Should hate speech be allowed ?
Should all forms of hate speech be allowed, including the racist ones. Should hate speech which instigates violence be allowed ? If we ban a certain type of offensive speeches and usually the arguments are oriented around feelings being hurt. We may also argue against criticizing a religion or an ideology. I know one of the group isn't a choice and the other is but does it matter.
Comments (2424)
Your objection amounts to either an endorsement of conformism or an ego-oriented fiat, depending on where the pendulum is.
"Your inches or mine?".
This highlights the absurdity, the big problems, which can arise as a consequence of Terrapinism. Terrapinism should therefore be rejected. He gives us the very means to put together a reduction to the absurd. And not just on this issue, but others as well.
If that's what you call being sensible instead of a crackpot, then yes.
Must. Not. Be. Too. Different.
Anyway, good to know we've once again reached that point where you're effectively throwing in the towel and handing me the victory. You will laugh and refuse to believe it, but that's how it works in debates. You might not want to accept defeat, but if you're unwilling or unable to come up with a proper response, then that's a defeat. You've conceded whether you come out and say so or not. This is also, I've noticed, the only way you ever concede.
The laughter is at your ego.
That in itself is laughable, because you could just as well be looking at your own reflection. Your ego prevents you from conceding anything at all. Ever. Your ego leads you to your free speech fundamentalism. Your ego is behind your biting of the bullet in many a situation on this forum when you should instead recognise absurdity and act accordingly.
Even when you become the butt of jokes as a result of some crazy bullet you've bitten, your ego prevents you from seeing sense. Do you still maintain that you don't know whether or not I believe I'm on the moon? Do you still maintain that the meaning of words is entirely subjective? Including these very words?
I'm not saying you can't invent them. I'm saying it's hugely significant to the process of normative discussions (like the one this thread is about) that no one ever has. Inches are obviously far more settled a matter than foundational moral principles, but in a world of 7 billion people, it is of huge significance that there is not one single functioning alternative to the agreement about what length an inch is. It means that for normative discussions (say, teaching a child to measure, or how long we should make some timber component) we need not at all go into the fact that the length of an 'inch' is arbitrary. It would be a foolish sideline.
With the caveat that foundational moral positions do vary, such that we have to talk about a range rather than a fixed point, it is equally the case with normative moral discussions. It is a foolish sideline to point out that some people might have some utterly bizarre moral foundation. They might (although, as per our other concurrent discussion, I think there are limits). But people might have a different idea of how long an inch is. It's just the same. Both are so unlikely that we ignore them in normal discussion.
The term 'correct' applies here to that which does not go beyond an assumed range of moral foundational positions (what @S is describing as "absurd conclusions"). And you're right, it does have normative weight. That's because we assume whilst having this discussion (the one about free speech, not the one we're having now) that you, along with everyone else taking part, have foundational moral principles within that range, and as such claiming a course of action was consistent with them (which again, we assume you are doing by advocating it), when such a course of action is actually not consistent with them, is 'incorrect'. To make a claim that something is consistent when it is not is 'incorrect'.
Now - the assumptions.
First, assuming that you have foundational moral principles that are within the normal range. This assumption is not only warranted on the grounds of reasonable expectation (positions outside of this range are rare and usually accompanied by other signs of mental disturbance), but it is necessary. It is reasonable that normative moral discussion needs to be had (we live in a community and so must find some mechanism of reaching consensus if only to make the behaviour of others more predictable). We cannot have normative discussions at all unless we assume some shared moral foundational principles.
Second, the assumption that you advocating a position is equivalent to you claiming it is consistent with your moral foundational principles. Again, this is a necessary assumption for discussion to take place. I agree, it might not be the case, someone might advocate a position and not give a fig that it doesn't match their foundational moral principles. But in such a case discussion is pointless, they might as well not take part.
The topic is about hate speech, not stupid speech. No one is suggesting that statements like, "I'm a free speech absolutist", should be banned. That's not hateful at all.
I'm not someone who thinks that their preferences are correct just because they have them.
Quoting S
Why would that be in favor of my ego? Be a free speech absolutist means that I'm endorsing that people be allowed to call for my death, to commit slander/libel against me, etc. How is that in service to one's ego?
Quoting S
As I explained during that discussion, it depends on just what you're claiming, the context, etc. But in general, yes, anyone could potentially believe anything.
Quoting S
Yes, of course. Meaning is something that brains functioning mentally do. It's not something that's done by the world outside of brains functioning mentally.
Are you actually endorsing that?
Aside from the fact that you're claiming to know everything anyone has ever proposed, which obviously you'd not know, you're aware that the measurement standards, per widespread acceptance, have not only changed over time, but there have been competing standards in effect simultaneously at various historical times, right?
Quoting Isaac
Huge significance for what re anything at all that's relevant to my comments?
Quoting Isaac
Although if anyone is thinking it's not subjectively devised, "arbitrary" in that sense, and/or "correct" simply by virtue of being common, I think we should go into that fact.
If you just wanted to have a discussion about what the common views are, as if you were doing a bit of descriptive cultural anthropology, then yeah, you'd be less likely to talk about arbitrariness, etc.--or at least that would be a big sidebar for it.
Hopefully you'd not be of a view that a cultural norm amounts to a normative, because it doesn't.
Yes of course. If I weren't, I wouldn't be able to say that I'm in favor of there being no speech prohibitions, would I?
You don't use that word, and you're oh so humble as a result. :lol:
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, I mean that you stubbornly think that you're right about your free speech fundamentalism in the face of much criticism. That's kind of why it's fundamentalism. All fundamentalism is egotistical, isn't it?
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, that doesn't answer the question. I wasn't asking you about what anyone could potentially believe, I was asking you about what I believe. You already have the claim and the context.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So you don't maintain that the meaning of words is entirely subjective, then. You just said, "Yes, of course", which means, "No, of course not".
It's not that I don't use that word. I do not believe that my preferences are correct just because I have them. You're so far up your own derriere that you can't comprehend how that could be the case, though, I suppose.
Quoting S
Not in the slightest. It's not something that one can be correct or incorrect about. It's simply my disposition, my preferences about it. That should underscore why criticism is of little use. Criticism of someone's preferences isn't likely to make them change their preferences. If you love the taste of grapefruit, no amount of criticism that people can lob at you about that is going to result in you not loving the taste of grapefruit. Hopefully, you wouldn't think that your love of grapefruit is "correct," so that people who don't like the taste of grapefruit are "incorrect," but who knows.
Quoting S
As if meaning were the same as the observable aspect of word usage.
I don't consider it to be anything that is morally wrong or that should be legislated against. "Harm" is too vague to make generalizations about. Certainly some people are psychologically harmed by words--certainly some people are psychologically harmed by all sorts of things. I don't base any moral or legislative stances merely on the concept of "harm."
Again, as I've made clear numerous times in this thread, I'd require that we can demonstrate that words force any particular action for me to have the opinion that words are harmful in a way that I'd consider morally problematic or necessary to prohibit.
What's vague about death threats and slander?
I didn't say that was vague. I said that "harm" is. "Harm" is as bad as "suffering." If you go to the current antinatalist thread, you can find someone who has a moral problem with "suffering" even when the person who is "suffering" has absolutely no issues with the states in question. For example, normal hunger is classified as suffering, even when someone has no negative assessment of being hungry so that they get off the couch and open the refrigerator to get something to eat.
You mean re intent? Someone could say any utterance with any conceivable intent.
You do, though. I'm not reaching that conclusion from the rationalisations you're coming out with. You're like the fox in Aesop's fable who says, "I wasn't hungry anyway". We shouldn't believe what the fox says, and we shouldn't believe what you say.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You don't think that free speech absolutism is right? Could've fooled me. Why are we arguing over it then?
Quoting Terrapin Station
How dare you suggest that my mother is a lady of the night!? That's what that means. I demand that you retract that statement and apologise.
Any random threat could be an example.
I have no problem accepting that you don't believe me. ¯\_(?)_/¯ That should have been clear from the post you're responding to. I don't expect you to believe it, because it's too far beyond the scope of what you can imagine.
Quoting S
It's my preference. It's not correct. Why are we arguing over it? People like to argue. At first, Wittgenstein thought maybe I wasn't considering "difficult cases." So he presented one. I clarified my view in the context of such difficult cases. He brought up "cause and effect." I stated my view about causality in this context, and then people wanted to argue about causality. I made it clear that what I care about in this regard is force, but folks wanted to keep arguing.
Presumably someone like you wants to argue about it because you're not comfortable with people being too different from yourself and what you consider to be the norm.
But go ahead, if you have an example, present it.
Wait, I think I know the answer. Terrapinism does count as philosophy, although it's bad philosophy and good entertainment.
You don't see the difference between someone's intent, someone's action, and your reaction?
Bertrand Russell once said, "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to not seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”
Ah, you conceded. About time!
Well, don't forget that I'd add that it's not incorrect, either. Correct/incorrect are a category error for this stuff.
But that's like saying that elevators don't go up or down, because up and down are a category error for that stuff. If there's no up or down in relation to elevators in a sense that I'm making up and choosing to go by in order to reach that conclusion, then there's no up or down in relation to elevators. Any objections to that? If so, then you'll understand my objection to you on this topic.
Also, it's really funny that you consider it a category error that people can be right and wrong about matters like this, yet you see nothing wrong with asking a question like, "Where is trigonometry located?".
It would simply be a case of someone thinking something different than what they're saying. There are a number of different ways to do that, including saying something facetiously, but you can just simply do it to do it, too.
No, it's not, because that wouldn't be a category error.
Why ever say 'I love you' when 'Kill yourself' with loving intent works the same, is that it?
But I'm using the same kind of justification as you are, so what's the problem? It's a category error, and it's a category error because the way that I'm interpreting it leads to that conclusion.
Again, intent, what's expressed, and how it's taken are not the same things.
The justification I'm using is that "correct/incorrect" have a normative connotation, but commonality or consensus do not make normatives obtain. Is that the same justification you're using?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, read before replying.
"Kill yourself' would be what's expressed, not intent, right? Intent and what's expressed are not the same.
The same [I]kind[/I] of justification. The elevator example is a category error, and it's a category error because the way that I'm interpreting it leads to that conclusion. What's the problem? Could it, perchance, be my interpretation?
Use those eyes for once and read before you reply.
If someone just comes up to you and says "Kill yourself," the way you know their intent is?
What you wrote is "in a sense that I'm making up" as if I were appealing to some unusual sense of the terms.
Yeah. It's very unusual to go by any interpretation which means that people can't get matters like we've been talking about right or wrong. You'll only get that in philosophy, not out there in the world through speaking to normal people.
Yes. I want to live in a world where anyone can express anything whatsoever, in any context.
What you seem to be doing is trying to figure out how to interpret normal folks so that per the exact language they happen to use, they don't have any either bollocksed or unanalyzed beliefs. (Although for some reason you don't really seem to do that when it comes to religion.)
Not all actions are speech.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Don't even try to squirm out of this one.
You've made it abundantly clear that you just want to get high on 'freedom' with no regard as to the consequences.
Expression = speech.
Not all actions are speech. Stabbing someone isn't speech, for example.
A reason to use "expression" instead of "speech" in a comment is that "speech" is often read with a connotation that it's only referring to natural language utterances, and sometimes it's read with a connotation that it's only referring to talking, as opposed to writing. "Expression" is more readily read with a broader connotation, where it includes things like artworks, too.
You of all people should know that knowledge claims are not based on absolute proof, come on!
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, this is rather disingenuous considering your usual attention to detail. I was referring specifically to the real world length represented by one inch. It is a standard which I have good reason to believe no significant number of people dispute despite a population of 7 billion. That is a serious degree of agreement. I can't even get my family of four to agree where to go on an outing, to get virtually the entire globe to agree what length an inch is puts such a standard in a justifiably different category, one which quite reasonably admits of words like 'correct' even with the normative connotations.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, you're ignoring my argument re moral foundational principles vs moral 'views'. Abstenence from sex before marriage is a moral view with normative weight, but no one (and I mean no one) is simply born, or grows up with a gut feeling that they should abstain from sex before marriage. The position derives from more foundational ones (we should seek to follow the Bible, we should resist carnal temptation as a virtue, we should not cause harm to others - presuming such an act would result in harm, etc...). Even some of those will be based on even more foundational beliefs.
So when we discuss normative moral positions we make an assumption about shared foundational beliefs (at least within a broad range). It's no different to when we have any other type of conversation, we assume shared principles on things like logical thought, language use etc. If I had a conversation about mathematics I would not assume that the person I was speaking with had a completely different set of mathematical axioms to any I've encountered before. He might. But I hold the conversation on the quite reasonable assumption that he doesn't.
Just because I'm a moral subjectivist, doesn't mean I have to ignore the absolutely startling similarity in the subjective moral principles most people have as foundational. It's not only entirely pragmatic in the face of overwhelming supporting evidence, but I have a reasonable mechanism (in the mechanical limits of the brain) to explain such similarities.
We don't have to limit ourselves to cultural anthropology, nor do we have to concede to falling into the argumentum ad populum. To put it simply...
1. The overwhelming majority of people have their foundational morals constrained by the features of the machine which produces them (the brain).
2. It is a reasonable approach to conversation on a subject to assume that your interlocutors hold foundational views in common with you where those views are so widely held as to make it unlikely to encounter alternatives.
3. Further to 2, it is also reasonable to make such an assumption when not doing so would render the entire discussion pointless.
4. We reserve words such as 'correct' for situations where the standard of judgement is so widely agreed upon as to, again, make encountering objections extremely unlikely.
5. We give normative weight on the basis of such widespread agreement, not because of ad populum arguments, but because we have good reason to believe the interlocutor shares those standards even in the light of their refusal to acknowledge this (consider someone insisting the wood was five inches long and on being told they were wrong, its seven, they reply that its five "of my inches, which are different to yours". We'd quite reasonably just not believe them assuming rather that they're frantically trying to save face on their poor guesswork).
I'm being sarcastic. There's no way to know that no one has ever had an idea for an alternate measurement standard (again, ignoring that we already know the history of this where it's not the case that there haven't been alternate, sometimes simultaneous measurement standards).
Quoting Isaac
You literally wrote, in support of there only being one measurement standard that no one ever has proposed a different measurement standard.
And actually, something else that you're overlooking is the fact that not all rulers, measuring tapes, etc. use 127/500 of the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second for calibration. So it's not at all the case that there's a universal length for an inch anyway. (I'd bet anything that many ruler manufacturers aren't even aware of the official standard that an inch is 127/500 of the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second. They probably just use some sort of template they have on hand.)
Quoting Isaac
I'm not a foundationalist, first off. Not just for ethics, but also for epistemology in general, I more or less buy Quine's "web of beliefs" view. When I talk about foundational view, I'm talking about that in a relative context, where it's something serving as a foundation in a particular instance. That's how I believe we reason. With "moveable 'foundations'" in a complex web of beliefs/stances. ("Moveable 'foundations'" are a bit like "moveable 'do'" in solfege if you're familiar with that.)
No moral stance has to "grow out of" or be based on any other moral stance, especially in a given instance.
The foundational view is another big gaffe that grows out of mathematics fetishism.
Quoting Isaac
All that it means to discuss normative moral positions is to talk about what we feel should or ought to be the case. It has absolutely nothing to do with sharing anything. Sharing anything has no normative weight. In other words, normatives (shoulds, oughts) don't actually have anything at all to do with statistical norms. Or, another way to say that is that statistical norms (or you could say sharing, including proportionate to how widespread it is) in no way imply, suggest, etc. anything about what should or ought to be the case, or what is correct/incorrect, in the sense of what you ought to or should do.
This is too long already, I've already said most of this stuff, and we're getting nowhere, so I'm leaving it off at that for now. I don't like ignoring parts of posts, but don't drone on and on.
Well, here's one report on the variances in rulers:
https://emtoolbox.nist.gov/Publications/MSCProceedings94.pdf
Well the conversation has moved on, but yes you have the basic idea of what Im getting at. Its a distinction which will make the conversation less fruitless, it will help the talking past each other. Thats my goal in presenting it.
Anyway, woke up 3 pages behind so evidently my window has passed.
You're the best candidate around here for an interpreter, so to speak, but I don't know how successful you can be at that.
I'm not going to be able to get why they're so drawn to consensuses, to a point where they think they're correct/incorrect and have normative weight (at least when it suits them (in S's case)), and why they can't see that the latter part of that is fallacious, and they're not going to get why I'm "perversely" denying the normative importance of consensuses.
Simple. Its neither 'weight' nor 'importance' of consensus, its the liklihood of broad confirmity and the usefulness in discussion of assuming it.
Well, there are more disagreements going on than Im attempting to address. I think one stumbling point is how some words are being used and understood so im focusing on that. Im not really sure how the consensus bit makes their points tbh.
Anyway, there are two uses of language here. You are focused on the creation of the standard and agreement to the standard and the subjectivity of it. The other folks arent referencing that when they use the language subjectivity/objectivity, they are referencing something else. This is causing confusion I believe.
What they are really referencing is what I call an objective standard, so thats why im trying to explain that concept. It is a helpful distinction for this subject, though I realise “objective” is a problematic term. We could call it whatever, its the concept that is important.
So when we measure the stick, we reference the standard, not our feelings. Not when we make the standard, or agree to use it (we are referencing our feelings about the standard in those cases) but when we are measuring the stick. (Thats when we are referencing the standard, the tape measure).
Right?
