I think there is also the inverse move where one abdicates power in order to put oneself into a position where one is powerless to adhere to a righteous yet onerous moral standard. A lot of this is going on in the meat/factory farming example, in my opinion. Consumers literally don't want to see how the sausage is made, so society has agreed to rules for meat production that make it very hard for consumers to find out about the lives of the animals they are consuming.
An example from my own life: I am a vegan but have married an omnivore. Our child eats meat. Purely morally speaking, I have doubts about that. At the same time, I am concerned whether a vegan diet would be healthy for a toddler and if so it would be very onerous to make sure he meets all his nutritional needs. So it is very convenient for me that for my wife raising our child vegan is out of the question anyway and I am not fighting it. At the same time, I feel less guilty about it because "it is not up to me". So my wife is doing the "sinning" for me but not due to me having power over her but because I have abdicated some control over my moral life when I entered this institution called "marriage" with her.
Against Adorno, we are engineering wrongness to live righteous lives within it.
Regarding the emergence of a world of compassion, out of the world of exploitation -- Noah Smith has written about this a number of times (first one I could find is this: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-rabbits -- but I think he has stated the principle more clearly in some other column). It also rather resembles Scott Alexander's "Goddess of Everything Else". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbwp4PbWYzw
The "Shabbos goy" (nowadays sometimes used as an insult) is a gentile who will carry out tasks for Jews on Shabbat which they are forbidden to do themselves.
Hah, I used to do this all the time when I watched the front desk at my university's Hillel center Saturday mornings, and someone needed a special favor. The irony is that I'm Jewish, but not at all religious (and named Chris to boot), so the Orthodox minyan had no qualms about asking me to stand in as the tenth guy during certain key prayers when they were one person short. I used to joke that I was the "Shabbos Joy."
On the Christian left: I think it's worth pointing out that Jesus was, specifically and inextricably, a Jew, who spent his life interpreting and expounding the Jewish religion with unsurpassed energy. The "Old Testament Justice" that Christian fundamentalists speak of is in fact the Jewish law that the left owes a lot to (and does the new right seem particularly enamored with Judaism? That's not a difficult question).
Honestly, I find the writing of the Jewish left (which is often explicitly religious writing) a lot more compelling than the writing of the Christian left right now. So it seems clear to me that the Christian left should start with Judaism (though the matter is of course a bit complicated, and Christian attempts to acknowledge their origins in Judaism can sometimes have the unfortunate effect of erasing or offending Jews - we need a dialogue between the Christian left and the Jewish left).
One question I had is how you define growth. Doesn't the capitalist define 'growth' as increase in production and consumption? What you want that for is to ensure a growth in profits, increase of wealth, etc.
It's not clear a non-capitalist economy has any need for this kind of growth. It would need to meet demand. Demand could increase if there were more people. But there'd be no incentive to produce a substantial number of the things that are produced whose purpose is merely to provide a profit. Also you would not overproduce. Why would you bother?
You could open up new sectors of the economy but this would be to meet needs or do something substantial. The whole purpose of that in capitalism is entirely different--it is for some to make a profit. If you remove the profit motive, everything would change.
Would growth matter much in economies where there is no demand for profits? Would it be 'growth'? You could have 100x the works of art and 100x the level of caregiving. You could improve human capacities substantially, improve lives, meet more needs, etc. But none of this would be growth strictly speaking. Economic growth has a very specific purpose, I thought?
It's hard to see how anyone who wants a different system would not have to bite the bullet on this. We're not going to be making people desire to have super shiny hair or make them worry about ridges on their nails so that new products can remove these things. There's is a huge amount of production and consumption that is purely for profit and would simply seem foolish if there were not a profit motive. Should people spend their lives in a factory to make nail-ridge remover cream? This would defeat the purpose of getting rid of capitalism, wouldn't it? Making people labor endlessly for something they don't care about and nobody really needs just seems pointless and cruel.
So there is simply no way a non-capitalist economy would have the same rate of production a capitalist economy would have. There would not be the same level of growth because a) so much of the economy involves people laboring for profit and for no other purpose and we would want to free people from that. It can be horrible and grueling. Why should people do it if nothing that they are doing is truly important?
So do you think this is not a good thing to just say 'oh to hell with 200,000 kinds of nail polish.' Or do you think somehow the non-capitalist economy would keep pace with our economies that are producing such a vast quantity of goods for purposes of consumption desires that the anticapitalist things are just created to fuel growth?
I think you're way too optimistic with respect to the evil people who believe that strength and domination basically equal goodness. Sure, the only people who explicitly claim as much are a small group of weirdos online, but lower-abstraction / implicit versions of this claim are pretty commonplace in everyday society.
