(no subject)

[proximoception]

I find incoherent Zizek's critique of Harris' argument, in The End of Faith, that torture should be permissible on utilitarian principles - i.e. in cases where there's reason to think the harm done while torturing will be less than the harm diverted by whatever info's obtained. Zizek claims this makes other people objects, not Neighbors, thus disregarding "the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject." But math can be done using infinites, after all - allowing X number of people to die abandons X numbers of infinite abysses to implode (or evanesce or whatever) for the sake of not harming X+1 minus X. That's so obvious even he must see it - he must ultimately mean some kind of sacredness should be respected. Which of course it should, but that doesn't help with questions of setting things right when it hasn't been, when questions of suffering in abyssal subjectivities are live. Harris wasn't arguing for punitive torture, after all. So how can this line of thought not fall apart? Unless he's suggesting, which he never seems to be, that "suffering shares the nature of infinity" (Wordsworth) but death is no big deal. Is Zizek an idiot? I don't know enough about Zizek, though he did print a good piece on European atheism in the wake of this that put him a lot closer to Harris et al. than to (e.g.) Eagleton and Mieville.

Personally, I accept that Harris is correct, but would argue that this is never a right we should cede to Them, the people that would be in charge of the permitted torture. We need it to not become a precedent, in fact need the punishment of people caught ordering and committing it to be the precedent, not because torture could never hypothetically work to prevent greater harm, but because we're too likely to be lied to by those in charge about the circumstances warranting the torture. Like we are about war, of course, but the threat of being able to wage war is probably foundational for states, hence until states have imploded or evanesced is a power necessarily yielded to the (delegated) ruling Few, whereas torture is not - unless you include any form of imprisonment under the torture umbrella.

We can of course vividly imagine examples where a state's very identity is threatened by knowledge withheld by some single, torturable individual - someone who knows the location of a nuclear weapon set to wipe out central D.C. or Manhattan, is the standard thought problem. But we can even more vividly imagine, having seen it, how a state's very identity can be threatened by the mission creep of treating situations that can lead to that hypothetical situation as being on par with it. And of course since the criminal code is ultimately aimed at a) disincentivizing dire misbehavior and, relatedly, b) empowering discretionary suppression of dire misbehavior, if That Situation ever does happen then presumably legal disincentives, and whatever law enforcers are on hand, will not stop the law-breaking torturer. The possible disincentives won't outweigh the obvious, exigent incentives to torture, for one thing, and any law enforcers in the room will likely help. If it can be made at all clear to anyone what you meant to accomplish by the torture, the Greater Good defense will be a shoe-in. Utilitarianism's built into, or rather laid under, the law already.

Hell, there should probably be a jury system in place to decide whether we should go to war. Alongside every other control we've been ignoring in the U.S. for sixty years.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Right -- I agree completely. I would say: torture should be illegal, but if you're president and there really is a chance to save NY by torturing, you'd better do it, illegal or not. You can make the case to the jury (for nullification) later. Sometimes you have to do illegal things (Lincoln, for example). But they should still be illegal, and risk big trouble. There should be a better way to adjudicate this. But there isn't. So I don't think a legal body of any sort should be permitted to decide torture is okay before the fact (which is what Alan Dershowitz wants). But I do think that a jury should be able to nullify the prosecution after the fact.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

I think he and I are going to keep arguing until past face-blueing. Someone should just put up a poll that says "I agree: A) Torture under certain circumstances should be permissable. B) There is something about torture which should not be permissable under any circumstances"

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

This and the foregoing both presume torture works.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Just that it might, I think.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Regimes that employ it pretty inevitably dump it. Regimes that are not very concerned about any kind of damage to perceived enemies. I think even the Romans disdained torture because it got bad information? You (the one who could employ it) have to actively discipline yourself against it, because you just waste resources. It's so attractive. The "might" bewilders, confounds, fascinates. It's the tar baby and the briar patch. Hell, it's like starting a war in Afghanistan when you're not Persian.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

But if an instance comes where it's your only resource - an absolutely horrible, untrustworthy one, but the last left?