Well, so I agree that there are widespread standards for some things, and individuals can choose to acquiesce to them, but the problem arrives in thinking that the standard in question has any sort of normative weight simply for being common.
Like I said, thats a different issue. I dont find appeals to whats commonly held to be true very compelling either.
Im on the objective standard stuff from pages back still, but I understand that the discussion has moved on from that. (I went to sleep and woke up way behind in the discussion.)
Ah well.
But what's the different issue they're getting at? Just announcing that there are things that are more statistically common, as if I'm not aware of that? What would be the point of announcing that there are things that are more statistically common?
So just what is the usefulness in discussion of assuming that? Is it supposed to imply something? What?
In regards to hate speech, clearly appealing to the populace regarding laws doesn’t work, especially when applying that fallacy to, say slavery or laws against homosexuality, which were once very common.
I dont know. I thought I was being clear about what specifically Im addressing and its not that. Its fine, your onto this other stuff with them now so have at it.
OK, so we may have different ideas of what a discussion is, and I'm sure as soon as I present mine, you'll pick at some specific aspect of the wording, so perhaps you'd give me your wording to work with. I know you've said before that you post here to sharpen your argumentative skills (or something like that), but with matters of morality - like that hate speech should not be banned -why post that? What would be your purpose for posting all the information you have done about that fact that you think freedom of speech should be absolute, that we should not criminalise any non-physical act...(don't get hung up if I've paraphrased your positions wrongly, that's not the point), if it's all just arbitrary. I don't buy it.
Your first comment on this thread was
Quoting Terrapin Station
Are you suggesting that those two statements are linked arbitrarily? I think anyone could see why I might find that hard to believe. It seems clear that the latter is given in support of the former, ie you believe that the former "yes" is not sound on it's own, but must be supported by an argument that free speech doesn't cause violence.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, an argument to support your absolutism - that following orders is a choice, implying that if following orders was not a choice your absolutism would not be so tenable a position to hold. Again undermining your assertion that your absolutism is just a gut feeling as arbitrary as any other. I could continue...every quote I find from you on the matter gives the clear impression that your absolutism is a reasoned position, that you've rationally derived it from (or at least checked it against) other principles that you hold (non-violence, autonomy, responsibility...)
Given the involvement of some rational derivation or checking, it is possible that you have made an error in some or all of those stages, and that, being a rational error, it is something that others who think rationally could reasonably point out.
Now you've not provided us with a full account of all the other principles that you might derive or check your policy opinions against, nor would it be practical to do so.
So, for the purposes of pointing out flaws in your position - which is what we're all here for, whether as a mental exercise, or to genuinely (and in my view misguidedly) convince others of them - it is a reasonably pragmatic assumption for me to make that you share the normal human set of basic moral principles against which you might check your policy ideas.
In addition - I'm in agreement with you re Quinian Web of Beliefs. I tend to go further and believe that our beliefs are mostly genetically or socially acquired and that most rational thought is post hoc justification for the belief we already held. The point is that such though occasionally produces results so overwhelmingly contradictory that we are forced to change our beliefs. Anyway, when I talk about 'foundational moral principles', I'm not using foundational in the inverse-pyramidal Foundationalist sense. I merely mean that such principles act as nodes to the policies being discussed, that the policies are not isolated.
Oh yeah, smacking you across the mouth isn't an expression of discontent for the quibble coming out of it, it's just the sensible thing to do.
Now you just need to find some expressive cavemen who don't have any speech regulations and forge your own country.
I have no Idea why you'd think that. I reckon that that's basically just a straw man that you thought you could get away with by beginning with, "What you seem to be doing is...".
Yep. Terrible judgement.
If you don't even understand what's wrong with allowing a proposition like, "All crimes beginning with 'm' should be legalised", to pass through your moral system, then it would make sense that you don't understand other related things. And I'm not doing anything fallacious. You haven't demonstrated that.
-Signed the Anti-Vac of speech
That was a lot of writing to not even answer the question you quoted at the start of it.
You said mentioned the "usefulness in discussion" of "assuming the likelihood of broad conformity."
I asked, "So just what is the usefulness in discussion of assuming that? Is it supposed to imply something? What?"
I'd be interested in you answering that. Going off on a big tangent about my comments, my motivations for posting what/how I post on boards like this, etc. does nothing to answer the question I asked about something you said.
So, assuming the likelihood of broad conformity is useful in discussions like this in your opinion because of what? What's the usefulness?
Because to me, it's what you seem to be doing. It's partially because you can't articulate what your actual views are very well, at least in any detail.
See, this is a good example. You're not capable of articulating what you think is wrong with it in any detail. Saying things like "you should know already," "it's absurd," "it's not sensible/it's contrary to common sense," "it's cuckoo," etc. don't count as articulating what you think is wrong with it in any detail.
You already said that. That wasn't what I was questioning, as I think you know. The thing is, that's not what I'm doing, and I don't know why it would seem that way to you.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, others here understand what I've said, so that's evidence against you. If what I've said is sufficient to be understood, as others would confirm, then why are you asking for more detail? One possible explanation could be, as I've said, that it's tactical. I don't actually need to articulate anything more than what I've already articulated, because the world doesn't revolve around you.
If this mattered as much as you seem to think it does, then it would be easy to win any debate. All you'd have to do is keep saying that it isn't clear and ask for more details.
[I]Example: what you said about Earth being the planet that we live on isn't clear. You must now provide more details.[/I]
And one could just keep using that whatever the other person says.
Well, whether it helped you or not, it was an honest attempt to answer your question. I'll try again.
Quoting Terrapin Station
1. The purpose of discussions like these is for your interlocutors to spot flaws in your argument, either for sport, for genuine persuasion (for those that think such a thing might work), or to simply act as editors and proofreaders to help hone argumentative skills.
2. Moral arguments such as the ones of yours I used as examples, are not isolated arbitrary policy opinions. They are connected by rational inference to other feelings, concepts etc. Therefore one of the flaws that can be spotted is something claiming to be a rational inference which is not, or one which is poorly expressed.
3. It is impractical (maybe even impossible) for a person to lay out their whole Web of beliefs prior, or even during, a discussion like this.
Therefore, to carry out 1 in a moral discussion, where the only errors are rational inferences between ideas, it makes sense to assume a relatively broad 'normal' range of beliefs at 2 because of the impracticality at 3. Especially as one is very likely to be broadly right in such an assumption.
The alternative is that discussion like this get dominated by teasing out the whole Web from one oddball, or we don't really have anything to discuss.
Yep, the former is pretty much any discussion that Terrapin gets involved in. "Hey guys, I have a web of oddball beliefs, so you're all wrong in light of my oddball beliefs". That's not how it works, I'm afraid.
The trouble it it seems more than that, and somewhat endemic here. If the arguments start out that way, at least I can dismiss them early as mere proselytising. But they don't. They start out within a web of rational justification and only when other people start to pick at the strands does it deteriorate into "that's just how I feel". It seems to have happened here, its happened discussing meta-ethics, consciousness, most religious discussions and almost anything 'continental'.
Just curious, but do you require laws to teach you from right or wrong, or how to act in good conduct?
Instead of picking apart all of the issues this has in my opinion, could you give at least a fictional example of how you think this would work for usefulness?
What would be a moral argument where it would be useful to assume the likelihood of broad conformity, and then give an example of how the discussion would proceed so that the assumption was useful. If you can give a good example, maybe you'll persuade me.
That's never something I do because (a) things that hinge on how one feels--ethical/moral stances, aesthetic judgments, etc., aren't things for which I'd ever present a "web of rational justiication," and conversely (b) things for which I'd present a "web of rational justification" would never end with "that's just how I feel."
For example, you bring up metaethics. My stance on metaethics isn't at all just how I feel. It's reflective of what the world is factually like. Same for the mind-body issue, etc.
I very much doubt you'd be persuaded, or act as though you are, even if he provides a really good example. An example that's highly relevant here would be that consequences like the ones you dismissed earlier matter. I recall you earlier on dismissing a situation where someone couldn't even walk down a street because some thugs were throwing rocks off of a building. That would be a consequence of your stance regarding the law, and your response was basically that that wouldn't matter. It shouldn't be illegal. You shouldn't be able to call the police to intervene, or if you do, they should just say, "Sorry, this isn't a police matter. No laws are being broken".
In reality, all that really means is that you're abnormal, and that we shouldn't take your wild ideas seriously.
That's not actually what I said in that part, but I don't want to focus on that. You're not understanding what I'm asking for. I'm asking for an example of an argument someone could give where it's useful (and then explain how it's useful) to assume the likelihood of broad conformity,
Presumably I wouldn't be a good example, because how would it be useful to assume the likelihood of broad conformity in the context of my comments about ethics/morals?
Okay, I'll be more explicit. It would be useful to assume that there's broad agreement that consequences like those I referred to in my previous reply matter, in an ethical discussion like this, because otherwise talking about more specific things in that context wouldn't really make any sense if we aren't even in broad agreement over the basics. People make points with that assumption in mind. We tend to assume that people aren't completely whacko, and that they'll be able to relate on at least a basic level. It's useful if you're a normal human being trying to have a discussion with other normal human beings.
Looking for a concrete example. A fictional one is fine.
What? Anyway, I knew this would be pointless with you.
Because I'm skeptical about what's being claimed.
Showing a concrete example of how it would be useful would help convince me.
It's way beyond that. More like wilful blindness.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I've given you one. It actually happened in this discussion earlier on. How much more concrete can you get? I don't believe that anything would help convince you enough; not anything to do with what we're saying, but rather because you just won't find anything convincing enough, or that it won't bring you to come out and say, "Oh yeah, actually you're right. I see what you mean".
First, did I even give an "argument" for the stance of mine you're taking to be an example?
Yes. Why? What problem are you going to invent this time? You're always saying things and then finding ways to avoid giving away any ground. It's kind of predictable.
Don't patronise me.
Why--because that's what I asked for an example of (because that's what Isaac was talking about). What argument did I give?
But that's not even the real problem with free speech. The problem is if there's not enough free speech in a society, people become vulnerable to charismatic leaders. So, society can shift toward a cliff within a few years. But if there's too much free speech, "The tyranny of the majority" will always tend to smother the introverts, and the wises.
Only about 10% of people are very intelligent. So absolute free speech means that morons will be able to force wise people to shut up.
What's sad is that those who decide what's censored and what's allowed base their decisions on moral grounds more than science or ethics. Though it's slowly changing now that science is more respected than it ever was (Not yet enough, but certainly more than ever.). I would be 100% for free speech if most people were really intelligent. But average humans are so easy to manipulate. People with charisma can lie and people believe every word. And people without charisma can speak the truth 24/7 (cause truth never sleeps :c) and people don't care about what they say. Noam Chomsky is a good example of that. The number of views for his videos on Youtube are shameful. Considering that the guy basically never lies, and tell everything exactly like it is. But, people prefer comforting lies, than stressful truths. I don't even need to argue that. It's so obvious.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The trouble is (and the reason I wrote my post the way I did) that the conclusion of utility depends on you agreeing with my premises. You've already implied that you don't. I'm happy to give an example to further clarify what they mean, but basically, if you disagree with any of those premises, you're going to disagree with the utility in the example.
Say someone states "I think all women should wear the hijab", and "I think all people should be treated equally". We have two choices...
We can say "oh, how interesting" - pointless, unless for some reason we're curating a collection of 'opinions from the Internet'
Or, we can assume, like most people, they do not like to hold contradictory ideas and argue that their position is flawed because the one idea contradicts the other.
They might come back and say "I don't care if two ideas I hold are contradictory", in which case our efforts have been wasted on them, but not on us, we still had the mental excerise of spotting the flaws. So the discussion has still been more useful with the assumption than without.
We could, as a third option, simply ask "do you mind having two contradictory ideas" but there are two problems with this. First, it is inefficient, we'd have to waste time asking stuff for which the answer is 'yes' 99% of the time. Secondly, unless we're curating ideas, if the answer is 'no' we've got nowhere and haven't even benefitted from the mental excerise of 'spotting the flaws'.
So, in all, it is more useful to the interlocutors, by my broad definition of what use these discussions might reasonably have, to simply assume the OP shares the common trait of not liking to hold contradictory views, rather than to not.
So I guess I would be inclined to ask, do you see a big difference between rules and laws?
First, it has nothing to do left/right politics for me. (And if you're curious, politically I consider myself a libertarian socialist, though I'm a very idiosyncratic sort of libertarian socialist.)
I don't agree with your assessment of intelligence or that science can fuel normatives (re what should/shouldn't be censored if we were going to censor anything). That's because in my view there are no true (or false) normatives; nothing is factually a normative.
Re "'The tyranny of the majority' will always tend to smother the introverts," and "absolute free speech means that morons will be able to force wise people to shut up," what do you have in mind, exactly? Could you give more details there/some concrete examples?
I'd have to dig for why I thought this, but I thought that re your "assuming the likelihood of broad conformity" you were talking about broad conformity re ethical normatives.
"Does not like to hold contradictory ideas" isn't an ethical normative, of course.
But ignoring that, shouldn't what you assume be either:
(A) "I think all women should wear the hijab", and "I think all people should be treated equally" wouldn't actually be contradictory to the person in question (in which case you could inquire why the person doesn't see them as contradictory if you're interested in a conversation with that person),
or
(B) They don't have a problem with contradictory normatives (in which case you could get more info about that if you're interested in a conversation with that person)
?
Because otherwise you're basically assuming that (i) they'd think it's contradictory, (ii) they'd care about that, but (iii) they're simply too stupid, naive, careless or whatever to have realized this before your brilliant mind came along and noticed it for them.
And re this in the context of this thread and why you brought it up, you weren't thinking that I was claiming something contradictory, were you? I'm pretty sure that you simply had a problem with me not holding something you take to be an ethical/normative commonality, holding something that you disagree with.
Quoting Isaac
I'm interested in people simply because I like people, and I think the variety we see in people is interesting. A lot of what attracted and still attracts me to philosophy to this day is "all the strange things that people say" under its rubric. I'm particularly interested in unusual people. (And not just when it comes to philosophy.)
The second thing about morons making wise people shut up can also be answered in part by the same conference, but I was referring more to how violence in society (physical and psychological) is the tool of the person who lack intelligence, generally used against someone with more skills and intelligence, and/or against people we think are too nice to counter-attack us. Violence is a way to gain back control in situations when someone think he/she can't win playing by the rules.
There are boundaries in society to prevent violence, but they're only partially efficient. And it targets mostly physical violence. The concept of bullying is an archetype of the extrovert making the life of an introvert miserable. And when adults intervene in bullying matters, it's usually when there's physical violence involved. So as long as it's "only" psychological, it basically never ends. And even after school is over, the damages are there for good.
Ironically, a lot of introverts bullied for years end up in prison, cause they've let themselves be psychologically bullied for a very long time. And one day they snap, and respond with an act of extreme violence. Like stabbing a bully. And they are jailed, while the bullies and their friends are legally considered victims.
Extroverts are better than introverts in social games. They are more charismatic, people have a hard time saying no to them, they are always believed more, when in fact they lie much more than introverts. I'm not gonna quote the whole Susan Cain book, but generally speaking, extroverts have better opportunities in society. In theory, everybody can to anything they want, but everything in modern society is easier to achieve if you are an extrovert. The age of social networks is very tough on them. I'm sure you won't be surprised now if I tell you I consider myself an introvert.
From some of your beliefs, I would tend to think you are more on the extrovert side. Cause it's very obvious from an introvert perspective that "pure" free speech is a dangerous thing. It's a reflex for an introvert to think before they act, or think before they speak. So not giving our opinions when we have the chance is something we are used to. So we don't tend to see a drama there. But there is one. The drama is that extroverts decide almost everything in society. For the best or for the worst. And what they decide is usually good for extroverts, and not that good for introverts.
A good example from Susan Cain is that it became mainstream in most industries to force people to work in teams. Usually teams of 4 or 5 people. But introverts are known to be way more efficient when working alone. Most of the brilliant minds in the world are introverts, and they prefer to work alone, in a quiet environment. But they are forced to brainstorm in teams anyway. Which is a huge loss for society, cause very few ideas from introverts actually make the final cut.
Now, back on free speech. As Noam Chomsky said, saying "I don't mind if the government spy on me cause I have nothing to hide" is like saying "I don't need free speech cause I have nothing to say". Well other people might have something to say. And it might be very helpful to society if they are allowed to say it. That's why I'm 95% for free speech. But the 5% where I'm against it would be to regulate the times where free speech becomes abusive.
For an example, "pure" free speech would mean that advertising companies could tell us any lies they want about their products, without any consequences. The tobacco industry could tell us that smoking is good for the health, and it's also very good for kids, it can help kids cope with anxiety, etc. "Pure" free speech mean there would be zero regulation. So zero boundaries against lies. So that's why I think science has to play a role on where to draw the lines. As long as science is really independent. Which is not always the case. But it's still much better to rely on science to draw the lines, than to let the free market decide everything.
One thing at a time. Instead of listening to a 48-minute presentation, reading an entire book, etc. in order to have the question answered--especially since I'm skeptical about the claim, and I'd be really annoyed if I spent the time on something like that and I felt that it didn't answer my question, could you just give an example/explanation of why you think that free speech absolutism would "smother introverts" whereas censoring some speech would not?
I could be wrong but this does not sound like something Chomsky would say. Would you please point me to the source of this quote? Thanks!
