Which, really, in a very compact nutshell, is literal truth.
You mock them endlessly and dare them to refute it with facts
In my experience, that won’t do shit. except make you feel better.
If I can’t convince them otherwise, then that’s ok
What works best is some sort of socratic instruction method: ask tailored questions about their beliefs until they push themselves off a logical cliff. May not always work, especially if they can cite studies that seem to support their position, but it usually works better than the ad hom treatment.
Exactly
But… those are axioms…
What are axioms?
Your worldview as presented here is axiomatic.
I think you may be giving the people I’m talking about too much credit. Part of this has to do with my own experience listening to conservatives talk on talk radio. I listen to them speak all the time, I am not unaware of their arguments, and especially not unaware of their rhetoric. It’s true that for many of them there is a MASSIVE gap between their rhetoric and what they actually believe, but my points about the cartoonish nature of the claims against government at large can be heard all throughout the day on talk radio. The rhetoric IS that bad, and rhetoric matters. If it’s really true that most of the people using over the top rhetoric against any and all government don’t actually believe what their word choice implies, then they need to stop being so god damned sloppy with how they speak. I don’t believe most conservatives are as radical as what much of talk radio might suggest, but the discrepancy over what is said and what they actually believe leads to a lot of shifty and dishonest arguments made in the public square. Like the general notion that conservatives are against income redistribution. Most of them are NOT against income redistribution period/end of discussion (k-12 school vouchers is an income transfer to the children of poorer families to pay for schooling), most of them are NOT against government healthcare end of discussion (read the VA = single payer), most of them are NOT against bigger and more intrusive government in all scenarios (read the texas law requiring 20% equity to qualify for a home mortgage that largely shielded that state from the worst of the housing crisis - that was GOVERNMENT regulatoin wading into the private decision making of private banks and individuals, and those restrictions protected that market). But to hear these people talk, none of these qualifications comes up, almost EVER. Don’t SAY you are against more government regulation, say you are against THIS government regulation for THESE reasons. Stop just blanketing the airwaves and comment sections with empty phrases IF you don’t actually believe what is being said. Be more precise, or get blasted.
And for those where the rhetoric I chafe against more closely matches their own views, I do understand where much of the beliefs are coming from, I just reject their source. I seek to find a way to take that source they rely upon so heavily and burn it to ash and scatter it to the wind. What do you say to someone who thinks god thinks it’s OK for them to burn alive another human being? I don’t want to leave it at, well, that’s where your foundational beliefs begin, so I guess that’s it.
I did admit that I probably hold similar sorts of axioms, just not the over the top government is evil ones mentioned above. A large chunk of my bafflement with people railing against government is the discrepancy between their rhetoric and what they are actually in favor of. I do think it would be a useful exercise to repeat their argument and isolate the assumptions implicit in those arguments that I don’t hold to.
The life at conception issue is actually quite easy to deal with with a secular argument, and it holds strong against everything other than some theological belief in a supernatural soul. A lot of liberals argue wrongly when talking about allowing abortions. When they focus on a fetus not being human life, they are just showing an insecurity in their own argument. Of course a fetus is human and alive. If by human we mean has human dna and alive we mean it has living cells, it’s alive. A single cell bacteria is alive, so why would a fetus not be alive? The real question is over personhood. A fetus is a potential person, a potential human BEING, but it is not there yet. And the human BEING is what has greater value, not human life. I reject the notion that all human life is equal, like a human vegetable that is both human and alive. It’s the PERSON that matters here. Even religious people hold this intuition.
If there was a just deceased mother with an 8.5 month old living fetus inside her and her 5 year old daughter next to her that were both dying of some disease and there was only enough antidote for one of them, how would you choose?
The mother is dead, so do you save the fetus and give it the antidote, or the 5 year old? They are both human and alive, but only one has achieved the additional level of personhood that we place greater value in. I’d bet well over 90% of people, even religious people would choose to save the 5 year old. They might say they believe that all life has equal value, that all life after conception has an immortal soul, but press them and I’d bet good money they would not act that way given the kind of choice presented above.
Back to the axioms though, I don’t know how to effectively argue against absolutist axioms. I can explain that I don’t hold the same core views, I can say what I think flows from the consequences of such views, but if someone truly believes something like it is NEVER ok to tax income using the force of the state because of some denial of freedom, I don’t know what to do with that.
