On Hardnosed Inc, if I had that experience I would suspect that they arranged it like that deliberately to trick the whingers into revealing themselves.
Your description of making moral decisions based on degrees rather than hard rules calls to mind the arguments in the '90s between advocates of rules-based analysis of phonology and grammar (particularly MIT-based linguists like Chomsky and Pinker), and the "Optimality Theory" of my own alma mater Johns Hopkins (Smolensky and Burzio), which, somewhat drawing on research about how neural networks actually worked, suggested that you might have several different "rules" applying to a situation. The output of the system is whatever best satisfies the system as a whole, given the various constraints. You can think of this as having different neural circuits that are applying excitation or inhibition to possible outputs.
So in the case of a moral optimality theory, the existence of many similar examples of something is inhibiting the conclusion that a new example of that thing is bad and should be censored.
If a game can be played by tons of people who show no signs of increased predilection to actually commit crimes that are "modeled" on the game, again, that should inhibit the idea that it needs to be censored.
Etc.
We can allow for a moral system that has multiple inputs, some of which might be in tension with one another.
Yes, it sounds like Broad and Ross are articulating something very similar. "No one master principle explains why the particular things we believe are wrong/right are in fact wrong/right. Instead, there exist a number of basic, defeasible moral principles resisting reduction to some more fundamental principle. These principles are relied upon in making decisions about what we ought to do, though there is no sense in which we deduce what we ought to do from principles. No one non-instrumental good/evil explains why the particular things we think are good/evil are in fact good/evil. Instead, there exist a number of non-instrumental goods which cannot be reduced to some more fundamental non-instrumental good."
This allows you to have disagreements among well-intentioned people about the right action, because they may be assigning different _weights_ to the inhibitory / excitatory value of different pieces of evidence relative to different principles of what is good/right.
Whether or not this is, in some transcendent sense, the best theory of morality, I think it is much closer to _what we actually do_, than mathematical utilitarianism.
Yes, I think in practice people do weigh up competing moral considerations rather than make a utlity calculation. I think the more sophisticated utilitarian position is rule consequentialism, which agrees that we don't make calculations and in fact it would have bad consequences if we did try to make calculations each time, and rather it's best to follow these rules of thumb or good life practice, the general social following of which creates good consequences — and so it can converge with many of the insights of both deontology and virtue ethics.
One interesting implication of this idea is that neural-net based AIs at least _might_ end up being morally intelligible, rather than having "shoggoth with a mask" alien motivations, because at least in principle this kind of excitation / inhibition circuitry can be replicated in that medium.
I agree with you that trump's tariffs don't "disprove marxism", but in a very different sense.
I think marxism, as you define it, like the definitions of leadership above it, is "not even wrong": it makes no substantive claims about history or economy, and as such can explain any situation.
Each of your defenses decreases the predictive power of the theory. How can a theory that posits that the nature of conflict is the oppression of labor by a capital class reconcile the working class voting for Trump? More broadly, how can it wrap itself around the fact that the working class votes for a "capitalist" class against a social / cultural elite?
As you are using it, Marxism is not a theory that explains what is, but a theory of what should be, and should be discussed / debated as such.
I think your perspective on leadership is missing something. Leadership isn’t directing people to do stuff, but rather motivating people to do stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise want to do in service of a larger organizational mission.
You correctly identify that individual brilliance can shine without any sort of leadership and direction, but translating individual brilliance (or even individual competence) to a task that no one person can do alone is also a skill.
It is also a skill that is distributed throughout an organization—the General needs to be able to lead, but so do the lieutenants. If you want to win a war, you need to be able to win the individual engagements. Someone needs to take that hill, and no one wants to get shot. Leadership gets them there.
Is it the world’s most valuable skill? No. Is it a skill you really need if you want your huge company, military, or project to succeed? Yes.
