A good read and even more relevant today than when it was written in 2013. I like that Wright does not suggest the world's moral ills could be solved if only everyone would convert to his chosen school of utilitarianism.
The argument eventually concludes that the answer is bias neutralization through metacognition aka self awareness. However, Wright acknowledges the extreme time, effort, and desire necessary to overcome one's biases.
Although I can't force others to be less biased, I can work on becoming less biased myself.
Yes. "Non-assistance à personne en danger" is a crime in France punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Personally I'm absolutely fine with people being punished for not helping save someones life.
However this must only be if doing so does not pose any risk to the helper. See [0] for a list of countries with similar laws.
> Maybe we’re approaching a point where we can actually harness this knowledge, make radical progress in how we treat one another, and become a species worthy of the title Homo sapiens.
These moral arguments always imply that we can pronounce the way things ought to be and that it's just a matter of finding a way to make everyone conform to the "correct" vision for humanity.
But there's a danger in homogeneous crops, flocks, and societies. Having everyone pulling in the same direction will surely have unintended consequences that may well do more harm than good when the final tally is taken.
> One question you confront if you’re arguing for a single planetary moral philosophy: Which moral philosophy should we use?
The Golden Rule is practically universal. I'm surprised it doesn't get a mention. I'm partial to Hillel's version: "What is hateful to you, do not do to others—this is the whole of Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study."
> It’s true that Greene is a utilitarian—believing (to oversimplify a bit) that what’s moral is what maximizes overall human happiness.
I prefer this formulation: what's moral is what minimizes overall human suffering, now and in the foreseeable future.
> The rift was mended by putting the boys in non-zero-sum situations—giving them a common peril, such as a disruption in the water supply, that they could best confront together.
It's tragic that Covid19 hasn't united us. How did we end up fighting over wearing masks? (This question is rhetorical.)
> Self-doubt can be the first step to moral improvement.
I mean yeah, but: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” — Bertrand Russell
This entire essay is premised on people wanting to get better. On having some degree of curiosity and willingness for self-examination. I don't see a lot of that in the world.
I suspect what the author is getting attempting to do is to get us to examine the criteria that determines suffering itself.
Some aspects are universal--hunger, pain, disease--but once those needs are met, emotional suffering becomes manifest to take it's place. And emotional suffering is subjective; I suffer because I lack the time to explore my true passions, my friend suffers because they are unable to form lasting relationships. Which of us is suffering more?
It's doubly tricky because the things that minimize physical suffering often aren't the best way to minimize emotional suffering. Eating fast food every day ensures you won't starve, and staying indoors ensures you'll never get sick, but you certainly won't be happy with that lifestyle.
I do agree that many people lack introspective tendencies that would lead them to becoming better people. I think that's partly because it's difficult to be introspective without context. If you don't expose yourself to points of view counter to your own, you will never know what views to self-examine. People tend to gravitate to echo chambers, it seems.
That's a good point about emotional suffering and I hadn't really thought of it. I was definitely thinking of the basic needs in Maslow's hierarchy.
Echo chambers are self-sorting into tribes, so I think the essay addresses that.
There's another point which is that self-examination is a form of critical thinking and people looking to maintain power in any given society often don't want a whole lot of self-examination and critical thought... that sort of thing could lead to revolution or is at least de-stabalizing. The essay mentions the gay marriage issue, but a few years later and in America we're now arguing about, for example, teaching a more wholistic view of America's history.
The flaw with the golden rule is that what is hateful varies by person, and what people like also varies.
A better rule is to treat people like they want to be treated. But this rule also has issues with people wanting something that isn't healthy for them.
We'd hate to be treated ourselves as we treat our kids, what helps someone could handicap others. We all have different modes of behaviour, included how we treat pain, harshness and transparency.
Empathy would be a facet among many others for any moral system.
I would add that the Golden Rule is more on a personal (one on one) level. For that I agree it is universal. For one vs a population / a community vs an individual it may not apply.
The idea that a universal moral system is preferable to a hierarchical or individually diversified one is itself a moral opinion which draws significantly from the Christian universalist conception of human value. That doesn’t make it right or wrong, but it certainly doesn’t make it culturally universal.
The reduction of suffering is also not a universal aspiration; many thinkers believe that meaningful suffering is desirable and necessary to form an identity and find meaning in the universe.
