Would it be better or worse if someone’s takeaway from this post was that no one should reason about what makes a course of action or policy better or worse? That they should just copy other people?
What if copying other people meant burning suspected witches alive? What if some people who burn witches aren’t really sure about the correctness of what they’re doing, they care about that kind of thing, and yet they profess great certainty that their acts are in accordance with correct values? Should I not try to play to the part of them which is uncertain in order to prevent a cruel outcome, against their initial value statement?
Would you want me to try to give you values which aren’t upstream from genocide, if you were born in a place which gave you values that were upstream from genocide?
The topics which are being invoked are way more fraught than is being implied. It’s not obvious that you’re not sneaking in a takeaway for a general topic by using this one question in a case where the takeaway doesn’t generalize across the space of questions in that topic. On good faith, I don’t assume you’re trying to do that, but it’s good to check; lampshade the possibility.
As a historical fact, did people actually burn witches because they were copying someone else’s behavior, or because they had some verbal theory for why that is the right thing to do?
These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive; talking is a thing that people do. The correct answer is that it’s the latter case (verbal theory) as an instance of the former category of cases (cases where people copy the behavior of others, such as fashions of thinking and talking).
I’m also not very sure that removing the ability to negotiate theories of objectivity or fairness, which are naturally controversial subjects, would make people more peaceful on average given it as a limiting condition on the deveopment of culture starting with the first appearance of any human communication; I expect it would make world histories more violent on average to remove such an ability.
Would it be better or worse if someone’s takeaway from this post was that no one should reason about what makes a course of action or policy better or worse? That they should just copy other people?
What if copying other people meant burning suspected witches alive? What if some people who burn witches aren’t really sure about the correctness of what they’re doing, they care about that kind of thing, and yet they profess great certainty that their acts are in accordance with correct values? Should I not try to play to the part of them which is uncertain in order to prevent a cruel outcome, against their initial value statement?
Would you want me to try to give you values which aren’t upstream from genocide, if you were born in a place which gave you values that were upstream from genocide?
The topics which are being invoked are way more fraught than is being implied. It’s not obvious that you’re not sneaking in a takeaway for a general topic by using this one question in a case where the takeaway doesn’t generalize across the space of questions in that topic. On good faith, I don’t assume you’re trying to do that, but it’s good to check; lampshade the possibility.
As a historical fact, did people actually burn witches because they were copying someone else’s behavior, or because they had some verbal theory for why that is the right thing to do?
These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive; talking is a thing that people do. The correct answer is that it’s the latter case (verbal theory) as an instance of the former category of cases (cases where people copy the behavior of others, such as fashions of thinking and talking).
I’m also not very sure that removing the ability to negotiate theories of objectivity or fairness, which are naturally controversial subjects, would make people more peaceful on average given it as a limiting condition on the deveopment of culture starting with the first appearance of any human communication; I expect it would make world histories more violent on average to remove such an ability.