Virtual principle isn't principle, and people know it. I'm not saying this fascination you identify won't cause horrible problems till the end of days, I'm just saying no discipline will get rid of it. Whereas talking might, talking about exactly where the exceptions might be and exactly what the many situations that can mislead us into thinking they're those exceptions when they aren't might be.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Okay, but then doesn't the talking get technical? Don't we have to become interrogators to have this conversation profitably?

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

And here's the other thing: can you imagine a society that would convict for torture? Has anyone? And past conviction, sentence and actually punish? So when we all know there's no consequence, but that the law may be called in to anoint it, the absence of consequence, and demand of the spectators the conclusion that something happened - what happens to the law?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

What kind of torture do you mean? Torture by an authority figure of someone generally perceived as an outgroup wrongdoer?

You're suggesting even having laws against such torture won't deter anyone once we all see they won't be enforced? That would be quite a problem, but I'm not sure what would solve it. The institution of a 'no torture ever' principle, I guess you're suggesting, but how, if not by law? Pass another law having schoolchildren chant 'no torture' in lieu of the Pledge of Allegiance? Principles put in place to avoid slippery slopes are utilitarian, hence not really principles at all, and people eventually notice that and we wind up back at this conversation - so I'm not sure how we could convince people that torture must never-not-ever occur.

"We need to convince the majority we must never torture out of fear that a majority will always secretly believe we must torture." That may well be true. But it sounds very difficult.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

"Is Zizek an idiot?"

Zizek will do anything to be surprising, while still maintaining respectable academic-leftist credentials. I liked The Sublime Object of Ideology the first couple of times I read it, but each book and essay is just a rehash of the same attempts at clever outrageousness. So eventually it looks like idiocy, yes.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Sounds like Fish, Eagleton etc. etc.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is pretty much the same thing as the usual utilitarian position on slavery -- it doesn't matter that in some hypothetical world utilitarianism might condone slavery, because in the actual world where ethics happens we understand enough about human behaviour and the frailty of legal protections to know that the likelihood of benign slavery actually working as such is negligible.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

I'd think this would be an argument against what he is saying here. Sure, it's possible that torture may in some perfect world be defensible, but in the real world, the rocky world where others live, it is never clear-cut, never completely logical, never completely defensible.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

As usual, I disagree. While pragmatism is useful, the little hairs on my arms get raised in apprehension whenever I hear pragmatism being used in ethics. Ethics is discrete from pragmatism, ethics is irrational while pragmatism is supposedly rational but very easily dissolves into ideology. I've never read Zizek (and don't much care to) but that 'abyss of infinity' line probably means, yes, a sacricity, a sacredness about the individual. Intellectuals avoid using the term 'sacred' because it is obviously irrational, indefensible, not based in utility. But pragmatism hijacks the Sacred too: "Why would we torture the would-be bomber?" you ask the pragmatist. Well, because wach life is sacred (in that it is irreducible, irretrievable and irreproducible). "Sacred" becomes the ultimate utility, because a life is sacred it is worth more than anything except another life (or two, depending on who you ask). But what if, you continue asking, this bomber was bombing people with the purpose of saving even more people (e.g. Hiroshima)? What makes this less reprehensible? In this case we would be bombing an Enemy, and therefore does the enemy has the right to torture us? The pragmatist argument can continue like this ad infinitum, eventually the world entire is both saved and damned by one act which is to be prevented or pre-prevented or pre-pre-prevented. No truly rational answer to this can be given, weighing a world against a world. The answer given is thus irrational: in the original case the man is bombing our friends and is therefore our enemy, and thus can be disrespected, tortured, even killed. In the Hiroshima instance the man is bombing our enemies.