Consider the use of 'loser' as an insult. That's kind of a weird thing for a person with an egalitarian outlook to use, right? It essentially bundles together weakness and disadvantage with a total lack of worth as a person. There's a whole suite of (usually gendered) language that outlines power as praiseworthy and weakness as gross and detestable.
This being the case, I'm pretty unsurprised how often the online weirdos who say this stuff out loud are the kind of people we'd tend to call losers: they got to experience this treatment firsthand, and so they're just repeating the moral norms that they grew up surrounded by.
Regarding evil, the distinction I usually make is that bad guys hurt people for money* and evil guys hurt people for fun; that if you lack a conscience** violence and deception can be fun. It relates to your spiral of wrongdoing in that tastes can be cultivated. The two traits do complement each other; violent career criminals offer illuminating case studies.
* Reasons broader than money, but money's a good proxy.
** Combat sports, for example, offer a way to morally practice violence: rules, referees, volunteers roughly your skill level et cetera. The things you do in practice would - rightly! - be felonious if you did them off the mat to, ah, non-practitioners, you know?
"That I have so little to say about [Gaza] reflects, if anything, the clarity of the horror." As it turns out at least 5 of your following sections are relevant to the Gaza situation and offer potentially useful concepts for making sense of some of it, so perhaps you're being a little hard on yourself. I can't think of a much better example of paramorality than politicians and leaders advocating and supporting wars they themselves don't have to fight in. But putting that aside, you're right about the basic dilemma of finding anything new to say even as it feels more important to say something. Sometimes the best we can do is keep paying attention, and reminding others to keeping paying attention.
You challenged us to give an example of creativity that cannot be seen as the recombination of existing elements. How about dreaming? Sure, it may recombine images and memories and knowledge we already have, but we don't really know how that works; it's a total mystery. Do you think we can get AI to dream properly?
Two comments about AI qualia. First, depending on your definitions there are lots of complex, self-reflective agents out there that are clearly not conscious. The United States, HVAC systems, etc. More importantly, it’s not a good argument to say we think A is the answer, but A is not actionable, so we’re going to pretend B is the answer. That says nothing about the truth of B. At the end of the day it’s hard to get around self-awareness as the only mark of value.
On paramorality:
I think there is also the inverse move where one abdicates power in order to put oneself into a position where one is powerless to adhere to a righteous yet onerous moral standard. A lot of this is going on in the meat/factory farming example, in my opinion. Consumers literally don't want to see how the sausage is made, so society has agreed to rules for meat production that make it very hard for consumers to find out about the lives of the animals they are consuming.
An example from my own life: I am a vegan but have married an omnivore. Our child eats meat. Purely morally speaking, I have doubts about that. At the same time, I am concerned whether a vegan diet would be healthy for a toddler and if so it would be very onerous to make sure he meets all his nutritional needs. So it is very convenient for me that for my wife raising our child vegan is out of the question anyway and I am not fighting it. At the same time, I feel less guilty about it because "it is not up to me". So my wife is doing the "sinning" for me but not due to me having power over her but because I have abdicated some control over my moral life when I entered this institution called "marriage" with her.
Against Adorno, we are engineering wrongness to live righteous lives within it.
Regarding the emergence of a world of compassion, out of the world of exploitation -- Noah Smith has written about this a number of times (first one I could find is this: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-rabbits -- but I think he has stated the principle more clearly in some other column). It also rather resembles Scott Alexander's "Goddess of Everything Else". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbwp4PbWYzw
Another example of paramorality:
The "Shabbos goy" (nowadays sometimes used as an insult) is a gentile who will carry out tasks for Jews on Shabbat which they are forbidden to do themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbos_goy
Hah, I used to do this all the time when I watched the front desk at my university's Hillel center Saturday mornings, and someone needed a special favor. The irony is that I'm Jewish, but not at all religious (and named Chris to boot), so the Orthodox minyan had no qualms about asking me to stand in as the tenth guy during certain key prayers when they were one person short. I used to joke that I was the "Shabbos Joy."
On the Christian left: I think it's worth pointing out that Jesus was, specifically and inextricably, a Jew, who spent his life interpreting and expounding the Jewish religion with unsurpassed energy. The "Old Testament Justice" that Christian fundamentalists speak of is in fact the Jewish law that the left owes a lot to (and does the new right seem particularly enamored with Judaism? That's not a difficult question).
Honestly, I find the writing of the Jewish left (which is often explicitly religious writing) a lot more compelling than the writing of the Christian left right now. So it seems clear to me that the Christian left should start with Judaism (though the matter is of course a bit complicated, and Christian attempts to acknowledge their origins in Judaism can sometimes have the unfortunate effect of erasing or offending Jews - we need a dialogue between the Christian left and the Jewish left).