It was said in one of his videos you can find on Youtube. I don't know which one. And I also heard Edward Snowden say that in an interview. In fact, Snowden said it first. And Chomsky quoted Snowden. But I could not say in which video Snowden said it also. But it was on Youtube for sure.
Ah - that's better. Also I mis-read the second half of the quote. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Because of her, now I assume myself as an introvert. I'm proud of it. But most people don't get what I'm proud of, cause the value of a human being today is absurdly based on social skills. It's not even funny. If you have great social skills, and you make friends easily, it's very hard to understand what most introverts must endure. There's so much tolerance in society for psychological violence against introverts.
Now, how is this related to the free-speech debate? Well first of all, I'm not sure you can really understand all the implications of your own beliefs about free-speech. We are not even close, even in 2019, to a society where free-speech is absolute. So what it would look like can only be theorized.
In today's society (With huge variations by countries, states, cities and villages) what you are allowed to say is restricted. Nowhere is there absolute free-speech. Nowhere. There's always something you are not able to speak about, or some opinions that will put you in trouble instantly. People will get mad at you, and might even try to destroy you, and ruin you. In sociology, this effect is called "Informal social control". Even if you are allowed, legally, to say something, people might want to destroy you.
All that said, a society where free-speech is absolute would need to systematically punish people when they disrespect the free-speech of others. Otherwise people would just censor themselves like they always did. That's the effect of "Informal social control" (All sorts of violence and threats, usually done by extroverts to make everyone shut up. Not just introverts.). People fear their own opinions, cause their reputations, safety, financial well-being, and sometimes even their lives are on the line; when they touch certain topics, likely to inflame some people or groups.
It's funny cause while I'm writing this, I just convinced myself that it should be a good thing for introverts if we really reach a society where free-speech is absolute. But only if we start to punish people who try to control what others are allowed to say. You almost convinced me of your own belief, just by letting me talk. That's the power of free-speech. :O)
On another matter, to back up my original claim (about extroverts smothering introverts), the only concrete example I can think of at the moment are sects. I'm gonna talk as if all leaders were all males, for obvious reasons.
The leader of a sect is the archetype of the extrovert (Someone who tend to modify his environment to suit his needs), and he generally surrounds himself with a few extroverts (inner circle) and a ton of naive introverts (bottom of the pyramid). And the bottom of the pyramid slowly become one with the beliefs of their leader. They start to believe everything he tells them, and at some point, it become natural for them to twist arms in the name of their leader, to force members into submission, and make them true believers too, by all means. Any fundamentalism, religion, and most social movements start that way. Even movements actually making some sense have a structure where a few extroverts use introverts as tools to get things done.
Right now, I think society need more freedom of speech, cause public debates are kind of rigged, and most speakers are selected, or tolerated by those in power, cause their beliefs are close to their owns.
It was, but the point I'm making is not specific to ethical normatives, so I used a more obvious example, to make it clearer. It's about the utility of assuming some common baseline views so as not to have to ask for the full set before engaging (which might be enormous). Whether those opinions are common because we're all fairly rational (and such conclusions are amenable to rational thought), or whether those conclusions are common because they are somewhat compassionate and by and large, humans have empathy.
As to what I'd assume, no, neither A nor B. For two reasons.
1. Why would I assume a person was right where their conclusions differed from mine, but where their originating or co-existing principles seem (even if only by my assumption) to be the same as mine? That would be tantamount to assuming I was wrong. Now I may be, but it would be utterly foolish to go about simply assuming I'm wrong. If I think I'm wrong I should change my views.
2. I post on this forum to have my ideas challenged. I'm not so arrogant as to think anyone would be interested in them wholesale. I make a reasonable assumption that at least most others post for the same reasons, so I'd be letting them down if I were to just say "well I'm sure that all makes sense to you" and leave it at that. Most people like to be challenged, and the ones that don't, I'm not interested in talking to.
As to that making it seem I assume people are "too stupid, naive, careless or whatever to have realized this before your brilliant mind came along and noticed it for them", this concept undermines the whole point of discussion. If everything I say is so basic and obvious that everyone I speak to has already thought of it, then what's the point in posting? And I know you don't feel that way so I'm confused as to why you'd bring this up? Obviously in my simplified example it's pretty obvious, but most discussions are more complicated than that and it's perfectly reasonable to think someone might not have spotted a flaw which you have.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You've either missed or forgotten the position I forwarded to begin this little sub-section. I'll try to be clearer.
1. You almost certainly have not posted all of you're views here, you hold both moral and rational beliefs which you have not written out in full here.
2. In the absence of your elucidation, I've assumed some of those moral and rational beliefs on the basis of my experience with normal human beings. I've assumed them rather than asked, for the reasons I've already given. For example, if you said "old people shouldn't receive free health care" I would assume your argument is economic, not because you have a psychopathic hatred of old people. I assume the former because it's very unlikely someone with such a psychopathic hatred would be composed enough to to write otherwise thoughtful comments on other matters.
3. I think aspects of your moral position with regards free speech contradict these other positions I assume you hold on the basis of being a normal averagely compassionate human being.
That's why earlier I (with tounge in cheek, I hope you realise) said that you must be a sociopath. I'm saying that your views here contradict some other views of normal socially concerned people which I assume you have.
I also reserve the right to form, and argue from, an opinion of your Web of beliefs other than the exact picture you slowly present. I'm not simply going to take everyone's word for everything they say without comment. If I think someone is claiming to hold a view, simply to avoid admitting an error (people do), where I don't think they genuinely hold it, I'll say so. As I've said before, my route into ethics was via psychology, so my approach is perhaps tainted by that.
So this is kind of patronizing, and suggests that you have thought a lot more about it than I have, or at least you understand it a lot better than I have, and if only I had thought about it as much as you have, or at least if I had your understanding or insight, I wouldn't have the view I have.
Quoting L Michaud
Correct. What I'm saying is that if I were king, there would be no speech restrictions.
Quoting L Michaud
I'm not going to punish anyone for "disrespect."
You'd simply not be allowed to initiate nonconsensual violence (for any reason, in response to speech or otherwise).
And sure, people might temper what they'd say in some cases as they do now, but that would be their decision. It's not as if I'd want to force people to say whatever is on their mind, even if they don't want to.
Okay, but what I'm most dubious about is the claim with respect to ethical normatives. So that's what I was hoping for an example of.
And now grumble grumble grumble with these friggin long posts again, by the way.
Quoting Isaac
First off, when we're talking about morality, no one is correct or incorrect. So you're not assuming that they're "right." You'd be assuming that either to them, what they're saying isn't contradictory, or to them, they don't care about contradictions, rather than assuming that they're basically morons who haven't thought through what they're saying enough, but here you come to "correct" them.
So the track to take would be to learn more about them and how they think, so that you learn why it's not contradictory to them, or alternately why they don't care that it's contradictory.
You might learn that they actually do care that what they're saying is contradictory, and that they simply overlooked a contradiction, but you're not going to learn that until you talk to them more where you actually care something about them and how they think.
Quoting Isaac
Yet look at the thousands and thousands and thousands of words you're writing. Just this one post of yours is nearing 700 words! (An acceptable book length (including novels) is only 60,000 words--you could be putting this effort into something more productive that might actually be able to earn you money.) So maybe just ask--"But don't you think such and such?" That would be much simpler and save a lot of time and aggravation.
It's obviously not useful to make the assumptions you're making when it results in so much misunderstanding, when it results in having to blah blah blah on and on and on for so many thousands of words, when it results in so much aggravation. We're on page 71 of this thread already (!!) and most of it is bickering with me, where you're telling me how "useful" your approach is, where if you'd follow my advice instead, this probably would have been over on page 4 or 5.
Be careful. Arguments of that sort were used against abolitionism. But the fact that there is no freedom is certainly no argument against freedom.
Try to conceive of all the expressions of mankind as one great artifact. Then imagine one piece of it stolen, burned or otherwise censored because of the fears of a few censors. Imagine the insights stolen from us when they killed Socrates. We’d probably still be in the dark ages had we not found a copy of De Rerum Natura collecting dust in some monetary. We might all be epicureans, not Christians, if the work of Epicurus had survived. Censors rob from humanity.
OK, I'll try for a short one. We're talking about two things contradicting each other. Whether those two things are theories about empirical observations, propositions of some logic, or ethical policies. A contradiction is a contradiction.
If A causes B, you can't advocate both the persuit of policy A and the avoidance of outcome B without being contradictory. So for a start, I don't understand why you're suggesting such a generous, charitable type of inquiry when it comes to ethics, when you yourself follow a much more demanding and confrontational approach with other fields (say epistemology, ontology, meta-ethics... ). I don't really get from your approach in those areas that you're thinking other people are probably right from their perspective.
I think you're basically taking the idea that ethics has no 'right' and 'wrong' to mean that no one can ever say anything wrong in any ethical discussion. But a contradiction is still a contradiction. Incoherence is still incoherence. Empirical evidence (with regards to something like consequences of policies) is still empirical evidence. Why are you treating these issues within ethical discussion with such open charity, where you don't in other fields of thought?
First, regardless of what we're talking about, I don't assume that something that seems like a contradiction to me both (a) would seem like a contradiction to the person who said it, and (b) is something that the person would think they should avoid (just in case it would seem like a contradiction to them).
The reason I so often post where I'm asking someone a question is that I'm literally, straightforwardly asking them a curiosity question about their views and how they work in their perspective. That's because it's not clear to me based on what they said, relative to how I think, but I don't automatically assume that people are morons who are posting something they just came up with two minutes ago.
If the person can't or won't respond to questions in good faith, then I might change my tune, especially if they start attacking me or something.
By the way, I've read that Norway hired a Philosopher as "moral compass" for the government in 2005. The guy is named Henrik Syse. It would be very interesting to see what came out of this surprising move. This is basically Socrates theory coming to life. Even if he's not the commander in chief. And likely not all his advice is systematically applied.
I just read a wiki page about him, and he is the son of a former prime minister (Jan P. Syse).
I hate the idea of a philosopher king. Philosophers are good at thinking ideas, but not so good at implementing them. I hope Syse restricts his advising to ethical matters only.
On their death beds, people with religious beliefs are 4 times more prone to delirium than non-believers. And I believe it's cause they tried to conquer their fear of death by taking a bad tool like religion. When there are tools out there harder to master, but giving much better results. Like philosophy. Or just "Not giving a fuck about dying". That's working great for me.
Also, someone can think about something for 2 seconds, and happen to be right on the first guess. And someone can be wrong about something, and just add meat over and over around their false beliefs. Time tend to make us wiser, but it's not a one-way ticket.
I'm thinking a lot about your second point (If you were a king), which sounds simple, but open up a lot of doors. I think deep down inside of me, there's fear of the unknown. Could you describe what you think the overall effects on society would be if there really was pure freedom of speech in your kingdom?
It's funny cause I'm watching an old show right now called Fantasy Island. Where a distinguished French host receive people on his island, promising to make their best fantasy come true. There's 2 different fantasies per episode, and there's 7 seasons total. Some episodes are on Youtube if you want to see what I'm talking about.
I think your fantasy of a society with absolute free speech would make a very good episode. And most of the times, there's gonna be a "Be careful what you wish for" kind of twist in the scenario. People will realize that there's always downsides to their fantasies. When at first, they only see the good sides, and they expect to spent a perfect week-end filled with pure joy. But it's never happening.
Your last point (about not allowing violence in response to free speech) have me wonder about your definition of violence. Are you considering psychological violence? Cause most people, when they know they can't hurt someone physically, will find twisted ways to make people's lives miserable. The "Informal social control" effect I referred to earlier, works in insidious ways.
Also, not only physical violence is likely not to be reported to justice, but psychological violence is almost never reported. So I don't think freedom of speech would be much greater than it is today. And it would save the US government billions that they would not waste anymore on censorship, so they will just finance more wars. Be careful what you wish for! Haha. Don't worry, I'm kidding.
But what would be a good effect of absolute free speech would be that rich and/or powerful people would not be allowed to fire artists or comedians who supported something they didn't like. Let's take the case of Louis CK. Normally, this exceptional comedian would already be back on TV by now, but people are scared as shit in USA. They fear they could also drown in quicksands if they just say something like "I think the guy is a good comedian, and I would love to see him back on TV.". It could be enough to end their career. And this is also part of the "informal social control" effect, even if it's made by rich people. Cause it's not about the law, it's about personal vendettas.
That's a really sad thing about censorship. Cause a few people can decide to deprive 100 millions people of a comedian they love, someone who make their lives better, make them better persons. And the reason why they do that, is cause 3 grown up women's saw his penis. Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. We see breasts all the times, almost everyday, and nobody call themselves victims. But apparently, seeing a penis is an horrible experience. Worst than death.
So I still don't think that free speech should be absolute, but I would not mind to live in your kingdom for 1 or 2 months, just to see what happens. It would certainly be a valuable experience.
It has to just be speculation, but one thing that I'd hope would result is that people would be much more skeptical of speech in general. When it's the case that, for example, slanderous/libelous claims can be prosecuted, people tend to think, "If so and so was allowed to say that without legal repercussion, it must be true." When there's no legal recourse, people realize that something isn't true just because someone said it.
I'm a relatively old dude. I used to watch "Fantasy Island" occasionally when it was new.
Quoting L Michaud
I don't consider psychological effects to be violence.
If I were king we'd not have a capitalist system. No one would be firing anybody.
What's weird is absolute freedom of speech would also come with the absolute freedom to lie, with zero consequences ever. So I would tend to think that people would just lie more. But in a way, if the whole system become more transparent, it's likely that the average person will also become more transparent. So they could indeed lie less. Very hard to say.
People would be less susceptible to lies, more skeptical of what people say. If anyone and everyone was lying it would be necessary to think critically and to research in order to get by. I think Terras idea is about self reliance and having a better, less gullible population.
It makes me think of that NRA argument where we would all be safer if everyone had guns. I hope you guys are seeing the parallel. So everyone would learn to swim through lies like ducks if only everyone would lie more? That's what I'm hearing right now and I don't think it makes any sense.
We are already living in a system where people lie way too much. More of what does not work can't be the solution. In fact, being skeptical about others is a very bad thing. Women's are brainwashed from their early childhood by a ton of "never trust men" principles. Fear of strangers, etc. And the result of that is nice guys who never lies have a very hard time connecting with girls. When those who lie all the time, as a second nature, pass through women's defences like a hot knife in butter.
And I don't even think that people would tend to lie more in a society where free speech is absolute. Companies, medias and governments might try to lie more at first. Tell us smoking cures cancer, we would all be safer with more guns, etc. But if the population has absolute free speech too, it would be easier to put their lies back in their faces. Maybe that's what Terrapin Station was trying to say. Said that way, now I really believe it would make governments and medias more transparent. And as a result of living in a transparent system, people would lie less. Certainly not more.
Those are good points.
I couldn't disagree more with this though...
“In fact, being skeptical about others is a very bad thing. ”
I believe the exact opposite, that one should always be skeptical about what others say. People are not to be trusted.
That creates more problems than it solves.
No. Less likely to believe things that people say just because they say them.
Quoting L Michaud
Well, the consequences would be speech consequences (in other words, responses via speech), credibility consequences, etc.
Look, I've given you an example of what you asked for, and I've explained why it counts as an example. If I am capable of either recalling your earlier argument or looking it up with the advanced search function, then so are you. If you've forgotten it, then look it up and get back to me in order to give a proper response.
The usefulness consists in reaching the right answer, or in solving the problem. For that, a group of people must have the right things in common, and if someone like you ends up being the odd one out, reaching the wrong conclusion, then you end up being disregarded because there are things which are more important than someone's contrary opinion. The right answer, and a resolution, are more important than an outspoken individual with misplaced self-importance.
In posts like this, you imply that the right answer hinges on a consensus. But in other posts, you make it clear that if your view isn't the same as the consensus, the consensus is wrong.
No. In anticipation of your objection, I tried to word it in such a way as to allow for both interpretations: that it's the right answer, as I would say, but which you wouldn't accept; and that it's the consensus, or resolution, which both of us would accept. (You might get funny about the word "resolution" here, but remember that this is in the context of a group trying to resolve a problem, and that couldn't happen if there had to be unanimous agreement where someone is being difficult (almost on purpose, it seems, merely for argument's sake). So, to be realistic, like I said, your disagreement would ultimately be disregarded in order to reach a resolution).
And that's why broad agreement is useful (which is pretty obvious anyway, and so shouldn't even need to be explained).
What Isaac was saying wasn't that a broad agreement is useful period. (Not that he'd disagree with that, but that's not what he was saying.)
He was saying that assuming widely accepted ethical normatives was useful for having an ethics discussion in a philosophy context.
Granted. But your position in any discussion must surely be based on whether you think there's a contradiction, and whether you think it should be avoided. So your charitable understanding of another's beliefs is noble, but not really relevant. Otherwise, we're back to just saying "oh really" in response to everything.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Terrapin Station
Glad I manged to make an exception to your general rule...
Your whole position here has not been "really, you think hate speech should be banned, how interesting, tell me more... ", it has from the start been "if you can't show me the exact evidence I count as acceptable, using the rule-making methodology I approve of, you're a moron". I don't mind that approach, I prefer people who have some passion behind their philosophy, but it's disingenuous to paint this 'curious curator of ideas' picture just to support your position here. You're just as passionate about telling everyone what's 'right' as the rest of us.
And here...
Quoting Terrapin Station
...is where the inevitable judgement comes in. All you've done is renamed it. You don't judge people as being contradictory, you judge them instead, of arguing in 'bad faith', which means what exactly, if not some form of contradiction between things they're saying?