Why is it we want to protect our friends more? Is this pragmatic? We are not bound by blood or even, in this day and age, economics. Our neighbors and friends are neighbors and friends for irrational reasons (proximity, history) and we want to protect them for irrational reasons (pride, nationalism, ideology). You want to torture the bomber not for utilitarian reasons but for ideological ones: my friends matter more than yours. Which is pragmatic in in a local, un-universal, utterly selfish way. It is an action which gets you what you want, and ignores the wants of others not like you. It is pragmatic but it is certainly not ethical.

The main problem is that we are a culture dominated by Reason but this has not made us any more reasonable in our decisions. All it has done is made it easier for us to excuse bad behavior. Today we act disrespectful to those who are not our neighbors and say it is pragmatism and not xenophobia. While tomorrow we give preference to our neighbors and say it is humane. A humanist would give equal preference to family and to foreigners. (Isn't almost the whole of pre-renaissance literature about what happens to those who are disrespectful to strangers?) A pragmatist would not give his family more preference than a foreigner. What we have now is a watered-down pragmatism, a pragmatism which allows people to be irrational and selfish as well as socially consistent.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Well, I've read that twice and still have no idea what you're talking about.

If you're saying torture, as used, is just used to find information that lets us kill a bunch of other people who want to kill 'us' for wanting to kill them for wanting to kill us etc., then yes, that torture would be morally equivocal at best. Any standard of morality that doesn't include the well being of (minimally) all living humans and all humans likely to live is a sucky standard.

Notice the emphasis I put on the thought problem: we can imagine a situation that's different, in which some ridiculous amount of destruction is likely to occur if we don't prevent it, and the sort of destruction that, bad as it is in itself, might also lead to (e.g.) even more intense fighting among the relevant parties, hence further destruction - and with no rational reason to think that that kind of war will lead to a better peace after. You don't go around slapping people so as to have a more enlightened peace after the reciprocations end: at almost any given point, we can see that less violence will lead to more peace. But exceptions are possible. I'm not saying they're likely. I'm in fact saying that they are unlikely enough that most cases where someone represents one as happening will turn out to be lies. Hence the need to never allow persons in authority to decide to torture except in cases of a clear greater good, as determined by prosecutors, judges, juries - or they all go to prison.

You can say that ethical valuation is irrational - that's a loaded statement, but fine. But he negotiation of ethical impulses, once we know what they are and that we're determined to act on them, will inevitably benefit by rational decision-making, rather than whatever the other kind is.

Notice I exactly did not attack the notion of sacredness, but simply pointed out it can't always apply even on its own terms without leading to gross sins of omission.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

You're still using practical terms, imagining a world of future peace, etc. Future peace for whom? The entire world? For those that agree with you? What if you're wrong? I am saying that there is no circumstance where you would torture any human being for anything but ideological reasons, i.e. because you believe you are more right than he is. Maybe you are more right than he is, there's no way to know for sure. But don't pretend that the decision is practical, rational and without ideology.

I did notice that you accepted the sacredness of human life, that's part of my problem with your argument. I accept it too but that is an irrational choice, it's one of the arbitrary axioms you have to decide on before the beginning of the rational decision-making process. It's not based on any real evidence. It's ideological. You could just as easily say "Human life is valued by contribution to a society" or "Human life is valued by knowledge" or "Human life is valued less than the infinitely more human lives yet to be" or "Every believer's life is sacred."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Confront the thought problem. It is something that could happen - people who have written they'd like to set off a nuclear bomb in an American city have been caught trying to buy them, after all. You somehow have a person who knows where the bomb will be. Do you permit the bomb to go off? You do not need to think in terms of future peace to not want thousands of people to die. This is not ideological, or if it is it is based on the entirely ubiquitous 'ideology' of basic compassion which I certainly hope you share - hell, I imagine in most situations the hypothetical terrorist would. And how is it ideological to disagree with someone? Especially if the someone is stupid or cruel or misguided? Are you suggesting no one can be more right than another, i.e. moral relativism?

