I believe that the only true morality is that “thou shalt not steal.” I can’t find a reference to it right now, but I think it was eloquently demonstrated in one of Philip Jose Farmer’s books, probably one of the Riverworld books. Really, everything that can be considered “morally wrong” is a form of stealing.
Regards Steven is right but I still have the prerogative of judging people based on their shitty opinions.
You are certainly free to judge people for any particular reason you choose.
However the idea ’ Anyone who disagrees with me is evil, no matter why they disagree with me’ is intellectually lazy and used quite widely by the most regressive elements out there. It is the sort of thinking and intollerance on display by radical islamists, old school communists (like killing all the ‘intellectuals’ by the Khmer Rouge) and the Inquisition.
Additonally, it is quite stupid if you care about changing a particualr policy or the direction the country is going. Clinton is the perfect example of this. The whole ‘basket if deplorables’ and the apparently widespread belief among liberals that those rural folks are too stoopid to understand what is good for them should be a crystal clear examole of why a condesending attitude is a bad strategy unless your only goal is to feel smugly superior.
Slee
I have the opposite impression. The response was not what I expected, and more than I had hoped for.
But then, I’m not looking for reasons to hate people. I’d much rather look for reasons to like or understand them.
As a radical centrist I can accept a broad range of political opinions. While I am strongly pro-Choice, it is very understandable that some consider any abortion to be murder and therefore hugely wrong. One way to grasp that their position is sensical is to look for a dividing line: Does a 181-day fetus have some special “human” status that a 179-day fetus doesn’t? Or, if it’s OK to abort an 8-month fetus known to have severe birth defect, how about a 1-month already-born baby with the birth defect? I think that many who vehemently oppose pro-Life people who object to killing a 5-month fetus would oppose just as strongly the murder of a 1-month baby, but is the dividing line so clear?
Or consider the outsourcing of a $20/hour job to a $10/hour worker. Many on the left would applaud this if it were a way to reduce income inequality inside the U.S.A., but not if it reduces inequality between two countries. Some on the right might object to this even if the cheap worker is a legal U.S. immigrant since he’s still an “Other.” Is the dividing line so very very clear?
Some people have strong feelings about the “naturalness” of gay marriage. I don’t have to agree with them to believe their feelings are sincere, and guided by their own spiritual sense of “right” and “wrong.”
What I do object to is ignorance and hypocrisy. I would have more respect for Republicans if they admitted they want to suppress black votes to win elections, but instead they pretend it is for a higher purpose. Charter schools sound good in principle, but in fact are a way to divert funds from the poor children of struggling families to richer kids and scamsters. Libertarians may have sincere ideas about economics, but propaganda has filled them with a visceral hatred of taxes or regulation — even if they understand the notion of external costs, they assume government action always makes things worse.
Both sides are in information bubbles, one side Googling “Head Start works;” the other Googles “Head Start is a failure.” I don’t click on links to Koch Brothers-sponsored sites; in one recent thread a Doper refused to click on pbs.org. To a large extent the problem isn’t in ourselves, it’s in the misinformation machines modern technology has spun for us.
Substitute (Balthisar post 19827691; “stealing”; “coercion”)
Well, actually, the compass rose has a real-world basis, aligning as it does with the Earth’s demonstrable magnetic field. It’s not like “North” is some arbitrary direction we’ve all just agreed to.
The magnetic poles exist. Their labeling and orientation on maps is arbitrary and there’d be no particular reason for aliens to agree with our conventions. Ancient maps often had east or south as being on top, sometimes due to political or religious criteria since human psychology has a bias that says things on top are superior, dominant, or holy. Current conventions of the north being on top didn’t become popular until a couple hundred years ago.
Mtgman’s larger point about morality is a lot trickier. Most philosophers are some form of moral realist, but they still have trouble agreeing on moral stances. They get about as far as it’s immoral to torture people for fun. It’s certainly possible to be against moral realism, though it seems most people aren’t aware of the arguments or consequences of different stances. Most people just go with what feels right.
No. The way you treat people is the content of your character.
Is a philosophical disagreement with Affirmative Action policies an indication that you hate black people?
Only a self-righteous rube would suggest so. The politics of governing a diverse country of 300,000,000 people is not the same as your interpersonal relations with the people you meet and know in life.
Well-poisoning won’t change the fact that this is completely wrong. The only sentence in your statement that is correct is your second paragraph. It’s just not that simple.
Your politics declare what you value, and what you value is the makeup of your character. Not just how you treat other people. You can be the nicest guy in the world and have horrible character. Consider the guy who is nice to everyone, but is secretly cheating to get ahead of everyone. You know, the charismatic psychopath.
I have met a lot of Republicans of good character. But their politics are different from the Republicans of bad character. (For one, they’re not usually based on greed.) I’ve not really met that many Democrats, but I’ve seen Democrats of bad character on TV, and their version of liberalism is different.
