If P has not worked the last X times it has been attempted, it seems to me that the argument that we have a moral responsibility to P is really saying "we have a moral responsibility to fail to P!"
Given our track record, we're downright incontinent.
Well, this is why I put so much emphasis on negative rights and hedge oh-so-much about positive rights.
Which, of course, brings us back to weighing the differences between "provision of affordable health care" and "stopping a murderer from killing men, women, children"... my inclination is to say that *IF* we have a positive duty to do anything, we have a positive duty toward the latter.
But how does the world work?
Did our attempt work in Iraq? If not, why do we think it will work here? Making appeals to the right thing to do without taking into account past performance is negligence at best.
The problem with Deontology *IN PRACTICE* is that it presents functionally identically with not actually having to do anything but merely saying that somebody should.
And once one has communicated that something ought to be done, one can then shrug as if one has done one's part.
Indeed, it is not works that saves us but *FAITH*.
Meanwhile, Martha's the one in the kitchen cooking and everybody's mooning over how devout Mary is.
When we make room for a moral framework, the cost of not doing anything is weighed against the wonderful outcome of going in there like White SuperJesus and yelling "Peace Be Still" and having everybody actually listen and hold hands on their way to a drum circle.
And then people ask, pointedly, "Don't you think that people *SHOULD* hold hands and go to a drum circle? Instead of killing and raping each other?"
The drums are over there, E.C.
Hop to it. I'm sure you'll be greeted as a White SuperJesus.
Yeah, I know. You didn't mean "you". You meant me.
Country P says "X needs to be done!"
Country Q says "X needs to be done!"
Country R says "X needs to be done!"
Country S says "Can't someone else just do X?"
Obviously, we need to criticize Country S for not getting with the program rather than countries P, Q, and R for not just doing X.
(Now, in this particular case, it looks like countries P, Q, and R *ARE* doing X. More power to them. Let's hope that they learned a thing or three from watching Iraq and compare/contrast with the thing or three that they learned from watching Bosnia. I don't see why S is required to be involved.)
No, Heidegger. I was cheering on Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was arguing that we, as a society, have a responsibility to others. We have a responsibility to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and to midwife the birth of a self-determined country (rather than the tyranny that existed) because the desire for Human Freedom beats in the heart of every man and we, as a society, have a responsibility to free slaves wherever we may find them.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle domestically but not internationally, you are a liberal.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle internationally but not domestically, you are a conservative.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle domestically and internationally, you are a moderate.
If you don't want the government to meddle anywhere you are an extremist.
Weel, in the past few months, we've seen Congress's Affordable Care Act, the Union Thingamabob in Wisconsin, and "unrest" in the Middle East with an added bonus of a third country in which we are officially lobbing missiles.
Moderates ought to be pleased.
In any case, I'm someone who doesn't much like Congress's Affordable Care Act, Public Sector Unions, or using the military the way I cheered it when I was cheering on Iraq (hoo, boy)... but when I think about the positive/negative rights argument we've been having and the whole moral obligation thing and the example of someone drowning and whether we save them at little to no cost to us, it seems like killing a dictator who is killing his own people is the most obvious analogue to helping a drowning man out.
If you could kill someone who is murdering people at little to no cost to you, would you?
(Now, of course, the punchline is that we won't end up only playing a limited role. We'll have boots on the ground before long and "little to no cost to you" means about the same thing as when someone says it in a commercial.)
Yeah, but the aggregate action part wasn't in the the quotes part.
You also touched on the prison system, which might address the question of what we do with others who would decrease moral agency.
Yeah, to say we ought to abolish it! To say that we needed to abandon this particular aggregate action because it was worse than doing nothing.
The question I’ve been mulling around, and which I posed in a hypothetical if it ever makes it into the guest posts, is what we do with our police.
Want my take? Here it is.
If I do not feel that I would be justified to X, I don't see how the police could be justified to X. So if I would not be justified to kick down your door and make you stop playing poker, I don't see how the police can be justified to do that.
This also works when I swap out "the government" for "the police". "The army" works too.
If we had a guarantee that no one would die (completely false of course) in military intervention in Libya, would we still feel on the fence about it?
What if we knew that it would end up exactly like Iraq? We'd be there for a decade, people would hate us, and we'd lose soldiers to IEDs like clockwork. Would we still be on the fence about it?
