(Note : This parable is obviously an allegory for something.
I’m glad you spelled the analogy out in another comment, because I would never have guessed that was what you were talking about.
That the parable can be interpreted according to that key is such an outlandish statement that I can immediately think of several blogs where, if I bought it to their attention (which I certainly will not), it would elicit an avalanche of incredulous scorn that would dwarf all the drama about Roko’s Basilisk.
Discussing whether the allegory is valid is interesting, but will lead to mindkill.
Quite so, and therefore I will not be drawn into explaining why I find the analogy so crazy, and am not asking you to explain it further.
I would prefer if the discussion could stay focused on the Martians, so that we can discuss the ethics of a hypothetical scenario that may not be relevant in real life. I am genuinely confused about the ethics of this, and I think this can lead to an interesting question regardless of whether it is applicable to humans)
You can’t have it both ways. As a purely hypothetical scenario of no relevance to real life, it is of no interest. As a purely hypothetical scenario of direct analogical relevance to real life, it is of interest to precisely the degree that it is an accurate analogy; but you want to forestall any discussion of its accuracy. You want to talk about PUA without talking about PUA. The thing cannot be done.
The whole posting reminds me of the situation where someone comes to you and says, “Suppose someone did such and such, and acted so and so, and then this and that, wouldn’t they be wrong wrong wrong?” and it’s clearly a tendentious, self-serving account of some drama they’ve got into with someone else. They’re not looking for advice, they’re trying to co-opt you into giving them validation but screening off the actual facts from you.
Let me just point out that the post was an attempt to discuss ethics in a hypothetical world where certain PUA claims about human psychology are true. I think this is an important question, and I did not want it to degenerate into a discussion about whether the claims themselves are true.
I tried my best to make the analogy as neutral as possible, by making women the “humans”, describing the PUA strategies as having a real harmful effect on women, and generally making their dislike of PUA strategies seem entirely reasonable.
I don’t see how the post is tendentious. I don’t think the analogy has any obvious ethical solution, and I am genuinely asking people for insight into what the relevant ethics are in this hypothetical world. I don’t see how I am leading people to give me validation on my views, because I am not even sure what my views are.
Some of your views are discernible. You seem to think men can be visibly divided into “high status” and “low status”, and that those categories can be matched to “sexually desirable” and “sexually undesirable,” and that all women have the same opinion about which men fall into which category, and that women are not initiators of sexual contact. Real life is a lot more complicated than that.
First of all, I took no position on the truth value of the premises.
Secondly, I fully recognize that my analogy is a simplified map of a map. It does not accurately represent the full territory.
The question is whether the aspects of the territory that I have glossed over are important for the resolution of the ethical question. If there are any such aspects, please feel free to point them out. I do recognize that some of the aspects that have been pointed out, such as consent, are important. I have upvoted those comments and attempted to explain why I think you can make the argument that the analogy still has some validity.
I took no position on the truth value of the premises.
Your translation of the analogy takes the postition that the status dichotomy is a thing. The rest follows from that assumption.
If the views I enumerated are not your views, you need to refine your analogy, because the way it’s written matches them neatly. The fact that my list of proposed solutions was perceived as having an overly physical emphasis seems to me like evidence of how much this analogy oversimplifies what it tries to represent.
Let’s reread your post:
an unjust world, where the ethics of an act is determined by characteristics of the Martian that they cannot be held responsible for.
Being a pleasant person to be around is beyond a man’s responsibility?
However, human ethicists are not very familiar with Martian physiology...
Is this supposed to mean that women don’t get how the male mind works?
a group of recently metamorphosed Blue Martians are vocally spreading information on the internet about tickling techniques.
They may be green for all we know. Being a published guru is no guarantee that he knows what he’s talking about.
if used imperfectly they increase the sting of the stinging hairs fourfold.
It may be the method’s fault as often as the user’s.