I don't think anyone has to 'accept' the sacredness of human life - which I don't actually accept as phrased, by the way, I was just pointing out how Zizek's take is illogical on its own terms. But anyway beliefs are not chosen; in a limited sense they can be assumed for one's own comfort, but to the extent one is dumb enough to adopt a belief for that reason, it's one's needs for comfort that will dictate the choice. But to me these things are logical extrapolations from some biological givens. We can phrase moral impulses in terms of (a small set of possible) arbitrary criteria, but that doesn't mean the impulses are random. They are common to all cultures and eras - ideology is what limits compassion, and to some extent what structures it, but it's not what creates it.

As for your specific, supposedly random criteria: Contributions to a society are valuable insofar as they make humans safer and happier, as is knowledge. Presumably the smart thing to do is make those efforts that keep both us and our children safer and happier - as a major source of human happiness is the projected welfare of descendants that's not all that hard. Believers' lives are no more sacred than anyone else's, and if they have a book saying otherwise their books is stupid. Which we already knew because they're believers.

You can argue that compassion is itself an irrational impulse, and self-preservation too. Fine. So what? I have them and you have them and every other person I have ever met has them. To differing degrees, sure, and sometimes with nasty restrictions on them - the less educated and more damaged, the nastier. So what again? Happiness, broadly defined (and fading into 'health,' which it so closely tracks) is the only standard we can refer to while making decisions as neighbors, citizens, human beings that isn't based on externally-imposed falsehoods. It's hard to argue how much we should sacrifice our own for that of others, but very easy to see that anything we do for others should be for their happiness, rather than for the next world or the master race. Since those are lies.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

Compassion may be a given, but what is universal is a compassion for one's friends, one's family, one's neighbors. Equally universal is a desire to see one's enemies punished. Neither of these impulses should be the basis for any rational argument.

Sure I would want to see my friends protected from bombs. But I know that if this were war (and a jihadist certainly thinks this is war) then the death of enemies in the face of progress might seem, to my compassion, permissable. A jihadist is trying to protect his people, and the countless generations of his people to come, from unjust hegemony. Yet, you say torture should be permissable while murder should not. Why is that? Because my people are the ones being harmed? Because the ends justify the means? That way fascism lies, and no matter how you try to bury it under committees it's still fascism (benign, inert fascism). And the only surprising thing is that I'm the only one taking the time out to point out how you're wrong.

There should be limits to what we can and should do, no matter our intentions. What no human being should be allowed to say is "I am more right than you, therefore I should be able to treat you like an object."



notes: 1) Your critiques of the random axioms are all opinions, and although I agree with most, I would not put them in any supposedly rational argument unless I wanted to sound like a preacher yelling down from a place of moral certitude. 2) Educated people are no more moral than uneducated people. If anything the opposite. I come from uneducated poor people and let me tell you we tip very well.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I don't even know where to start with this. It seems to me that you're not making sense and not listening. First thing you should do is go figure out whether you're a moral relativist or moral absolutist, I'd say, as you alternately sound like one then the other. The next is actually read what I'm saying (what is this murder crap - when did I even mention it?). After that actually confront (answer) the thought problem, in which the intentions of the jihadist do not matter in the slightest, just the foreseeably likely results of their actions. After that look up the definition of fascism.

If you agree with those of my opinions you say you do, you probably do so for reasons. You seem to view opinions as irrational - and also put an extremely strange burden on the concept of rationality because of some pet peeve of yours.

Less educated people are likelier to tip better and support the social safety net because they or those they know well have directly benefited from tips and welfare services. However, less educated people are also more likely to be murderers, rapists, domestic abusers, racists, sexists, homophobes, gang members, xenophobes, and harmers of animals. Which doesn't mean large numbers of them do any of that, but that was the sense in which I cited 'less educated' as a correlate of having nasty restrictions on natural feelings of compassion.