I don't know... it seems obvious to me that there are matters of taste and matters of morality and the biggest problems come when one is mistaken for the other. Co-incidentally, it seems like the lion's share of such mistakes are one way... that is, a matter of taste is mistaken for a matter of morality (though the other way has some doozies!).
More than that, there are many notable attempts to rectify these matters of morality (we have a responsibility, after all) that have resulted in *HUGE* piles of bodies that are bigger than the ones created by the original problem in the first place. (See, for example, Iraq's Liberation, the War on Drugs, Applied Communism, and so on.)
When there are questions or blurry things going on, it seems to me like we'd be better off not barging in and making things better through application of force.
It doesn't always end up as nice and clean and neat as the Civil War did.
I suppose a better comparison might be to pre-natal chakra activation. If I were someone who did not believe in chakras, it does not necessarily follow that I would be uninterested in prenatal chakra activation.
That's one of those things when one hears about it, one wants to learn more even if one is skeptical (even if one does not believe at all).
Oh, I don't think I ever got to government stuff. The limitation to the essay is that it's stuck on the individual and never even moved up to the aggregate except to complain about the solutions that get provided by aggregate action. (I'd probably say that since the moral wrongs done by groups are socialized that the losses tend to be greater than if there were an individual who was responsible. See, for example: Corporations.)
Now would you say that we have an obligation to increase moral agency? Or only an obligation not to allow it to be decreased?
I'd say an obligation to not decrease it.
"But what if someone else is decreasing it! Don't we have an obligation to stop them?"
Hoo boy. I dunno.
"What about children? They can't be responsible for themselves yet."
Yeah. I know. I don't know how to deal with that either.
And here I was thinking that the personality type description from the "You're Scary Spice! Rrrrawr!" answer from the "Which Spice Girl Are You?" quiz was never going to be topped.
I don't know that all morality is based in convention either.
It would make sense to me that it would be and that even the most successful organisms has some vestigial parts... but that's deeply unsatisfying (and the downsides of being wrong include being wrong about the existence of morality).
I’m a lot more inclined to give credence to intervention requests when the locale is one we’ve screwed up in the past (particularly, selling weapons to countries that then use them on their populace).
Heh. That's much of what gives me pause.
I'll reshuffle your words to give something much closer to my take:
I’m a lot more inclined to give credence to intervention when the locale has requested it.
I’ll just say, that if “moral” is to mean anything important, it has to do with our obligations to others. If you can think of a meaningful concept outside of that, I’m all ears, but for the most part, it seems like that is the only conception not covered by other phrases and that gets at something shared by the large number of instances in which morality is invoked, which all seem to do with our social interaction with others.
Dude! I wrote an essay!
Anyway, I don't understand how "I’ll just say, that if “moral” is to mean anything important, it has to do with our obligations to others" is not an intuition.
I ask, do you agree, because I’d like to short circuit any talk of moral relativism or anti-realism from the start, but if you want to hold anyone of those positions, that’s fine, in which case people’s calls for acting morally shouldn’t just be unpersuasive to you, but completely uninteresting.
Assuming I am a moral relativist or anti-realist, what else ought I find completely uninteresting?
So I only put out the assumptions for hope that we could go beyond them, but if you have serious reservations, then by all means let’s delve in.
My reservations have to do with the intuition that the majority, if not entirety, of my moral intuitions are culturally seated. That essay I wrote was an attempt to divorce morality from historical trivia (the inclination to do so is probably one of the shackles that I'm not even noticing that I'm wearing).
What will my morality look like in 100 years?
I tell you what, 100 years ago, I think it's safe to say that I'd be considered, at the very least, unfit to be seated on a jury. Why? Because the Judge, Prosecution, and Defense know that they have obligations to society.
Not unusual at all. Reading people uncharitably is something that comes naturally to me.
I’ll ask you first if you believe moral duties exist, at all, anywhere, at anytime.
There are 15 or 16 essays in this question.
I am pretty sure that I have at least one moral intuition that goes almost entirely counter to a moral intuition that you have. This alone gives me a great deal of pause.
The world is full of examples of devout, inspired people who were absolutely certain of their moral rectitude.
So when you ask about moral duties in theory, there are a lot of questions there with answers that go from "Russell's Teapot?" to "And that's why you need to watch Reverend X on youtube."