Now let’s address your actual questions:
Is it unethical for a Green Martian to attempt to metamorphose?
Is it unethical to attempt to become a better person? Absolutely not. BUT, as with everything, a good end does not justify nasty means.
Does this depend on whether they believe themselves to be fast or slow learners?
In your example, tickling is described in terms one would commonly use to refer to an optional pastime, but it actually stands for a fundamental biological urge with deep psychological and social consequences. This complicates the attempt to give an answer. Should I try to play chess? is not the same question as Should I try to get laid? Having a low expectation of success in mastering a pastime does affect your motivation to learn it, while it only has a moderate effect on your motivation to follow your biological urges. However, since there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get laid per se, or wanting to become a more desirable person, I’ll answer that everyone should be allowed, in fact encouraged, to learn.
Should only the small subset of Martians who intuitively understand the tickling techniques be allowed to use them?
Chess child prodigies should have the chance to play as much as they like, but it makes no sense to keep the game’s rules from everyone else. So, same as the previous question.
Is spreading explicit information about the techniques unethical?
It is only as acceptable as the techniques themselves.
Your translation of the analogy takes the postition that the status dichotomy is a thing. The rest follows from that assumption.
No, it takes the position that there exist people who believe status dichotomy is a thing, and then explores some of the consequences if this belief were to be true.
Moreover, status dichotomy is very obviously a lossy compression. For some purposes, this construct will lose so much information as to be useless. For other purposes, the information that is lost by dichotomizing status is not essential, and so it may still be a useful model.
In order to convince me that dichotomous status is not a useful model when what we are interested in is exploring the ethical issues in this post, you would have to show me a situation where considering a continuous or multidimensional status construct is necessary in order to make an essential point with implications for the correct ethical choice. If you are able to do this, you will have contributed a lot to the conversation, and I will have learned something important.
Being a pleasant person to be around is beyond a man’s responsibility?
No, what I meant was that a Martian cannot be held morally responsible for whether he is Green or Blue.
a Martian cannot be held morally responsible for whether he is Green or Blue.
This insistence in keeping the analogy disconnected from its real-life referent will result in making answers to the analogy useless for the real-life issues behind it. Which means that:
show me a situation where considering a continuous or multidimensional status construct is necessary in order to make an essential point with implications for the correct ethical choice
needs to be answered in real-life terms if it’s to be a meaningful question. There’s no universal, objective agreement about when exactly your Martians are blue or green. It partly depends on the human beholder, and Martians may switch many times between those categories during their lifetimes. Some Martians are better matches for some humans than for others, and very often both sides find themselves forced to compromise. And you’re still neglecting the fact that humans tickle Martians.
The questions you actually want answered would benefit from having been expressed in plain language since the start. You can keep the exercise the way it is, and with the collaboration of other posters come up with new and wonderful solutions within its framework, but if you don’t check at every step whether the analogy still holds, you will reach solutions that will only work on Mars.
There’s no universal, objective agreement about when exactly your Martians are blue or green.
That falls under “lossy compression”. There are certainly Martians who are considered to be green in the majority of interactions with humans, and other Martians who are considered to be blue in the majority of interactions with humans.
And you’re still neglecting the fact that humans tickle Martians.
1) Humans don’t tickle Martians as much as Martians tickle humans. (Women don’t approach men nearly as much as men approach women, and aren’t expected to.)
2) Humans who tickle Martians tickle blue pretty much all the time. (It is acceptable for women to act as though a bad pickup attempt from a man is a threat; it is not acceptable for men to act as though a bad pickup attempt from a woman is a threat except for the most extreme cases.)
PeerGynt has, in fact, constructed an analogy to something he doesn’t understand. This is useful if he then learns from others’ critique of the analogy that he does not understand the original.
I am certainly learning from any useful comments that are made, regardless of which position they take. This is not one of those comments. It is also the only comment in the thread which I have downvoted—I am trying to have a discussion about ethics in a hypothetical world, not a flame war.