People HAVE argued that, this is not some straw man. At that point I just tell them to go live on an island, because the only way to live in a world where you never have any external burdens placed upon you by others, is to live alone. Civilization kind of requires people setting some rules so we can live in a less anarchic society. There can be plenty of overreach and stupid wasteful spending by governments, I think the tens of billions set to be spent on the train in California is a colossal waste of money, I think the golden parachutes and pensions of many public employee unions is over the top and need to be dialed back, but when I am against such things I rail against those specific policies, I don’t rail against government in general, because that is stupid… unless I was among the throngs of conservatives talking on talk radio and in comment sections. Oh there I went again, placing my own standards above others. Good, deal with it anti government losers! Oh, there I went again, resorting to name calling when faced with absolutist anti government axioms (btw, it does make you feel better). Old habits. But seriously, if they are not as radical as I’m suggesting, then they really need to start being more precise with their rhetoric.
There are any number of intertwined problems with such a viewpoint that render it meaningless, completely ineffective or both.
1)It’s turtles all the way down.
Promoting utility to the prime position, i.e. choosing to “value value” is itself a moral axiom. There’s no a priori reason why utility and effectiveness should be valued over potential, spirituality, tradition, revenge, happiness, progress, freedom, environmentalism and all the other potential moral primacies with which it is competing. You have decided that “pragmatism” is the prime determinant in resolving issues of moral conflict, but that doesn’t make you any more correct than the people who assign “freedom” or “tradition” as the prime determinants.
This is obviously the single biggest criticism of your position: you claim that you don’t base your moral arguments on absolutist moral positions, and that you know this because you always decide whether an action is right or wrong on the basis of what is most pragmatic. But of course any standard by which one differentiates right or wrong is a moral standard, by definition. And since you always base your decisions on this standard, you are basing your position upon an absolutist moral axiom. So, you are arguing that you don’t base your arguments upon absolutist moral positions, and you know this because you always base your arguments upon pragmatism as the prime arbiter of whether a decision is right. Or, in short, you know that you don’t base your arguments upon absolutist moral positions because your arguments are based upon an absolutist moral position.
But don’t even bother to try to argue that it isn’t “really” a moral position because if we accept that is true:
- You can’t win an argument on morality from a position of amorality
Nobody else argues social issues as you claim to, so your position is worthless as a way of arguing against axioms. I don’t care whether you can prove that slaves are better off by every measurable standard than they would be in Africa. Condemning a child to a life of bondage because of the colour of her skin is wrong. I don’t care how functional, effective and or productive from a real-world, sociological/behaviorist perspective slavery is. It is wrong. I don’t care if you have determined that 99% of people will be happier an more productive if just 10% of the people sent ot the electric chair are innocent. I do not care if you can prove that 200 million Aryans will be 1000 times richer and happier forever more if only we kill 10 million Jews right now. I do not give a flying fuck how pragmatic or productive your solutions are are or how much evidence you have to support them in any of those situations because your solutions are morally wrong..
When your opponent believes that what you are proposing is morally abhorent, all the evidence in the world that it is pragmatic will not convince them. All that it will serve to do is make them believe that you are an amoral monster because…
- You are simply arguing that the ends justify the means.
By arguing a moral position based purely upon pragmatism you are forced, by definition, to ignore subjective experience. You can not take into account how much pain you cause or how many people die. You can only take into account the outcome. The ends must justify the means, and nothing else matters.
By adopting a position where you can only object to something on pragmatic grounds, then you will be forced to accept that slavery is acceptable in a pre-industrial society. For the problem being considered; that that there is a lack of available labour in the New World; enslaving Africans is pragmatic and unobjectionable. If you do object to it, then you have to object purely on pragamatic grounds: it reduces the local economy etc. You would never argue that enslaving millions of people because of their race is inherently wrong. You would only ever argue that it was economically inefficient, and should only have been ended once it was costing money. Suffering, death or simple lack of freedom can never enter into your argument.
And that of course is why arguing from a position that pragmatism should be the prime and sole arbiter of moral positions is utterly futile in any argument. Because it’s just another way to say that the ends justify the means, and almost nobody believes that the end justifies the means.
- It is epistemologically/ontologically valueless.
