These stories kind of remind me of a Lynch movie, where I’m pretty sure a major part of the point is to present puzzles for the audience, with almost none of them resolved in the text, so that people can try to make progress on the fun of solving puzzles.
As a genre, it would be like how Inception had that spinning coin at the end, except, for this genre, the movies or stories would be filled with the bare minimum of definite facts to set up the most possible spinning coins, each of which is a sort of a puzzle.
I kind of love this genre!
(A pretty good example, not by Lynch, with way less magical realism, is Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, made in 2011 by Nicolas Winding Refn.)
I worry about spoiling your story.
This is a risk I’m willing to take, because maybe your story was aiming… weirdly low? My model of LW involves the audience being pretty savvy.
With apologies to the art, it seemed potentially useful to maybe explain some objective things:
(A) lying is not subjective (and in the subjective-based-on-objective-complexity case, at least one party is confused on at least some level), and
(B) stealing physical property is not subjective (and in the complexity-caused-subjectivity case, that’s what title insurers are paid to handle and mitigate).
I feel like I’m in danger here of saying something approximately as tedious as:
Just to explaaaaain some aktually objective things: eleven is a prime number, and in Euclidean geometry parallel lines never intersect. And aaalso things like computers canhandle the process of really truuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuly finding(!) and verifying quite large prime numbers, in practice, at quite low cost.
However...
Another thing that is objective is: “(0) Someone being an official public health official, with formal court and cop backed powers of medical regulation, and then (1) failing to deliver actual public health, (2) while not being able to explain how viruses are physically existing things that properly-worn physical masks can filter out of the air before someone breathes the virus particles and gets infected by the physically existing virus (3) and then gets sick and transmits it to someone else (4) as predicted by the germ theory of disease”.
It makes sense to me, though, that if the median voter was uncertain about the objective evil of lying or stealing, then maybe the median voter would also be unable to elect someone able to generate public health via the competent operation of a public health system. Like maybe the concept of such an outcome is just inconceivable, to enough people, that it is also inconceivable to the median voter?
Maybe?
When I was hunting around for a reasonably canonical theoretical explanation of some of the simpler answers here, I ran across an empirical result that surprised me somewhat.
Are moral truths objective or are they subjective? In other words, are moral truths (like “don’t cheat” and “don’t steal”) objectively true and thus true independently of what our society says? Or are they subjective and thus relative to what our society says?
I always poll my students and take a vote before diving into the arguments. Out of around 160 current students from last Fall in my Intro to Philosophy classes, about 95% of students answered the same way: they are subjective. And this is not atypical. The results for just about every poll I have taken over the last decade or so about this question have been similar.
One might be tempted to think that this is a generational phenomenon: perhaps it’s a millennial thing! But I’ve found it to be much more widespread. During the summers, I often teach college philosophy courses to intellectually advanced junior high and high school students (to qualify for this program, students must test into the top 3% in the nation…these students are incredibly bright). About 95% of them answer the same way: morality is subjective. And I am currently teaching an Ethics course at a prison here in Southern California. I always designate the first week of the prison class to discuss the question of whether morality is objective or subjective. Once again, about 95% of inmates agree: morality is subjective. [Sauce. Emphases in original.]
With a “chance of being just kind of egregiously confused by abstractions involving right and wrong” among 95% of random college students and random prison inmates, it becomes a little harder to figure out your story.
It made me think that maybe you’re better calibrated than I am about normal elites, and made it slightly plausible (given apparent base rates) that… maybe you agree with them?
If you agree with them… then this wouldn’t actually be a puzzle story, in the puzzle story genre...
(If you had asked me about the thing people didn’t understand, with the unacceptability of the existing public health system, it might be like… the idea of delegation or the related idea of deputation or how these relate to duty?
These topics actually are tricky in practice. I can easily imagine that 95% of the population has never studied or seen or participated in a culture of honor, and we only have a residue of the high points of the 1800s in very very old books, but…
But maybe it is NOT a lack of understanding of honor or duty or deputation? Maybe the breakdown involves a lack of something even deeper? And maybe you noticed this before me?)
