Thanks to BackYardFoundry who teased this out in a comments-discussion. Playing Haidt-ian ethics.
Ethical intuitions are like senses...some folks are strong in some, weak in others...others vice versa.
My best analogy (analogy alert...attempting to prime an intuition pump, for lack of a better way to explain it) goes something like this:
I have extraordinarily sensitive taste buds...and an almost non-functional sense of smell. Due to allergies to every air-born substance known to man, I was pretty much nasally blocked for my entire youth. Assuming that I don't have a sense of smell is probably a better proxy for my state of affairs than assuming my sense of smell is like yours.
Similarly...my sense of taste is far off in a different direction. I consider the sweet Reislings (you know, the ones you would say are a kind of candy) to have too much of the alcohol bitterness in them to be drinkable. Grapefruit (from the 80s) was all bitterness...nothing else. Sometimes edible with substantial sprinklings of sugar. Coffee: If it gets far from 1 part coffee, 1 part cream, 1 part sweetener...It's so foul I can't even look at it.
Also...my sense of touch is unusually strong...I'm roughly autistic with respect to stuff/dirt/goo on my hands... and that extends to food textures as well.
As such...my experience of food is massively different than most folks...with normal senses of smell, taste, and touch.
My assertion is that ethics-es are similar.
I effectively don't have a ingroup outgroup sense. (Haidt doesn't refer to it as this...but his 3 conservative moral foundations can be classified together as ingroup/outgroup senses). I have a massive/hyper-developed sense of liberty/freedom. And a pretty strong ethical sense of harm/care.
From my point of view...the immigration restrictions hurt lots of people a lot to help a few people a little. From the two ethical senses that I have available...this is atrocious behavior. Shit on a stick.
From other folks points of view...with much weaker senses of liberty/freedom, somewhat milder senses of harm/care, and functioning senses of ingroup/outgroup suggest that the think I see as shit on a stick smells fabulous, enticing, and they want it everywhere, because the look and feel aren't what's important.
...........
And so we're back to one of the Aretaevian core theses:
What we're disputing is effectively never what is true. It's always what is important.
And on first approximation, that's not arguable.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
10 comments:
That's... really kind of weird. I would assess my senses in almost exactly the same manner. (Except that I kind of like "bitter")
I'm interested to know if the distinction between ingroup and outgroup is somehow linked to the sense of smell.
1. smell is linked to disgust,
2. disgust is linked to the purity ethics foundation,
3. the purity foundation is linked to the ingroup-outgroup thing.
People without strong senses of smell are more inclined towards hard libertarianism?
More like Orphan - I like my half instant coffee/half cream mixture. I shifted away from needing sweet when I adopted a ketogenic diet. Used to have milk/tea/brown sugar...confection.
Now I'm going to have to thoroughly read the comments. I now agree that tribal-liking should be emphasized.
Thing is, most intrinsically enjoy being part of a tribe. It's not instrumental. Adaptively, yes, but consciously, no.
Immigration directly harms this tribal-hedonic system, by diluting or disintegrating the tribe.
As such, it is equivalent to vandalism.
But this raises a question - who owns the tribe? Who can, allegorically speaking, authorize a mural?
"I effectively don't have a ingroup outgroup sense."
Based on your black bus anecdote, you have no sense of how faces portray emotion. You were undoubtedly mean-mugged constantly. I don't see how you could've missed it. It's what I meant by viewing people as 'walking furniture.' Faces don't carry meaning and people are just obstacles to avoid. Or maybe you did notice the hostility bt couldn't piece it together. Maybe you are lib-tarded, because you seem intent on letting people know just how extraordinarily lib your views are. I keep thinking of Stephen Colbert shtick about not seeing race. You're apparently a real-life example of a really funny and implausible joke.
"From my point of view...the immigration restrictions hurt lots of people a lot to help a few people a little. From the two ethical senses that I have available...this is atrocious behavior. Shit on a stick."
Based on meta studies produced in an environment where it's impossible to avoid being blackballed for mentioning basic facts. What happened to Larry Summers, again?
BYF,
There are at least 3 distinct positions. Progressive positions vs. Libertarian positions vs. Conservative positions.
The progressives are anti-realist on race. I oppose.
The libertarians are anti-state force. I support that.
You're getting us confused with your Summers comment.
"You're getting us confused with your Summers comment."
My point about Summers is that the establishment punishes deviation from the SSSM, which you already know because you're a race-realist. You cannot be confident about any study involving Hispanics when you know that there's a party line and that the party line is the one that you want to believe is true. It's obvious that you're really emotional about this topic.
Maybe you were reading some maximally engrossing books on the bus of black race-hate, which is why you didn't catch the lynchy vibe. Must have been some serious shit.
1) Someone will control the state. There is pretty much zero historical evidence of stateless societies being a realistic equilibrium.
2) That person(s) will want to use force.
3) They will be able to use force because they are the state (duh, state = force).
The libertarian position on the state, as best I can understand its realistic hope for success, is for most citizens to have an aversion to state force and for the various stakeholders in the state to offset each other and result in paralysis.
However, MC is in contradiction to this. I see no evidence that MC increases libertarianism or results in libertarian outcomes. If we took polls of third world groups or looked at the politics they practice they are very anti-libertarian. Is the libertarian program for success to let in a bunch of people that hate its ideals?
1. History is vast, and complex, and uncertain.
1.5. If you still want to appeal to history, apparently both Ireland and Iceland ran stateless societies for longer than the age of the USA. If that were true...it looks like it may well be a better equilibrium than limited government.
2. Your model doesn't work on systems like the early USA. Switzerland.
3. I'm not smart enough this evening to handle your abbreviations. MC=Mind Control?
Some tiny island countries ran something kinduv like what I'm talking about for unique moments in history = there is historical evidence. Not buying that.
I like Singapore and Switzerland too. I also recognize that they are really unique examples that don't apply to the vast majority of the world. Most of the world is big countries (there is a reason for this). Big countries don't function like small little countries on islands or in the mountains with unique histories. You can't hold them up for a model for everyone else, they are by definition exceptions. This depresses me too, but I get over it rather then harp on it.
Singapore and Switzerland are, btw, heavy into the government. They only seem free compared to here. Compared to anarcho-ideal they are probably farther away then half the pre-industrial systems.
MC = multiculturalism.
If the ethical system you're running isn't tribal, what is it? Utilitarian? If you could take an action that would net 1 happiness point, but with 10,000 coming out of you, your family, and others close to you and them, and 10,001 going to some people in Siberia who will never be anything more than points in the moral calculus to you, your family, etc., would you take it?
Re: sensory input: I don't have much of a sense of smell, and as far as taste goes, I drink my coffee black and very strong, love things like salmiak, and don't like adding sugar to things. My result on the Haidt test (last time I took it, which was a while ago) put me as placing highest emphasis on loyalty and almost none on purity.
Post a Comment