But the compassion thing in general is a near-approach to a valid critique and deserves a longer answer. It's actually quite a complex matter how in-group limitations on compassion are no longer rational, leaving only the compassion, by default, for those able to realize this. But the mess that's the rest of your argument needs to be cleaned up before that's moved on to.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

I am saying a number of things, mainly because I disagree with you on a number of levels, and I'm sorry if you're not following it. As for moral relativism and absolutism I am coming out against any mixing of the practical and the moral. It's like trying subtract the color blue from the color orange. It becomes meaningless.

I did answer your thought experiment. A jihadist decides to commit mass murder, you decide to commit torture, you want to save your friends, he waants to save his country, you both have ideological aims and not rational ones. You do not know that if in torturing this person you will end up hurting more people down the line. You have only your hope. Both you and the jihadist would be morally reprehensible for the action.

Saying that the decision is "practical" does not save it. You could say that bombing new york is "practical" from a radical moslem standpoint, that would not save it either.


I agree with some of your stated opinions because of my own opinions, which are opinions, in that they are unproven, untested and based on things like hope and faith. I hope that all of humanity can act like one brotherhood. I do not know if this is possible. I don't know if this is even desirable, or if the yearing for this would only lead to some soviet dystopia. I would never claim that because of my held opinion I had the right to take a life or imprison a mind.

You also have your own definition of "educated," since, for example, the mess of racists who support the Tea Party has on average more education than the average democratic supporter. Or are you equating "educated" with "moral" again?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I don't even know what you mean about mixing the practical and moral. You'll need to explain this less metaphorically.

Let's alter the thought experiment so that you no longer think I want to save my little buddies. Suppose the apprehended person is Dick Cheney, who has a nuclear bomb hidden in Tehran if it isn't found and disarmed. It's hypothetically possible that this nuking of Tehran will stop nuclear war in the future - be impossible to disprove, after all. But do you stop him?

I haven't yet used the word practical, pragmatic, you'll notice, though I'm not sure what the problem with those is either.

I do not care about any 'standpoint' that does not make sense, except to talk sense into the person holding it until it's replaced. The radical Muslim standpoint is based on lies, and I can tell you exactly what many of lies are. except I wouldn't bother because you already know them. You know the Christian lies, the non-radical Muslim lies, the Jewish lies, the Hindu lies, the racist lies, the Dick Cheney lies. These are not 'standpoints' in the sense of being different, equally valid vantage points of some vast, dark truth in an inaccessible middle.

How is anything I'm saying based on the hope that humanity can act in brotherhood? I don't understand why you're even bringing that up.

College educations are getting pretty worthless in some quarters, I agree, so conceivably having a BA might not be proof against Tea Partitude (though I highly suspect you'll find that correlation if you just look at the demographic). Anything above a BA and there is one hell of a correlation, though. And obviously countries whose school systems are better than ours will tend to have governments - both as cause and effect - diametrically opposed to the Tea Party philosophy in most respects.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

^ white demographic

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Is it - it's kind of rude of me to be romping in late with this, but torture's this thing I've been interested and pursued, and so I just rankly want to toss out that -

the scenario of short-time and great prospective slaughter is the one least approachable with torture. You're the person who's got the code. You don't have to wait very long. There's very little time you have to hang on for to succeed.

Almost any technique that would get you to talk would put you into the kind of state where you'd say anything, and frankly, you can help yourself into that state.

We have this idea that a certain kind of communication continues, clear, within the torture scenario - that the tortured person will understand the situation as we do, understand pain as we want him or her to, and will respond physiologically in a way that we can both trust and understand.

It's how little any of that turns out to line up that's funded all the drug studies. And in fact, that's funding the work into amplifying subvocalized thought. We work on getting ways to make people betray themselves to our advantage, because violence doesn't do it.