I really like this paradox of ethics idea.
Interesting ideas about degrowth.
One question I had is how you define growth. Doesn't the capitalist define 'growth' as increase in production and consumption? What you want that for is to ensure a growth in profits, increase of wealth, etc.
It's not clear a non-capitalist economy has any need for this kind of growth. It would need to meet demand. Demand could increase if there were more people. But there'd be no incentive to produce a substantial number of the things that are produced whose purpose is merely to provide a profit. Also you would not overproduce. Why would you bother?
You could open up new sectors of the economy but this would be to meet needs or do something substantial. The whole purpose of that in capitalism is entirely different--it is for some to make a profit. If you remove the profit motive, everything would change.
Would growth matter much in economies where there is no demand for profits? Would it be 'growth'? You could have 100x the works of art and 100x the level of caregiving. You could improve human capacities substantially, improve lives, meet more needs, etc. But none of this would be growth strictly speaking. Economic growth has a very specific purpose, I thought?
It's hard to see how anyone who wants a different system would not have to bite the bullet on this. We're not going to be making people desire to have super shiny hair or make them worry about ridges on their nails so that new products can remove these things. There's is a huge amount of production and consumption that is purely for profit and would simply seem foolish if there were not a profit motive. Should people spend their lives in a factory to make nail-ridge remover cream? This would defeat the purpose of getting rid of capitalism, wouldn't it? Making people labor endlessly for something they don't care about and nobody really needs just seems pointless and cruel.
So there is simply no way a non-capitalist economy would have the same rate of production a capitalist economy would have. There would not be the same level of growth because a) so much of the economy involves people laboring for profit and for no other purpose and we would want to free people from that. It can be horrible and grueling. Why should people do it if nothing that they are doing is truly important?
So do you think this is not a good thing to just say 'oh to hell with 200,000 kinds of nail polish.' Or do you think somehow the non-capitalist economy would keep pace with our economies that are producing such a vast quantity of goods for purposes of consumption desires that the anticapitalist things are just created to fuel growth?
By growth I approximately mean GDP
I think you're way too optimistic with respect to the evil people who believe that strength and domination basically equal goodness. Sure, the only people who explicitly claim as much are a small group of weirdos online, but lower-abstraction / implicit versions of this claim are pretty commonplace in everyday society.
Consider the use of 'loser' as an insult. That's kind of a weird thing for a person with an egalitarian outlook to use, right? It essentially bundles together weakness and disadvantage with a total lack of worth as a person. There's a whole suite of (usually gendered) language that outlines power as praiseworthy and weakness as gross and detestable.
This being the case, I'm pretty unsurprised how often the online weirdos who say this stuff out loud are the kind of people we'd tend to call losers: they got to experience this treatment firsthand, and so they're just repeating the moral norms that they grew up surrounded by.
Regarding evil, the distinction I usually make is that bad guys hurt people for money* and evil guys hurt people for fun; that if you lack a conscience** violence and deception can be fun. It relates to your spiral of wrongdoing in that tastes can be cultivated. The two traits do complement each other; violent career criminals offer illuminating case studies.
* Reasons broader than money, but money's a good proxy.
** Combat sports, for example, offer a way to morally practice violence: rules, referees, volunteers roughly your skill level et cetera. The things you do in practice would - rightly! - be felonious if you did them off the mat to, ah, non-practitioners, you know?
"That I have so little to say about [Gaza] reflects, if anything, the clarity of the horror." As it turns out at least 5 of your following sections are relevant to the Gaza situation and offer potentially useful concepts for making sense of some of it, so perhaps you're being a little hard on yourself. I can't think of a much better example of paramorality than politicians and leaders advocating and supporting wars they themselves don't have to fight in. But putting that aside, you're right about the basic dilemma of finding anything new to say even as it feels more important to say something. Sometimes the best we can do is keep paying attention, and reminding others to keeping paying attention.
You challenged us to give an example of creativity that cannot be seen as the recombination of existing elements. How about dreaming? Sure, it may recombine images and memories and knowledge we already have, but we don't really know how that works; it's a total mystery. Do you think we can get AI to dream properly?
Two comments about AI qualia. First, depending on your definitions there are lots of complex, self-reflective agents out there that are clearly not conscious. The United States, HVAC systems, etc. More importantly, it’s not a good argument to say we think A is the answer, but A is not actionable, so we’re going to pretend B is the answer. That says nothing about the truth of B. At the end of the day it’s hard to get around self-awareness as the only mark of value.