Yes, and my example shows that. What I said is both true in general and in this specific context. Presumably you have no valid objection, or you would have raised one by now. All you've done is respond with red herrings.
It's useful to assume that consequences like those mentioned earlier matter, because we're talking to people, and not brick walls. Some people like to act like brick walls, but again, most people do not, and so an agreement can be reached, the person acting like a brick wall can be disregarded, and for all practical purposes, the problem is resolved.
I know, right. I find that funny, too. It's like when says, "You're interested in debating. I'm interested in having conversations".
You aren't fooling anyone. You're interested in debating, just like the rest of us. And you think you're right, just like the rest of us think we're right. It's a fake distinction and virtue signalling. It's not that you're so humble and we're so egotistical. You're one of us.
I have no idea where you think you showed that. And again, his comment was in the context of someone stating an argument. I didn't state any arguments, a fortiori because I don't even believe there are true or false ethical utterances.
No idea why you'd think I'd even have a "position" in a discussion, much less one based on whether I think there's a contradiction.
My position in a discussion is either (a) that I'm interested in things other people are saying for some reason, so I want to talk with them more and find out more, or (b) I want to express my opinion about something, especially if it's not an opinion that's already been expressed, and maybe someone else will find it interesting for whatever reason and want to talk about it more.
Quoting Isaac
The second part you quoted wasn't an automatic assumption. It was a comment made after interacting with you many times.
That you're the sort of person who routinely can't manage things like discerning the difference between an "automatic assumption" and a comment made after interacting with you many times is part of what motivated the second comment.
Well you've seen and presumably read my replies. You're just deciding not to recognise the content.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I understand that that's your stated position. It's just that, like Isaac (and no doubt others), I think that it's disingenuous, because you definitely did state an argument. The only possible way to truthfully say that you didn't do so would be to define it away, so that superficially your argument doesn't count as an argument by your definition, but that would be an example of sophism.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Oh, come on. This is getting really silly now. You stated your position in this discussion in your very first reply.
And you should know as well as I do that it's sophism to make misleading statements and then try to back them up by defining things away, like, for example: "I have no idea why you'd think that I'm a 'member' of this forum. I'm not a 'member', I just signed up and regularly participate in discussions here. That doesn't make me a 'member' of the forum".
Well, the evidence of my own experience, for a start. Ar you telling me you don't have a 'position' in this discussion. That if I did a quick poll now asking "what is Terrapin's position on free speech?" the majority of people reading this thread would answer "we haven't a clue, Terrapin doesn't really seem to have a 'position' on this one"?
If I ran a second poll asking people whether they thought you'd expressed any 'position' on the opposite view regarding whether it was consistent, rational etc, you think I'd get a similar answer - "no, terrapin's not really expressed a view on that one, he seems to be just impartially interested in what they have to say"?
I think it's obvious to anyone that you have a 'position' in this, and any other discussion, and that that 'position' extends to, quite bombastically, pointing out what you think are flaws in the opposing arguments. You're kidding yourself if you think you've not let that come through.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Ah... so there's a number of times after which one is permitted to start judging another person rather than maintain a dispassionate interest in what they have to say? So, going back to my purposes I listed earlier, spotting flaws being one of them in other people's arguments (presumably necessary to judge them moronic, disingenuous etc), after how many posts does that become acceptable, in your view. 72 pages enough?
If you're not going to state what the supposed argument is, etc., there's nothing I can do about it.
Re the "position comment," if he's just stating that we're going to give opinions, express views, stances, etc. okay, but that would be a weird way to state that, especially in the context of "must be based on whether you think there's a contradiction," which just reads like gibberish to me.
I wouldn't call my stance on free speech a "position in the discussion" and re the context you presented it especially doesn't have anything to do with basing anything on the notion of contradictions.
Quoting Isaac
So then let's present any evidence that I'm criticizing any ethical views on whether they're consistent, or whether I'm criticizing any views at all on whether they're "rational."
Quoting Isaac
Take my first post in this thread. I said:
"In my view, yes. I'm a free speech absolutist.
"I don't agree that speech can actually cause violence. People deciding to be violent causes violence."
That's just giving a different view, because I have a different view. It's not pointing out "flaws" in the other argument. It's a different view.
My second post, the fourth post after the above on the first page, is just clarifying my view that speech doesn't cause violence in light of a standard question about that. Again, that's not pointing out "flaws" in the other argument. It's further explaining my own view. It's not an argument for my view, just more details about my view.
My third post, in response to a comment about my second, said, "That's not a direct cause because I could just tell him to screw off. I have to decide to do what was asked (well, or 'commanded')"
which is again explaining my view in counterdistinction to the one presented. I'm explaining why I don't consider that causal. It's not an argument for my view. I'm stating (a) how I use the term "cause," and implying that (b) in order for me to think that something is a moral or legal problem, it has to involve causality in the way I use that term. Again, this is simply giving more details. I didn't state that I consider causes to only involve force, but that should have been contextually clear from my comment. At this point we also begin moving away from the ethics discussion, because people begin to want to have an ontological discussion about causality.
My next post, a few below that (I'm not quoting the whole thing because it was longer), was again responding to questions, so I give more details--though not arguments--about my view (this time also re fraud, etc.). So still no arguments from me, no "bombastically pointing out what I think are flaws in opposing arguments." Not that I never point out flaws in other arguments, when someone actually presents an argument (see Bartricks' threads, for example), but much of the time, that's not at all what I'm doing. You might read it that way because of your own biases, and maybe many others do, too, but that's not what I'm doing much of the time.
Interesting first post in context, lol
On the contrary, I enjoy the way you discuss things and would have no interest in causing you to discuss them any differently. What we're discussing here is the way you discuss the way you discuss things. You missed a meta-level out. We were merely discussing the discussion, pages back. That's old hat. We're now well into discussing the discussion about the discussion.
Although, my current post is obviously the first in discussing the discussion about discussing the discussion.
So perhaps we should stop there?
Was your position in this part of the discussion based on whether you think there was a contradiction?
Yes. Put (very) simply I believe that you cannot rationally hold an absolutist position about free speech, and also a concern for the welfare of those around you without contradiction. I merely presumed you had the latter, without asking, and so holding the former would be a contradiction.
The reasoning behind thinking that those two positions are rationally contradictory is not immediately obvious, so it seemed reasonable that it might well be something I had stumbled across which you may not have done.
We agree that there is no such thing as correct when it comes to purely ethical statements. "One should do A", and "one should strive for B" are two such statements. But "one should do A because it causes B, which one should strive for" is an ethical statement but one which does admit of 'right/wrong' judgements because it contains within it a hidden empirical claim (A causes B). Likewise the opposite would be true (with the empirical claim being that A does not cause B).
I think that the vast majority of ethical normative statements, including the ones you've forwarded here, are of the above form (including logical, as well as empirical claims), and thus open to rational counter-argument.
I wouldn't say something like "I have a concern for the welfare of those around me" without qualification. Because that's way too vague. It's like very broad/general statements about "suffering" and "harm," Both way too vague in my opinion.
For example, I think that people should often enough be potentially subject to, and should often enough subject themselves to, things that they do not like, things that they would rather were different, etc.
Many people might call those things "suffering" or "harms" or "negative re welfare." And maybe some wouldn't, but I'd have no way of knowing whether a particular person considers the stuff in question "suffering" etc. without asking them how they categorize. So terms like that are too vague for my tastes, too vague to represent my views, etc.
======================
It's kind of patronizing to think that someone has the view they have due to probably not thinking about the consequences of it. Rather, they probably would disagree with you whether the consequences are acceptable or even desirable.
I actually forgot that the first post in the thread even mentioned racism. It seemed weird in the context of where the discussion is now to bring up racism, lol.
So your claim is what? You were just born that way? This feeling just popped into your head one day? Because I think the same as you, but I quite clearly think it because toughness is a virtue which I have good reason to believe will lead to a society of people better off than otherwise. Ie we still get down to the vague notion of a 'better' society.
Are you really claiming that this idea of being subjected to small hardships being a good thing is not itself based on the idea that doing so might achieve some other objective, it just appeared in your mind unbidden and without further consideration?
Quoting Terrapin Station
I don't think it's patronising at all. Maybe if the consequences were really simple, but they rarely are. People think differently, with different focuses, it's not unreasonable to make use of that mileau, to check one's own thoughts.
So you're telling me that you're incapable of remembering or looking up your own argument from earlier on in the discussion about throwing rocks off of a building? (Assuming that's what [I]you're[/I] referring to, since you didn't quote me in your reply).
Quoting Terrapin Station
So why are you choosing to interpret it in a way that reads like gibberish? This is a big problem that you have in general. I'm not sure you realise how big a problem it is to choose to interpret things in the way that you do. You don't seem to take on board the feedback you get, so unsurprisingly the problem persists.
It's not based on anything like idea of what would "lead to a better society,"
That's based on the fact that anyone could find anything conceivable not to their liking, and it would be impossible to control/put sanctions on everything everyone had a problem with, especially because people often have a problem with conflicting things. (For example, "I have a problem with the truck idling below my apartment window" and "I have a problem with not being able to get deliveries to my restaurant from refrigerated trucks,"--those are conflicting things to control.)
The problem is that I didn't state an argument. I simply stated what my policy would be. What my policy would be isn't an argument for the policy.
Quoting S
I couldn't figure out a more sensible way to read it. Hence querying about it.
Right. Which is an empirical claim and so subject to counter-argument. Have you conducted or read a survey of "everything people don't like" to see how many different things there would actually turn out to be? It also contains a logical claim (a known fallacy in fact) that a direction on a scale includes all points of that scale (slippery slope fallacy). There's no logical link between legislating against some perceived harms and legislating against all perceived harms.
Plus, why would that be a moral normative at all? If your argument genuinely is that we should make/allow people to suffer a bit simply because it would be impossible to not, then where's the normative? It's just impossible. It's not a moral normative to say we shouldnt fly, we just can't.
I think that that's you deliberately causing problems. That's like me saying that I wouldn't call those two appendages on the lower half of my body which I use to walk, "my legs".
Sure. That much I agree with. (And of course, that part isn't an ethical claim.)
Quoting Isaac
Just informally, from living and observing people over the course of almost 60 years.
Quoting Isaac
? I'm not saying anything about a "direction on a scale" or "including all points," so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.
Quoting Isaac
I didn't say anything at all like that. Again, it's a simple fact that if we were to try to control everything that every single person doesn't care for--control it to try to get rid of the things they don't care for--it would be impossible, because the control would necessarily involve creating situations that other people don't care for, because people have conflicting desires.
So it's not possible to have a situation where some people are not subjected to stuff they don't like.
Quoting Isaac
I'm fine with saying it's not a moral normative. I didn't have anything invested in it being a moral normative. I'm just explaining that it's why I don't use something so broad as "caring about the welfare of others" as a basis for any moral stance.
I understand you. You stated an argument that you refuse to admit is an argument, and likewise with regard to a position in this discussion. And you apparently lack the self-awareness to see why that's a problem.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The normal way is fine, and doesn't lead to gibberish. I find it impossible to believe that you couldn't figure out that, normally, it's considered stating your position in a discussion to enter a discussion and say, "In my view, yes. I'm a free speech absolutist". I can therefore only conclude that you're consciously playing games here, and I think that you should stop.
Maybe I'd agree with you if you could tell me what the argument was.
Why are you pretending to be incapable? Don't you think that that's immoral? You know exactly what I'm referring to.
Yes, but you're using this fact to justify a position about harms. The original position about harms was not all harms, so it is a logical error to raise, in support of it, the impossibility of some act to eliminate all harms. The fact that it would be impossible to eliminate all harms as no bearing on whether people should suffer some harms.
Quoting Terrapin Station
But it does not explain it if its not a moral stance. Saying we should not do X because X is impossible is not a moral stance, I'm asking you about your moral stances. Could you give me an example of something you think of as a moral stance you hold, so that I might explain what I mean with reference to it.
It's as if you can't comprehend that I'm saying that at least on my view, I didn't forward any sort of argument.
Yet, despite that fact, you think it's "immoral" for me to not tell you what my argument was. lol
If you're reading this as being anything other than me explaining why I don't use something as broad as "I care about the welfare of others" as an ethical basis, you're making a mistake. That's all I was commenting on. I was explaining why that's too broad in my view.
I understand your position. I just think that it's immoral to feign ignorance and make unnecessary requests of me. You knew exactly what I was referring to without me having to tell you, so cut the crap.
If you're simply not going to believe me and insist that I know what you're talking about, there's not much I can do.
Given that the evidence is stacked against you, [I]you[/I] have a burden to justify your suggestion that you have no idea what I'm referring to.
How would someone "justify their suggestion" that they weren't forwarding an argument and that they don't know what one is talking about re the claim that they were?
How would one even begin doing that?
Part of the problem might be that I really do not do "(foundational) principle-based ethics." I think that approach is a bad idea.
But maybe you're assuming that I would be doing some sort of (foundational) principle-based ethics?
What I typically do when ethical dilemmas arise is think something like, "We could do or allow x versus not doing/not allowing x. Which option do I prefer? Which do I think is okay/not okay to do to other people?" Where I'm very situational/specific about that, where it's not principle-oriented but just practical for the situation at hand . . . and where lately, it seems like I'm usually having to stress that a lot of things people want to do seem like overreactions to me.
You would have to explain why you supposedly don't understand what I'm referring to when I've made it incredibly obvious through multiple explicit references. What's your explanation? You haven't been reading my posts, or... what? Even then, you could just retrace the discussion.
I know the content you're referring to.
What I don't know is what you're considering to be an argument, since I didn't state an argument. Is it that you consider any stance an "argument"?
If someone says "I like Aaron Copland. I'd listen to him every day." Is that an argument?
OK, so what I'm asking, with reference to the above, is whether it's your view that these preferences and limits (what is/isn't OK) just pop into your head without any consideration. Were you born thinking that way, have you ever changed your mind about them (if so what was the experience like of suddenly finding yourself feeling differently about what it is OK to do to others without having given the matter any thought).
Are no ethical stances based on anything, or just some/most of them? Your views on the ethics of taxation, for example. Do they just pop into your head without any prior consideration, or are matters with complicated consequences an exception?
You realise that this approach would be extremely exceptional. Most people give some thought to their ethical positions with reference to broader duties or objectives.
Then stop pretending that you don't know what I'm referring to. You were pretending that you didn't know what I was referring to instead of just saying that you don't accept that what I'm referring to is an argument.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You do know what it is that I'm considering to be an argument. You literally just said that you know the content that I'm referring to.
Have you completely forgotten how logic works? Bizarre.
Hence why I'm asking. If it's that you consider any content whatsoever to be an argument, then okay, that makes sense. Again, if someone says "I like Aaron Copland. I'd listen to him every day," is that an argument in your view?
If so, then at least that makes sense. You consider anything anyone says (at least aside from questions, exclamations, etc. maybe) to be an argument.
What about spreading lies about a competitor causing him to lose money?
What about copyright infringement?
What about psychological abuse?
What about leaking military plans causing a lot of deaths?
What about leaking company secrets to competitors causing loss of income?
You've been asking the wrong questions. You should have just asked me why I think that it's an argument instead of pretending that you have no idea what I was referring to.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I consider arguments to be arguments. You made an argument. I considered that argument to be an argument.
Your argument was basically that consequences which matter don't matter, just because they don't matter to you.
I think that that's a rubbish argument.
I'm considering the specific situation at hand.
Quoting Isaac
I don't think we're born thinking much at all. We're certainly not thinking about speech etc. per se. I'm not sure why that's relevant, though. Do you have a view that's something like "Either you're born thinking x, or x is necessarily built on foundational moral principles?"
Quoting Isaac
Is "them" just a way to refer to all moral dilemmas? If so, sure, I've changed my mind about some. An example would be that I didn't used to be against how we treat prisoners in general. Now I am.
Quoting Isaac
In the case I just mentioned, it was due to becoming more aware of how we treat prisoners, seeing sentences that seemed like ridiculous overreactions, etc.--just being more aware of the circumstances, the existential situation, and it not seeming like a justified way to control other persons' lives to me.
Quoting Isaac
It's not that they're "based on nothing." It's that I don't take a principle-based approach. "Either 'Based on nothing' or 'principle-based approach'" is a false dichotomy.
From the start of this particular nonsense, I said, "His comment was in the context of someone stating an argument. I didn't state any arguments, a fortiori because I don't even believe there are true or false ethical utterances."
Then I said in the next response to you, "If you're not going to state what the supposed argument is . . ."
And then in the next one, "The problem is that I didn't state an argument. I simply stated what my policy would be. What my policy would be isn't an argument for the policy."
Etc.
You're the one turning a molehill into a mountain.
First, if I were king, the economy would not be capitalist. There wouldn't be private companies. We wouldn't have an economy based on money in any traditional sense.
I also don't agree with copyright law as it's currently instantiated. I'd have a copyright law of sorts, but it would be very different than current copyright law (and far less restrictive--it would basically be limited to (a) needing to credit sources, and (b) in the case of material benefits from borrowed materials (the equivalent of monetary benefits in a money-based system), a percentage of those benefits would need to be shared--and that's it).
Re defamation, one of my goals is to get people to put far less weight on speech acts than they do presently.
At any rate, I'd still have contractual law, and I'd still have laws against fraud. I talked about that on page 1 of the thread.
Can you answer if you're calling any statement anyone makes "an argument"? Is the example about liking Aaron Copland an argument in your view?