About the only other factor besides character is intelligence. There are people of good character who make very stupid decisions due to lack of knowledge, and it can be really hard to get through to them.
There is a such thing as a morally indefensible political position, but it’s rare in the generally ‘40 yard line to 40 yard line’ game of American politics. Much, much rarer than militants on both sides of the US political spectrum nowadays tend to think.
IME when people are ‘called out’ for ‘immoral’ political positions it’s more often than not based on distorting their position, guilt by association with much more extreme people on the same side of the political centerline as the target, or making all kinds of follow on assumptions and extrapolations about the person’s position.
Some political issues are inherently moral. One either believes abortion is immoral or not. That isn’t the totality of the issue, since there’s some room for an ‘anti-abortion but pro-choice’ position which considers abortion immoral but among immoral activities where state power should not brought to bear. But morality is still pretty directly and inherently part of the mix in that issue, either way.
In contrast the general issue of big/small govt, ‘safety net’, ‘economic equality’ etc. is IMO routinely and grossly over-moralized. A ‘social safety net’ by the govt means coercing some people more than others to give money to support it, or else go to jail. And it couldn’t be otherwise. But it’s neither immoral to force those people to pay nor immoral if they vote against paying even more, at least not without specifying a much more extreme position than that general direction more/less. And in the common real world case it’s typically one person wanting a 10% bigger welfare state and another 10% smaller. Moralizing this sort of debate is foolish and counter productive, though distressingly common.
No. At least, not realistically. The guy who thinks like this will not keep a running total of all the money he didn’t give to these individuals and make sure he gives the same amount to the charity. Heck, he probably will wind up not helping the charity out much at all. If he can rationalize like this when the pressure is on, he will forget when the pressure is off.
There’s also a ton of judgement involved here. Everything you said is steeped in the idea that poor people get that way because of their own choices. There’s no other reason to think that giving the money to these organizations, who then have to pay other stuff, will result in the money going further.
I remember the first time I wrestled with this. A church pastor did that whole “I’ll buy you food” thing to get out of giving a beggar money. And then, when he didn’t take the food, that was just proof that the guy was just going to spend it all on sin, and a way to absolve any guilt for not helping him.
If you’re judging this man in that way, you don’t really care about him.
While in theory, such a person could possibly exist, in reality, I would say it’s basically impossible. Sure, you can always find some weird outlier, but this is not the norm at all.
And that’s why I feel that many on the right do not like the idea of a social safety net. They want to be able to choose the ones to help. They only want to help the ones they feel deserve help. They want the poor to show up at their churches, looking all forlorn and lost, so that they can ply their missionary ways on them. The church my parent’s go to (and I used to) does an outreach a few times a year to feed the hungry, and they require that all those getting food join in prayer before they are allowed to eat. In some ways, saying a few words to avoid starvation is a small price to pay, but I always thought it was a pretty despicable thing to do. In fact, I think that that was one of my first real partings of ways with my church as a teen.
Giving a govt check to the poor doesn’t allow the “charitable” to make those decisions as to who is worthy of their help, and who is not, and it really bothers them that someone out there might be getting something that the they [the charitable] do not believe that they [the recipient of govt assistance] deserve.
Your anecdote about a church requiring people to pray to receive charity is unusual as far as I know, or at least there’s one gigantic exception in the Catholic Church, a highly imperfect institution, but which absolutely does not do that in any case I’ve ever heard of. Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services are large charitable orgs in the US and overseas respectively and absolutely don’t do that.
Anyway I still doubt the relevance of this kind of thing, bitter ex-Christians complaining about Christians, to the actual difficult political issues, which again are not whether to have a welfare state, but how to finance its promises especially in the future and what the trade offs will be in growth, economic freedom, and other countervailing benefits to ever larger govt social spending. It’s really not a big pile of money and just some greedy people it doesn’t really belong to want to grab it instead. That’s a cartoonish view.
And the role of private charity might enter in, but tends to be relatively marginal. But let’s even pretend not and further pretend your anecdote of forced prayer to receive charity is broadly representative, though I doubt it is even among Protestants. It’s still a matter of opinion whether or not it’s moral or showing ‘good character’ to ‘work their missionary ways’ on recipients of charity. They think it is. You think it’s not. I don’t really care (what some Protestant church does if it’s legal). Which is a hint of the possible advantages for more of a role for private charity at the margin: its assumptions and methods aren’t imposed on me like the govt’s are. Though again at the margin: the realistic debate simply isn’t whether there will be welfare state or not: there will be, and it will spend $ trillions. How may trillions and where to find them is the question, and whether people are ‘caring’ is not much of the answer to that, IMO, practically speaking.
