, and these can be opinions as well. Thinking something yourself out of your free will is a decision and an action.
Yes, I know I chose the terms above badly.
Of subconscious thoughts, a person is not responsible of. People's feelings aren't moral either, but their opinions about these opinions, which are conscious, are. One can for example have an opinion on some subject their own conscious opinions disagree with; for example because of rational reasoning or one's morals. Example given, I'd give (or want to give) Hitler a death sentence, was he alive and the desicion was up to me, but I also realize a being morally superior to me would only put him in jail. Feeling he deserves a death sentence is not a desicion of mine that I'd be responsible of, but knowing that my feelings are wrong is, and thus I believe my actions (which include thoughts) are morally acceptable.
In the case of pedophiles, if they get the thoughts, which are part of the second group, but know that those thoughts are sick, they are not morally wrong any more than any other person. However, if they enjoy those thoughts and think they're fine and don't act only because of the fear of consequences, the person is bad (a bit similarly to how Aristotle's ethics that don't focus on individual actions but the nature of a person).
One would expect misanthropy to increase with overcrowding.
That depends; is it good vanilla ice cream? There's some really bad ice cream about these days.
The only thing I'd count as evidence for misanthropy is someone expressing dislike, contempt, or hatred for humankind in general.
Maybe you mean "justification for misanthropy"? Maybe if everyone acted like a complete asshole all the time. But they don't, thankfully.
Oh it's quite wrong to like mediocrity!
[quote=Revelations]I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot not cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.[/quote]
I meant justification.
Everyone does not have to act badly all the time to give a negative assessment of humans or the human condition. I consider World War two and the Holocaust a huge black mark against humanity that cannot be lessened by acts of kindness. It is hard to find acts of helpful behaviour equivalent to the harmful and destructive behaviour.
I cannot understand why people could treat human atrocities and other bad behaviours so lightly.
Not everything everyone does is great, of course, but I think good things far outweigh bad things.
I think if you dislike something that is harmless that would seem irrational, or merely a preference, but disliking horrible destructive behavior would appear to be a rational analysis.
From what I remember utilitarian calculations calculate levels of harm and pleasure in a similar way. I higher proportion of pleasure is seen as desirable and it is hard to see how a higher level of pleasure could be seen as undesirable.
I don't think anything can outweigh a genocide. These kind of things are the depths of depravity.
However I am not sure how you would be making your calculation.
What is on your positive and negative side over the calculation?
On my negative side I would place the arms industry, poverty and inequality, greed and overpopulation. I would also include historical destructive behaviour like wars and slavery.
On the positive side I would put attempts at social reform, attempts to decrease inequality and create a sustainable population and economy. I would also include Historical altruistic and reforming behaviour like campaigns against slavery, racism and misogyny.
But you could put all sorts of random things in an equation to skewer it and ignore certain phenomena.
Maybe I just have an inexplicable prejudice against humans? Fueled by experience though.
I don't just blanketly consider the arms industry or greed negative. Inequality I think is unavoidable and not negative. I wouldn't say the world is overpopulated, either. Re poverty, the problem is simply when people don't have housing, food, etc.
Re positive stuff, there are countless little things that hundreds of millions of people do every day that are positive. That's what most of the world is like most of the time.
This seems to be a subjective assessment.
In terms of misanthropy, the fact that we need trillions dollars worth of weapons to protect each other from each other I cannot spin in a positive light.
I think a lot of positive actions only happen because of something negative. So for instance giving to charity because of poverty and under funding of medicine, or caring for a sick relative but they have to be sick for you to do this.
Of course. It can't be anything else.
Anyway, a few examples of positives that I'd not say are not "because of something negative," these are things that I experienced just today:
My wife and I enjoyed breakfast together and enjoyed a movie together while we ate breakfast.
People held the door for others at a store I went to and helped a woman out of the door with her baby stroller.
People were courteous to me and others biking (I was biking), walking, jogging as we all went about our activities, plenty of people smiling and greeting each other, accommodating each other to make travel safe and easy (including vehicular traffic in some areas), etc.
People were helpful re taking pictures of tourists. (I'm in an area with lots of tourists).
I don't think that the amount of people that die in a famine or war is subjective.
And that is the context of your people opening the door for each other example.
Weren't we talking about value assessments of facts such as that, including compared to other things? We're not just naming the facts, right?
Facts can lead to value assessments.
Some facts are about preferences only, such as my brain enjoys the taste of ice cream and this leads me to value ice cream for example.
But other facts that lead to values are likely completely independent of how I respond to an event. Someone else's suffering and hardship is not diminished by how you respond to it.
Any value assessments are subjective.
Someone else's suffering is a way they feel about their situation, their experiences.
I don't think pain is simply an opinion. People writhe in agony from pain.
It would be bizarre if peoples values were not at correlated with any objective event. Your position verges on solipsism.
I believe those people suffered in that war and I have good reason to do so and that triggers my values.
I don't think anyone would be misanthropic if there was no mean spirited and destructive behaviour from humans.
For example I don't like the feel of cotton wool but I don't blame cotton for that because it is simply my response to it, but you can blame humans for some of their dire conduct.
"Subjective" refers to it being a mental state. You're not arguing that pain is something other than a mental state, are you?
I am not sure I agree with this definition.
I think subjective means personal or perspectival.
You can judge someones is in pain without them telling you.
In a banal sense everything can only be a mental state for us to access it in which case you can say nothing is objective but it does not need to follow that observing something through mental state means is has no external reality.
However take your example of someone opening a door for you. All you know about that person is that one action not their past history thoughts, beliefs and desires. There are other facts that would give you a better informed opinion of their character.
Connected to this is a passage I recently read in a book by Manly P. Hall, concerning the Eleusinian Mysteries which represented the myth of the abduction of Persephone from her mother Demeter by the king of the underworld Hades:
"The soul of man - often called Psyche, and in the Eleusinian Mysteries symbolized by Persephone - is essentially a spiritual thing. Its true home is in the higher worlds, where, free from the bondage of material form and material concepts, it is said to be truly alive and self-expressive. The human, or physical, nature of man, according to this doctrine, is a tomb, a quagmire, false and impermanent thing, the source of all sorrow and suffering. Plato describes the body as the sepulcher of the soul; and by this he means not only the human form but also human nature.
The gloom and depression of the Lesser Mysteries represented the agony of the spiritual soul unable to express itself because it has accepted the limitations and illusions of the human environment. The crux of the Eleusinian argument was that man is neither better nor wiser after death than during life. If he does not rise above ignorance during his sojourn here, man goes at death into eternity to wander about forever, making the same mistakes which he made here. If he does not outgrow the desire for material possession here, he will carry it with him into the invisible world, where, because he can never gratify the desire, he will continue in endless agony. Dante's Inferno is symbolically descriptive of the sufferings of those who never freed their spiritual natures from the cravings, habits, viewpoints, and limitations of their Plutonic personalities. Those who made no endeavor to improve themselves (whose souls have slept) during their physical lives, passed at death into Hades, where, lying in rows, they slept through all eternity as they had slept through life."
I much prefer such an outlook over a misanthropic view, for what is left for the misanthrope but to sulk?
Most of the time, can't you tell if someone is really loving or hating a song, film, painting, or some particular food etc. without them telling you?