“Only the English [philosophers] want to be happy.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Personally I remain unconvinced that this drive to make everyone everywhere look, act, and think the same way is desirable or conducive to actual diversity. It mostly just makes the world less interesting; McDonalds and the western business suit replacing centuries of local cuisines and clothing. Solutions should instead focus on how to manage various ethical and cultural values under the banner of a secularized political state. Otherwise you’ll get secession and fracturing into smaller states, which are highly undesirable from a geopolitical perspective (see: Germany and Italy prior to their unifications in the 1800s.)
I think Nietzsche was a great man and not nearly as judgmental as he conducted himself. But I also believe the classical explanation that he had a problem with his mother and that is the reason why he had such strong expectations towards himself and others.
Nazis abused his writings but he wouldn't have like them of course. His dislike for christian morals is understandable because he saw them as a form of subjugation and contrary to emancipation. I think this grew to an unfortunate amount of hatred later on. He is partially correct as are the morals of Christianity in my opinion.
Well I only invoked the quote as a response to universalism, not necessarily as a reference to Nietzsche’s ideas in general.
But sure, I don’t agree with him on everything, and while I think his diagnosis of Christianity is in many ways correct, it also is flawed in others. Of course we have to differentiate between what Nietzsche actually wrote and what the popular culture notion of his ideas is.
Otherwise, I don’t think I’d agree that his high expectations come from a Freudian read of his childhood. For the most part they are pre-Socratic Ancient Greek cultural values, especially agon, which was a sort of competition.
Weird tendency in modern internet discourse of pseudo psychoanalyzing people in order to discredit them. Instead of say engaging in the discussion, talk about their ideas, etc.
We already have separate countries to contain conflicting cultures. Isn't that enough? They all want to impose their culture on each other but are held apart by the threat of war.
Diversity with ethical commitments to zero-oppression, avoiding arbitrary enforcement of power.. we do not need uniformity, only universality. To embrace suffering as meaningful is to extend suffering beyond the natural consequences domain into projecting it for power purposes/ control.
Suffering is not necessary, only useful to oppressors. Some suffering from learning is different from that being intentionally utilized for other purposes.
Without universality of commitment to reduction in suffering, there's "managed" suffering of some kind.
It's still possible to use decision theory and an utilitarian framework (and/or bounded rationality) to unify whatever two random people's morals happen to be. Sure, in theory people with infinite time on their hands will come to agreement about everything - Aumann's agreement theorem. But even if they don't, it doesn't matter, as they are still going to maximite their utility as best as they every point in time can, with all the complexities involved due to our neurobiology and path-dependence on personal experiences.
Now, that said, ignoring pathological cases (both abstract/hypothetical and real clinical - eg someone just on the verge of suicide) rational agents have instrumental goals, such as survival, gathering resources to be able to survive, keeping warm, but not too warm, etc. And this is where "the fun begins", or the complications. Because there are many possible strategies, just putting them on a predatory-cooperatory spectrum gives a sort of handle on them. (Obviously there are situations where otherwise even the most cooperative-minded person can end up selfish, and vice versa.)
And abstracting all this basically gets you Rawls' Theory of Justice, which says, that since you don't know what situations you can end up in (eg. you don't know if you get cancer in the next year or not), you should think through many situations and determine what would you prefer in them, and then try to find moral norms that are the most satisfiying in the most cases. (Eg. the most fair rules.)
Of course this is extremely handwavy, and naturally - as things in philosophy are rarely - the matter is not settled, but I think there there is a convincing argument to say that sentient minds can find a common moral ground, if they want to.
This is more of a side remark, not a direct reply to your comment.
I'm a utilitarian for general policy making, especially when statistical data is at play, but I cannot understand utilitarians who believe that all of morality should be utilitarian. Even elaborate versions are flawed, even e.g. Harsanyi's utilitarianism where you are supposed not to know who you are in society (similar to Rawl's "veil of ignorance" but formally worked out in his framework).
It's way too easy to find counter-examples that do not match our moral preconception and it takes a huge leap of faith to just ignore these. For example, it is easy to find real-world and fictitious scenarios in which utilitarianism would tell us to torture or murder someone, yet existing laws and traded morality strongly go against these recommendations.
Another huge problem is that utilitarians rarely take into account human agency, but we do that all the time in our lives. There is a gigantic difference between risking your own life and telling someone else to risk his or her life. Most utilitarians don't even try to model these differences, and I personally suspect that there could be an impossibility theorem hiding in versions of utilitarianism that attempt to take agency formally into account. (Not that I have investigated this in detail yet, it's just a hunch.)
The biggest flaw of utilitarianism is my view that it oversimplifies values. It is often based on the assumption of value monism but in reality we base our judgments on multiple value categories that are often in conflict with each other.