> To sum: Maybe I’m just making an apologia for my own narrow mindedness here, but it seems to me that sometimes something just exceeds a certain threshold, and you’ve got to say “Nuh-uh” even if you can’t give clear criteria. Agree or disagree?
I've been mulling over this one since you posted it the other day and my tentative conclusions:
1. We have pre-theoretical moral intuitions shaped by our understanding and upbringing. When a moral rule would seem to clash with one of these, that gives us pause to consider whether our intutions are misplaced or whether the rule needs refining. It can go either way.
2. Your example of the steam game is a good one insofar as it poses the same dilemma for me as well: rape simulators seem more morally abhorrent than the killing that is routine in videogames, but why is this, and is it sufficient to call for such things to be disallowed on the platform and not call for murderous games to be withdrawn?
3. I think either a full libertine approach, or a code of standards approach is permissible for Steam. It's up to them what kind of platform they want.
4. I want to say that because there are circumstances in "real life" where killing is justified, while rape is never justified, simulating killing is not corrosive to the spirit in the same way as simulated rape would be. Is that just post hoc justification? I'm not sure. I think liking these kinds of games says something much worse about their character.
Regarding leadership, it makes more sense if you decouple the act and effects of leadership from any moral good. Leadership is a broader concept than just command, but I'll use command as a specific example. The commander can exercise power only so long as their subordinates believe in it. Command, therefore, is extension of the will by subordinates.
The essence of leadership is extending your will through other people - not just subordinates [command]; it's getting people to align and cooperate towards your desired ends. This is value-neutral, it can be morally good or bad, and there are many arch-villains of history who were exceptional leaders. The reason why leadership is done to death by corporate propagandists is that the cliche is true, you can't get big things done without it. You cite a list of exceptional people who were not leaders of people. Sophie Scholl is a hero, but lone heroes do not unite the weak to resist the strong. That takes a leader.
look at the Zionist trope forever lauding the High Morality of IDF soldiers... it now appears that such morality not merely condones but lauds targeting pre adolecent youth, even infants, to eliminate future "terrorist" attacks on a self proclaimed Chosen People...a bunch of circlear gobubbly gook for self intoxicated champaign victory toasts over indiscriminant slaughter; compared to which personal failings at ethical treatment of fellow animals wanes for demographic significance however dispicable as imterpersonal behavior - an example which points to nuanced conclusions warped by perspectives conscious or merely absorbed from ambient culture and parochial geneology... humans remain mostly cognitive cripples absorbing morality indiscriminant Sponge suck... needing SpongeSuckers Anonymous 12 step rehabilitation support..🫠🤔🤭
also Mr Bear, my subsistance income geriatric denoument leaves me penniless for subscription support, but still a semi astute occasional viewer, thanks
The whinger problem seems like a pretty classic Newcomb-like setup, with the added complication that two-boxing has a pro-social externality that you don't capture.
As such, the (be a whinger, whinge) outcome is 15% you get hired, plus whatever prosocial benefit there is for possibly reforming the process (assuming you can't reapply later)
While the (don't be a whinger, don't whinge) outcome is 60% get hired.
So it comes down to whether you want to sacrifice 45% chance of hiring for the prosocial result.
I think people's intuitions are being infected by Newcombe's problem. In particular, I think a lot of people would say "yes, whinge" if it weren't for prior exposure.
I'd put that to the prosocial instinct to make the situation better for future people. As long as your whinging to the friend is more than minimally effective, it's easy for the prosocial benefit to later applicants (assuming that anti-whinging discrimination is bad) to outweigh the personal cost.
As such, it makes sense for naive intuitions to be in favor of whinging.
> While this isn’t strictly part of the basic Marxist theory, any theory of history focused on objective conditions will acknowledge that the fight for global power isn’t always reducible to the interests of national capital but follows its own partially independent logic.
It's not part of the caricature of vulgar Marxism, but then again neither is The 18th Brumaire.
On Hardnosed Inc, if I had that experience I would suspect that they arranged it like that deliberately to trick the whingers into revealing themselves.
