No wonder people make seemingly absurdist statements like “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.”
The statement might be absurdist but it’s not itself an absurd claim (which is what I take you to be implying). It’s a claim that there exists no consumption pattern under capitalism that doesn’t involve participating in the infliction of harm on others. You can’t be a private citizen minding your own business. This means that there’s an affirmative duty to help make the system better, since supposed neutrality is actually just unremediated complicity.
This is correctly seen as a moral emergency which breaks down “normal” peacetime systems of ethics, because there is a war. But of course the focus on whether there is or isn’t ethical consumption (i.e. the binary of “blameworthy” and “blameless”) privileges the blame-oriented asymmetry that comes from the corruption of simulacra level 4 scapegoating games. Seems wrong to say people shouldn’t use the words they have to try to point to important things, even if the words are too corrupted to have adequate expressive power to just explicitly say the things.
I say seemingly absurd to point out that, to my and many other ears, the statement seems upon first encounter to be absurd. And of course, the idea that it can’t be ethical to consume anything at all in any way at all, when lack of at least some consumption is death, does seem like it’s allowed to be absurd. Of course, also: Some absurd things are true!
I also think it is very wrong, that even the default consumption pattern is ethical as I see things (although not some other reasonable ways of seeing things), and that an engineered-to-be-ethical one is ethical under the other reasonable ways as well, such that for any given system there exists such an engineered method.
This is because I don’t think it is reasonable to apply different order-of-magnitude calculations on second and higher order benefits and harms from actions in complex systems, and I have a much more benign view of those higher order effects than those making this statement. The main error is upstream of the statement.
That doesn’t mean one doesn’t have an affirmative duty to work to make things better, somewhere, in some way. But one must structure that as the ability for actions to be good, and the best score to not be zero (e.g. the perfect person isn’t the person who fails to interact with the system).
[This discussion in particular risks going outside LW-appropriate bounds and so should likely be continued on the blog, if it continues]
Just wanted to say I appreciate the efforts to keep things LW appropriate.
Also, my ideal is for ‘LW-appropriate‘ to be… like… actually a good way of conducting intellectual discourse, and insofar as that is (unnecessarily) preventing important conversations from happening publicly, it’s something I’d want to fine tune.
Earlier today I said at the LW office “I think the things Zvi and Ben have been saying lately are pretty important and if they’re not currently in a state that we’d be happy having them on frontpage, we should probably put in some effort to help them become so.”
I think the steelman I’m pointing to is often what people are trying to say, using corrupted language with inadequate expressive power (at their level of verbal skill and privilege / allotted airtime). I think this general pattern is important to be aware of.
The statement might be absurdist but it’s not itself an absurd claim (which is what I take you to be implying). It’s a claim that there exists no consumption pattern under capitalism that doesn’t involve participating in the infliction of harm on others. You can’t be a private citizen minding your own business. This means that there’s an affirmative duty to help make the system better, since supposed neutrality is actually just unremediated complicity.
This is correctly seen as a moral emergency which breaks down “normal” peacetime systems of ethics, because there is a war. But of course the focus on whether there is or isn’t ethical consumption (i.e. the binary of “blameworthy” and “blameless”) privileges the blame-oriented asymmetry that comes from the corruption of simulacra level 4 scapegoating games. Seems wrong to say people shouldn’t use the words they have to try to point to important things, even if the words are too corrupted to have adequate expressive power to just explicitly say the things.
I say seemingly absurd to point out that, to my and many other ears, the statement seems upon first encounter to be absurd. And of course, the idea that it can’t be ethical to consume anything at all in any way at all, when lack of at least some consumption is death, does seem like it’s allowed to be absurd. Of course, also: Some absurd things are true!
I also think it is very wrong, that even the default consumption pattern is ethical as I see things (although not some other reasonable ways of seeing things), and that an engineered-to-be-ethical one is ethical under the other reasonable ways as well, such that for any given system there exists such an engineered method.
This is because I don’t think it is reasonable to apply different order-of-magnitude calculations on second and higher order benefits and harms from actions in complex systems, and I have a much more benign view of those higher order effects than those making this statement. The main error is upstream of the statement.
That doesn’t mean one doesn’t have an affirmative duty to work to make things better, somewhere, in some way. But one must structure that as the ability for actions to be good, and the best score to not be zero (e.g. the perfect person isn’t the person who fails to interact with the system).
[This discussion in particular risks going outside LW-appropriate bounds and so should likely be continued on the blog, if it continues]
Just wanted to say I appreciate the efforts to keep things LW appropriate.
Also, my ideal is for ‘LW-appropriate‘ to be… like… actually a good way of conducting intellectual discourse, and insofar as that is (unnecessarily) preventing important conversations from happening publicly, it’s something I’d want to fine tune.
Earlier today I said at the LW office “I think the things Zvi and Ben have been saying lately are pretty important and if they’re not currently in a state that we’d be happy having them on frontpage, we should probably put in some effort to help them become so.”
I’ll try to keep my reply here within bounds.
I think the steelman I’m pointing to is often what people are trying to say, using corrupted language with inadequate expressive power (at their level of verbal skill and privilege / allotted airtime). I think this general pattern is important to be aware of.
Related, comparatively unpoliticized example: https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1121482193317109761