Related to that, all utilitarians I know of suggest compensatory decision methods but there are many good reasons why we should sometimes use noncompensatory outranking methods. The idea is crazy that you can murder someone as long as that allows you to give n people $1 each, yet it is implied by any compensatory value aggregation method.
Utilitarianism and its hard problem of not killing your grandmother if she isn't contributing anymore.
> I cannot understand utilitarians who believe that all of morality should be utilitarian
Nothing to understand in my opinion, they just haven't thought it through. Same thing can be applied to rationalists and romanticists. Doesn't apply to everyone of course.
But intrinsic to utilitarianism is always the question of who the recipient for this utility should be. And it quickly disintegrates before that question in my opinion.
> Utilitarianism and its hard problem of not killing your grandmother if she isn't contributing anymore.
Doesn't seem that hard. When I'm old and feeble I'll be totally relying on social systems to protect me (respect for property rights, policing, etc). Ergo, I should be working as hard as possible now to make the system robust such that people can't hurt the elderly. If they aren't safe, I will eventually be wiped out.
If I'm in a position where I can kill my mother to benefit myself, the rational lifetime-optimum response is to improve the system of policing and investigation so I couldn't possibly get away with it. This will inconvenience me now but secure my comfort in the future.
> I prefer this formulation: what's moral is what minimizes overall human suffering, now and in the foreseeable future.
Isn't that easier to find loopholes we wouldn't like, such as exterminating all humans to prevent any future suffering? Or generally doing all sorts of killing of people who suffer.
I think this is a bit too extreme but it's not difficult to imagine a world where everyone is taking anti depressants and pain killers on a regular basis.
Can you recommend any sources (selfishly I'll say preferably in a european language) for relatively mainstream chinese viewpoints?
One might hope HN would provide a non-siloed venue including (one would guess, self-selecting for relatively pro-western) chinese geeks, but as far as I've seen, those who openly identify as such are discouraged.
This sounds crazy, but /r/sino on reddit is pretty much as close as you'll get to mainstream Chinese political thought in English. There's a very good chance many of the people there are legitimate shills for the government, but I mean, those are the state-sponsored and permitted opinions that they're presenting. People going against the grain either don't talk or get silenced.
From an American perspective, the stuff said there is absolutely bizarre and contradictory to virtually every talking point you'll hear from everybody else, but it aligns very closely with what people I know who live in China/still have strong ties to China say. Expect lots of cherry picked data and extreme reaching just to prove a point. Though to be frank, that's politics everywhere.
If you're frequently caught up in American/European politics, a few minutes of reading discussions there might frustrate you, but it'll also make you think because the viewpoints are so contrary to what most Westerners regard as the norm.
I sure hope actual Chinese netizens aren't as polarized as the guys on /r/sino. We need the east and the west to come together, and not merely to contend on who can be the biggest bully.
At the moment, I'm not sure if /r/sino is any more serious than /r/aeiou. We truly live in a Poe's Law world.
(And I leave it to the argies and the austrians to fight over who makes the best milanesa/schnitzel. But it does sound like it may be what I was looking for, in terms of non-hanzi-expressed general opinions which, however outlandish they may sound on HN, would be unremarkable on 新浪微博.)
I would not recommend /r/sino if you're looking for good discussions. It's an echo chamber. Most of the guys there are blindly pro-China, blindly anti-American. For better discussions and analysis, check my recommendations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24035638
I mentioned /r/Sino because it's what you'll typically find on the Chinese internet. It is an echo chamber.
Try scrolling through weibo for an active discussion saying "Maybe Taiwan can be its own country" or "Maybe China's policy of banning all foreign discussion platforms isn't good." You might have a one off comment saying something like that, but the moment multiple people talk about it, it is guaranteed to be deleted in the best case. If the discussion gets too big, worse things will happen. Oftentimes there'll be a discussion about something offending China by simply existing, and the comments are just increasingly outlandish suggestions of how everyone needs to retaliate.
/r/sino is just a mirror of the Chinese internet experience, in English. It's like reading comments on a mainstream TV news site, but anyone who dares call out the content as BS gets their comments instantly wiped.
Mainstream chinese views are probably going to be tricky as China is rather dominated by it's dictatorial leader who I think is still a fan of Mao. The new yorker had quite a good article on him https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/born-red
The Chinese not under the CCP dictatorship in places like Taiwan, Singapore or the US mostly seem hard working democratic and easy going.
Everything you read, by anyone, whether it's from a Chinese or a western source, is propaganda in one way or another.
