But as with dogs, there is nothing I can do to “fix” other people into being intellectually serious, or anything else I think they should be. I take people as I find them and leave them the same way.
My guess is that what Richard is trying to gesture at, and what I would claim you should maybe do, is separate the concept of moral patienthood and moral agency to a greater extent. Like with a dog, you might love and cherish a child without respecting their policies or their moral reasoning at the level that they’re at. And you might care a lot about their happiness, protecting them from harm, empathizing with their sorrows, meeting their preferences, making them feel comfortable, etc.
Obviously you shouldn’t literally treat an adult exactly the same way you would treat a dog or a child, but I think that there might be a path to channeling respect for them as moral patients who feel, who love, who grieve, who dream, etc. while also completely acknowledging their shortcomings
I guess to reframe another way: Are you incredibly shitty towards babies and dogs? If you are, then (assuming you agree that babies and dogs are moral patients) I would claim that your problem it is about how to treat with care and empathy beings who you don’t intellectually respect. It’s not (just) about how to find a path to intellectually respecting adults that don’t merit it because there will always be beings that merit empathy and love but not intellectual respect.
I also think intellectual respect is not a binary trait with respect to whether you have it for an individual or not. I think that you can (and often should) have intellectual respect for an individual on some topics but not others. E.g. I merit no intellectual respect on any topic related to sports. I think a lot of rationality is about trying to deserve intellectual respect on increasingly meta/abstract levels (e.g. while I don’t think I merit any intellectual respect on any topic related to sports, I would hope that I would merit some intellectual respect if I were to try to confer about how to approach learning about sports, because I try to be thoughtful about how to learn new topics in an efficient, unbiased, and truth-seeking way). But I think that even for the people who are most worthy of intellectual respect writ broad, there’s quite a bit of unevenness.
I think this is an important point a bit buried here. I like my therapist and listen to her and want her advice—she’s not just a sounding board. However, I am pretty sure I’m smarter than her, and I’m definitely more oriented toward truth-seeking, which doesn’t seem to be something she really thinks about much. And yes, I do find myself frustrated and contemptuous during some conversations. But I continue to see her because I trust that she still has a lot to teach me! I’d be a terrible truth seeker if I saw her fumble one conversation and decided that she couldn’t help me in any way.
So I guess the important thing is that I don’t engage her in philosophical debates? Jenn, perhaps the answer is to meet with “common” folks on their own ground. It strikes me while writing this that the philosophy meetup you went to might have been the worst possible setting to test your empathy. These people were racing on hands and knees to call themself the fastest in the world and had never even heard of running.
i do not want to treat other people as if they are dogs. sorry if i’m being obtuse.
But as with dogs, there is nothing I can do to “fix” other people into being intellectually serious, or anything else I think they should be. I take people as I find them and leave them the same way.
Let me be obtuse in return.
Why not?
My guess is that what Richard is trying to gesture at, and what I would claim you should maybe do, is separate the concept of moral patienthood and moral agency to a greater extent. Like with a dog, you might love and cherish a child without respecting their policies or their moral reasoning at the level that they’re at. And you might care a lot about their happiness, protecting them from harm, empathizing with their sorrows, meeting their preferences, making them feel comfortable, etc.
Obviously you shouldn’t literally treat an adult exactly the same way you would treat a dog or a child, but I think that there might be a path to channeling respect for them as moral patients who feel, who love, who grieve, who dream, etc. while also completely acknowledging their shortcomings
I guess to reframe another way: Are you incredibly shitty towards babies and dogs? If you are, then (assuming you agree that babies and dogs are moral patients) I would claim that your problem it is about how to treat with care and empathy beings who you don’t intellectually respect. It’s not (just) about how to find a path to intellectually respecting adults that don’t merit it because there will always be beings that merit empathy and love but not intellectual respect.
I also think intellectual respect is not a binary trait with respect to whether you have it for an individual or not. I think that you can (and often should) have intellectual respect for an individual on some topics but not others. E.g. I merit no intellectual respect on any topic related to sports. I think a lot of rationality is about trying to deserve intellectual respect on increasingly meta/abstract levels (e.g. while I don’t think I merit any intellectual respect on any topic related to sports, I would hope that I would merit some intellectual respect if I were to try to confer about how to approach learning about sports, because I try to be thoughtful about how to learn new topics in an efficient, unbiased, and truth-seeking way). But I think that even for the people who are most worthy of intellectual respect writ broad, there’s quite a bit of unevenness.
I think this is an important point a bit buried here. I like my therapist and listen to her and want her advice—she’s not just a sounding board. However, I am pretty sure I’m smarter than her, and I’m definitely more oriented toward truth-seeking, which doesn’t seem to be something she really thinks about much. And yes, I do find myself frustrated and contemptuous during some conversations. But I continue to see her because I trust that she still has a lot to teach me! I’d be a terrible truth seeker if I saw her fumble one conversation and decided that she couldn’t help me in any way.
So I guess the important thing is that I don’t engage her in philosophical debates? Jenn, perhaps the answer is to meet with “common” folks on their own ground. It strikes me while writing this that the philosophy meetup you went to might have been the worst possible setting to test your empathy. These people were racing on hands and knees to call themself the fastest in the world and had never even heard of running.