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Main Paineframe posted:Personally, I feel that a large part of this conversation is driven by overly focusing on presidential elections specifically, which I suspect is largely driven by the overwhelming media focus on presidential elections, as well as a tendency for people to imagine that they're more politically involved than they actually are. You're equivocating here (and you basically admit it). Given that the president has the capacity to (almost) unilaterally set foreign policy, that local/state governments have no say at all, and that the senate has a very limited say only in some specific circumstances, it follows that the mechanisms you are proposing for effecting bottom-up change only apply to domestic policy. If those mechanisms are only operative with respect to domestic policy, then it is in fact the case that the only (significant) chance to impact foreign policy is a vote in the presidential election. Ergo, if one wants to effect change in foreign policy, withholding one's vote or voting for some alternative in the presidential election is - and this basically follows from what you've said - the only way to exert any kind of leverage over foreign policy. Edit: Just to be perfectly clear, the equivocation consists in making a point in the first two paragraphs which applies only to domestic policy, then performing a sleight-of-hand in the last paragraph where you almost acknowledge that your argument doesn't apply to foreign policy, before finally using a point that only applies to domestic policy ("People act like their only chance to impact anything is deciding whether or not to vote in presidential elections, and that's so profoundly wrong") to condemn anyone who withholds their vote in a presidential election. Gnumonic fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 23:23
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Vire posted:I know the trolley problem is a meme but the reason people use it is that people don't seem to understand that inaction is also an action it has nothing to do about actually picking what's best its designed to show that if you do nothing you are still responsible. We can argue about how much responsibility that is like maybe its a very small amount barely anything even as you were not the person who tied them to the tracks etc but I would have to actually hear a convincing argument on why if you had the choice to do something that may kill less people its not your responsibility to engage in the question because people will still die. This isn't really correct. Specifically: "reason people use it is that people don't seem to understand that inaction is also an action". Well, maybe that's why people (who I suppose are only familiar with it from memes) use it, but the trolley problem isn't supposed to be a knock-down argument that inaction amounts to action. That you are responsible for a failure to act is the consequentialist position. (Edit: I should have said: That you have a responsibility to act is the consequentialist position, apologies, running on like 2 hours of sleep) A deontologist (or at least a Kantian, I don't know that much about non-Kantian forms of deontology) would say that without action there can't be a maxim (I guess "intent" is an OK gloss, what exactly a maxim is and how it figures in Kantian moral psychology is complicated), and without a maxim/intent there just isn't anything that can be evaluated morally, i.e. such that someone could bear responsibility for it. The trolley problem, in its original academic non-meme context, is supposed to be a starting point for discussion, not a refutation of deontology or utilitarianism or whatever. Honestly I think it's a mistake to understand the problem as primarily concerned with responsibility. Deontological accounts of moral responsibility almost always involve an aforementioned complex account of moral psychology. Consequentialist accounts of responsibility are... consequentialist - i.e. they tend to avoid thinking of responsibility as if it's some metaphysical fact that someone is responsible, and instead focus on the utility of ascribing blame. Or, put another way: Even if you failed to pull the lever, there are a bunch of ways for a consequentialist to coherently argue that you shouldn't be blamed or held responsible for it. For example: Most consequentalists are aware that, outside of contrived thought experiments, acting in accordance with a deontological moral stance tends to bring about good consequences, so severely blaming or punishing someone for making the wrong choice in a highly contrived situation is not likely to maximize overall positive outcomes. Though you're using "responsible/responsibility" in two different senses here, and perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point. In "if you do nothing you are still responsible" you mean, I take it, "if you do nothing you can still be blamed". But when you say "if you had the choice to do something that may kill less people its not your responsibility to engage", you're using "responsibility" in a way that's more-or-less synonymous with "obligation" or "duty". Gnumonic fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 03:21
