What does this mean? I understand the intended affect, but not the denotation.
In such cases, the topic is often the existence of moral arguments against a position. “What? He did S? How could he?” is raw material for constructing moral arguments that allow you to have less of S done, by affecting either the person in question, or others with influence over that person. But in this particular case, it’s not apparent to me what kind of moral argument is to be constructed (apart from using empathy of others to yourself, and thus trying to enforce your decision through actions of others by strongly feeling the need for your decision to be enforced).
I actually thought this was a very useful transition between the two sentences it abuts because it summarizes and repeats the ideas in them in another way. Is it not clear that the underlying sub-text of my sentence is more like “The way the world currently works, we’re entitled to no material support and no ones a priori support for our causes.”
Since we’re not “entitled to [some]one [...] based on [...] the intrinsic goodness of our cause”, it explains why you shouldn’t disrespect them (or at least not “net disrespect them”) over their failure to join. This is less of a moral argument and more just describing how the world currently works. We can’t expect more support from people for help saving the world in proportion to the obvious (to us) value that each cause actually contains. I suppose it might be different if the world had more rationalists.
Perhaps another way to think of this is that we shouldn’t disrespect a person twice who isn’t a rationalist and not saving the world. If they’re not on board with the idea of following chains of logic to their conclusions and then accepting them, it’s a bit like beating a blind dog for walking into the wrong room of your house. They might figure things out eventually by some random cue, but it’s cruel and ignores their disability in a thoughtless sort of way. Better to wait for them to regain their eyesight before expecting them to really understand… and hopefully at that point, you haven’t been so heavy-handed with them in the past that they will run away in fear of you.
What does this mean? I understand the intended affect, but not the denotation.
In such cases, the topic is often the existence of moral arguments against a position. “What? He did S? How could he?” is raw material for constructing moral arguments that allow you to have less of S done, by affecting either the person in question, or others with influence over that person. But in this particular case, it’s not apparent to me what kind of moral argument is to be constructed (apart from using empathy of others to yourself, and thus trying to enforce your decision through actions of others by strongly feeling the need for your decision to be enforced).
I actually thought this was a very useful transition between the two sentences it abuts because it summarizes and repeats the ideas in them in another way. Is it not clear that the underlying sub-text of my sentence is more like “The way the world currently works, we’re entitled to no material support and no ones a priori support for our causes.”
Since we’re not “entitled to [some]one [...] based on [...] the intrinsic goodness of our cause”, it explains why you shouldn’t disrespect them (or at least not “net disrespect them”) over their failure to join. This is less of a moral argument and more just describing how the world currently works. We can’t expect more support from people for help saving the world in proportion to the obvious (to us) value that each cause actually contains. I suppose it might be different if the world had more rationalists.
Perhaps another way to think of this is that we shouldn’t disrespect a person twice who isn’t a rationalist and not saving the world. If they’re not on board with the idea of following chains of logic to their conclusions and then accepting them, it’s a bit like beating a blind dog for walking into the wrong room of your house. They might figure things out eventually by some random cue, but it’s cruel and ignores their disability in a thoughtless sort of way. Better to wait for them to regain their eyesight before expecting them to really understand… and hopefully at that point, you haven’t been so heavy-handed with them in the past that they will run away in fear of you.