Your attempt to base your decisions on whether a decision is right or wrong solely upon pragmatism is of no help in an argument because it provides no basis for evaluating truth or worthiness in most moral arguments.
Just consider the fairly straightforward, simple example given in the OP. How do you evaluate the relative pragmatic value of forcibly taking people’s savings against the value of schooling for 5, 000 children? Which of those outcomes is more “pragmatic”? Is it more pragmatic to not take 5 hours savings each week from 2 million people and not provide schooling for 5, 000 children? Or is it more pragmatic to take 2 million peoples savings 5 hours a week and thus provide schooling for 5, 000 children? How about if we have to force 20 million people to work to provide schooling for 3 children? How can you possibly make a decision on such matters based upon pragmatism?
The problem is that here, as in most moral arguments, you are trying to compare the pragmatic value of apples and wheelbarrows. “Pragmatism” itself is not objective, so it can not provide any objective point of comparison in a moral argument. You can only begin to apply pragmatic standards once all participants agree what the ultimate goal is, but in moral arguments such as this one, the argument is about what the ultimate goal is. Should America be run to maximise the freedom of its citizens or should it be run to maximise outcomes for children. Until that question is resolved, there is no way to apply your pragmatic standard because nobody agrees what we are defining as success.
Since a pragmatic standard can only be applied once all parties agree on what counts as success, it provides no standards at all in most moral arguments
- In my experience, it’s used as a smokescreen for people wanting to claim superiority of their position.
This is more an observation than a cristicism, but it is true. In my experience people say that they apply “pragmatic standards” or “live their life by science” as a way of trying to claim a moral superiority for their argument, as though pragmatism is somehow morally superior to empathy or environmentalism or other moral primacies.
To summarise, I utterly reject your assertion. Selecting pragmatism as the prime arbiter of right and wrong does not mean that you are not arguing from absolutist moral axioms, because “pragmatism should be the prime arbiter of right and wrong” is itself an absolutist moral axiom. Moreover it is simply another way of saying “The end justifies the means”. By deciding whether a position is right or wrong purely upon pragmatic, material outcomes, you are forced, by definition, to ignore pain and suffering. I reject that position entirely, as do most people. The pain we cause to the other sentient beings must be a major consideration in whether an action is right, and your position does not allow the consideration suffering because it is solely able to be based upon pragmatic concerns. For that reaosn alone I reject it, as do most people. And finally, it offers no solution to most moral dilemmas. Most moral dilemmas stem from a conflict between two competing outcomes: freedom of women vs. the life of an unborn child, the value of an acre of rainforest vs the economic advancement of an impoverished farmer and so forth. A pragmatic standard provides absolutely no value for such dilemmas because the heart of the dilemma is what weight to give to two competing pragmatic outcomes. A moral arbiter based upon pragmatism is, by definition, worthless because the dilemma is what pragmatic measures should be used. Telling us that you think that one should be used is about as useful as telling a starving man that he should eat more.
In my experience, empathy and mockery in combination can move the ball a little.
“No, you really don’t want to be that way.”
All the same, the process of persuasion is a puzzle, one I’ve thought about (with little to show) since I joined this board. I have books, unread. The OP asks a good question, though I feel that we’re groping our way through the dark.
Salvor, you seem to be having difficulties with multiple and totally unrelated problems and you are twisting them al into one big strawman, as though the people you are debating online are the same people talking on the radio and using exactly the same arguments and you have exactly the same response. That;s not true and it’s not an effective way to think about it.
Your first issue is how to deal with annoying extremist rhetoric on the airwaves. That’s easy: just don’t listen. There is plenty of extremist rhetoric from all sides of politics. Spend some time listening to representatives of PETA or Greenpeace some time if you don’t believe me. You can’t actually argue with it, people who agree with it are going to listen to it regardless of whether you do or don’t, and it annoys you. So stop listening. Problem solved
The second is how to argue with people who use extremist rhetoric that they don’t believe in arguments. That’s really easy, and you told us the solution yourself: repeat their argument and isolate the assumptions implicit in those arguments. When someone says something like “any increase in government power is wrong” then ask them why they support putting increased military power into the hands of the government. When they add a qualifier, then point out that they don’t, in fact, believe that any increase in government power is wrong. Point out that they believe exactly the same thing that you do: that there are some areas where increased government power leads to potential abuse and should be avoided. Then proceed with the real argument of where you think those limits are, where they think they are, and why you each believe that. That’s simple and effective.
