Feminist hero and birth control campaigner Marie Stopes, who was voted Woman of the Millennium by the readers of The Guardian and honoured on special Royal Mail stamps in 2008, was an anti-Semite and eugenicist
My conclusion from this is more like “successful politicians are not moral paragons”. More generally, trying to find morally virtuous people by a popular vote is not going to produce great results, because the popularity plays much greater role than morality.
I googled for “woman of the year” to get more data points; found this list, containing: 2019 Greta Thunberg, 2016 Hillary Clinton, 2015 Angela Merkel, 2010 Nancy Pelosi, 2008 Michelle Obama, 1999 Madeleine Albright, 1990 Aung San Suu Kyi… clearly, being a politician dramatically increases your chances of winning. Looking at their behavior, Aung San Suu Kyi later organized a genocide.
The list also includes 2009 Malala Yousafzai, who as far as I know is an actual hero with no dark side. But that’s kinda my point, that putting Malala Yousafzai on the same list as Greta Thunberg and Hillary Clinton just makes the list confusing. And if you had to choose one of them as the “woman of the millenium”, I would expect most readers to vote for someone representing their political tribe. But to me that does not mean that people have no sense of morality, only that they can easily get politically mindkilled.
For the Malagasy people in Madagascar, it’s taboo [...] to sleep facing westwards, as you’ll kick the sunrise.
And this sounds silly to us, because we know that “kicking the sunrise” is impossible, because Sun is a planet, it is far away, and your kicking has no impact on it.
So, we should distinguish between people having different moral feelings, and having different models of the world. If you actually believed that kicking the Sun is possible and can have astronomical consequences, you would probably also perceive people sleeping westwards as criminally negligent, possibly psychopathic.
Kinda like being angry at people who don’t wear face masks only makes sense under the assumption that the face masks prevent spreading of a potentially deadly disease. Without this context, anger towards people with no face masks would just be silly.
And this sounds silly to us, because we know that “kicking the sunrise” is impossible, because Sun is a planet, it is far away, and your kicking has no impact on it.
I think a lot of contemporary cultures back then would have found “kicking the sunrise” to be silly, because it was obviously impossible even given what they knew at the time, i.e., you can only kick something if you physically touch it with your foot, and nobody has ever even gotten close to touching the sun, and it’s even more impossible while you’re asleep.
So, we should distinguish between people having different moral feelings, and having different models of the world. If you actually believed that kicking the Sun is possible and can have astronomical consequences, you would probably also perceive people sleeping westwards as criminally negligent, possibly psychopathic.
Why did the Malagasy people have such a silly belief? Why do many people have very silly beliefs today? (Among the least politically risky ones to cite, someone I’ve known for years who otherwise is intelligent and successful, currently believes, or at least believed in the recent past, that 2⁄3 of everyone will die as a result of taking the COVID vaccines.) I think the unfortunate answer is that people are motivated to or are reliably caused to have certain false beliefs, as part of the status games that they’re playing. I wrote about one such dynamic, but that’s probably not a complete account.
I feel like your definition of “morally virtuous” is missing at least 2 parameters: the context that the person is in, and the definition of “morally virtuous”. You seem to treat both as fixed or not contributing to the outcome, but in my experience they’re equally if not more important than the person. Your example of Aung San Suu Kyi is a good example of that. She was “good” in 1990 given her incentives in 1990 and the popular definition of “good” in 1990. Not so much later.
Moral virtue seems to involve certain… inflexibility to incentives.
If someone says “I would organize the genocide of Rohingya if and only if organizing such genocide is profitable, and it so happens that today it would be unprofitable, therefore today I oppose the genocide”, we would typically not call this person moral.
Of course, people usually do not explain their decision algorithms in detail, so the person described above would probably only say “I oppose the genocide”, which would seem quite nice of them.
With most people, we will never know what they would do in a parallel universe, where organizing a genocide could give them a well-paid job. Without evidence to contrary, we usually charitably assume that they would refuse… but of course, perhaps this is unrealistically optimistic.
(This only addresses the objection about “context”. The problem of definition is more complicated.)
> and this sounds silly to us, because we know that “kicking the sunrise” is impossible, because sun is a planet, it is far away, and your kicking has no impact on it.
No, the reason it sounds silly to you is not because it’s not true, but because it’s not part of your own sacred beliefs. There is no fundamental reason for people to support things you are taking for granted as moral facts, like women’s right or racial rights.
In fact, given an accurate model of the world, a lot of things that make the most sense you may find distasteful based on your current unusual “moral” fashions.
For example, exterminating opposing groups is common in human societies historically. Often groups are competing for resources, since one group wants more resources for them and their progeny, exterminating the other group makes the most sense.
And if the fundamental desire for survival and dominance—drilled into us by evolution—isn’t moral, then the concept just seems totally meaningless.
