I don’t think this premise is as intuitive. For example, if someone said that a quadriplegic should have saved a nearby drowning child, then the objective appears immediately this it wouldn’t have been possible and so the “should” claim isn’t reasonable. On the other hand, if you say that the quadriplegic should avoid intentionally drowning the child, I don’t think that’s clearly nonsensical or false.
Arjun Panickssery
Karma: 2,912
Yeah I’ve argued that banning lab meat is completely rational for the meat-eater because if progress continues then animal meat will probably be banned before the quality/price of lab meat is superior for everyone.
I think the “commitment” you’re describing is similar to the difference between “ordinary” and “constitutional” policy-making in e.g. The Calculus of Consent; under that model, people make the kind of non-aggression pacts you’re describing mainly under conditions of uncertainty where they’re not sure what their future interests or position of political advantage will be.
People should be free and equal
You opened with an assumption that your described audience (“progress studies people, economists, techno-optimists, anarcho-capitalists, proper libertarians”) largely doesn’t share. Why should people be equal? What sense of equality do you have in mind?
More generally, you make a bunch of undefended claims, e.g.
You say that when one side has bargaining power over another, that’s bad per se, but it’s not explained why
You say that when there is more wealth concentration, that leads to less freedom “empirically” but you don’t present any empirical evidence
You give Elon Musk buying Twitter as an example of the negative influence of billionaires, but in fact the Twitter Files reveal an apparently more serious threat to freedom from the state, whose power is actually counterbalanced by wealthy individuals
It makes intuitive sense to me to say that if you have no way to do something, then it’s nonsensical to say that you should do that thing. For example, if I say that you should have arrived to an appointment on time and you say that it would be impossible because I only told you about it an hour ago and it’s 1000 miles away, then it would be nonsensical for me to say that you should have arrived on time anyway. This is equivalent to saying that if you should do something, then you can do it.
The converse “Whatever ought to be avoided can actually be done” doesn’t make sense because there’s no equivalent intuition.
What fundamental confusions?
No I think Kant’s “ought implies can” principle usually uses “can” to mean some kind of “practical possibility” that means “possible given your powers and opportunities” or something. And whatever is possible in that sense is also physically possible (i.e. “possible given the actual state of the world and physical laws”). So the argument is still sound.
Why? If you’re taking as a premise that “Whatever ought not to be done can actually be done” then I don’t think that makes sense.
Yes I agree to be clear.
In fact the argument is basically the same I think. And I know Michael Huemer has a post using it in the modus ponens form to write a proof of free will presuming moral realism.
(MFT is his “minimal free-will thesis”: least some of the time, someone has more than one course of action that he can perform).
1. With respect to the free-will issue, we should refrain from believing falsehoods. (premise) 2. Whatever should be done can be done. (premise) 3. If determinism is true, then whatever can be done, is done. (premise) 4. I believe MFT. (premise) 5. With respect to the free-will issue, we can refrain from believing falsehoods. (from 1,2) 6. If determinism is true, then with respect to the free will issue, we refrain from believing falsehoods. (from 3,5) 7. If determinism is true, then MFT is true. (from 6,4) 8. MFT is true. (from 7)
Is this argument about determinism and moral judgment flawed?
If determinism is true, then whatever can be done actually is done. (Definition)
Whatever should be done, can be done. (Well-known “ought implies can” principle)
If determinism is true, then whatever ought to be done actually is done (from 1, 2).
The context is that it appears to me that people reject determinism largely because they’re committed to certain moral positions that are incompatible with determinism. Perhaps I will write a longer post about this.
Oh also how many mature cards? (from the same window)
What’s your total lifetime review count? (Stats → Collection/All Time → Reviews)
There are even “non-democratic liberal-ish societies” today . . . like Singapore, Brunei, Dubai and other Gulf monarchies, etc
Only read the first few paragraphs of your post, but this 1997 article called “Is Love Colorblind?” might be interesting. Sailer claims that Asian men are perceived as somewhat less masculine than white men and black men as slightly more masculine, while the reverse is true for women, leading to more white/Asian and black/white pairings than you’d expect naively.