I sometimes think that we cling to the ethical hash-out about torture, because for the duration of the conversation, we have the comfort of the idea that torture works. And isn't there something of the bargaining we all tend to, in this? I only have to go down to the crossroads, and the devil etc.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Not rude at all - you step in just at the traditional point principle vs. utility was going to reduce to unprincipled, unuseful mutual throttling.

Do you, as jury member, convict the person who tortured, in either version of the thought problem presented above? Because I don't. Even if there's little chance one can get the information needed by torture, the damage caused is dwarfed by what will be averted if it somehow works.

Yes, the thought problem will never occur - but any conditions that could hypothetically violate principle destroy it as principle, mandate its replacement by something virtual, like a law the enforcement of which can take into account special circumstances (such as is any law, under a jury system).

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I would convict, because it doesn't work. I would do pretty much anything to interpose myself between people and their fantasy that violence gets information.

Violence in a stressful situation is really soothing. The rest is bullshit, the rest is a story that lets you do this thing you're really cued to want.

I think it's quite possible that we really will be able to get information from people using techniques that amplify subvocalized thoughts, or that in others ways invade people's minds - and basically rape them. I think it's possible that a person interrogated that way would have physical sequelae, could be injured seriously in the long term, could be an indefinite suicide risk, etc.

I think, in other words, these would be successful methods that would cause significant damage.

Would I favor conviction then, is the question. Which I'll punt til I'm back from breakfast.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Suppose it did. Suppose the violence got the information.

Thinking torture cannot work is really soothing too in its way, no?

You're completely right that violent fantasies tend to supplant thought here. But we can't round 'tend to' up to 'invariably do' without censoring. And the problem with censorship, as with touching up a photo, is that people eventually catch on that it's happened. Same goes for the (awesomely utilitarian) notion of convicting the torturer not because you would have done otherwise but to send a message about torture. I think I might do the same, now that the option's been revealed to me, but the forcing of the point raises the possibility that a solution forcing no points at all, however difficult, might have been possible in its place.

You defer the very possibility of successful torture into the future, but I'm not sure we can. 'It doesn't work' is probably quite just as an attack on the torture actually being done in our name, since false positives waste resources and torture produces tons of them - it doesn't work overall, we mean. But for the thought problem? Even the possibility that it might work, even the possibility that the evidence that torture doesn't work at all is wrong, would be enough to mandate its use if all other options had dried up, given the number of deaths about to happen.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_mayer

Schrodinger's question, maybe. I think the posing of the thought problem itself can be, basically, immoral. The answer only ever goes one way, because either you allow an imaged other to do it, or admit that you yourself would - at least, I don't see any merit in limiting my own prospective future acts. NB the inevitable referenced Stanford Prison Experiment - in a situation where allowing torture has been beforehand valorized.

Asking the question praises torture, and tells a certain story in a certain way with effects I know to be bad. The only way to resist the outcome seems to be to say no to the question, but I'm sure that's not true, either.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Every time one has the conversation about the one-time-incident, I feel, pretty strongly, one puts the actual, encountered situation in blurrier and more distant view. Actually, this is backed up - we're primed to notice exceptions. Exceptions are where we spend our mental time. While I'm spending my mental time here, I'm actively distorting my understanding of the real situation.

I think I'm morally on the hook for participating in that, or for encouraging other people to. Even though pursuing the question falls into this category of things that sounds so defensible - "pursuing questions."

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I don't think we're pursuing questions whimsically off to the side while the ranch burns. I think this is the kind of question that makes us see the lay of the land, hence where water might be.

People will always come up with the thought problem independently because there's room for it. It is the correct answer to, "We must never torture" - a valid objection to what is being presented as an absolute when it isn't one, an objection and not a trick. It's true it ties up the energy of the anti-torture and ambivalent people to have this conversation, but the conversation actually has an end. There's a reason andalus is going insane. Going from following rules to seeking maximized benefit is the single most alarming shift possible in ethics, and the one likeliest to drive people nuts. Because to assess benefit you really do have to see everything (impossible as that it), and when rules are required you have to establish where they begin and end (hence can never again rely on them as psychic ordering principles for yourself).