“North” is absolutely an arbitrary direction we’ve all just agreed to. In fact it became slightly more fictional in 2010. But we persist in this shared fiction because heuristics and shortcuts are easy on the brain. It’s a form of rational ignorance, which is a good thing most of the time. It allows us to abstract the details and focus on what is important.
But when you want to use shortcuts to judge people’s character, like “republican = evil” then you’ve gone away from rational ignorance and into intentional ignorance. As numerous people in this thread have pointed out, politics is too far removed from individual actions and too full of compromises to use as a reliable indicator of character. Actions indicate character. Politics do not.
Enjoy,
Steven
How is it intentional ignorance to judge people based on the policies they support, exactly? It sounds like a lot of people here are upset that other people will judge them for supporting outright evil policies, but just arbitrarily declaring that it’s ‘ignorant’ to hold someone accountable for what they support doing to other people doesn’t really hold water.
There is a distinction between claims which may be objectively proved and claims which do not admit to objective analysis.
You may be confident that certain policies are evil, but I bet I disagree with you on at least some of those judgements.
The declaration that your approach is ignorant is not an arbitrary one. It’s an observation that the model you’re using is unlikely to produce dependable results.
Now, if your position is simply, “These are my thoughts and I am entitled to hold them,” then this is both true and unassailable.
But if your position is that your model is a useful one for producing objective, verifiable truths about a person, then it’s fair to point out that your expectation is flawed.
Do you see now that the water is, in fact, held?
Just out of curiosity, would you consider nazis to be evil, or would you equivocate that as well?
I am not being snarky, just trying to get a baseline. Personally, I don’t believe in good and evil, just things that help or harm people, things that cause pleasure or pain, things that save lives or end lives. Putting a label of “good” or “evil” on them complicates things a bit, but it is something that the vast majority of people tend to do. When people say “good” I assume that they are talking about things that advance society in a peaceful and prosperous way, when people say evil, I think of things that do the opposite.
So I am just wondering, if you are kinda like me in that evil is something that is pretty arbitrary, and hard to pin down, and that is why you nitpick why people call out evil. Or, do you actually believe in an actual state of evil, and you just disagree with those on the left about what that is?
Would you consider someone who say, turns a blind eye towards a … (throw in your evil boogeymen here, murderer, rapist, child molester, telemarketer) because they promised to move your couch next week someone who enables those activities, or someone who just values getting their couch up a flight of steps?
[list=a][li]It completely ignores the reasons they support the policy, which would be driven by their character.[]It assumes the “right” and “wrong” of the policy is objective truth, instead of subjective judgment.[]It ignores that support for a policy/candidate may be tepid or reluctant, as a “lesser of two evils” choice, instead of a full throated endorsement or reflection of the person’s values.[]It ignores the fact that people change over time.[]It oversimplifies the world into “good vs evil” or “right vs wrong” instead of shades of grey.[/list]Basically it’s all built on the fallacy of thinking that “right thinking people think alike”. This is the same fundamental error of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. It fails to understand that two different people can look at the same situation and, both being perfectly rational in their own moral and ethical framework, come to different conclusions. Ayn Rand famously said that “there is no such thing as a contradiction. If you believe there is a contradiction then re-examine your premises, you’ll find that one of them is wrong.” She then went on to do a lot of things that others on the pro-politics-as-character side do, which is to say things like “if you don’t see this policy is X-ist then you’re being willfully ignorant.” The Objectivist term for this is “evasion” and it generally refers to refusing to agree on the premises or logical argument. In practice it is used for anyone who disagrees with someone else because in Objectivist philosophy the ego is praised and someone can elevate themselves to the position of supreme arbiter of right and wrong and anyone who disagrees is either a fool(not reasoning correctly, or ignorant of the correct premises) or smart enough to know better, but being willfully ignorant by choosing to ignore the facts(evasion).[/li]
I generally consider Objectivism to be a bankrupt system for living your life and making moral decisions. I also consider the shorthand proposed by the OP a bankrupt system as well.
Enjoy,
Steven
The thing I find most interesting is that the side of the political spectrum, the left, which is a) much less likely to agree with Rand about anything (at least if they realize they are) and b) much more likely traditionally to say ‘there’s no absolute right and wrong, it’s all relative’ is the side now much more likely to try to gain leverage in political discussions by claiming their positions are ‘morally right’ and the right’s are ‘morally wrong’.
Exceptions to this rule can be named, but that’s what they are. And as I said in earlier post, some political issues are inherently moral (there would be nothing much to talk about wrt abortion if everyone agreed the practice was moral or had no relevance to morality). But if an issue isn’t inherently moral (eg. how big and intrusive should the govt be?) it’s now very predictable which side is more likely to appeal to morality in a debate. Even though their members typically don’t believe in an absolute moral code, or necessarily even the concept of right and wrong. The idea must be something like ‘it works politically, so why not continue?’ But it’s debatable how well it’s working politically.