Interracial marriage is growing steadily. From the 1960 to the 1990 Census, white—Asian married couples increased almost tenfold, while black—white couples quadrupled. The reasons are obvious: greater integration and the decline of white racism. More subtly, interracial marriages are increasingly recognized as epitomizing what our society values most in a marriage: the triumph of true love over convenience and prudence. Nor is it surprising that white—Asian marriages outnumber black—white marriages: the social distance between whites and Asians is now far smaller than the distance between blacks and whites. What’s fascinating, however, is that in recent years a startling number of nonwhites—especially Asian men and black women—have become bitterly opposed to intermarriage.
...
The heart of the problem for Asian men and black women is that intermarriage does not treat every sex/race combination equally: on average, it has offered black men and Asian women new opportunities for finding mates among whites, while exposing Asian men and black women to new competition from whites. In the 1990 Census, 72 per cent of black—white couples consisted of a black husband and a white wife. In contrast, white—Asian pairs showed the reverse: 72 per cent consisted of a white husband and an Asian wife.
LET’S review other facts about intermarriage and how they violate conventional sociological theories.
1. You would normally expect more black women than black men to marry whites because far more black women are in daily contact with whites. First, among blacks aged 20 − 39, there are about 10 per cent more women than men alive. Another tenth of the black men in these prime marrying years are literally locked out of the marriage market by being locked up in jail, and maybe twice that number are on probation or parole. So, there may be nearly 14 young black women for every 10 young black men who are alive and unentangled with the law. Further, black women are far more prevalent than black men in universities (by 80 per cent in grad schools), in corporate offices, and in other places where members of the bourgeoisie, black or white, meet their mates.
Despite these opportunities to meet white men, so many middle-class black women have trouble landing satisfactory husbands that they have made Terry (Waiting to Exhale) McMillan, author of novels specifically about and for them, into a best-selling brand name. Probably the most popular romance advice regularly offered to affluent black women of a certain age is to find true love in the brawny arms of a younger black man. Both Miss McMillan’s 1996 best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back and the most celebrated of all books by black women, Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, are romance novels about well-to-do older women and somewhat dangerous younger men. Of course, as Miss Hurston herself later learned at age 49, when she (briefly) married a 23-year-old gym coach, that seldom works out in real life.
2. Much more practical-sounding advice would be: Since there are so many unmarried Asian men and black women, they should find solace for their loneliness by marrying each other. Yet, when was the last time you saw an Asian man and a black woman together? Black-man/Asian-woman couples are still quite unusual, but Asian-man/black-woman pairings are incomparably more rare.
Similar patterns appear in other contexts:
3a. Within races: Black men tend to most ardently pursue lighter-skinned, longer-haired black women (e.g., Spike Lee’s School Daze). Yet black women today do not generally prefer fairer men.
3b. In other countries: In Britain, 40 per cent of black men are married to or living with a white woman, versus only 21 per cent of black women married to or living with a white man.
3c. In art: Madame Butterfly, a white-man/Asian-woman tragedy, has been packing them in for a century, recently under the name Miss Saigon. The greatest black-man/white-woman story, Othello, has been an endless hit in both Shakespeare’s and Verdi’s versions. (To update Karl Marx’s dictum: Theater always repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as opera, and finally as farce, as seen in that recent smash, O.J., The Moor of Brentwood.) Maybe Shakespeare did know a thing or two about humanity: America’s leading portrayer of Othello, James Earl Jones, has twice fallen in love with and married the white actress playing opposite him as Desdemona.