Your description of making moral decisions based on degrees rather than hard rules calls to mind the arguments in the '90s between advocates of rules-based analysis of phonology and grammar (particularly MIT-based linguists like Chomsky and Pinker), and the "Optimality Theory" of my own alma mater Johns Hopkins (Smolensky and Burzio), which, somewhat drawing on research about how neural networks actually worked, suggested that you might have several different "rules" applying to a situation. The output of the system is whatever best satisfies the system as a whole, given the various constraints. You can think of this as having different neural circuits that are applying excitation or inhibition to possible outputs.
So in the case of a moral optimality theory, the existence of many similar examples of something is inhibiting the conclusion that a new example of that thing is bad and should be censored.
If a game can be played by tons of people who show no signs of increased predilection to actually commit crimes that are "modeled" on the game, again, that should inhibit the idea that it needs to be censored.
Etc.
We can allow for a moral system that has multiple inputs, some of which might be in tension with one another.
What you're describing is essentially the idea of prima facie obligations. (More on this here if you're interested: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/william-david-ross/#RosDisMorFraRigGoo)
Yes, it sounds like Broad and Ross are articulating something very similar. "No one master principle explains why the particular things we believe are wrong/right are in fact wrong/right. Instead, there exist a number of basic, defeasible moral principles resisting reduction to some more fundamental principle. These principles are relied upon in making decisions about what we ought to do, though there is no sense in which we deduce what we ought to do from principles. No one non-instrumental good/evil explains why the particular things we think are good/evil are in fact good/evil. Instead, there exist a number of non-instrumental goods which cannot be reduced to some more fundamental non-instrumental good."
This allows you to have disagreements among well-intentioned people about the right action, because they may be assigning different _weights_ to the inhibitory / excitatory value of different pieces of evidence relative to different principles of what is good/right.
Whether or not this is, in some transcendent sense, the best theory of morality, I think it is much closer to _what we actually do_, than mathematical utilitarianism.
Yes, I think in practice people do weigh up competing moral considerations rather than make a utlity calculation. I think the more sophisticated utilitarian position is rule consequentialism, which agrees that we don't make calculations and in fact it would have bad consequences if we did try to make calculations each time, and rather it's best to follow these rules of thumb or good life practice, the general social following of which creates good consequences — and so it can converge with many of the insights of both deontology and virtue ethics.
One interesting implication of this idea is that neural-net based AIs at least _might_ end up being morally intelligible, rather than having "shoggoth with a mask" alien motivations, because at least in principle this kind of excitation / inhibition circuitry can be replicated in that medium.
I agree with you that trump's tariffs don't "disprove marxism", but in a very different sense.
I think marxism, as you define it, like the definitions of leadership above it, is "not even wrong": it makes no substantive claims about history or economy, and as such can explain any situation.
Each of your defenses decreases the predictive power of the theory. How can a theory that posits that the nature of conflict is the oppression of labor by a capital class reconcile the working class voting for Trump? More broadly, how can it wrap itself around the fact that the working class votes for a "capitalist" class against a social / cultural elite?
As you are using it, Marxism is not a theory that explains what is, but a theory of what should be, and should be discussed / debated as such.
I think your perspective on leadership is missing something. Leadership isn’t directing people to do stuff, but rather motivating people to do stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise want to do in service of a larger organizational mission.
You correctly identify that individual brilliance can shine without any sort of leadership and direction, but translating individual brilliance (or even individual competence) to a task that no one person can do alone is also a skill.
It is also a skill that is distributed throughout an organization—the General needs to be able to lead, but so do the lieutenants. If you want to win a war, you need to be able to win the individual engagements. Someone needs to take that hill, and no one wants to get shot. Leadership gets them there.
Is it the world’s most valuable skill? No. Is it a skill you really need if you want your huge company, military, or project to succeed? Yes.