As a purely hypothetical scenario of direct analogical relevance to real life, it is of interest to precisely the degree that it is an accurate analogy;
Analogies in moral discussions can serve the purpose to illuminate and identify relevant principles, but generally they just meta the argument from “is X Moral” to “Does the analogy properly map in the relevant aspects?” And that’s on a good day. Normally, it’s more of a “that’s not the same situation”, “is so”, is NOT”...
The original description of the thought experiment should have included the fact that experimenting on the mothership is the actual purpose behind the tickling. Such an omission is very telling.
Moreover, believing that tickling is an “action that is generally conducted by the active Martian to the passive human” is a major part of being Green :-/
A mitigating circumstance, though, is that humans are quite content to let the Martians believe that :-D
I’m glad you spelled the analogy out in another comment, because I would never have guessed that was what you were talking about.
That the parable can be interpreted according to that key is such an outlandish statement that I can immediately think of several blogs where, if I bought it to their attention (which I certainly will not), it would elicit an avalanche of incredulous scorn that would dwarf all the drama about Roko’s Basilisk.
Quite so, and therefore I will not be drawn into explaining why I find the analogy so crazy, and am not asking you to explain it further.
You can’t have it both ways. As a purely hypothetical scenario of no relevance to real life, it is of no interest. As a purely hypothetical scenario of direct analogical relevance to real life, it is of interest to precisely the degree that it is an accurate analogy; but you want to forestall any discussion of its accuracy. You want to talk about PUA without talking about PUA. The thing cannot be done.
The whole posting reminds me of the situation where someone comes to you and says, “Suppose someone did such and such, and acted so and so, and then this and that, wouldn’t they be wrong wrong wrong?” and it’s clearly a tendentious, self-serving account of some drama they’ve got into with someone else. They’re not looking for advice, they’re trying to co-opt you into giving them validation but screening off the actual facts from you.
Let me just point out that the post was an attempt to discuss ethics in a hypothetical world where certain PUA claims about human psychology are true. I think this is an important question, and I did not want it to degenerate into a discussion about whether the claims themselves are true.
I tried my best to make the analogy as neutral as possible, by making women the “humans”, describing the PUA strategies as having a real harmful effect on women, and generally making their dislike of PUA strategies seem entirely reasonable.
I don’t see how the post is tendentious. I don’t think the analogy has any obvious ethical solution, and I am genuinely asking people for insight into what the relevant ethics are in this hypothetical world. I don’t see how I am leading people to give me validation on my views, because I am not even sure what my views are.
Some of your views are discernible. You seem to think men can be visibly divided into “high status” and “low status”, and that those categories can be matched to “sexually desirable” and “sexually undesirable,” and that all women have the same opinion about which men fall into which category, and that women are not initiators of sexual contact. Real life is a lot more complicated than that.
Those are not my views:
First of all, I took no position on the truth value of the premises.
Secondly, I fully recognize that my analogy is a simplified map of a map. It does not accurately represent the full territory.
The question is whether the aspects of the territory that I have glossed over are important for the resolution of the ethical question. If there are any such aspects, please feel free to point them out. I do recognize that some of the aspects that have been pointed out, such as consent, are important. I have upvoted those comments and attempted to explain why I think you can make the argument that the analogy still has some validity.
Your translation of the analogy takes the postition that the status dichotomy is a thing. The rest follows from that assumption.
If the views I enumerated are not your views, you need to refine your analogy, because the way it’s written matches them neatly. The fact that my list of proposed solutions was perceived as having an overly physical emphasis seems to me like evidence of how much this analogy oversimplifies what it tries to represent.
Let’s reread your post:
Being a pleasant person to be around is beyond a man’s responsibility?
Is this supposed to mean that women don’t get how the male mind works?
They may be green for all we know. Being a published guru is no guarantee that he knows what he’s talking about.