The third is how to effectively argue against absolutist axioms. As I already said, you simply can not do so. An axiom is a necessary basis for an argument. You can’t argue against it. You can argue about axioms, but that argument itself will rest on certain axioms. As I noted above, and as you reiterated, if you and someone else proceed from different axioms, there is simply nothing that can be done.
I believe that it is wrong for a government to tell someone that they can’t live in some places or work in some jobs because of the colour of their skin or their ancestry. I don’t care if God himself or a time traveler from the future comes down and confirms that if we reinstitute Jim Crow laws, it will usher in a golden age for all White people. Restricting the freedom of people because of their skin colour or ancestry to provide a better future for other people is wrong. Pure and simple. Nothing you can say will convince me otherwise.
I am guessing that you believe likewise. Which is why I am surprised that you are still expressing bafflement that some people believe that it is never ok to tax income using the force of the state because of some denial of freedom. These two beliefs are not particularly different. Both are absolutist positions. Both are based upon the idea that a utilitarian argument never justifies a denial of freedom to people who have done no wrong. I may be wrong, but to me, your bafflement still demonstrates that you are failing to see your opponents position in light of your own experience. Nobody is saying that you need to agree with the axiom, but you should be able to see how someone can accept that axiom. Most people believe that it is generally wrong to restrict the freedom of innocent people in order to provide a better future for some unrelated group of people. I will assume that you believe that. The only difference between you and your opponents is where you draw the line. You draw the line when the people being oppressed are one racial group, and the people benefitting are some other racial group. Your opponents draw the line when it is one economic bracket, and the group benefitting is another economic bracket. But your actual beliefs are almost identical. You both believe that it is unjust to curtail the freedom of one group in order to benefit another.
And that is how you have to learn to deal with absolutist axioms. Don’t simply dismiss them as bizarre and incomprehensible. If large numbers of highly intelligent people believe something (as is the case with the example you provided), then it is not bizarre. And it is not incomprehensible. Thousands of people with degrees in economics, law and sociology comprehend this position just fine. If you fail to comprehend it, then it is just that: your failing. Make the effort to understand why so many intelligent people accept this axiom.
Start by trying to see the axiom in terms of you own experience. Do not do what you just did: do not say “I do not hold to over-the-top axioms like this one”. Instead, look to see what axioms you do hold to that are similar to this one. In my experience, when thousands of intelligent people hold to an axiom, then I will inevitably hold to a very similar axiom somewhere.
If you told me that you oppose Jim Crow laws, then I could very easily respond as you propose to do to your opponents. I can just tell you to go live on an island, because the only way to live in a world where you never have any external burdens placed upon you by others, is to live alone. Civilization kind of requires people setting some rules so we can live in a less anarchic society. But that isn’t any sort of argument at all and it is hardly going to convince you that Jim Crow laws are just or desirable. In order for me to argue in favour Jim Crow laws, I need to see them in light of your experience, not simply demonise you by suggesting that you want to live in a world where you never have any external burdens placed upon you by others. And your opponents see your laws as being functionally the same as Jim Crow laws. Telling them to suck it up because we need to set some rules that place external burdens on other is going to be exactly as effective as me telling to suck up the Jim Crow laws.
Your attempt to address the abortion problem is actually non-responsive. All you have done is argued from an absolutist moral axiom that a fetus is a potential person not an actual person, and that a human being has greater value than a human life. You seem to have missed my point altogether. Simply stating the absolutist moral axioms from which your argument stems doesn’t go any way to addressing my point, which was that it is necessary to proceed an absolutist moral axiom. At best you have reinforced my point, you haven’t “dealt with it” as you claim to have done.
Unless you think that you can achieve whet no philosopher in the past 3, 000 has managed to achieve, there is no way to “deal with” this issue. You just need to accept it. There is no absolute basis for truth. Any argument ultimately rests on arbitrary and absolutist axioms. You can’t “deal with” that. It is simply a truth, or at least nobody has managed to demonstrate otherwise.
My apologies, either I am using the wrong word, or you are viewing “pragmatism” through the narrow lens of absolutism. To me, the idea of pragmatism is different from the idea of strict utilitarianism, which itself is axiomatic and absolutist.