And, what the hell, I'll point you to that essay I wrote about Vector Morality:
https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2009/07/07/the-vector-a-post-theist-moral-framework/
We may not agree 100%, but I’m fairly confident that we could zero in one some situations where intervention is justified, and others where it is morally obligatory (morally does not have to mean “in our best interest”).
Would it be uncharitable to read this as justification coming from two dudes agreeing? Probably. How about if I reframed this as "I am a fairly intelligent person who has reached consensus with another fairly intelligent person from my same culture and we've come to agreement on moral issues pertaining to our responsibility to intervene when it comes to the following folks doing the following things."
I mean, seriously, there are a lot of assumptions here.
How many things are you doing right now that not only *COULD* but *DO* qualify as something worth intervention according to a handful of cultures that have actually, for real, existed (and may even exist today)?
I am willing to bet that the answer is *NOT* "none".
The answer is *NOT* none for me.
This also gives me pause.
You continuing questions seem to be aiming at the idea that, yes, these kinds of moral calculation are difficult, but simply taking a long time to figure out and not having 100% certainty or consensus does not mean they are not real.
I don't know. I have intuitions... but I don't know how much weight I ought to give them. Certainly not as I look back with how much certainty I had when it came to our invasion of Iraq.
On “Leo Strauss, Meet John Stuart Mill”
What we need are the atheistic version of missionaries to go into all the world and bring Truth to people unfortunate enough to never have heard it.
Those poor Southerners! Those poor Buddhists! Those poor Muslims!
We need to go into their countries and convert them away from their backwards cultures and bring them to enlightenment.
What could possibly go wrong?
On “On Libya and the Moral Case Against Intervention”
"The Precogs are never wrong. But, occasionally, they do disagree."
"
My opinion of puns is very, very low.
I thought that the point of having only moral considerations would be that we're able to ignore stuff that we know, at this time.
We can just make sweeping statements about the importance of saving Mohammed's life.
"
If P has not worked the last X times it has been attempted, it seems to me that the argument that we have a moral responsibility to P is really saying "we have a moral responsibility to fail to P!"
Given our track record, we're downright incontinent.
"
Well, this is why I put so much emphasis on negative rights and hedge oh-so-much about positive rights.
Which, of course, brings us back to weighing the differences between "provision of affordable health care" and "stopping a murderer from killing men, women, children"... my inclination is to say that *IF* we have a positive duty to do anything, we have a positive duty toward the latter.
But how does the world work?
Did our attempt work in Iraq? If not, why do we think it will work here? Making appeals to the right thing to do without taking into account past performance is negligence at best.
"
The hurdle of the world working the way it works in spite of positive visualization?
That ain't a hurdle, it's a limit.
"
The problem with Deontology *IN PRACTICE* is that it presents functionally identically with not actually having to do anything but merely saying that somebody should.
And once one has communicated that something ought to be done, one can then shrug as if one has done one's part.
Indeed, it is not works that saves us but *FAITH*.
Meanwhile, Martha's the one in the kitchen cooking and everybody's mooning over how devout Mary is.
Feh.
"
When we make room for a moral framework, the cost of not doing anything is weighed against the wonderful outcome of going in there like White SuperJesus and yelling "Peace Be Still" and having everybody actually listen and hold hands on their way to a drum circle.
And then people ask, pointedly, "Don't you think that people *SHOULD* hold hands and go to a drum circle? Instead of killing and raping each other?"
The drums are over there, E.C.
Hop to it. I'm sure you'll be greeted as a White SuperJesus.
Yeah, I know. You didn't mean "you". You meant me.
"
See it as analogous to the "chickenhawk" argument then.
If you want blood and treasure poured into North Africa, pour your own.
When you, yourself, don't have to pay any price, it's easy to make an analogy to someone saving someone else's life at little to no cost.
"
Country P says "X needs to be done!"
Country Q says "X needs to be done!"
Country R says "X needs to be done!"
Country S says "Can't someone else just do X?"
Obviously, we need to criticize Country S for not getting with the program rather than countries P, Q, and R for not just doing X.
(Now, in this particular case, it looks like countries P, Q, and R *ARE* doing X. More power to them. Let's hope that they learned a thing or three from watching Iraq and compare/contrast with the thing or three that they learned from watching Bosnia. I don't see why S is required to be involved.)