No, I'm only calling arguments "arguments".
Quoting Terrapin Station
No.
So could you state how you consider me stating what my policy would be on what I'd call "criminal threatening" to be an argument?
Like I said, you basically think that consequences which do matter, don't matter, just because they don't matter to you. And on that basis, you think that, ideally, the law should reflect your own feelings on the matter, in total disregard of everything else.
You will of course now predictably deny that this is your argument, even though it's obvious to everyone else here that it is.
Over to you.
Okay, so necessarily if you want a preference to be implemented, that's an argument for that preference in your view? (So an argument doesn't have to be anything in the vicinity of a support why the preference is right, correct, etc.?)
And then does the part about feeling that different things do/don't matter automatically make something an argument, too?
At any rate, yeah, I'd prefer that my preferences be implemented, and yeah, part of it is that I'd prefer the consequences my preferences would result in. If that's what Isaac had in mind by his comments about arguments, how would you say that assuming a widespread consensus about ethical normatives would be useful in the discussion?
Suggestions that I feel are sensible, sure. Whether you'll agree, I have no idea. We could tackle one thing at a time. Which one do you want to start with re "these problems given the 'nature of reality'"?
Edit: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/health/scream-at-your-own-risk-and-your-childrens.html
Some context.
Your question in your third paragraph about usefulness isn't significantly different from your previous questions about usefulness which I've answered multiple times now, so I'm not answering it yet again just because you've slightly changed the wording. Find the answer I've already given, and then ask a question about it. Don't just ignore the answer and repeat what's basically the same question.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So what's the alternative? It's like getting blood out of a stone talking to you about this. I'm obviously asking about how you form and change moral views and you're just giving me a list of things it isn't (namely, everything I happen to suggest). So what actually is it, in your view? You're not just born with an opinion on prison sentences, one does not just pop into your head spontaneously, yet you claim that no other principle or objective connects your view on the matter (such that you could be wrong about the logic of that connection). I'm struggling to see any other way in which these very specific policy choices you have come about. They're all very libertarian, for example. But you'd have me believe that libertarian values are not in any way foundational. That the strong libertarian bent to all of your policy preferences is what...coincidence?
I think that his priority is not giving any ground in this discussion, and coming up with ways around any perceived challenge to his position, over and above intellectual honesty. If intellectual honesty was really important to him, you'd think that we would've been able to agree on a lot more things. Right? But it's more like when we say "up", he says "down"; when we say that the sky is blue, he says that it's red.
With respect to my "criminal threatening" policy? I suppose the policy was x, but what was y?
So you'd say that the argument is "My policy would be such and such because I'd prefer this to be implemented"?
So you can't read?
I'd not have any laws based on psychological effects period.
Just out of curiosity, how would you enforce any laws against psychological abuse? How would you establish that there has even been psychological abuse against kids?
I suppose not. I sure can't figure out what you're saying the "because" would be. Can't you just straightforwardly tell me rather than having to play a game about it? I feel like I'm taking crazy stabs at what you might think it would be, because you don't seem to be plainly stating it.
You're the one playing games, and this one seems to be your favourite: the game of playing dumb. So you followed my link, read what I said, including the part after the word "because", yet you somehow can't figure out what I'm saying the "because" would be?
Re the prisoner treatment example, my view was influenced by experiencing the way we treat prisoners, the sorts of sentences we give, and intuiting whether I feel that's a just way to treat people. That's not a view I'm born with, and it's not principle-oriented, but it's something that thought goes into, too.
My disposition is very libertarian on a lot of things, sure. That's a way that I naturally am. When I first discovered libertarianism when I was in my later teens or early 20s (I don't recall exactly when I learned about it, but it was around that time), I thought, "Holy cow! There actually are some other people who feel the same way I do about this stuff!"
But my disposition isn't just libertarian. I have a lot of dispositions that are socialist, too. So that's why I consider myself a "libertarian socialist," although I'm a very idiosyncratic sort of libertarian socialist. Re my views about how the economy should work, how social assistance should work, etc., I've yet to run into anyone where I've said, "Holy cow! There actually are some other people who feel the same way I do about this stuff!"
Okay, so there's one "because" in that post: "because they don't matter to you." Your "they" stands for "consequences which do matter." So you're saying that the argument I forwarded was:
because consequences which do matter don't matter to me.
Is that right?
Well, things mattering are to an individual, and it's because the individual cares about it/is concerned with it/feels it should be taken into consideration. That's what "mattering" is.
In this case, sure, the consequences matter to me. I wouldn't have preferences for things like this where I'm not thinking about practical upshots of them.
I'm talking about the consequences which matter, generally (yes, to people, obviously), but which don't matter to you. Do you see any problem at all with that? Are you capable of understanding why this is a problem?
Do I see any problem with something mattering to other people but not to me? No.
Do other people have a problem with things that matter to me but not to them? Why?
That's the whole problem, here and in many other discussions.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes, because this is ethics, and you have the wrong ethics, meaning that some things, like free speech, matter to you too much than they should, and other things, like the welfare of others, don't matter to you enough as they should.
Ideally, we'd get to a point where you'd realise this.
How much anything should matter to anyone is a matter of individual opinion. There is no correct answer.
It's no different than saying, "You don't like Yngwie Malmsteen's guitar playing as much as you should, but you like Neil Young's guitar playing more than you should."
According to whom? People have no requirement to feel the same way that you do about it.
You are extremely predictable. And a dead end, apparently.
Well, consistent. I've had the same view literally for decades. You'd need a pretty good argument that I've not heard hundreds of times before for me to be persuaded that my view of what ethics, what normatives, etc. are ontologically is incorrect.
How do you view operating from axioms? You see axioms as being neither correct or incorrect, but what about operating from axioms? You don’t think that something can be correct or incorrect according to operating principals/axioms?
Cue the line: "What's good sense is a matter of individual opinion". :roll:
Do you mean for ethics? Or in general?
For ethics, I see it as a principle-based approach (unless you're talking about relatively arbitrary, regularly-changeable axioms . . . that would be pretty unusual, though), and I think that principle-based approaches tend to lead to what I consider to be draconian overreactions to things that should be basically written-off or treated with kid gloves. I hate invoking "common sense," but basically I think that principle-based approaches tend to ignore common sense. We should wind up saying, "Hold on a minute. We're advocating doing such and such to person A just because they did that? Are you crazy?"
At any rate, sure, something can be in line with an axiom or not, but I wouldn't say that it's "correct" just because it's in line with some axiom.
Imagine if free speech mattered to other people, but not to you. Now do you see a problem?
Right. This is as good a definition as any of what I'm talking about. The consequences matter to you. The consequences of some policy are an empirical question. It is possible to be wrong about them. That is what ethical arguments are about.
No. What do you see as the problem that different things matter to different people? Apparently you're thinking that the same things should matter to everyone? Why?
Sure, it's possible to be wrong about them, although basically we have to argue counterfactuals and counterfactual truth values are close to impossible.
Of course the consequences aren't the same thing as the ethical stances, but sure, someone might change their ethical stance given different consequences of it.
In the cases at hand, it's not an issue of disagreeing over what the consequences would be, but feeling differently about the consequences regarding whether they're acceptable/desirable or not.
So, the real you, now, with your free speech absolutism: you see no problem if free speech didn't in fact matter to you, and other people were trying to explain the merits of free speech absolutism, and why free speech matters, and why it should matter, and you were just not getting it at all, and were in fact boasting about how consistent you are in not getting it? You hadn't got it for decades, in fact.
Well I would say its correct/incorrect according to that axiom at least.
I don’t think principal based ethics make much sense either, for similar reasons, but I think that certain axioms can inform ethics. Ive been trying to articulate to myself where exactly you and S (and others) are diverging and its something about where each of you are at structure wise, in a linear sense. (By way of analogy, I think you two are getting off at different stops along the track, and S might be transferring from other tracks you don’t acknowledge as existing)
I won’t hold referencing common sense against you, sometimes to zero in on something you have to start with a less than ideal ambiguity like that. I know what you mean by common sense, generally, so its enough to make your point. Anyway...
That's actually a massive problem, and it's a massive problem if it's not recognised as a massive problem. I mean, that could be used to "justify" practically anything, right? Decapitating children, burning people alive, genocide, finding Adam Sandler funny... you name it.
It's not a fact that it matters or should matter.
It's not a fact that it doesn't matter or shouldn't matter.
We're talking about ways that people feel, dispositions they have.
If you feel that everyone should feel the same way, okay, but I don't feel that everyone should feel the same way.
With S it's frustrating because he doesn't want to straightforwardly articulate stuff. He often resorts to saying that you should simply know what he has in mind. He often thinks that you do know, but you're just being disingenuous by saying you don't. ¯\_(?)_/¯
Honestly, I don’t think you have diagnosed much at all. You don’t seem concerned with understanding his view, only dismissing it and condemning it. I think you are just as big a problem to you two talking past each other as he is, assuming both of you are not being disingenuous (if either of you are, its moot anyway).
That's a blatant red herring. Please answer what you quoted.
Thinking that there are things one should or shouldn't care about, independent of whether one does care about them, is the opposite of subjectivism.
I'm a subjectivist on this stuff.
Well then why don't you actually tell me what you think is wrong with my diagnosis? Maybe that would actually help.
Obviously I don't think that's a problem. What I wrote is why I don't think it's a problem.
Maybe I think too highly of you.
Wow. So you won't even acknowledge that if the shoe was on the other foot, and you didn't get why free speech was so important, that that would be a problem.
Again, maybe I'm thinking too highly of you, but I find that too hard to believe. I just think that you're trying to maintain consistency here.
If you think that I'm not being forthright re whether I know what you're claiming (for example, re thinking I stated an argument earlier), then you probably are.
Oh god, not this again. That stuff can still be subjective, even of it's independent of one particular subject. And that's the only kind of independence which you can tie me to in that regard. So stop suggesting objectivism, which is the opposite of what we're both saying, at all times throughout this discussion. Subjectivism is broader than any one particular subject or subjective view. If you don't understand that, then you don't understand subjectivism.
Its a bit awkward for me to be interjecting (just a little disclaimer) but I can see how each of you is being frustrated. I find it hard to believe you dont understand how the way you choose to engage could be frustrating to people...based on your track record with people in this forum alone you have a pretty obvious clue.
How would that work?
Did I say that? (I seriously don't recall saying that, but maybe I did.)
Easily, through relativism. Relativism doesn't have to be exclusively relative to the views of a single subject. Surely you get that. So just because I might be disregarding your personal view, that doesn't mean that I'm therefore adopting an objectivist stance. That's a complete [I]non sequitur[/I].
Well I confess Im having trouble articulating to myself what exactly is going on. Part of it is semantics, some of it has to do with you two being stubborn about framing...my analogy of the train tracks hopefully help illustrate what I think might be happening.
Maybe you didnt, thats the impression I get though. Have I made a mistake? If you realise you are frustrating people, do you just not care if people get frustrated then? Im not trying to be disparaging, just trying to parse the waters here.
Forget about me for a second. Focus on the ball, not the player. Do you think what I said in my diagnosis is true or not?
There are times when it's much harder - or even impossible - to believe that you don't get something, than to believe that there's some other explanation for why you respond in the way you do.
Like - and I'll keep going back to this example, because it's one of the best - how you say that you don't know whether or not I believe that I'm on the moon. I can't help but believe that there's some other explanation for why you say that. You do know that I don't actually believe that. So it must be something else, like that you don't really mean what you say. That's much more plausible an explanation. After all, earlier on you actually said that you don't have a position in this discussion. That's something you actually said.
Some of it is true, some of it isnt. If you want flat out one or the other, I guess not true as some of it doesnt seem accurate or charitable. I dont think a dichotomy will be useful here though. The issue is in framing and communication, as I think both of you are being consistent to your views.
Also, Im not making comments on the player because I find the players personality abrasive or problematic the way other folks do on this forum. I mention the player because of the way the player is handling the ball, as part of addressing the...er, ball? (The diagnosis, whatever, the point is im not mentioning you rather than your argument because I cant see past your diagnosis do to a problem i have with you).
But relativism doesn't imply subjectivism. The objective world is relative. It's not subjective.
Facepalm.
Its because you are stubborn about framing and im not much for being told how I have to frame things.
Anyway, when you are saying that Terra should care about this or shouldnt care about that, you are making an appeal to something Terra doesnt even acknowledge, and so your diagnosis doesnt actually address what Terra is saying or why.
How do you expect your diagnosis to be accurate when it doesnt do that? Its a sure way to unintentionally strawman someone.
You think that he is just an idiosyncratic contrarian, and maybe thats true but that doesnt mean he is wrong. From the basis he is operating from he is being consistent, as are you. So that is where the discussion needs to focus in order to move forward. Hence, Im trying to find a path where you guys arent talking past each other.
Is that more the kind of answer you wanted?
Edited: There...
Articulate response. :up:
The way to test that is to say things I normally agree with and see if I disagree with them just to disagree with them. :wink:
Quoting Terrapin Station
K well this is exactly what needs to be parsed with more than a flip “facepalm” S. i get why that makes you wanna bang your head against a wall, but you two should discuss that distinction (relative and subjective), its integral to how you are both thinking about this.
No, because I asked you which part of what I said you think isn't true, or isn't accurate, and your first five words were, "It's because you are stubborn", which is exactly not the kind of answer I wanted.
Honestly, you people do my head in.
...You have to keep reading. Lol, you just skipped over the majority of it that does talk about your diagnosis. I pretty obviously moved on in the next paragraph.
Edited: ah, I see. Perhaps I could have better separated my points. Ill go fix it.
A simple, non-controversial example is inertial frames of reference. They're relative, but not subjective.
That is one sense of “relative”, but I doubt its what S has in mind when he uses the term.
Let me posit this: you guys are using the same words but in different categories, and this is the source of the talking past each other. Could that be it?
Yeah, well that's hard to do when you piss me off with that first line.
Anyway, it's not a major problem that I'm appealing to something which he doesn't acknowledge, because whether I'm right is more important than whether he acknowledges what I'm saying. And I'm right about this. If you disagree, then explain why. And don't stray off point this time. The question is whether or not I'm right that he doesn't care, and doesn't see a problem, with things that he should care about, and things for which it is a problem not to care about. Please don't make this about something else, like my temperament, or communication between me and him, or something of that nature, because it's trying my already thin patience. An example would be the one from earlier, that he doesn't care enough about the situation where there's a person who can't walk down the street because people are throwing rocks off of a building. He doesn't see it as a problem. But he should care more, and it is a problem. Do you agree with that or disagree with it?
I don't know what another sense would be, really. Relative simply refers to the idea of being dependent on particular relations (while not obtaining for other relations; well, and we could also say the "background idea" of nothing obtaining relation-free). I'm not familiar with an alternate conventional sense of the term.
Not even what I said.
The only point that I was bloody making was that my subjectivism (not objectivism, because I'm not a bloody objectivist) can easily be explained through relativism in that what one should or shouldn't care about, in accordance with my position on the matter, is relative to a subject or subjects or their subjective views, even if in this particular case that doesn't include him or his particular subjective view.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I don't see how spending my time unmuddling his damn muddle is better than just giving a facepalm and saving myself the aggravation. Thanks for nothing.
I didn't bloody say that it's what you said, did I? I was talking about you, not trying to represent your position from your own perspective.
What would determine who it includes?
Sorry, I didn't catch that you were trying to represent my position with a claim that I'd explicitly disagree with.
Well it's hardly surprising that you wouldn't agree with it. There aren't many people who would readily agree with a description of their ethical stance which suggests callousness and an inability to recognise an ethical dilemma, but obviously that doesn't mean that it isn't true.
Its a major problem in actually understanding his position, and a major problem in communicating.
Tough shit if you don’t want me to talk about communicating, thats what you arent doing well and its why this is frustrating to you. We’ve been over this before, if you ignore me ill stop responding and you can carry on as you see fit. It does nothing for you to bitch about where i choose to focus and warn me about your thinning patience. Yawn.
Im not concerned with your “diagnosis”, im concerned about the discussion, and what I can learn from it. Thats why I chimed in, not because I care to add to the pages and pages of argumentation. I already said your view is consistent, but so is Terras so you have to go deeper and see where the divergence arises in each of your operating principals. Then, you will be able to move forward rather than the circles youve been running in.
My goal isnt to refute either of you, its to help you two understand the other so that you are actually engaging each other rather than talking past each other. If that doesnt interest you then tell me to fuck off and I will.
Okay, but explicitly means that I explicitly said the opposite of what you're saying.
So? Actions speak louder than words. If you cared, or at least cared enough, then that would be reflected in your policy proposals regarding the law. That's what I'm basing my judgement on, and I thought that I'd already made that clear. I don't trust what you say, especially as you have a record of coming out with unbelievable and contradictory things.
I'm skeptical that that's really possible. S thinks there are certain moral stances that need to be adhered to, via some combo of reason, consensus and the mere fact that it's his view, and (a) I don't agree with that, and (b) I don't hold the moral views that he believes need to be adhered to.
I don't know how we'd be able to reconcile anything.
But it explicitly was.
Quoting S
And earlier you were criticizing my consistency.
What would you give as an example of some P that I've both asserted and denied?
No, you only think that it does, but you can't distinguish reality from your own wishful thinking. You obviously see your policy proposal as faultless and as covering all grounds, instead of the crackpottery that it is. You're just like that creativesoul guy banging on about "thought/belief" as though he's just come up with something brilliant, and can't understand why others don't see it like he does. I very much doubt that you'd be taken seriously by professional legislators anywhere in the real world.