But maybe by reading Chinese sources, and seeing how different they are, will make us think more critically, and make us more immune to the propaganda we are fed at home.
Try Tom Fowdy, Carl Zha, and Jerry Grey (@Jerry_grey2002) on Twitter; Daniel Dumbrill, Nathan Rich, and China Teacher Brand on Youtube.
All of these lean more towards pro-China, but they're nowhere near as crazy and blindly pro-China as the /r/sino guys, and they analyze situations pretty well. All of these are open for debate, whereas on /r/sino you get banned if you're not showing absolutely loyalty (speaking from experience).
Jerry has an excellent blog too. The funny thing is, he never intended to talk about politics, but all the bad news on China since COVID-19 frustrated him so much that he began writing. https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002
If you wanna discuss things, feel free to seek me out.
You're mistaking the tools of the conflict for its cause. The conflict arose because the US finally realized China is a threat (as China knew the US was all along). Which one plays more unfairly is just a tool in propaganda efforts of each side to draw people and countries to its cause.
Which is not to say there's no moral difference between the two, just that it's mostly unrelated to the cause of the conflict.
In other words, you won't convince the US to allow themselves to become more vulnerable to China, by pointing out their sins in South America. Similar holds for China.
> “They fight not because they are fundamentally selfish but because they have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be.”
Agree. I think much of the conflict in the world today comes from the fact that people on the left end of the political spectrum value empathy, while people on the right value loyalty. It's difficult to find a common morality when your hierarchy of values is misaligned.
But loyalty to whom? To your group or tribe of course. The group as a whole can be highly immoral raping and killing other groups. So loyalty does not mean morality, even though as you suggest it may be the case that "right values loyalty".
Left values empathy? Surely yes, but I would rather say the left values equality of all human beings. Empathy follows from understanding that we are all the same, and should therefore have equality in our dealings with the society.
Loyalty is selfishness. You help those who have helped you in the past you don't care about those who have not helped you in the past. Loyalty is mob-mentality
Rather than expecting people to standardise beliefs, perhaps it would be easier to identify a set of practices that make it easier for people with different "moralities" to coexist?
For instance, if my morality is individualism, and your morality is collectivism, we can't coexist without one side being forced by the other to compromise their morality.
True, it's cutting off hydra heads to replace one big problem (should we all be individualist or all be collectivist?) with many many small ones (is this particular problem better addressed with individualistic solutions or collectivistic solutions?) but I'd say expecting that one big problem to be solved would be inhuman.
[1] this hypothetical is not very. As far as I can see, none of Eastasia, Eurasia, nor even Oceania, hold to a pure individualism or pure collectivism. (Even north korea, while still apparently very collectivist, looks more individualist in fashion and cuisine than in prior years.)
If either side is forced to compromise, they simply feel that the system is immoral, and they seek to change it.
You can see this, for instance, in American politics. There is no agreement to compromise in general. When compromises happen, they are temporary tactical maneuvers. Afterwards, both sides will continue to fight for what they believe to be moral.
(This example is a bit outdated, but just imagine American politics in 1980. I'm not sure both sides today believe in moral principles.)
The idea of a meta system where you judge each case individually is not a compromise between individualism and collectivism, it's a new morality that is neither one. Basically, it's pragmatism.
Pragmatism tends not to work in the long run, because there isn't any good way to judge each individual case without reference to more general principles. The need for more general principles is why you have moral systems (other than pragmatism) in the first place.
Excellent point about pragmatism. (although I suspect the long run in which it fails to work[1] is the same long run in which we are all dead.)
American politics I find makes a poor example, because the first-past-the-post system conflates majorities with mandates, discouraging compromise, so it results in a perpetual political Cupid Shuffle. On the other hand, the executive committee of my government has representatives of far-right (nativist populist) and far-left (socialist) parties, as well as the various centrist parties[2], and we expect them to make compromises which all sides can accept. (Indeed, part of the job of the excomm members is to defend government decisions to their own parties.)
"One person one vote" is a practice that allows people to seek to change the system in a way that is more conducive to coexistence than "One less person one less vote".
My guess is that the portion of a population who judge cases by referring to pure moral principles tend to get outvoted by the portion of a population whose decision making is more syncretic. In any case, I don't see populations as being bimodally split between pure individualists and pure collectivists, so I would expect that adherents of both, in large enough societies, would find the system immoral: the individualist because the system uses units of coordination which are too large, and the collectivist because the system uses units of coordination which are too small.