"
No, Heidegger. I was cheering on Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was arguing that we, as a society, have a responsibility to others. We have a responsibility to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and to midwife the birth of a self-determined country (rather than the tyranny that existed) because the desire for Human Freedom beats in the heart of every man and we, as a society, have a responsibility to free slaves wherever we may find them.
Hoo boy.
"
That's one of the jokes I made when Dubya was president.
"Conservatives are finally agitating for a one-world government."
"
There is an old joke.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle domestically but not internationally, you are a liberal.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle internationally but not domestically, you are a conservative.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle domestically and internationally, you are a moderate.
If you don't want the government to meddle anywhere you are an extremist.
Weel, in the past few months, we've seen Congress's Affordable Care Act, the Union Thingamabob in Wisconsin, and "unrest" in the Middle East with an added bonus of a third country in which we are officially lobbing missiles.
Moderates ought to be pleased.
In any case, I'm someone who doesn't much like Congress's Affordable Care Act, Public Sector Unions, or using the military the way I cheered it when I was cheering on Iraq (hoo, boy)... but when I think about the positive/negative rights argument we've been having and the whole moral obligation thing and the example of someone drowning and whether we save them at little to no cost to us, it seems like killing a dictator who is killing his own people is the most obvious analogue to helping a drowning man out.
If you could kill someone who is murdering people at little to no cost to you, would you?
(Now, of course, the punchline is that we won't end up only playing a limited role. We'll have boots on the ground before long and "little to no cost to you" means about the same thing as when someone says it in a commercial.)
On “Toward a norm of humanitarian intervention”
My quotes part was taken from your essay.
Yeah, but the aggregate action part wasn't in the the quotes part.
You also touched on the prison system, which might address the question of what we do with others who would decrease moral agency.
Yeah, to say we ought to abolish it! To say that we needed to abandon this particular aggregate action because it was worse than doing nothing.
The question I’ve been mulling around, and which I posed in a hypothetical if it ever makes it into the guest posts, is what we do with our police.
Want my take? Here it is.
If I do not feel that I would be justified to X, I don't see how the police could be justified to X. So if I would not be justified to kick down your door and make you stop playing poker, I don't see how the police can be justified to do that.
This also works when I swap out "the government" for "the police". "The army" works too.
If we had a guarantee that no one would die (completely false of course) in military intervention in Libya, would we still feel on the fence about it?
What if we knew that it would end up exactly like Iraq? We'd be there for a decade, people would hate us, and we'd lose soldiers to IEDs like clockwork. Would we still be on the fence about it?
"
I don't know... it seems obvious to me that there are matters of taste and matters of morality and the biggest problems come when one is mistaken for the other. Co-incidentally, it seems like the lion's share of such mistakes are one way... that is, a matter of taste is mistaken for a matter of morality (though the other way has some doozies!).
More than that, there are many notable attempts to rectify these matters of morality (we have a responsibility, after all) that have resulted in *HUGE* piles of bodies that are bigger than the ones created by the original problem in the first place. (See, for example, Iraq's Liberation, the War on Drugs, Applied Communism, and so on.)
When there are questions or blurry things going on, it seems to me like we'd be better off not barging in and making things better through application of force.
It doesn't always end up as nice and clean and neat as the Civil War did.
"
Morality as analogous to health?
That's an essay.
But when I think about "golf", I am uninterested.
I suppose a better comparison might be to pre-natal chakra activation. If I were someone who did not believe in chakras, it does not necessarily follow that I would be uninterested in prenatal chakra activation.
That's one of those things when one hears about it, one wants to learn more even if one is skeptical (even if one does not believe at all).
"
Oh, I don't think I ever got to government stuff. The limitation to the essay is that it's stuck on the individual and never even moved up to the aggregate except to complain about the solutions that get provided by aggregate action. (I'd probably say that since the moral wrongs done by groups are socialized that the losses tend to be greater than if there were an individual who was responsible. See, for example: Corporations.)
Now would you say that we have an obligation to increase moral agency? Or only an obligation not to allow it to be decreased?
I'd say an obligation to not decrease it.
"But what if someone else is decreasing it! Don't we have an obligation to stop them?"
Hoo boy. I dunno.
"What about children? They can't be responsible for themselves yet."
Yeah. I know. I don't know how to deal with that either.