If we set things up so that an alarm bell sounds whenever we get near the thought problem, an alarm that tells us we're not able to think right here, that to even be heading here is irresponsible, to even think about this is to harm others, among other things we're doing is we're saying rules can be absolute in general. Who's to say which rules can be absolute in general without reference to what's most beneficial, and how can we know what's most beneficial without having analyzed and compared the possible rules?

What you're saying would be Grand Inquisitor logic if you weren't folding yourself into it - by basically saying you can feel the Dark Side eating away at you while you even think about this. I think I'd actually prefer Grand Inquisitor logic, because at least in that the Inquisitors take a minute while visiting their Jesuses to remember why and where they made their rule. The Inquisitor would pace out every inch of the area where the no torture principle logically founders so as to know exactly how to position the alarm bell. In yours, it's like we can't know why we can't know certain things, we can only know that it's no good to: all the mind's hallways get flooded with blood when we start to know them. The alarm you want to institute is somehow already there.

Your concerns about the uses made of the bomb scenario are not misplaced. It has been used, will continue to be used, will continue to do damage. You can throw it out the window for yourself personally (probably to some cost, I've been saying), but I don't think you can uproot and discard it on the behalf of others, even if that would be of great benefit to them. You simply don't have that power.

And it's obvious I have no power either, pursuing the other route of clarifying what the problem is, where its importance starts, where it ends - which you'd be much better at if you ever took this up, since you have such a vivid sense of how people are liable to misinterpret it (seriously, the things you're saying, right before each gets veered toward the self-silencing taboo, are exactly what's called for). But if anything ever does get through to the 24-mesmerized, it will be reasonable arguments based on what's in front of us. I don't think you can fight fear with fear - that's pretty much the mess we've been in these nine years.

Been following this exchange with interest.

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

D'you know Jonathan Dancy's work on the role of thought experiments in ethics? I don't offer it as a solution, per se, merely a way of metathinking how this debate has gone...

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Who of us was being Danciest?

I'm not sure what to make of moral particularism, from what little I've just seen. Is it just utilitarianism in practice - constantly trying to get a new handle on where the good might be found at each fresh decision point?

Or would it come out against how I never question the principle that one should always question principles.

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

Who of us was being Danciest?

I don't think that's quite how I would frame the question.

I'm not sure what to make of moral particularism, from what little I've just seen. Is it just utilitarianism in practice - constantly trying to get a new handle on where the good might be found at each fresh decision point?

Yes & no. Variability certainly matters to it a lot, particularly the variability of reasons (its theory of reason does not see morality/ethics as a special case, only one point in a constellation of reasons/beliefs.) Like utilitarianism, it is contingent, but its contingency is more extreme in that it argues against principle entire. (Utilitarianism, as you've pointed out, is deeply involved with the principle of maximization of benefit, which is maybe one of the few principles qua principles able to give you a range of choices almost as large as (but not quite) those of moral particularism. So I could easily see an argument in favor of stopping at the singly principled utilitarianism and having done.) Again, I'm not bringing it up as prescription but as a kind of descriptive condiment.

Or would it come out against how I never question the principle that one should always question principles

Assuredly! For a moral particularist questions every principle except the principle that the use of principles is to demonstrate that one should never act on principle.

[toctoc.livejournal.com]

Shutting up now.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I think this is tangential enough to go on with - though all I have at the moment is a prophecy of the moral atomists of the 2020s, who will question even the principle that one should never act on principle.

I'm not really seeing how there can be situations where one shouldn't maximize benefit, though if this viewpoint includes all decision-making perhaps it's just saying there will be times when we're less moral. But I should probably look to Dancy himself for the explanation to that. I think I smell Davidson behind this school.