[1] pragmatism can judge cases by the measure of "how is that working out for you?" Would it be controversial to say that a pragmatic society, faced with either taking an individualistic approach to infectious disease control and a collectivistic approach to ethanol production, or the opposite choices, would not be able to decide if the outcomes of their decisions were favourable or unfavourable?
[2] and that's just the political balance. Recently it's been pretty well gender and language balanced as well.
> For instance, if my morality is individualism, and your morality is collectivism, we can't coexist without one side being forced by the other to compromise their morality.
Individualism and Collectivism aren't moral frameworks. You could have both an individualist and a collectivist both be deontologists, utilitarians, or some other framework.
> 'Individualism and Collectivism aren't moral frameworks'.
Of course they are. Nozick begins Anarchy, State and Utopia with the pronouncement that individual rights are absolute. Rawls begins A Theory of Justice by claiming that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. Their conflicting visions of political life are intimately related to the value the place, respectively, on the value of the individual and the value of the collective.
The triumvirate deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics is a useful framework, especially pedagogically, as a parsimonious way of teaching ethics. But actual ways in which humans have thought about ethical and political life is far more complex, varied and interesting. If you tried to reduce Hegel, early Javanese culture, or third-wave feminism to 'deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics', you would get no where. The vast majority of people have not thought in those terms, and so are misunderstood when read through those terms.
This is the problem with hypotheticals, they are never an accurate representation of human psychology just like a ball ignoring air resistance. The two problems are not the same, the human brain KNOWS that pushing a large man onto tracks is not guaranteed to save the people on the trolley, even if a researcher tells them it will. The subconscious recognition of that uncertainty will affect the result. Flipping a switch is a guaranteed outcome, one which cannot be swayed by subconscious thought.
In addition, one could also throw themselves on to the track in the second problem, and if you decide to push the large man on to the track you will also have to weigh the guilt of knowing you may have been able to stop it by sacrificing yourself.
This is just one example, but it shows how such research is flawed. The human brain isn't designed to think in terms of guaranteed outcomes, and a researcher cannot assume that two decision are equal just because they say they are.
One key feature for human success was the adaptability of behavioural patterns. Anything you find that's "hardwired" or heavily biased towards must have been pretty universally positive to neutral along the way.
In light of that it would be more surprising than not to find very much in the way of those.
67 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadThe argument eventually concludes that the answer is bias neutralization through metacognition aka self awareness. However, Wright acknowledges the extreme time, effort, and desire necessary to overcome one's biases.
Although I can't force others to be less biased, I can work on becoming less biased myself.
Individualism is directly comparable to utilitarianism.
The rational people in our society should be debating individualism vs. collectivism vs. utilitarianism (possibly vs. others).
That is in lieu of discussing the higher-level political instantiations of these things (e.g. libertarianism vs. socialism, etc.).
What political system you want depends (at least) on what moral system you favor.
I am not so sure about this...
However this must only be if doing so does not pose any risk to the helper. See [0] for a list of countries with similar laws.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue#Regulations_by_...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
People should just use common sense and do what I think is right.
These moral arguments always imply that we can pronounce the way things ought to be and that it's just a matter of finding a way to make everyone conform to the "correct" vision for humanity.
But there's a danger in homogeneous crops, flocks, and societies. Having everyone pulling in the same direction will surely have unintended consequences that may well do more harm than good when the final tally is taken.
The Golden Rule is practically universal. I'm surprised it doesn't get a mention. I'm partial to Hillel's version: "What is hateful to you, do not do to others—this is the whole of Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
> It’s true that Greene is a utilitarian—believing (to oversimplify a bit) that what’s moral is what maximizes overall human happiness.
I prefer this formulation: what's moral is what minimizes overall human suffering, now and in the foreseeable future.
> The rift was mended by putting the boys in non-zero-sum situations—giving them a common peril, such as a disruption in the water supply, that they could best confront together.
It's tragic that Covid19 hasn't united us. How did we end up fighting over wearing masks? (This question is rhetorical.)
> Self-doubt can be the first step to moral improvement.
I mean yeah, but: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” — Bertrand Russell
This entire essay is premised on people wanting to get better. On having some degree of curiosity and willingness for self-examination. I don't see a lot of that in the world.
Some aspects are universal--hunger, pain, disease--but once those needs are met, emotional suffering becomes manifest to take it's place. And emotional suffering is subjective; I suffer because I lack the time to explore my true passions, my friend suffers because they are unable to form lasting relationships. Which of us is suffering more?