And if the fundamental desire for survival and dominance—drilled into us by evolution—isn’t moral, then the concept just seems totally meaningless.
A concept is “totally meaningless” just because it does not match some evolutionary strategies? First, concepts are concepts, regardless of what is their relation to evolution. Second, there are many strategies in evolution, including things like cooperation or commitments, which intuitively seem more aligned with morality.
Humans are a social species, where the most aggresive one with most muscles is not necessarily a winner. Sometimes it is actually a loser, who gets beaten by the cops and thrown in jail. Another example: Some homeless people are quite scary and they can survive things that I probably cannot imagine; yet, from the evolutionary perspective, they are usually less successful than me.
Even if a group wants to exterminate another group, it is usually easier if they befriend a different group first, and then attack together. But you usually don’t make friends by being a backstabbing asshole. And “not being a backstabbing asshole” is kinda what morality is about.
There is no fundamental reason for people to support things you are taking for granted as moral facts, like women’s right or racial rights.
Here we need to decouple moral principles from factual beliefs. On the level of moral principles, many people accept “if some individual is similar to me, they should be treated with some basic respect” as a moral rule. Not all of them, of course. If someone does not accept this moral rule, then… de gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. (I suspect that ethics is somehow downstream of aesthetics, but I may be confused about this.) But even if someone accepts this rule, the actual application will depend on their factual beliefs about who is “similar to me”.
I believe it is a statement about the world (not just some kind of sacred belief) that approval of women’s rights is positively correlated with the belief that (mentally) women are similar to men. Similarly, the approval of racial rights is positively correlated with the belief that people of different races are (mentally) similar to each other. This statement should be something that both people who approve and who disapprove of the aforementioned rights should agree upon.
At least it seems to me that historically, people who promoted these rights often argued about similarity; and people who opposed these rights often argued about dissimilarity. For example, if you believe that women are inherently incapable of abstract thinking, then of course it does not make any sense to let them study at universities. Or if you believe that black people enjoy being slaves, and actually slavery is much better for them than freedom, then of course abolitionists are just evil fanatics. But if it turns of that these beliefs are factually wrong, then this belief update has moral consequences. If does not effect which moral principles you accept; but if you already accept some moral principles (and many people do) it can effect what these moral principles apply to. You can become an X rights proponent not by adopting a new moral principle, but by learning that your already existing moral principle actually also applies to group X (and then it requires some moral pressure to overcome compartmentalization).
This agains if different from the question what is the right meaning of the word “similar” in sentence “people similar to me should be treated with respect”. What kinds of similarity matter? Is the color of the eyes important? Or is it more about being sentient, capable of feeling pain, and such stuff? Again, it seems to me that if someone decides that the color of the eyes is ultimately unimportant, that person is not making a completely random decision, but someone builds on the already existing underlying moral feelings (perhaps combining them with some factual beliefs about how the eye color is or isn’t related to other things that matter).
My conclusion from this is more like “successful politicians are not moral paragons”. More generally, trying to find morally virtuous people by a popular vote is not going to produce great results, because the popularity plays much greater role than morality.
I googled for “woman of the year” to get more data points; found this list, containing: 2019 Greta Thunberg, 2016 Hillary Clinton, 2015 Angela Merkel, 2010 Nancy Pelosi, 2008 Michelle Obama, 1999 Madeleine Albright, 1990 Aung San Suu Kyi… clearly, being a politician dramatically increases your chances of winning. Looking at their behavior, Aung San Suu Kyi later organized a genocide.
The list also includes 2009 Malala Yousafzai, who as far as I know is an actual hero with no dark side. But that’s kinda my point, that putting Malala Yousafzai on the same list as Greta Thunberg and Hillary Clinton just makes the list confusing. And if you had to choose one of them as the “woman of the millenium”, I would expect most readers to vote for someone representing their political tribe. But to me that does not mean that people have no sense of morality, only that they can easily get politically mindkilled.
And this sounds silly to us, because we know that “kicking the sunrise” is impossible, because Sun is a planet, it is far away, and your kicking has no impact on it.
So, we should distinguish between people having different moral feelings, and having different models of the world. If you actually believed that kicking the Sun is possible and can have astronomical consequences, you would probably also perceive people sleeping westwards as criminally negligent, possibly psychopathic.
Kinda like being angry at people who don’t wear face masks only makes sense under the assumption that the face masks prevent spreading of a potentially deadly disease. Without this context, anger towards people with no face masks would just be silly.
I think a lot of contemporary cultures back then would have found “kicking the sunrise” to be silly, because it was obviously impossible even given what they knew at the time, i.e., you can only kick something if you physically touch it with your foot, and nobody has ever even gotten close to touching the sun, and it’s even more impossible while you’re asleep.