It may be the method’s fault as often as the user’s.
Now let’s address your actual questions:
Is it unethical to attempt to become a better person? Absolutely not. BUT, as with everything, a good end does not justify nasty means.
In your example, tickling is described in terms one would commonly use to refer to an optional pastime, but it actually stands for a fundamental biological urge with deep psychological and social consequences. This complicates the attempt to give an answer. Should I try to play chess? is not the same question as Should I try to get laid? Having a low expectation of success in mastering a pastime does affect your motivation to learn it, while it only has a moderate effect on your motivation to follow your biological urges. However, since there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get laid per se, or wanting to become a more desirable person, I’ll answer that everyone should be allowed, in fact encouraged, to learn.
Chess child prodigies should have the chance to play as much as they like, but it makes no sense to keep the game’s rules from everyone else. So, same as the previous question.
It is only as acceptable as the techniques themselves.
No, it takes the position that there exist people who believe status dichotomy is a thing, and then explores some of the consequences if this belief were to be true.
Moreover, status dichotomy is very obviously a lossy compression. For some purposes, this construct will lose so much information as to be useless. For other purposes, the information that is lost by dichotomizing status is not essential, and so it may still be a useful model.
In order to convince me that dichotomous status is not a useful model when what we are interested in is exploring the ethical issues in this post, you would have to show me a situation where considering a continuous or multidimensional status construct is necessary in order to make an essential point with implications for the correct ethical choice. If you are able to do this, you will have contributed a lot to the conversation, and I will have learned something important.
No, what I meant was that a Martian cannot be held morally responsible for whether he is Green or Blue.
This insistence in keeping the analogy disconnected from its real-life referent will result in making answers to the analogy useless for the real-life issues behind it. Which means that:
needs to be answered in real-life terms if it’s to be a meaningful question. There’s no universal, objective agreement about when exactly your Martians are blue or green. It partly depends on the human beholder, and Martians may switch many times between those categories during their lifetimes. Some Martians are better matches for some humans than for others, and very often both sides find themselves forced to compromise. And you’re still neglecting the fact that humans tickle Martians.
The questions you actually want answered would benefit from having been expressed in plain language since the start. You can keep the exercise the way it is, and with the collaboration of other posters come up with new and wonderful solutions within its framework, but if you don’t check at every step whether the analogy still holds, you will reach solutions that will only work on Mars.
That falls under “lossy compression”. There are certainly Martians who are considered to be green in the majority of interactions with humans, and other Martians who are considered to be blue in the majority of interactions with humans.
1) Humans don’t tickle Martians as much as Martians tickle humans. (Women don’t approach men nearly as much as men approach women, and aren’t expected to.)
2) Humans who tickle Martians tickle blue pretty much all the time. (It is acceptable for women to act as though a bad pickup attempt from a man is a threat; it is not acceptable for men to act as though a bad pickup attempt from a woman is a threat except for the most extreme cases.)
PeerGynt has, in fact, constructed an analogy to something he doesn’t understand. This is useful if he then learns from others’ critique of the analogy that he does not understand the original.
I am certainly learning from any useful comments that are made, regardless of which position they take. This is not one of those comments. It is also the only comment in the thread which I have downvoted—I am trying to have a discussion about ethics in a hypothetical world, not a flame war.
Analogies in moral discussions can serve the purpose to illuminate and identify relevant principles, but generally they just meta the argument from “is X Moral” to “Does the analogy properly map in the relevant aspects?” And that’s on a good day. Normally, it’s more of a “that’s not the same situation”, “is so”, is NOT”...
The original description of the thought experiment should have included the fact that experimenting on the mothership is the actual purpose behind the tickling. Such an omission is very telling.
Moreover, believing that tickling is an “action that is generally conducted by the active Martian to the passive human” is a major part of being Green :-/
A mitigating circumstance, though, is that humans are quite content to let the Martians believe that :-D