It's doubly tricky because the things that minimize physical suffering often aren't the best way to minimize emotional suffering. Eating fast food every day ensures you won't starve, and staying indoors ensures you'll never get sick, but you certainly won't be happy with that lifestyle.
I do agree that many people lack introspective tendencies that would lead them to becoming better people. I think that's partly because it's difficult to be introspective without context. If you don't expose yourself to points of view counter to your own, you will never know what views to self-examine. People tend to gravitate to echo chambers, it seems.
Echo chambers are self-sorting into tribes, so I think the essay addresses that.
There's another point which is that self-examination is a form of critical thinking and people looking to maintain power in any given society often don't want a whole lot of self-examination and critical thought... that sort of thing could lead to revolution or is at least de-stabalizing. The essay mentions the gay marriage issue, but a few years later and in America we're now arguing about, for example, teaching a more wholistic view of America's history.
A better rule is to treat people like they want to be treated. But this rule also has issues with people wanting something that isn't healthy for them.
We'd hate to be treated ourselves as we treat our kids, what helps someone could handicap others. We all have different modes of behaviour, included how we treat pain, harshness and transparency.
Empathy would be a facet among many others for any moral system.
Sounds like people should treat their kids better
Which makes some people arrive at antinatalism. Suffering is too subjective to be a useful metric.
The reduction of suffering is also not a universal aspiration; many thinkers believe that meaningful suffering is desirable and necessary to form an identity and find meaning in the universe.
“Only the English [philosophers] want to be happy.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Personally I remain unconvinced that this drive to make everyone everywhere look, act, and think the same way is desirable or conducive to actual diversity. It mostly just makes the world less interesting; McDonalds and the western business suit replacing centuries of local cuisines and clothing. Solutions should instead focus on how to manage various ethical and cultural values under the banner of a secularized political state. Otherwise you’ll get secession and fracturing into smaller states, which are highly undesirable from a geopolitical perspective (see: Germany and Italy prior to their unifications in the 1800s.)
Nazis abused his writings but he wouldn't have like them of course. His dislike for christian morals is understandable because he saw them as a form of subjugation and contrary to emancipation. I think this grew to an unfortunate amount of hatred later on. He is partially correct as are the morals of Christianity in my opinion.
But sure, I don’t agree with him on everything, and while I think his diagnosis of Christianity is in many ways correct, it also is flawed in others. Of course we have to differentiate between what Nietzsche actually wrote and what the popular culture notion of his ideas is.
Otherwise, I don’t think I’d agree that his high expectations come from a Freudian read of his childhood. For the most part they are pre-Socratic Ancient Greek cultural values, especially agon, which was a sort of competition.
Suffering is not necessary, only useful to oppressors. Some suffering from learning is different from that being intentionally utilized for other purposes.
Without universality of commitment to reduction in suffering, there's "managed" suffering of some kind.
Now, that said, ignoring pathological cases (both abstract/hypothetical and real clinical - eg someone just on the verge of suicide) rational agents have instrumental goals, such as survival, gathering resources to be able to survive, keeping warm, but not too warm, etc. And this is where "the fun begins", or the complications. Because there are many possible strategies, just putting them on a predatory-cooperatory spectrum gives a sort of handle on them. (Obviously there are situations where otherwise even the most cooperative-minded person can end up selfish, and vice versa.)
And abstracting all this basically gets you Rawls' Theory of Justice, which says, that since you don't know what situations you can end up in (eg. you don't know if you get cancer in the next year or not), you should think through many situations and determine what would you prefer in them, and then try to find moral norms that are the most satisfiying in the most cases. (Eg. the most fair rules.)
Of course this is extremely handwavy, and naturally - as things in philosophy are rarely - the matter is not settled, but I think there there is a convincing argument to say that sentient minds can find a common moral ground, if they want to.
I'm a utilitarian for general policy making, especially when statistical data is at play, but I cannot understand utilitarians who believe that all of morality should be utilitarian. Even elaborate versions are flawed, even e.g. Harsanyi's utilitarianism where you are supposed not to know who you are in society (similar to Rawl's "veil of ignorance" but formally worked out in his framework).
It's way too easy to find counter-examples that do not match our moral preconception and it takes a huge leap of faith to just ignore these. For example, it is easy to find real-world and fictitious scenarios in which utilitarianism would tell us to torture or murder someone, yet existing laws and traded morality strongly go against these recommendations.
Another huge problem is that utilitarians rarely take into account human agency, but we do that all the time in our lives. There is a gigantic difference between risking your own life and telling someone else to risk his or her life. Most utilitarians don't even try to model these differences, and I personally suspect that there could be an impossibility theorem hiding in versions of utilitarianism that attempt to take agency formally into account. (Not that I have investigated this in detail yet, it's just a hunch.)