Well this was why I was trying to explain my “objective standard” to you. I think it might have been useful to that end. I think it is what S is operating under, even if he doesnt call it that. You didnt respond to my last point on that so I assumed you werent interested. So, im trying something else now.
Not sure what you mean. Pushing your luck with what?
That was a reference to your very last line. Pushing my luck with my use of inflammatory language.
[I]Performative[/I] contradiction. You're usually very consistent in what you [I]say[/I], and at a heavy cost.
I wouldn't say that. It's just that it covers situations such as the rock-throwing scenario.
I believe that you believe that. And creativesoul believes that he's onto something with his "thought/belief" stuff. But you're both going off-the-wall and trying to reinvent the wheel.
That wasn't the case. I was interested. I must have not seen it. Sometimes I miss posts addressed to me out of my own carelessness, especially if I'm busy at the time. But sometimes I don't get notifications, too. I don't know why. And it especially happens with some posters. Most notifications from Isaac don't show up in my mentions "feed" for some reason, for example.
Do you get warnings? Ive went off a few times and no ones said anything, just curious.
What would be an example of a performative contradiction of mine, then?
This is my last post on it:
Im not talking about whether the standard itself is correct, Im talking about whats correct according to the standard.
The “inch” is not under a rock somewhere, its something we make up and agree to reference when measuring things. Right?
If you dont feel like looking back, I suggest you just summate a your take so far and we can just pick it up.
Yes. Just last week. Some jerks complained about me being a jerk.
Funny, I feel like Ive been way more offensive than you and no ones said anything. Must be frequency based. Lol
Saying things that there's no way in hell that you actually believe, like that you don't know whether or not I believe that I'm on the moon, and that the meaning of words like these is entirely subjective, and that you have no position in this discussion. Those are purely philosophical positions, and I don't mean that in a good way. And those are just the ones I can remember.
Use your imagination. You say that I don't give straightforward answers, but the reason I do that is because I think that you ask questions without thinking things through properly, even though you're capable of doing so.
We've spoke about this before. Weren't you a teacher?
Again. You're not king remember? But how am I to understand this? You're OK with child abuse? Seriously?
Indeed, but it's a task that is necessary nonetheless because we can only have one policy as a community. We need to work out, to the best of our ability, which policy that should be. Arguments about the likelihood of counterfactuals is really the only way to inject any consensus building into the process (otherwise it's just might/majority power).
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, I disagree, and this is the point I'm trying to make. The question of whether you find the consequences acceptable/desirable is itself amenable to further analysis of this kind. why do you find those consequences acceptable/desirable? At some point in time during this questioning process you will come to "I just do", but that reality does not, in itself, constitute an argument that any given question (about acceptability/desirability) is at the point.
With free speech, simply taking as our base for the sake of ease (given a 70+ page thread) the consequences @Benkei has recently listed.
What about defamation?
What about spreading lies about a competitor causing him to lose money?
What about copyright infringement?
What about psychological abuse?
What about leaking military plans causing a lot of deaths?
What about leaking company secrets to competitors causing loss of income?
You do not merely find these consequences acceptable/desirable as a matter of foundational feeling, they are too specific for you to have a gut feeling about, you would be thinking about consequences still. Psychological abuse you've already mentioned, you just happen, foundationally, to think that's fine. You think that exposure would make people tougher, less liable to believe lies. But the feeling that people would be better tougher and less liable to believe lies doesn't just pop into your head either, you're still thinking about the consequences, how much better a society would be if people were tougher and less liable to believe lies.
Ultimately, it always comes down to some vision of utopia (your frequent reference to "if I were king"), but society is like a machine, you cannot simply imagine a car that flies (without any modifications) and claim you're just as right as any other in aiming for it. The laws of physics will constrain your options. Likewise with society, the limitations on what a human can do with their brain constrain the options for your utopia in a very real and empirical sense. They also constrain the options for how to get from here to there.
We may not have all the data on what those constraints are, but it doesn't allow for just any old nonsense to get treated as reasonably as mainstream views.
-- just to add, I'm only very intermittently available for a few days, so I might not get around to responding further for the duration.
Yeah, I lost that subthread a bit--I forgot exactly what the context was overall. But basically I'd say the same thing I said above. A measurement can be in accordance with some standard, but it would be difficult to argue for a usage of "correct" that doesn't have a normative connotation. You'd have to keep pointing out that you're using a non-normative "correct," because it would be read with a normative connotation in the vast majority of cases.
The problem is that there's no should to being in accordance with some standard, aside from one personally feeling that way.
You're bringing up too many issues to address at the same time.
Quoting Isaac
I think this is the most important thing to address first.
When ethical stance M is foundational for S on occasion O, all that means is that for S, on occasion O, there is no sentential (utterable-in-a-sentence) ethical stance "beneath" or "behind" M.
M can be any conceivable ethical stance.
How can that be the case?
Let's say that S is considering a situation where (this is a real-world occurrence I just heard about this morning) S was shot in the face at close range with a t-shirt gun at a sporting event, causing S to fall backwards, hit S's head on concrete, get a concussion, and have subsequent medical problems. S is contemplating whether S feels it would be morally acceptable to sue the team in question. This is a very specific thing to consider.
Well, in that situation, S can simply feel that either yes, it would be morally acceptable to sue the team in question, or no, it wouldn't be morally acceptable, where S's decision is simply S's intuitive or "gut" feeling, without S's decision resting on some other moral stance that S holds.
You apparently want to argue that this isn't possible (without actually providing an argument that it's not possible).
Meanwhile, I do that sort of thing often myself. I consider some specific dilemma and simply intuit how I feel about it. That stems in part from me coming to believe that principle-based approaches are not a good idea. This doesn't imply that no thought can go into it, but (a) the thought that goes into it might not be any sort of ethical stance, and (b) the thought that goes into it might not be foundational--and really it can't be if it's not an ethical stance, as no non-ethical stance can imply any particular ethical stance.
I'm telling you what I'd do. What do you want instead--tell you what someone else would do?
I'm okay with "child abuse" when it's only psychological, sure.
With you not being okay with it and wanting to prohibit it, can you answer the question I asked: how would you enforce any laws against psychological abuse? How would you establish that there has even been psychological abuse against kids?
Have you noticed that you're the only one who has this problem? It's a problem that you've invented.
Quoting Terrapin Station
It's not a problem now, and it never was a problem to begin with. There's no "should" in saying that something is 7". You're arguing against no one other than yourself on this point, it seems.
Without bothering to clear up just what I said, all you're doing there is saying that you're incapable of even buying that someone can have a view that's that different than your own. To some extent it's because folks aren't interested enough to learn the details of what the view actually is (such as my view of what meaning is, how it works, etc.).
Quoting S
Yeah, I taught a bit when I was a grad student and briefly beyond that. If I were to ask a student to give details or further explain something they were saying and they refused and basically said, "You should know already/I don't believe that you don't know" they wouldn't have received a very good grade.
Would you like to make a wager on whether a large majority (say >85%) of people assign a normative connotation to the word "correct" in various contexts? I'll put up any amount of money you'd like. We'll put it in escrow. Then we'll set up a research project to check whether people assign a normative connotation to that term.
You use the term normatively all the time. The only time you try to not do that is when it's pointed out that you do. I don't know why you don't want to admit that you use the term that way.
Quoting S
The "should" is in saying that it's correct to say that it's 7" and that it's correct to use a particular standard. "Correct" is the term that has a normative connotation to the vast majority of people.
The way I'd not be "immune" to negative feedback is this:
You make an argument--an actual argument (it doesn't have to be formal, but at least a rhetorical argument with some logical flow to it), not just a lot of posturing and attitude--that
(a) I've not heard a bunch of times before (in various guises)
(b) I consider at least tentatively plausible and sound
(c) can stand up to sustained tough questioning, objections, etc., so that the idea that the argument is plausible and sound is cemented after that.
Again, that would have to be done in good faith, without a lot of ego-oriented defensiveness, ego-oriented attacks, etc. (in other words--posturing and attitude). And the sustained phase of examining the argument would have to stay on-track, without veering all over the map re bringing up additional issues, questions would have to be answered in a straightforward way, in the detail asked for, etc.
Edited: I was being redundant.
Someone can be correct or incorrect according to a standard, but not in the adoption of that standard. Right?
I don't know why the other posts were deleted. Anyway, again, yeah, obviously I have unusual views, including unusual ethical views. I've stated this many times. As I said, with my political views, I've yet to run into a single other person who agrees with them overall.
We have a standard.
A particular measurement of x, measurement A, is in accordance with the standard.
Another measurement of x, measurement B, is not in accordance with the standard.
We're going to call measurement A "correct," and measurement B "incorrect."
===========================================================
We present the information above to a large group of random people (who of course haven't been prepped in any way).
Now, we ask those people,
"We ask you to measure x. Remember that measurement A is correct, and measurement B is incorrect. True, false, or not applicable/there's not enough information to answer: you should measure A when asked to measure x."
What percentage of people do you think will answer "false" or "NA/not enough info"?
Why? If "correct" doesn't have a normative connotation to the vast majority of people, this should be a common question.
The only way it's not a common question is if it seems redundant, so that "correct" has a connotation of being what one should do.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I disagree with those statements. As I've said, the human brain is a machine, it has limits and a relatively narrow range of normal function. FMri scans done by Eric Corchesne on six month old babies showed activity being processed through the pre-frontal cortex in response to having a toy taken away before they cried. Even a six month old child processes things through the rationalising part of their brain before responding. I've mentioned before the prevailing theory of childhood learning being one of theory testing and rejection.
The majority of the psychological evidence is that if your S is deciding whether to sue without thinking, it is based on previously wired responses from repeatedly following similar patterns, the first examples of which would have been worked out rationally. Its not an honest acceptance of inherent subjectivity, its just lazily relying on rational work done earlier in life without bothering to check it's still valid.
That's fine, but as I noted, I do this all the time myself. So I'm left with (a) it apparently being the case that you do not do this--which is fine, and (b) you apparently insisting that people can't be that different than you are--which I wouldn't say is fine when we're doing philosophy (or anything like science, etc.)
Maybe you're claiming something like unconscious moral stances? I don't buy that there are unconscious mental phenomena period.
If you wanted to try to forward an empirical claim that all moral stances of a certain type MUST be based on earlier or intuitive moral stances of another type, whether those other/earlier stances are conscious or not, that would be a near-impossible task . . . and not the least difficulty would arise in trying to plausibly define the types of moral stances to even begin.
You didnt answer my question, but instead pivoted to something else. I thought you didnt like that kinda thing? Simple, one thing at a time, right?
Ill try tweaking the question to get a more specific answer.
Someone can be correct or incorrect according to a particular standard, but not correct or incorrect about adopting that standard, right?
(The example standard I was using was the unit of measurement “inch”)
It's not about difference from me though is it? Again, this is an empirical matter. I'm not claiming "I behave this way, therefore everyone else should", I'm claiming that the psychological evidence we have indicates that people behave this way.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Really? How do you explain Weiskrantz's 'blindsight' experiments, Tulving's procedural memory experiments, Bargh & Chartrand's work on automatic processing, Brook's work on subliminal image recognition...?
I think if we're talking about what's acceptable in philosophy then one thing I'd rule out is making wildly controversial claims without any evidence simply by saying "I don't buy..."
Quoting Terrapin Station
It's not that complicated at all. We have a pretty clear idea, for example, that the pre-frontal cortex is involved in rational thought (people with damage to certain parts of it find rational thought hard), we know it's not much involved in instinctive responses. So if people engage that part of the brain when making moral decisions, they're thinking about some aspect of it rationally. Much oftthis work has already been done.
-The neuroscience of morality and social decision-making, Keith J. Yoder and Jean Decety
This is a very difficult issue, especially with the “think of the children” rhetoric involved.
I like to think of it this way: if we educated children in the nature of language, and how to better grapple with their feelings when in contact with abusive words, they will learn to negate the bully’s attempts to exert power and coercion through verbal abuse.
Can you give an example of the psychological evidence you're referring to? At least that would take the conversation somewhere different.
What I've said over and over is that the word "correct" conventionally has a normative connotation. You can use it however you want to use it, of course, but the vast majority of people are going to read it with a normative connotation. S and others kept denying that.
Quoting DingoJones
Someone can be correct or incorrect according to a particular standard if you're saying that "correct" has no normative connotation, and you're just using the word to refer to whether the measurement is according to the standard. (However, the vast majority of people are going to assign a normative connotation to "correct," and S typically uses it with a normative connotation, too, but sure, we can ignore that and choose to use the word in a different way. (We could use the word "correct" to refer to a broken car door--"Pull on the bungee cord to secure the correct before we start driving", or any arbitrary thing we like, of course.))
If we're using the word that way, then being correct or incorrect about adopting a standard could be the case according to some other standard (a standard, Y, of "This is the standard, X, we're going to use" for example). Unless you're using the words "correct/incorrect" in a different, normative, sense in the second instance?
The measurement can not be correct in a normative sense, of course. So if we're saying that the measurement is in line with some standard, that's fine as something descriptive, but as I said many times earlier, what of it? There's no normative weight to it. It's just a way of saying that "This is per this idea of measurement units." Well, okay, and something else can be per a different idea of measurement units.
Just because people who think that the correct answer to the question of what one plus one equals is two, [I]also[/I] most likely have related normative beliefs, like that you should answer "two" to that question if you want to give the correct answer, that doesn't mean that the former is normative, or "has normative connotations". The former is still descriptive. Descriptive and normative are two different categories, and mean two different things. The one is not the other. And the one doesn't logically imply the other. The "ought" can't be derived from the "is". You should know that as someone who includes Hume in his list of favourite philosophers.
If I say that "two" is the correct answer, there's no "should" in the meaning of that. There's just an "is". It's entirely descriptive. So no, I don't need to keep pointing out something that isn't there in the first place. If you read something into it, then that's entirely on you. It would be your misinterpretation that leads you to think that.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No. There's literally no "ought" in that. The "ought" is in your imagination. And your logic is flawed. I can say that, and I can also say that you should act accordingly. I can hold both the descriptive belief and the normative belief. But it's illogical to conclude from that that I mean the latter by saying the former.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, it's descriptive to the vast majority of people. Pointing to [I]different[/I] statements which are normative won't make [I]that[/I] statement normative. [I]That[/I] statement is clearly descriptive. Your logic is flawed here.
I can provide a million-and-one examples where I'm right and you're wrong on this point:
[I]What day is it today?
Wednesday.
(I'm not saying that it should be Wednesday, or that you should think that it's Wednesday, or anything of that sort. I'm not saying anything normative at all. It's entirety descriptive. I'm simply giving the correct answer).
I dont understand why its suddenly important to you how other people use words.
I was correct in surmising that the conversation has moved on, and Im unwilling to sort through the baggage in order to get you back in point, so Ill let it go.
The paper I cited is a really good overview. I've not got a good Internet connection at the moment, but I'll see if I can track down a link with no paywall.
And are you open to a critical examination of the paper and its claims?
S (and maybe Isaac; I know it was someone else) complained about my criticism of calling something correct/incorrect, just because it's common/according to some consensus, etc. by claiming that I'm using those terms (correct/incorrect) unusually in suggesting that there's a normative connotation. And they also claimed to not be using the terms with a normative connotation.
Again, aside from that, if we're saying that we're really not going to use the word with a normative connotation, then pointing out that I'm departing from moral views that are widely-accepted, assuming that's the case, is pointless, because there's zero normative weight to it. It's like pointing out that someone is eating a cookie they made themselves rather than eating a Chips Ahoy. Well so what?
Okay, so you're sure that you'll win the bet re "correct" having a normative connotation. So how much are we wagering?
What? You don't believe that you'd win the wager? (I'm trying to confirm that that's what you're saying.)
I guess, quite ridiculously, because I used the term, "fucked up". Either that or it was the automatic filter. I guess I shouldn't have called your fucked up morality "fucked up", I should have called it something more politically correct instead.
:brow:
Har har. No, I meant that I don't believe your account. I don't believe that a good argument would convince you. That's kind of what I meant by immunity in the first place, otherwise you wouldn't really be immune, and I wouldn't have said that.
Okay, so the wager?
Yeah, metaphorically, I'd wager against you, so long as you didn't skew the set up. But no, if you actually want real money from me, on ya bike.
I'm not talking metaphorically. If you're sure you'd win, I wouldn't be getting any money from you, right? You'd only be getting money from me.
Lol, I don't bet my real money with people online. Full stop. The rest is irrelevant.
Which means that you're talking shit.
I'm not. I'll seriously wager any amount on this.
Here's when I won't take a wager: when I'm not more or less 100% certain that I'll win.
That's absolutely hilarious. There are lots and lots of people who outright refuse to bet their real money in response to people who goad them to do so online, and that's perfectly understandable. Draw whatever foolish conclusions you like from that.
You put the money in escrow. You draw up a contract specifying the terms. There's zero risk unless you're talking shit.
If you put up enough--say at least 10k US, I'll come to Australia or wherever you are (for some reason I was thinking it's Australia) and we can do the study there, so you're present every step of the way.
Very funny. Anyway, I told you that I don't bet my real money against people online. Do you understand what that statement means?
Yes, that you're a bullshitter.
You're being very childish, you know.
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Yeah, okay then. Go ahead and make all the arrangements. I'll send you the 10k US I don't even have, and we'll fly out to Australia! I've always wanted to go there. Put another shrimp on the barbie!