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GlyphGryph posted:That's an effective argument that Biden is morally reprehensible. He really doesn't need to do that. The rough shape of his argument is perfectly coherent (& would be recognized as such by anyone who had any experience studying ethics or moral philosophy): 1. Biden is enabling & facilitating a genocide. 2. Voting for someone enabling & facilitating a genocide is an intrinsically morally wrong action (3. One shouldn't ever perform intrinsically morally wrong actions) Conclusion: One shouldn't vote for Biden GlyphGryph posted:Better in what way? How? Why? There's no way for me to evaluate whether your statement is reality based or coherent because I have no way to determine what assumptions and values underly it, what mechanisms might lead to the actions in question better serving those values, whether the actual components are factual or reality based, or the scope in which the assertion would even apply. This is a bizarre objection. If someone thinks that certain actions are intrinsically morally wrong (and most people do - even if you disagree that this action isn't intrinsically morally wrong, I doubt you'd seriously argue that, e.g., raping a baby to death to save 10 lives could ever be morally obligatory), then not performing the morally wrong action is, directly, the only coherent way to "serve those values". Throughout your responses in this thread, you consistently presuppose that the only way of justifying an action is in terms of the consequences that it brings about. That view is known as consequentialism. There are MANY arguments against that view. (That link is just a brief overview, if you're seriously interested I can find you at least 100 academic papers with specific arguments against various formulations of consequentialism). Unless you are going to address at least *some* of those those objections and put forth a positive argument for your (extreme, relative to actual moral theories) form of consequentialism, you are not warranted in demanding that every participant in the discussion justify their position in consequentialist terms. I doubt you actually believe in the position you're presupposing. If you truly believe that only consequences matter (this is important: almost everyone agrees that they matter to some extent, that's different than the claim that they're the ONLY thing that has any moral value), consider the following thought experiment: You're a German in the 1930s who's been drafted. You receive an offer to become the administrator of a concentration camp. You are personally opposed to the holocaust, and you know that if you don't take the position, it will go to someone else who would enthusiastically murder as many innocents as possible. You reason that if you were to take the offer, you could prevent more death than anyone else likely to take the position, but you would still be forced to order the deaths of a large number of innocent people. Let's just assume that if you try to defect or desert, you will likely be killed, and a more committed Nazi will run the camp anyway. (This is a riff on one of the most famous objections to consequentialism) If you keep to the assumptions in the experiment, consequentialism says that it's morally obligatory to administer the concentration camp in a circumstance where you will do so in a less brutal manner than any of the alternatives. Maybe you really do think that. It's perfectly coherent & rational to do so. But most people - even people who are very sympathetic to consequentalism - have a pretty strong intuition that you shouldn't be morally obliged to do that. Compelling someone to engage in brutally dehumanizing killing seems to violate their dignity as a human being, even if it does bring about the best consequences. If you agree that it does violate their dignity, then you've admitted that some things other than consequences have moral value or worth. You effectively concede that some actions have an element of wrongness that is intrinsic to the action itself, regardless of the consequences. You might still think that consequences are very important. You may even argue that, in this particular case, the harm to the person's dignity is outweighed by the magnitude of the consequences. But you have to admit that dignity is part of the moral calculus here, and ergo must be open to the possibility of actions that are so intrinsically damaging to human dignity as to outweigh the consequences. Here's another one: Suppose that you're a judge in 1800s America. A black man is brought before you on specious murder charges, and a racist mob has formed outside the courthouse, threatening a riot that will assuredly cause many innocent deaths if you do not find the man guilty and sentence him to execution. You are certain that the man is not guilty. What should you do? (Again this is a riff on a famous objection to consequentialism that has been presented in dozens of forms, I don't even know what the original is) A pure consequentialist would say that you should hang the innocent man to appease the racist mob. You sacrifice one life to save many lives. The facts that the mob is racist & that the man being tried is innocent are strictly irrelevant - in consequentialism, the intentions of agents do not have any intrinsic moral value (because they aren't consequences). Again maybe you think that a judge in that circumstance would be morally obligated to execute an innocent black man to appease a racist mob. But I'm pretty sure you don't think that. You probably think that killing innocent people to appease racists is wrong - even if doing so would prevent a larger amount of death/destruction/harm. That is: You probably think that killing innocent people to appease racists is an intrinsically repugnant action which should probably never be performed! It's certainly true that neither of those thought experiments are straightforwardly analogous to deciding whether to vote for Biden. But hopefully the examples at least make clear why an analysis that focuses solely on the negative consequences of Trump winning relative to the (presumably) less negative consequences of Biden winning misses something, especially when you're engaged in dialogue with someone who believes that "voting for someone who vocally supports / facilitates / enables a genocide" is intrinsically wrong. Maybe you disagree that voting for a genocide supporter/enabler/facilitator is intrinsically wrong. Maybe you agree that it is intrinsically wrong but think that the consequences of Trump are so dire that they outweigh the intrinsic wrongness. Those are positions that could possibly lead to a productive debate. But you are certainly not entitled to presuppose the truth of a moral framework which, I believe I've shown here, is subject to serious objections and is itself a matter for debate.
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May 9, 2024 00:13
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