The biggest flaw of utilitarianism is my view that it oversimplifies values. It is often based on the assumption of value monism but in reality we base our judgments on multiple value categories that are often in conflict with each other.
Related to that, all utilitarians I know of suggest compensatory decision methods but there are many good reasons why we should sometimes use noncompensatory outranking methods. The idea is crazy that you can murder someone as long as that allows you to give n people $1 each, yet it is implied by any compensatory value aggregation method.
> I cannot understand utilitarians who believe that all of morality should be utilitarian
Nothing to understand in my opinion, they just haven't thought it through. Same thing can be applied to rationalists and romanticists. Doesn't apply to everyone of course.
But intrinsic to utilitarianism is always the question of who the recipient for this utility should be. And it quickly disintegrates before that question in my opinion.
Doesn't seem that hard. When I'm old and feeble I'll be totally relying on social systems to protect me (respect for property rights, policing, etc). Ergo, I should be working as hard as possible now to make the system robust such that people can't hurt the elderly. If they aren't safe, I will eventually be wiped out.
If I'm in a position where I can kill my mother to benefit myself, the rational lifetime-optimum response is to improve the system of policing and investigation so I couldn't possibly get away with it. This will inconvenience me now but secure my comfort in the future.
Isn't that easier to find loopholes we wouldn't like, such as exterminating all humans to prevent any future suffering? Or generally doing all sorts of killing of people who suffer.
Both sides believed the other cheated bullied and unfairly gained from themselves...
One might hope HN would provide a non-siloed venue including (one would guess, self-selecting for relatively pro-western) chinese geeks, but as far as I've seen, those who openly identify as such are discouraged.
From an American perspective, the stuff said there is absolutely bizarre and contradictory to virtually every talking point you'll hear from everybody else, but it aligns very closely with what people I know who live in China/still have strong ties to China say. Expect lots of cherry picked data and extreme reaching just to prove a point. Though to be frank, that's politics everywhere.
If you're frequently caught up in American/European politics, a few minutes of reading discussions there might frustrate you, but it'll also make you think because the viewpoints are so contrary to what most Westerners regard as the norm.
And based off what I see on the actual Chinese net in Chinese, /r/sino stays completely in line with the common consensus.
(And I leave it to the argies and the austrians to fight over who makes the best milanesa/schnitzel. But it does sound like it may be what I was looking for, in terms of non-hanzi-expressed general opinions which, however outlandish they may sound on HN, would be unremarkable on 新浪微博.)
Try scrolling through weibo for an active discussion saying "Maybe Taiwan can be its own country" or "Maybe China's policy of banning all foreign discussion platforms isn't good." You might have a one off comment saying something like that, but the moment multiple people talk about it, it is guaranteed to be deleted in the best case. If the discussion gets too big, worse things will happen. Oftentimes there'll be a discussion about something offending China by simply existing, and the comments are just increasingly outlandish suggestions of how everyone needs to retaliate.
/r/sino is just a mirror of the Chinese internet experience, in English. It's like reading comments on a mainstream TV news site, but anyone who dares call out the content as BS gets their comments instantly wiped.
The Chinese not under the CCP dictatorship in places like Taiwan, Singapore or the US mostly seem hard working democratic and easy going.
But maybe by reading Chinese sources, and seeing how different they are, will make us think more critically, and make us more immune to the propaganda we are fed at home.
All of these lean more towards pro-China, but they're nowhere near as crazy and blindly pro-China as the /r/sino guys, and they analyze situations pretty well. All of these are open for debate, whereas on /r/sino you get banned if you're not showing absolutely loyalty (speaking from experience).
Jerry has an excellent blog too. The funny thing is, he never intended to talk about politics, but all the bad news on China since COVID-19 frustrated him so much that he began writing. https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002
If you wanna discuss things, feel free to seek me out.
People constantly complained US corps extracted too much profit, and get too much recession from the government.
The government recession part is less noticeable, because Chinese people are not informed anyway.
Like TESLA's shanghai factories. It's common that people complained "I can be as successful as Elon, if I got the same support from the government"...
I'm not American. I don't hang around in the same circles as you.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Trap-Americas-economic-again...
It seems to me to be saying the US unfairly gained.
Which is not to say there's no moral difference between the two, just that it's mostly unrelated to the cause of the conflict.