4. The civil-rights revolution left husband—wife balances among interracial couples more unequal. Back in 1960 white husbands were seen in 50 per cent of black-white couples (versus only 28 per cent in 1990), and in only 62 per cent of white—Asian couples (versus 72 per cent). Why? Discrimination, against black men and Asian women. In the Jim Crow South black men wishing to date white women faced pressures ranging from raised eyebrows to lynch mobs. In contrast, the relatively high proportion of Asian-man/white-woman couples in 1960 was a holdover caused by anti-Asian immigration laws that had prevented women, most notably Chinese women, from joining the largely male pioneer immigrants. As late as 1930 Chinese-Americans were 80 per cent male. So, the limited number of Chinese men who found wives in the mid twentieth century included a relatively high fraction marrying white women. In other words, as legal and social discrimination have lessened, natural inequalities have asserted themselves.
5. Keeping black men and white women apart was the main purpose of Jim Crow. Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark 1944 study found that Southern whites generally grasped that keeping blacks down also retarded their own economic progress, but whites felt that was the price they had to pay to make black men less attractive to white women. To the extent that white racism persists, it should limit the proportion of black-man/white-woman couples.
I’m responding to John’s more general ethical stance here of “working with moral monsters”, not anything specific about Cremieux
For what it’s worth I interpreted it as being about Cremieux in particular based on the comment it was directly responding to; probably others also interpreted it that way
Yeah I was reading the other day about the Treaty of Versailles and surrounding periods and saw a quote from a German minister about how an overseas empire would be good merely as an outlet for young men to find something productive to do. A totally different social and political environment when you have a young and growing population versus an aging and shrinking population. And Russia is still relatively young: Italy, Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Austria all have median ages of 45 or higher.
Oh yeah that could be misleading; I’ll rephrase, thanks
Regarding the Russians and East Slavs more broadly, Anatoly Karlin has some napkin math that at the very least shows the huge toll that the world wars had on their populations, which barely grow or s:
(8a) Russia just within its current borders, assuming otherwise analogous fertility and migration trends, would have had 261.8 million people by 2017 without the triple demographic disasters of Bolshevism, WW2, and the 1990s – that’s double its actual population of 146 million.
Source: Демографические итоги послереволюционного столетия & Демографические катастрофы ХХ века by Anatoly Vishnevsky
(8b) According to my very rough calculations, based on various sources, the population change for each of the following in their current borders between 1913⁄14 and 1945⁄46 was about as follows:
Russia – 91M/97M
Ukraine – 35M/34M
Belarus – 7.5M/7.7M
Assuming a threefold expansion in all of these populations, we could have been looking to a Russian Empire or Republic with a further ~120M fully Russified Belorussians and largely Russified Ukrainians, for a total Slavic population of almost 400M.
That’s twice bigger than the number of White Americans today, the most populous single European ethnicity, and almost as much as all of today’s Western Europe.
(8c) Total population of a hypothetical Russian Empire that also retained Central Asia and the Caucasus, and that hadn’t been bled white by commies, Nazis, and Westernizers during the course of the 20th century, would likely have been not that far off from Dmitry Mendeleev’s 1906 projection of 594 million for 2000.
These indices are probably not meaningful. It’s easy to find news stories of ordinary people in England and Germany being arrested for their opinions or even for mocking elected officials.
German criminal law actually adds special penalties for “defaming” politicians (Defamation of persons in the political arena, Section 188, German Criminal Code) as part of a dozen free-speech limitations that would violate the First Amendment here. And truth isn’t an ironclad defense the way it is here.
In England, content that’s merely “grossly offensive” or “menacing” is illegal under their Communications Act 2003, and similar laws date back earlier.
There are multiple cases even in the last few months alone of these laws being used vigorously in both countries (e.g. this case in England in which someone was jailed for insulting a politician)
In contrast, in America since Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech is criminal only when it is (a) intended, and (b) likely to produce imminent lawless action, or when it is a true threat, obscenity, or narrow category such as child‑pornography.
Why is (1) obviously false?