"
And here I was thinking that the personality type description from the "You're Scary Spice! Rrrrawr!" answer from the "Which Spice Girl Are You?" quiz was never going to be topped.
"
Take the refugees in and give them a better place to be. If they want to go back and duke it out, more power to them.
You won't find a bigger fan of open borders than me.
The problem comes when there's noplace left to run to...
But that's another essay.
"
Possible? Certainly.
Sufficient? This is where I get really, really, really nervous.
"
I don't know that all morality is based in convention either.
It would make sense to me that it would be and that even the most successful organisms has some vestigial parts... but that's deeply unsatisfying (and the downsides of being wrong include being wrong about the existence of morality).
"
It's purple. It's not very good. It's a rough draft. It kinda sucks. It's puerile, really.
"
I’m a lot more inclined to give credence to intervention requests when the locale is one we’ve screwed up in the past (particularly, selling weapons to countries that then use them on their populace).
Heh. That's much of what gives me pause.
I'll reshuffle your words to give something much closer to my take:
I’m a lot more inclined to give credence to intervention when the locale has requested it.
"
Hey, E.C. Down here.
I’ll just say, that if “moral” is to mean anything important, it has to do with our obligations to others. If you can think of a meaningful concept outside of that, I’m all ears, but for the most part, it seems like that is the only conception not covered by other phrases and that gets at something shared by the large number of instances in which morality is invoked, which all seem to do with our social interaction with others.
Dude! I wrote an essay!
Anyway, I don't understand how "I’ll just say, that if “moral” is to mean anything important, it has to do with our obligations to others" is not an intuition.
I ask, do you agree, because I’d like to short circuit any talk of moral relativism or anti-realism from the start, but if you want to hold anyone of those positions, that’s fine, in which case people’s calls for acting morally shouldn’t just be unpersuasive to you, but completely uninteresting.
Assuming I am a moral relativist or anti-realist, what else ought I find completely uninteresting?
So I only put out the assumptions for hope that we could go beyond them, but if you have serious reservations, then by all means let’s delve in.
My reservations have to do with the intuition that the majority, if not entirety, of my moral intuitions are culturally seated. That essay I wrote was an attempt to divorce morality from historical trivia (the inclination to do so is probably one of the shackles that I'm not even noticing that I'm wearing).
What will my morality look like in 100 years?
I tell you what, 100 years ago, I think it's safe to say that I'd be considered, at the very least, unfit to be seated on a jury. Why? Because the Judge, Prosecution, and Defense know that they have obligations to society.
"
Not unusual at all. Reading people uncharitably is something that comes naturally to me.
I’ll ask you first if you believe moral duties exist, at all, anywhere, at anytime.
There are 15 or 16 essays in this question.
I am pretty sure that I have at least one moral intuition that goes almost entirely counter to a moral intuition that you have. This alone gives me a great deal of pause.
The world is full of examples of devout, inspired people who were absolutely certain of their moral rectitude.
So when you ask about moral duties in theory, there are a lot of questions there with answers that go from "Russell's Teapot?" to "And that's why you need to watch Reverend X on youtube."
And, what the hell, I'll point you to that essay I wrote about Vector Morality:
https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2009/07/07/the-vector-a-post-theist-moral-framework/
We may not agree 100%, but I’m fairly confident that we could zero in one some situations where intervention is justified, and others where it is morally obligatory (morally does not have to mean “in our best interest”).
Would it be uncharitable to read this as justification coming from two dudes agreeing? Probably. How about if I reframed this as "I am a fairly intelligent person who has reached consensus with another fairly intelligent person from my same culture and we've come to agreement on moral issues pertaining to our responsibility to intervene when it comes to the following folks doing the following things."
I mean, seriously, there are a lot of assumptions here.
How many things are you doing right now that not only *COULD* but *DO* qualify as something worth intervention according to a handful of cultures that have actually, for real, existed (and may even exist today)?
I am willing to bet that the answer is *NOT* "none".
The answer is *NOT* none for me.
This also gives me pause.
You continuing questions seem to be aiming at the idea that, yes, these kinds of moral calculation are difficult, but simply taking a long time to figure out and not having 100% certainty or consensus does not mean they are not real.
I don't know. I have intuitions... but I don't know how much weight I ought to give them. Certainly not as I look back with how much certainty I had when it came to our invasion of Iraq.