Why did the Malagasy people have such a silly belief? Why do many people have very silly beliefs today? (Among the least politically risky ones to cite, someone I’ve known for years who otherwise is intelligent and successful, currently believes, or at least believed in the recent past, that 2⁄3 of everyone will die as a result of taking the COVID vaccines.) I think the unfortunate answer is that people are motivated to or are reliably caused to have certain false beliefs, as part of the status games that they’re playing. I wrote about one such dynamic, but that’s probably not a complete account.
I feel like your definition of “morally virtuous” is missing at least 2 parameters: the context that the person is in, and the definition of “morally virtuous”. You seem to treat both as fixed or not contributing to the outcome, but in my experience they’re equally if not more important than the person. Your example of Aung San Suu Kyi is a good example of that. She was “good” in 1990 given her incentives in 1990 and the popular definition of “good” in 1990. Not so much later.
Moral virtue seems to involve certain… inflexibility to incentives.
If someone says “I would organize the genocide of Rohingya if and only if organizing such genocide is profitable, and it so happens that today it would be unprofitable, therefore today I oppose the genocide”, we would typically not call this person moral.
Of course, people usually do not explain their decision algorithms in detail, so the person described above would probably only say “I oppose the genocide”, which would seem quite nice of them.
With most people, we will never know what they would do in a parallel universe, where organizing a genocide could give them a well-paid job. Without evidence to contrary, we usually charitably assume that they would refuse… but of course, perhaps this is unrealistically optimistic.
(This only addresses the objection about “context”. The problem of definition is more complicated.)
No, the reason it sounds silly to you is not because it’s not true, but because it’s not part of your own sacred beliefs. There is no fundamental reason for people to support things you are taking for granted as moral facts, like women’s right or racial rights.
In fact, given an accurate model of the world, a lot of things that make the most sense you may find distasteful based on your current unusual “moral” fashions.
For example, exterminating opposing groups is common in human societies historically. Often groups are competing for resources, since one group wants more resources for them and their progeny, exterminating the other group makes the most sense.
And if the fundamental desire for survival and dominance—drilled into us by evolution—isn’t moral, then the concept just seems totally meaningless.
A concept is “totally meaningless” just because it does not match some evolutionary strategies? First, concepts are concepts, regardless of what is their relation to evolution. Second, there are many strategies in evolution, including things like cooperation or commitments, which intuitively seem more aligned with morality.
Humans are a social species, where the most aggresive one with most muscles is not necessarily a winner. Sometimes it is actually a loser, who gets beaten by the cops and thrown in jail. Another example: Some homeless people are quite scary and they can survive things that I probably cannot imagine; yet, from the evolutionary perspective, they are usually less successful than me.
Even if a group wants to exterminate another group, it is usually easier if they befriend a different group first, and then attack together. But you usually don’t make friends by being a backstabbing asshole. And “not being a backstabbing asshole” is kinda what morality is about.
Here we need to decouple moral principles from factual beliefs. On the level of moral principles, many people accept “if some individual is similar to me, they should be treated with some basic respect” as a moral rule. Not all of them, of course. If someone does not accept this moral rule, then… de gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. (I suspect that ethics is somehow downstream of aesthetics, but I may be confused about this.) But even if someone accepts this rule, the actual application will depend on their factual beliefs about who is “similar to me”.
I believe it is a statement about the world (not just some kind of sacred belief) that approval of women’s rights is positively correlated with the belief that (mentally) women are similar to men. Similarly, the approval of racial rights is positively correlated with the belief that people of different races are (mentally) similar to each other. This statement should be something that both people who approve and who disapprove of the aforementioned rights should agree upon.
At least it seems to me that historically, people who promoted these rights often argued about similarity; and people who opposed these rights often argued about dissimilarity. For example, if you believe that women are inherently incapable of abstract thinking, then of course it does not make any sense to let them study at universities. Or if you believe that black people enjoy being slaves, and actually slavery is much better for them than freedom, then of course abolitionists are just evil fanatics. But if it turns of that these beliefs are factually wrong, then this belief update has moral consequences. If does not effect which moral principles you accept; but if you already accept some moral principles (and many people do) it can effect what these moral principles apply to. You can become an X rights proponent not by adopting a new moral principle, but by learning that your already existing moral principle actually also applies to group X (and then it requires some moral pressure to overcome compartmentalization).
This agains if different from the question what is the right meaning of the word “similar” in sentence “people similar to me should be treated with respect”. What kinds of similarity matter? Is the color of the eyes important? Or is it more about being sentient, capable of feeling pain, and such stuff? Again, it seems to me that if someone decides that the color of the eyes is ultimately unimportant, that person is not making a completely random decision, but someone builds on the already existing underlying moral feelings (perhaps combining them with some factual beliefs about how the eye color is or isn’t related to other things that matter).