Maybe starting in 1914 or 1971 or some other date… maybe college students have begun, gradually then suddenly, to just literally not manage to get to past the bottom few rungs of Kohlberg’s moral stages?
Kohlberg himself avoided talking about anything higher than the official top of his scheme because he could barely find that many people who were at the top of it, empirically.
Are you actually aiming too low with this story? Is this really a juicy puzzle, even for a LW reader?
Heck… are you in unreflective (or reflective?!) agreement with Phil-and-the-current-95% here?
These stories kind of remind me of a Lynch movie, where I’m pretty sure a major part of the point is to present puzzles for the audience, with almost none of them resolved in the text, so that people can try to make progress on the fun of solving puzzles.
As a genre, it would be like how Inception had that spinning coin at the end, except, for this genre, the movies or stories would be filled with the bare minimum of definite facts to set up the most possible spinning coins, each of which is a sort of a puzzle.
I kind of love this genre!
(A pretty good example, not by Lynch, with way less magical realism, is Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, made in 2011 by Nicolas Winding Refn.)
I worry about spoiling your story.
This is a risk I’m willing to take, because maybe your story was aiming… weirdly low? My model of LW involves the audience being pretty savvy.
With apologies to the art, it seemed potentially useful to maybe explain some objective things:
(A) lying is not subjective (and in the subjective-based-on-objective-complexity case, at least one party is confused on at least some level), and
(B) stealing physical property is not subjective (and in the complexity-caused-subjectivity case, that’s what title insurers are paid to handle and mitigate).
I feel like I’m in danger here of saying something approximately as tedious as:
However...
Another thing that is objective is: “(0) Someone being an official public health official, with formal court and cop backed powers of medical regulation, and then (1) failing to deliver actual public health, (2) while not being able to explain how viruses are physically existing things that properly-worn physical masks can filter out of the air before someone breathes the virus particles and gets infected by the physically existing virus (3) and then gets sick and transmits it to someone else (4) as predicted by the germ theory of disease”.
It makes sense to me, though, that if the median voter was uncertain about the objective evil of lying or stealing, then maybe the median voter would also be unable to elect someone able to generate public health via the competent operation of a public health system. Like maybe the concept of such an outcome is just inconceivable, to enough people, that it is also inconceivable to the median voter?
Maybe?
When I was hunting around for a reasonably canonical theoretical explanation of some of the simpler answers here, I ran across an empirical result that surprised me somewhat.
With a “chance of being just kind of egregiously confused by abstractions involving right and wrong” among 95% of random college students and random prison inmates, it becomes a little harder to figure out your story.
It made me think that maybe you’re better calibrated than I am about normal elites, and made it slightly plausible (given apparent base rates) that… maybe you agree with them?
If you agree with them… then this wouldn’t actually be a puzzle story, in the puzzle story genre...
(If you had asked me about the thing people didn’t understand, with the unacceptability of the existing public health system, it might be like… the idea of delegation or the related idea of deputation or how these relate to duty?
These topics actually are tricky in practice. I can easily imagine that 95% of the population has never studied or seen or participated in a culture of honor, and we only have a residue of the high points of the 1800s in very very old books, but…
But maybe it is NOT a lack of understanding of honor or duty or deputation? Maybe the breakdown involves a lack of something even deeper? And maybe you noticed this before me?)
Maybe starting in 1914 or 1971 or some other date… maybe college students have begun, gradually then suddenly, to just literally not manage to get to past the bottom few rungs of Kohlberg’s moral stages?
Kohlberg himself avoided talking about anything higher than the official top of his scheme because he could barely find that many people who were at the top of it, empirically.
Are you actually aiming too low with this story? Is this really a juicy puzzle, even for a LW reader?
Heck… are you in unreflective (or reflective?!) agreement with Phil-and-the-current-95% here?
All this said, you’d be in good company if you refuse to answer.