> To sum: Maybe I’m just making an apologia for my own narrow mindedness here, but it seems to me that sometimes something just exceeds a certain threshold, and you’ve got to say “Nuh-uh” even if you can’t give clear criteria. Agree or disagree?
I've been mulling over this one since you posted it the other day and my tentative conclusions:
1. We have pre-theoretical moral intuitions shaped by our understanding and upbringing. When a moral rule would seem to clash with one of these, that gives us pause to consider whether our intutions are misplaced or whether the rule needs refining. It can go either way.
2. Your example of the steam game is a good one insofar as it poses the same dilemma for me as well: rape simulators seem more morally abhorrent than the killing that is routine in videogames, but why is this, and is it sufficient to call for such things to be disallowed on the platform and not call for murderous games to be withdrawn?
3. I think either a full libertine approach, or a code of standards approach is permissible for Steam. It's up to them what kind of platform they want.
4. I want to say that because there are circumstances in "real life" where killing is justified, while rape is never justified, simulating killing is not corrosive to the spirit in the same way as simulated rape would be. Is that just post hoc justification? I'm not sure. I think liking these kinds of games says something much worse about their character.
Regarding leadership, it makes more sense if you decouple the act and effects of leadership from any moral good. Leadership is a broader concept than just command, but I'll use command as a specific example. The commander can exercise power only so long as their subordinates believe in it. Command, therefore, is extension of the will by subordinates.
The essence of leadership is extending your will through other people - not just subordinates [command]; it's getting people to align and cooperate towards your desired ends. This is value-neutral, it can be morally good or bad, and there are many arch-villains of history who were exceptional leaders. The reason why leadership is done to death by corporate propagandists is that the cliche is true, you can't get big things done without it. You cite a list of exceptional people who were not leaders of people. Sophie Scholl is a hero, but lone heroes do not unite the weak to resist the strong. That takes a leader.
More on command and control: https://locon.substack.com/p/command-and-control
look at the Zionist trope forever lauding the High Morality of IDF soldiers... it now appears that such morality not merely condones but lauds targeting pre adolecent youth, even infants, to eliminate future "terrorist" attacks on a self proclaimed Chosen People...a bunch of circlear gobubbly gook for self intoxicated champaign victory toasts over indiscriminant slaughter; compared to which personal failings at ethical treatment of fellow animals wanes for demographic significance however dispicable as imterpersonal behavior - an example which points to nuanced conclusions warped by perspectives conscious or merely absorbed from ambient culture and parochial geneology... humans remain mostly cognitive cripples absorbing morality indiscriminant Sponge suck... needing SpongeSuckers Anonymous 12 step rehabilitation support..🫠🤔🤭
also Mr Bear, my subsistance income geriatric denoument leaves me penniless for subscription support, but still a semi astute occasional viewer, thanks
The whinger problem seems like a pretty classic Newcomb-like setup, with the added complication that two-boxing has a pro-social externality that you don't capture.
As such, the (be a whinger, whinge) outcome is 15% you get hired, plus whatever prosocial benefit there is for possibly reforming the process (assuming you can't reapply later)
While the (don't be a whinger, don't whinge) outcome is 60% get hired.
So it comes down to whether you want to sacrifice 45% chance of hiring for the prosocial result.
I think people's intuitions are being infected by Newcombe's problem. In particular, I think a lot of people would say "yes, whinge" if it weren't for prior exposure.
I'd put that to the prosocial instinct to make the situation better for future people. As long as your whinging to the friend is more than minimally effective, it's easy for the prosocial benefit to later applicants (assuming that anti-whinging discrimination is bad) to outweigh the personal cost.
As such, it makes sense for naive intuitions to be in favor of whinging.
> While this isn’t strictly part of the basic Marxist theory, any theory of history focused on objective conditions will acknowledge that the fight for global power isn’t always reducible to the interests of national capital but follows its own partially independent logic.
It's not part of the caricature of vulgar Marxism, but then again neither is The 18th Brumaire.