I don't recall where you are. Just wager whatever you can afford. You don't send it to me. Again, we put it into escrow and draw up a contract. (No wonder you can't afford $10k though if you don't know the difference between sending it to me and putting it in escrow.)
Sure. How much are we wagering? And we need to figure out the terms. For one we could use the scenario I set up earlier re measurements and the true/false/not enough info question. If you want to suggest modifications that's fine; we can hash that out. We should probably devise three-five questions for this, although not more, as people won't have patience for that. And then we could ask, say, 500 people chosen at random? I could do it on the streets of NYC, or in a mall over the course of a couple weeks, say, and I could video it so you see that the responses are what I say they are.
A million dollars, my cat, and my favourite pair of socks.
A minute ago you didn't have $10k
I didn't. I had a million dollars.
The paper is basically a summary of the state of psychological and neuroscienetific thinking on the matter. If you're not going to trust the expert judgement (which I've already outlined), then there's nothing much in that paper to go on. This is the problem with your attitude that any expert position can be critically examined. There have been literally thousands of experiments done in this field. You cannot possibly examine them all, nor would you have the background knowledge to do so. Experts in the field examine some of them, other experts collate the conclusions of those experts, other experts summarise all that in conclusions like the one I quoted. Could they all be wrong? Absolutely. Have we got a chance in hell of reasonably demonstrating that they are? No.
If you want to critically examine the experiments which have lead to the conclusions I cited, be my guest. There are 95 citations in that paper alone, and many of those are citing other summaries which themselves have scores of experimental results cited. I'll find a link to the paper, when you've read through the several thousand experiments it collectively cites, I'd love to hear your thoughts on their conclusions.
Here's an escrow company I've used:
http://smprtitle.com/services/escrow-services/
Is that okay with you?
We need to go over the terms/devise the questions, of course.
So in other words, you're not really going to go through a critical examination of anything with me.
Part of what we'd be critically examining, by the way, is if a claim is even being made to the effect of the claim you're making.
Don't you think that a philosophy background is relevant, especially with focuses on philosophy of science, epistemology and ontology?
Do I just go here and follow the instructions?
There is no "think of the children" rhetoric involved and it was one of many examples I provided. I picked it, because it has the most egregious consequences in my view. Psychological abuse is a real problem and it's not just limited to child abuse but that's an example where the State can (and will) step in by separating the children from abusive parents. We do not step into adult-adult relationships the same as we consider them autonomous enough to walk away from that relationship because of presumed independence. Children are dependent on their parents and therefore deserve special protection from parents who do not properly fulfil their caretaker role to the point where the relationship becomes abusive.So the idea "if we educated children" only works if the educators can be trusted. They cannot be trusted in every case, therefore education alone is not a panacea.
Next, you're equating bullying with psychological abuse. They are not remotely the same thing.
Quoting Terrapin Station
First off, I explicitly asked you to reply given the nature of reality where you're not king. I again get a reply "I'm telling you what I'd do" but that's just made-up nonsense if it's not grounded in reality. You keep on doing this and are effectively not answering my questions at all as a result.
I'm not sure what to say to your claim that you're okay with "child abuse". We're not remotely on common ground - ethically speaking - if you're okay with child abuse. Such abuse leads to serious behavioural, emotional or even mental disorders. How is that "okay"? Are you suggesting we should let parents abuse their children to protect their free speech?
Your questions are a bit silly given that children are regularly placed out of their parental homes due to psychological abuse. It's more difficult to assess than bruises but it's entirely possible. So there's no issue there, parents can appeal in the courts against such decisions but there's already a system in place and a method of establishing such abuse (e.g. disorders of kids the source of which can be found in parental behaviour towards those kids).
So if you're not asking me what my view is--what I think should be legal/illegal, what I think is moral/immoral, etc., what exactly are you asking me? Are you asking me what other people think or something?
Not having laws "based on psychological effect" isn't a solution because the reality is that people think parents shouldn't get away with psychological child abuse. So your "view" is useless.
I'm not sure what the calculus is behind it that you find this acceptable.
It's the same with your answer to "what to do with lying about a competitor if it causes him losses?". Your anwer was that if you were king, it wouldn't be a capitalist society. Well, news-break, it is a capitalist society. So how are you going to get free speech absolutism given the very profound and relevant fact that it is a capitalist society and that the competitor will want a remedy.
So basically what you seem to be saying is that "if the world worked totally differently I'd be in favour of free speech absolutism". Great. Very informative. If the world worked totally differently I'd be in favour of everybody being rich.
Right. I'm not in favor of any laws about "psychological harms." Why hasn't that been clear from what I've said?
Quoting Benkei
That's not at all what I'm saying, by the way. I'm in favor of free speech absolutism now.
When I say, "If I were king blah blah blah" it's another way of saying, "This isn't how things presently are, but this is what I'm in favor of." One reason I say that is that whenever I wouldn't say it in past discussions (not necessarily here--I've been talking about this stuff with people online since 1994, and since the early 80s if you go back to BBSs), I'd get people responding telling me what the present laws were, as if my intention was to report what the present laws were for some reason (as if people couldn't simply look that up if they're curious).
I can tell you the laws I'm in favor of, I can tell you what the laws presently are (if you're incapable of looking that up for some reason), I can tell you what other persons' opinions are when I'm aware of them.
I'm not in favor of any laws against "psychological harms" as things are. I don't know how to make that any more plain.
Plenty of other people are in favor of laws against "psychological harms" obviously. And we have laws about it now. But I'm not in favor of them. I don't feel the same way about that as those other people.
Correct.
Why not?
Also that was an example of a non-normative use of the word "correct".
For one, I don't consider any psychological states to be forced by environmental factors such as speech, and I only have an ethical problem with nonconsensual force. (And only a subset of nonconsensual force at that, but there's no need to get into the details of that in this context.)
Uhm. Why must it be forced (whatever that means) and why not "caused"? I mean, if I shoot someone I don't force him to die. It's just really likely that he will, so it's considered a conditio sine que non. If parents don't yell at their kids and continually tell them they're crap, stupid and not worth a dime, the kids wouldn't have a behavioural problem either as a result. So the presence of their yelling and name-calling is a conditio sine que non for the behavioural problem.
Second, a kid is in a dependent relationship with their parents. It's not as if they can escape to somewhere else to avoid this behaviour, especially at very young ages.
EDIT: come to think of it. It's pure nonsense. All thought is caused by speech that we learned from others. We don't come in this world ready with words. In that sense, every psychological state is caused by speech except the most base emotions but even that is routed through the neo-cortex.
Yes. And in the context of an ethical discussion about what's right or wrong, or what is or isn't a problem, the resolution to the issue of someone speaking up to say that it's okay, or that it isn't a problem, is simply to disregard what they say. Or, especially if there's a risk that they might cause harm by influencing others with their views, then the best thing to do would be to get them to see sense, if possible. But we certainly shouldn't treat what they say as in any way credible, acceptable, reasonable, or justified.
I'd say it must be "caused," but contiguous, etc. physical force is how I'm using the term "cause" there. So I'm substituting "force" for that to make that clear. (There was an issue with that earlier.)
It must be forced because dispositionally/in terms of intuitive feeling, etc. that's the only thing I find morally objectionable. (And again, just a subset of that.)
If you shoot someone, you were applying physical forces to them, for which we can detail the causal (forced) chain. They might not die, of course, but when they do, there's a causal (forced) chain we can trace. (And of course there are causal chains we can trace when they don't die but the shooting causes other sorts of physical damage, too.)
Quoting Benkei
Not a claim that I agree with in the slightest.
For one, I don't agree that all thought is linguistic, and I don't think that meaning is linguistic, either.
Found it.
To directly support my comment.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of course you don't. And all those people working in advertisement and speech writers are really not influencing anything. Oh wait...
By the way, I don't know if you saw me mention this, but for some weird reason, I often do not receive notifications for posts you respond to. It happens occasionally with other posters, too, but it seems like more often than not your responses don't show up in my "Mentions 'feed.'" So if sometimes I don't respond to you, that might be why.
At any rate . . . so among other things, we'd have to examine (a) just how they're defining some of those terms, (b) just how they're reaching the empirical conclusions that they're reaching.
It's not clear just from that text that they're claiming something akin to "Moral stances of type x (that is, of a certain complexity and/or specificity) must be based on moral stances of type y (of less complexity/specificity), even if moral stances of type y are unconscious," which is what you were claiming.
Part of examining just how they're defining terms would be looking at whether they'd "define away" someone intuiting moral stance M, where it's not consciously based on any other moral stance, despite being of type x (a certain complexity and/or specificity), as "not being morality" because it's not meeting some requirement or other--such as not being what they'd consider deliberative processes that interact with social environments and cultural exposure. I have no idea if that would be the case without looking at how they're defining "deliberative processes" as well as "deliberative processes that interact with social environments and cultural exposure.
Alternately, if they're claiming that M is based on unconscious moral stances of type y, we'd need to examine just how they're supposedly gaining empirical evidence of there being an unconscious moral stance of type y.
So one, I have issues with the methodology of lots of those sorts of claims. We could get into that, but it would be a big, detailed diversion to get into. I think it would be a good diversion to get into, because we'd be digging into some epistemological issues we normally avoid on this board, and that's presumably the sort of thing we'd be doing on a philosophy board, but no one ever wants to bother, and there's a weird tendency here to want to defer to people that one considers experts in various fields. (Meanwhile, we have people here who have the qualifications necessary for "expertise" in philosophy, where that includes concentrations such as philosophy of science and epistemology, but there's no similar deference to them. It turns out to be deference to "experts saying things I agree with/experts saying things I want them to say.")
Quoting Benkei
So putting aside the epistemological issues for a moment, what I said, and I shouldn't have to repeat this, is that I brought up force because per my dispositions, my intuitive moral feelings, that's the only thing that I find morally objectionable. So if we're not claiming force in those situations, I don't find it morally objectionable, whatever other things, exactly, we're claiming.
It's not as if any particular moral stance follows from any particular set of facts. That's definitely NOT the case. That would be an example of an ought following from an is, but oughts don't follow from "ises."
Quoting Benkei
I'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything. I'm telling you what my disposition is. You asked me my opinion. That's my opinion. It doesn't have to be your opinion, and I'm not attempting to make it your opinion by persuading you of anything. I'm just reporting to you what I'm like.
Quoting Benkei
Science methodology 101: we don't prove empirical claims.
You could be using "prove" in a loose sense--giving what we consider to be evidence for something, but the whole nut behind falsification re a demarcation criterion for science is that any positive claim whatsoever could be wrong, and is thus open to revision in principle.
Quoting Benkei
Definitely you are not required to care about, be interested in, my opinion. The smart thing to do in that case would be to just not respond to me.
Quoting Benkei
If only that had something to do with whether all thought is linguistic, whether meaning is linguistic, etc.
Yes, as I said, your dispositions are irrelevant. That YOU think certain things ought not be punished isn't relevant to the fact most people believe they ought. So your free speech absolutism cannot work because it assumes conditions that don't exist. As I said, everybody should be rich. That's as informative as your position is. E.g., not relevant in any way.
That's not the case. We're not disagreeing on any facts. We're disagreeing on whether those facts are acceptable.
In other words, I'm fine saying for the sake of argument, "Speech causes psychological harm."
I think that psychological harm is acceptable. You do not.
What fact would you say we're disagreeing on?
Re relevance, everything is relevant to some things and not relevant to others, depending on the interpretational framing one is doing. That's why I didn't address that part.
Here's a thought experiment:
99 persons say punching someone in the face should be allowed.
1 Terrapin Station says it shouldn't.
TS is welcome to his opinion but is punched in the face nevertheless.
What is that thought experiment supposed to be showing?
Well, or just be straightforward and say what you think it's supposed to be showing.
Your speech doesn't force my psychological states.
At any rate, if you don't want to be straightforward about what you think the thought experiment shows, that's fine with me. It would just have the practical implication that it must not be very important to you to talk about it with me in any depth. ¯\_(?)_/¯
Happens to me too, I'll try and '@' you if ever I think you're missing out on my edifying pronouncements.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So, the main thing you'd need to explain to counter this theory, is what the prefrontal cortex is doing when making complex moral choices, if they are just intuited. That's the main sticking point with your theory. Both functional imaging and brain damage studies show this activity. They also show different areas of the brain functioning with simple desire satisfaction, stimuli avoidance, even phobic responses. Basically, everything we associate with 'intuition' happens in areas of the brain outside of the key area engaged in complex moral decision making, which just happens to be an area also involved in prediction, calculation and weighing choices. Are you suggesting we put that down to coincidence?
You could conclude from this that no moral decisions are intuitive (though other studies would counter that), but what does not match that evidence is your theory that all moral decisions are intuitive feelings.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You'd have to look into the experiments themselves for that. I know a very large proportion of the older ones were done using the trolley problem, then that was updated (it was considered a bit 'sterile') to a variety of 'aid' dilemmas (what you would risk to help a person) and unfair judgement responses (deliberately treating third parties unfairly).
The problem is rather that:
(a) if S is making what's being classified as a "complex moral choice,"
and
(b) S reports that he's making the choice simply intuitively, with no other (moral) stances behind it
and
(c) the prefrontal cortex shows activity A via imaging during this process
then
What grounds do we have for saying that something additional is going on mentally with respect to (moral) stances, despite S's report?
That would be a classic example of disregarding recalcitrant data in the guise of theory-worshipping.
In other words, the only way to link third-person observational stuff like brain imaging to mental phenomena is via first-person reports from the subjects in question.
Well, if we do that and we develop a theory linking certain observables with certain mental phenomena, but then we come across a subject who shows the observables in question but who does NOT report the same mental phenomena, that doesn't suggest that the subject is wrong and really has the mental phenomena in question (but just isn't aware of it or some nonsense like that).
It rather suggests that something is off with the mapping or with the theory. What we thought were observables for the mental phenomena in question weren't really--maybe they're correlated in some way, usually, at least, but they're not the same thing as the mental phenomena in question, and there's not always a correlation.
Imagine that we had a bunch of lights that can flash, and then we have (to invoke Wittgenstein a bit) a black box that we can open and check whether there's a beetle inside. We don't know beforehand just how the lights, the box and the beetle are connected. We notice that whenever the lights go off in certain pattern, there's a beetle in the box after we check. But then on one occasion, the lights go off in that pattern and there's no beetle in the box. We can't insist that "there really was a beetle in the box that time, too--it must have just been invisible" or something like that. We have to consider that the lights in that pattern aren't actually a guarantee that there's a beetle in the box. There might be some connection, but it at least wouldn't be the same thing, and there's not necessarily a connection. We'd have to do a lot more research to figure out what's going on.
The problem with the mental version of this is that we can't actually third-person check for the beetle in the box. We have to rely on someone else telling us whether there is. Which not only means that they can tell us that there isn't a beetle in the box when there is (if they're not being honest, for example), but the opposite, too--they can tell us that there's a beetle in the box when there isn't, and that can be exacerbated by priming or pumping them, maybe in ways that aren't obvious.
By the way, this is unfortunately what we more or less literally have done when it comes to positing something like dark matter. We realize that our equations aren't working for what we're observing, so rather than thinking, "Crap--maybe we've got this theory, these equations wrong for at least some circumstances," we say, "there must be far more matter there, it's just effectively invisible."
OK, so how do we go about holding any theory at all by that standard? We have a theory that the earth is round but Bill says he measured it and it came out flat. Do we have to re-think our theory, or just dismiss Bill's results as probably an error?
You're basically begging the question of your 'no unconscious mental events' theory. We can never disprove it because any brain activity we link to unconscious thought, doesn't count without the correct first-person account. If you want to hold self-immunised theories, that's fine, but there's no point in discussing them.
As I've said before. Quite a lot of careful work over tens of thousands of man-hours has gone into considering issues like this. I can't give a degree course in psychology over the Internet to convince you these matters have been considered already. If you have a specific experiment you want to question the methodology of, I don't mind going through that, but spending time convincing you that the whole of psychology is not a castle in the air is not something I'm interested in doing I'm afraid.
"The earth is round" isn't about individual's subjective experiences. It's about the objective shape of the Earth.
"S has mental content M" is about subjective experiences. There's no way for anyone to observe the subjective experience per se aside from the subject reporting it to someone else.
Recalcitrant data for the Earth being round is a different objective measurement. Not someone's subjective report.
There can be recalcitrant objective data. I just mentioned this above re why we posit "dark matter."
How is "I measured the earth and found it to be flat" not a subjective report?
That might be, but we don't go by subjective reports for this. We make objective measurements.
We can't do that when what we're studying is subjective phenomena. Again, this is the whole point of noting that the only way to link third-person observational stuff like brain imaging to mental phenomena is via first-person reports from the subjects in question.
We can't make objective measurements. Every measurement is of the form "I looked at the measuring instrument and it seemed to me to say X". It is a subjective account. We believe it on the basis of commonality and utility. It's not a different kind of account. Absolutely everything we know is a subjective account of the way things seem to us to be.
Also, you're missing the whole point, which is that when you have recalcitrant data, you don't just insist that the data has to be wrong. You have to consider the possibility that other things have gone wrong, including the theory.
This is the whole point to Duhem-Quine--that falsificationism often doesn't work well in practice, because people have a tendency to excuse away recalcitrant data, because they want to hold on to their theories.
So you have to figure out what's going on when you come across recalcitrant data. The issue when you're studying something subjective is that you have to rely on reports from the subject in question. It's not as if we can just observationally check it directly.