In other words, you won't convince the US to allow themselves to become more vulnerable to China, by pointing out their sins in South America. Similar holds for China.
Agree. I think much of the conflict in the world today comes from the fact that people on the left end of the political spectrum value empathy, while people on the right value loyalty. It's difficult to find a common morality when your hierarchy of values is misaligned.
But loyalty to whom? To your group or tribe of course. The group as a whole can be highly immoral raping and killing other groups. So loyalty does not mean morality, even though as you suggest it may be the case that "right values loyalty".
Left values empathy? Surely yes, but I would rather say the left values equality of all human beings. Empathy follows from understanding that we are all the same, and should therefore have equality in our dealings with the society.
Loyalty is selfishness. You help those who have helped you in the past you don't care about those who have not helped you in the past. Loyalty is mob-mentality
https://xkcd.com/927/
For instance, if my morality is individualism, and your morality is collectivism, we can't coexist without one side being forced by the other to compromise their morality.
BTW, I upvoted your comment.
True, it's cutting off hydra heads to replace one big problem (should we all be individualist or all be collectivist?) with many many small ones (is this particular problem better addressed with individualistic solutions or collectivistic solutions?) but I'd say expecting that one big problem to be solved would be inhuman.
[1] this hypothetical is not very. As far as I can see, none of Eastasia, Eurasia, nor even Oceania, hold to a pure individualism or pure collectivism. (Even north korea, while still apparently very collectivist, looks more individualist in fashion and cuisine than in prior years.)
You can see this, for instance, in American politics. There is no agreement to compromise in general. When compromises happen, they are temporary tactical maneuvers. Afterwards, both sides will continue to fight for what they believe to be moral.
(This example is a bit outdated, but just imagine American politics in 1980. I'm not sure both sides today believe in moral principles.)
The idea of a meta system where you judge each case individually is not a compromise between individualism and collectivism, it's a new morality that is neither one. Basically, it's pragmatism.
Pragmatism tends not to work in the long run, because there isn't any good way to judge each individual case without reference to more general principles. The need for more general principles is why you have moral systems (other than pragmatism) in the first place.
American politics I find makes a poor example, because the first-past-the-post system conflates majorities with mandates, discouraging compromise, so it results in a perpetual political Cupid Shuffle. On the other hand, the executive committee of my government has representatives of far-right (nativist populist) and far-left (socialist) parties, as well as the various centrist parties[2], and we expect them to make compromises which all sides can accept. (Indeed, part of the job of the excomm members is to defend government decisions to their own parties.)
"One person one vote" is a practice that allows people to seek to change the system in a way that is more conducive to coexistence than "One less person one less vote".
My guess is that the portion of a population who judge cases by referring to pure moral principles tend to get outvoted by the portion of a population whose decision making is more syncretic. In any case, I don't see populations as being bimodally split between pure individualists and pure collectivists, so I would expect that adherents of both, in large enough societies, would find the system immoral: the individualist because the system uses units of coordination which are too large, and the collectivist because the system uses units of coordination which are too small.
[1] pragmatism can judge cases by the measure of "how is that working out for you?" Would it be controversial to say that a pragmatic society, faced with either taking an individualistic approach to infectious disease control and a collectivistic approach to ethanol production, or the opposite choices, would not be able to decide if the outcomes of their decisions were favourable or unfavourable?
[2] and that's just the political balance. Recently it's been pretty well gender and language balanced as well.
Individualism and Collectivism aren't moral frameworks. You could have both an individualist and a collectivist both be deontologists, utilitarians, or some other framework.
I could re-formulate my example using your terminology quite easily.
Of course they are. Nozick begins Anarchy, State and Utopia with the pronouncement that individual rights are absolute. Rawls begins A Theory of Justice by claiming that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. Their conflicting visions of political life are intimately related to the value the place, respectively, on the value of the individual and the value of the collective.
The triumvirate deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics is a useful framework, especially pedagogically, as a parsimonious way of teaching ethics. But actual ways in which humans have thought about ethical and political life is far more complex, varied and interesting. If you tried to reduce Hegel, early Javanese culture, or third-wave feminism to 'deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics', you would get no where. The vast majority of people have not thought in those terms, and so are misunderstood when read through those terms.
In addition, one could also throw themselves on to the track in the second problem, and if you decide to push the large man on to the track you will also have to weigh the guilt of knowing you may have been able to stop it by sacrificing yourself.
This is just one example, but it shows how such research is flawed. The human brain isn't designed to think in terms of guaranteed outcomes, and a researcher cannot assume that two decision are equal just because they say they are.