My view is flexible, relativistic, situational and does not favor one party over another. You cannot apply any kind of fixed morality to the kind of pragmatism I use – in fact, it does not even tolerate “right” and “wrong”. Every situation should, as much as is practicable, be addressed in terms of the needs and wants of all involved – not the “greater good” as in the utilitarian ethos, but the most serviceable compromise for everyone (which right away rules out your slavery argument because supporting slavery fails to consider the needs of the enslaved). Simply put, there must be a salient answer to the “why” of a course of action.
In my experience, everybody is wrong about stuff. That includes me. Hence, the pursuit of understanding should be a matter of figuring out where each of our errors lie and trying to distill them out of the picture. Every instance I have seen of someone claiming to have the answer to a vexing issue has ultimately revealed them to be either blinkered, delusional or a huckster. The best leader typically seems to be the one who excuses himself in order to go catch up with his followers.
I understand that it is difficult to cope with the muddy purchase of absolute relativism, but nothing else has shown itself to be fair, stable and workable. I think it is worth a try.
Maybe you should ask why you feel compelled to engage in arguments with intractable people? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone change their world view based on someone else’s message board or Facebook rants.
If you insist, maybe ask them why they believe the way they do. Then probe into the details and edge cases. For example, if someone is a Libertarian who is against the state taxing at all, ask them how the roads gets fixed (or built in the first place.
The problem with all these ideologies is that none of them work for 100% of the people. So the question is always how to handle the exceptions.
Blake - I’ve enjoyed your posts in this thread.
I’m kind of baffled too, to be honest. You can annihilate vulgar Libertarianism with Hobbes (nasty, brutish, short). You can mock pure libertarianism while carving out a space for libertarian leaners - a perfectly respectable position according to my stance.
(Don’t be this way, be that way.)
“…the state using force to tax incomes for other purposes is NEVER OK,” seems like a highly dubious axiom, since the speaker has set up taxes as an evil, and decided that certain qualitative criteria make it into a necessary evil. That’s bonkers. (Mock 1: I could escalate later.) The concept of a necessary evil inherently involves some sort of weighing.
Note again though that I’ve permitted a carve out for basically the entire Cato Institute, never mind libertarian leaners. Apologies if I’m missing something or even mangling what is a pretty good way of thinking about the problem (axiom vs. conclusion).
I don’t think all absolutist axioms people hold are equally impervious to being altered. Now you might say that implies they are not really absolute to begin with, but you could make that case about just about anything. Are our beliefs and feelings and impressions some sorts of immutable laws of the universe? Constant throughout all time and space? If not then nothing is truly perfectly absolute and immune to change in the mind of a human being, some things are just far less likely to change. If that’s true, then the question becomes, what causes those first principles and axioms to be held onto in the first place? Is it some sort of hard wiring in the brain that is immensely difficult to shift course? Is it based on a complicated web of tangential assumptions about the world, without the support of which the primary axiom would be undermined and even discarded? I can imagine several types of foundational structures that would lead to different levels of resiliency in those core beliefs.
That does not mean it’s always practical or possible to uproot those ideas, but even if there was only a 10% chance to make headway against conflicting axioms, that’s better than just agreeing to disagree without making the attempt.
One area where I think the best case scenario is to agree to disagree is abortion. My argument above was not made well, I was not trying to say it solves the abortion debate, more that it better allows each side to see where the other is coming from. The choice argument when made to a pro lifer is a non starter because they have an entirely different conception about the intrinsic value of a fetus. The choice argument does nothing to highlight and argue over those different conceptions about the relative value of a fetus and so it just confuses the issue. Bringing up the fact that most pro choice proponents weigh the relative value of a fetus differently from an older child tackles the disagreement head on. It does not solve the disagreement in and of itself, but it at least crystallizes it. I still don’t think it’s an impossibility to make further progress there, but trying to dismantle more of the core ideas on that issue might involve turning over so much internal baggage that it’s impractical. I don’t want to have to face the challenge of trying to strip away their support for an immortal soul and gods command and a theology they may have spent decades of their life infusing into their very being, or worse, trying to alter their own particular brain wiring that is extremely hard to set on a different course.
Now that is a good one.
So that’s why you don’t believe in global warming, because it makes you feel better. Believe me, that won’t last