The measurement isn't in your mind.
Yes, hence my reluctance to go back over the several thousand experimental results firming the history of psychological research in order to demonstrate that this has already been considered. Psychologists are not idiots (despite the protestations of phil science grads). They have already looked at aberrant results, already considered how they could devise further experiments to confirm/deny theories about those aberrations, already carried out and drawn reasonable conclusions from these further tests. This is just normal science, partly because of interventions like Duhem-Quine. What you're presenting here as a devastating "ah-ha" moment is something we learned in A-level psychology. It's something very much in the mind of most serious researchers.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Where is it then?
First off, there's been absolutely nothing to even suggest that anyone is forwarding a categorization of complex/compound versus simple/atomic moral stances. Has any of the research you're appealing to forwarded that?
Quoting Isaac
The world outside of minds, obviously.
Take your pointless dispute elsewhere, preferably not on this forum.
Quoting Terrapin Station
What, the measurement? I've never seen one. All that's in the world outside of mind is (if anything at all) a sea of heterogeneous stuff. All objects, measurements, laws, and concepts are constructions of the human mind.
So when you use a device like this:
(And here's some info about it, including links to how it works)
http://www.johnsonlevel.com/News/LaserDistanceMeasure55
You think that device is just in your mind? Or the readings on the display are just in your mind?
Or are you now devolving to conflating concepts, terms, etc. with what they're about?
Re the quotations, by the way, so then the answer is no, no one has suggested the complex/compound versus simple/atomic categorization you're suggesting? (Because the quotes you pasted sure don't suggest anything like that)
Regarding “psychological abuse”, It’s the same kind of question: do words cause stress or is stress caused by the body because of perceived threats and fears?
Quoting Terrapin Station
They end in failure because they start with the charitable assumption that the other person can be reasoned with, but fail because the other person can't be.
So we're not allowed to give our analysis on things like that? Or only when it's someone like me? Or what?
Anyway, are you going to ban me or not? It's been good, but I think I spend too much time here anyway, and I don't really like how people like @jamalrob judge me with regard to his intervention just now.
Well, it's always going to be at least partially a matter of how people semantically interpret what's said, and people have some degree of control over that. The control of it isn't necessarily easy, but it's possible. For example, if you don't want to be offended, or if you don't want to see other people with different personalities, different behavior than your ideal to be a problem that torments you, there are ways to parse things so that you don't have to be offended, you don't have to see difference as a problem.
When that's one's assessment, why wouldn't one simply move on and not bother with the person in question? Wouldn't that be a simple solution that wouldn't cause one so much apparent strife?
Well, for me, I almost can't help but want to reason with people in situations like that. I find it hard to move on. That's partly why banning me from the forum would be a good thing, for my own sake.
i suppose it's some sort of psychological thing where you figure you can always get folks to come around to your thinking if you just try hard enough?
Yes, exactly.
I can't be the first person you've run into where that doesn't work. It would probably be a good idea to learn how to let that go if it's causing you frustration.
I think it's good to learn how to accept difference.
Yeah well, I'm human, aren't I? All too human.
Yes. As I said all there can really be (if there's anything at all) is a sea of heterogeneous stuff. The device (as opposed to its immediate surroundings) is an artificial division of that stuff I've made up, the readings are more artificial divisions of that stuff I made up.
Making this stuff up the way we do, and broadly agreeing with each other about what divisions we're going to put where really works well as a way to get on with life. Making up theories with laws about how things work really helps too.
But just as the observation and the readings from your laser measure are my subjective interpretation of the heterogeneous sea of stuff, so is my feeling about my brain activity. If we happily rely on one, call it 'truth', on the basis of consistency, repeatability etc. then we can do so with the other. They're not different categories of thing. In both cases, something is happening to the heterogeneous sea of stuff (the laser measure in one case, my brain in another) and my mind is interpreting it. I check those interpretations with others, test them, keep the ones which work for me, discard the ones which don't. Part of what science does (psychology included) is checking with others, checking repeatability, and yes sometimes we discard anomalies because it works better that way, so what?
I'm not getting into this again where I've got to find some quote with the exact wording your looking for. As far as I'm concerned they're as close as need be. If you don't think so, there's not much I can do about that.
So, given what you said above about anomalies, how can you know this? Have you asked everyone in the world whether they're capable of doing what you're claiming can be done? Why is it when I claim humans can/can't do X, you say "show me evidence that they can/can't" and require an astonishingly high level of evidence to support it, but when you're supporting your outlandish ideas any old guess as to what human minds are capable of seems to be satisfactory?
Huh? So you think the device is just something you're imagining, and it's an artificial division of something you're imagining?
No, I think the device is an artificial division of the stuff reality is made of. I'm pretty agnostic about whether the reality it's made of is actually there.
I wasn't asking you anything like that. I'm asking you if you think it's literally mental content and not a piece of plastic etc. that's independent of your brain
No. I think it's independent of my brain, I'm not totally sold on the idea, but it works best for me.
So then you don't think that it's subjective.
No. I think the measuring device as a distinct object is subjective, the stuff it's made from probably isn't. Where does the stuff stop being 'air' and start being 'plastic'? That's subjective. That there is some stuff to be called 'air' and 'plastic' in the first place, that's not. We decide how we're going to divide reality, but I prefer to think reality itself is outside of our minds.
That's talking about the concepts. That's not what I'm asking about.
I've given my answer to both. The stuff the measure is made of is objectively there, the division by which we name it and think of it as one thing (as opposed to another) is not.
Now, before we get too far into a classic Terrapin diversion I'd like you to answer my question (although I'm going bed now so you have until morning). I asked (in case you missed it with your notification issues)...
I'm not asking about naming and thinking about.
In this manner we can consider that such expression of speech is not really freedom of speech, as it is self-limiting. Hate speech - if u agree that it’s aim is to prevent the equitable speech of another group or member of humanity - in its use prevents freedom of speech.
So hate speech cannot hide under the umbrella of freedom of speech - at least not with conversations of people who can actually think logically. It is by its very nature an attack on freedom of speech. It is a self contradiction and ergo false.
So the answer must be no. Hate speech is not a form of freedom of speech.... it is a form of the denial of freedom of speech. It cannot be though of as otherwise. But please reply if you think otherwise, it would be interesting to be proven wrong!
Quoting Isaac
Now are you just going to repeatedly ask the same question, or are you going to address the glaring hypocrisy in dismissing my position because it universalises some theory about the way human minds work, whilst doing exactly the same thing in support of your own position?
We're still working on you understanding how measurements are objective. You keep bringing up thinking about measurements --concepts, applying particular terms and all sorts of things, but we're trying to reach understanding that the claim isn't about concepts etc.
A measurement is a concept. It doesn't exist outside of someone's mind, the only thing I concede probably exists outside of someone's mind is the heterogeneous sea of stuff reality is made of. It doesn't contain measurements, which are a human concept attached to human-determined objects. I don't know how much more clear about this I can be.
Something exists/happens in 'reality'. We decide in our minds what to think about that in terms of naming, significance, prediction, beliefs, associations, modelling etc.
No. That's not even a sophormoric conflation. It's a freshman-level conflation. Or a high school kid getting high and thinking that he might be interested in philosophy-level conflation.
There is a concept of measurement. But measurements themselves are not concepts.
You can't conflate concepts and what they're concepts of. That's one of the most naive philosophical mistakes.
Now, you can make a sort of "guesstimation measurement" in your head at times, but that's not what we're talking about.
Free Speech Is Killing Us
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/free-speech-social-media-violence.html
So, ad populum arguments are fair use when they suit you? No need to present a case for why I'm wrong, simply refer to the fact that educated people think I'm wrong, therefore I must be.
So where does that leave your outlandish views on how the mind works, which everyone above high-school level psychology would disagree with?
Quoting Terrapin Station
You're presuming that there is a thing that the measurement is a concept of. Absent that presumption there are no two things to conflate. What is my concept off flying space monkeys a concept of?
Quoting Terrapin Station
So, I look at an object and guess it is six inches. I look at the same object together with a ruler (where I see the number 6) and you're telling me the latter observation is a philosophically distinct thing?
Can you explain this question?
You have frequently rejected arguments against positions you hold which consist of nothing but reference to how many people disagree with you. Your argument above contained no substantive support, simply a claim that everyone above high-school level philosophy would disagree with me (not make the 'mistake' I'm making).
Simply saying that better educated people would not agree with me is not an argument unless there is a body of empirical fact that those people are learnt in, and that is a fact which you yourself have used previously against interlocutors.
??
Not what I said. It's more that you wouldn't agree with you at a stage of development in your thought about this stuff that didn't resemble a high school kid who "thinks he might be interested in philosophy" and who just smoked a joint.
It's like if you were to say, "I'm going to only eat bubblegum!" I might point out that you seem like you're four years old. That has nothing to do with what other people say. It has to do with the fact that that's the stage of development where people typically think something like "I'm going to only eat bubblegum!"
Well, the stage of development where people have a lot of problems separating concepts from what concepts are about is around the time of either "stoned high school student with some interest in (at least what he thinks is) philosophy" or the "freshman taking a Phil 101 course for the first time."
That's nothing to do with agreeing with other people.
Can speech-censoring as a means to mitigate/overcome unnecessary suffering (of those who would take psycho-affective (?) damage from such speech), ultimately achieve such?
Does the censoring of hate speech solve the problem, or does it merely palliate(?)/treat the symptoms of a hateful condition?
If it does (promise to OR actually) solve the problem, does the enforcement of this kind of censoring only need to increase further?
If it only mops up after the symptoms (which certainly has its value, seeing as it can serve to decrease the flow-rates of verbal vitriol, at least in theory), does any deeper treatment necessarily involve the allowance of such expression regarded as "hate speech"?
If any deeper treatment does involve such allowance, what, then, would be the plan? Would attempts need to be made to appeal to the sensibility enshrouded in what we may call the clouds of hate? Can such appeals be made?
If such appeals can be made, at what cost? How far does the offended have to cater to the offender in this scenario ("offended"/"offender" used as provisional terms, seeing as the concreting of such labels only serves to crystalize an opposition that does not seem, to me, to be absolute and irreconcilable)?
If you think such appeals cannot be made, do you also think that the defenses of the offender are impenetrable?
If you think such appeals should not be made, what do you think should be done? Should the offended, or the defender of the offended, continue to correct/censor the offender? Can such be done, effectively, with sensitivity? Or should the offended/defender sacrifice sensitivity in the interest of assertiveness? Does sensitivity need to be sacrificed in this situation?
How much psychic energy does the offended have to spare? How draining is it to have been under such a barrage for the bulk of one's life?
What of the hermeneutics (?) of hates speech? Does the speaker need to be consciously driven by hate for it to constitute hate speech? Or can ignorance/unawareness (unconsciously driven by hate or not) qualify speech as hateful? If the ignorant/unaware speaker speaks and is accused of hate speech, is their ignorance/unawareness reified, in their mind, as hate? If so, how can this problematic equation be remedied? Does this bring us back to appealing to the offender?
Is hate merely repressed if its expression is censored? Does this depend on the (situational and socio-systematic) power dynamics (?) of the censoring interaction?
Are we framing hate as the absence of love? Is it a matter of substantiating a void?
Or are we framing hate as negative, love as positive, and neutrality as zero?
Which aspects of these dichotomies are fixed, and which are fluid?
If one is worried about unnecessary suffering, in a situation where we're censoring some speech, what about the unnecessary suffering of people who now can't say what they want to say?
This seems, to me, to be the crux of the matter.
From what little I gather, by means of both personal speculation and testament of others, about the experience of some marginalized person, one who has not been taken into account as a subject by whatever mainstream/"master" narrative that defines their social environment; from what I gather about the condition of such ongoing experience, I am willing to equate such marginalization (intentional or not) to suppression.
This suppression, in turn, can, perhaps, be framed as a being-held-underwater, in which case the gradual demarginalization (by means of political correctness?) can be framed as a coming-to-the-surface, the fresh air of which has been reserved, historically, for those who are/have been taken into account as subjects by the local mainstream/"master" social narrative.
In this analogy (and perhaps I am clutching onto it too dearly, at the expense of optimal expression), is the movement upward, toward the surface, represented by the inversion of suppression? Would the marginalized being, by ceasing their censorship of the kind of expression they deem offensive/suppressive; by ceasing this censorship, would they necessarily be curbing their movement upward? Is this a fixed inverse relationship? Does ground gained by the historical non-subject (the so-called "other?") necessarily equate to ground lost by the historical subject? If the historical subject (the oppressor, in certain terminology; capital M "Man," etc.) is the arbitrator of who is deserving of the title of subject, how can this power be shared? Is that possible?
Back to your point, Terrapin: I, perhaps, can address this from firsthand experience, unlike the matters aforementioned. There are aspects of this kind of censorship that, in as far as I identify with the censored subject, carry with them connotations of total invalidation. That is, if I am as privileged as everyone says I am, is there anything worthwhile (i.e. is any of my "success" the fruit of my work at all? Or is it entirely derived from my genetic and socio-economic circumstances?) about my being qua what-part-of-my-being-is-up-to-me?
Additionally, the accusations of insensitive speech can sting (In as far as you pride yourself on being a good person, I suppose), but I can only assume that such speech stings more on the other side. But, if I understand what you are saying, what of the sting felt by the censored? Is it necessary? Does it amount to anything positive/remedial(?) for both sides? Does it only sting until one gets accustomed to it? Again, is the inversion of suppression promising as a solution, or does it merely smolder the emotions accused of being hateful, and cause them to fester and, perhaps, explode, automatically, through a barrel into a crowded area?
Now, that last question, admittedly, reads quite pointedly - but I do see some serious import in it, as hyperbolic as it may seem.
The best answer I have, of now, is to embrace the sting (the post-oppressor as martyr??), and hopefully it will lesson the suffering on both ends - one of which, I feel compelled to point out, has been suffering (in various ways, not necessarily in every way) far longer.
But ^this^ kind of "A (but really B (but also A (but really B)))" oscillation can, in my eyes, persist into oblivion.
If one starts to introduce all of those additional qualifications, they'd need to be supported, and we could just suggest that one state the full policy, with all of the qualifications, right off the bat, instead of modifying it every time we point out a problem with it.
Well perhaps it was a bit too complicated an answer, but this does seem to be a complicated issue.
My intentions are merely to lay out what contingencies seem to arise from such choices. It would be ideal if such a policy could be prescribed off the bat, and then, the policy itself being deemed sufficient, it would only be a matter of adhering to it. But does that not amount to our supposing that the relation being addressed by the policy is fixed in its nature? I'm inclined to believe that, at most, the essence of such a relation (oppressor/oppressed?) may be fixed in its nature, but the circumstantially-dictated attributes are surely liable to change, are they not?
Then, if a policy is to be asserted and remain fixed, it must account for this essence (which also assumes that the essence is, in fact, fixed), withstanding whatever circumstantial changes may be experienced (?).
I don't necessarily believe that all of these qualifications can be completely supported, but I am inclined to believe that, by introducing more factors to be suspended in criticism, alternative pathways may open. Pretty vague, but I do believe it.
Or maybe I am totally off-base and am considering your points in ways you did not intend.
The idea is that, for example, "needless suffering" and "oppressor/oppressed" are different ideas. If we state that our concern is for one, but then we switch to the other when we're analyzing a policy we've stated, it suggests that we're simply ad hoc arguing for our preference and not actually basing it on any sort of principle after all.
Maybe I'm still not understanding your point, because "ad hoc" seems, to me, to be a wonderful modality (?) to adopt.
If the absence of fundamental principles - which apply, unflinchingly, throughout any and all scenarios - is what you hold as the negative aspect of such ad hoc operation, perhaps I even agree with such an arrangement, but I merely think of such an absence as a positive (my understanding of "positive" and of "negative," as they are both commonly used, is especially unstable).
Maybe my reasoning here comes down to this: when the adhering to fundamental principles obstructs/prevents the realization of the intentions behind the principles, should one take liberties to stray from such adherence? In this case, if the (fundamental) pretext for such considerations is a concern for the one (oppressed), when does switching our concern to the other (oppressor) actually work in favor (overcoming unnecessary suffering) of our concern for the one?
The idea of "ad hoc" is that one is just making any shit up, as needed as a discussion continues, in order to "support a point"/be right.
Okay, I think I understand I bit more now. If there isn't any kind of guiding principle at all, then any and all points drawn are that much more arbitrary, dictated by one's whim.
But can ad hoc movement be effectively subordinated to a more constant (yet fluid?) underlying principle? If we take "incremental overcoming of unnecessary suffering" (Anyone know, by the way, where that originated? I heard it from Mckenzie Wark, and various other iterations in other places.) - if we take "incremental overcoming of unnecessary suffering" as the guiding principle, one that is constant in essence but flexible in expression (?), and express it with ad hoc technique (oppressor/oppressed sympathy dialectics), could that not be effective? Ad hoc as a means/micro to achieve "overcoming of unnecessary suffering" as an end/macro? At this point, would "ad hoc" merely semantically not be the best term?
Official Bollocks.
What counts as an inch was established long before we even knew the speed of light.
Sure, but what I quoted is the official standard now.
Certainly. That's why it's humorous. I'll check my rule against it for accuracy.
Haha--right. So it probably ended up not being that great of an example for "assuming a standard," since in practice, that one's actually a bit of a mess (which is why that was dropped when I brought up the data re variances in rulers).