Friday, August 7, 2020

21 Dumb & Boring Reflections on Politics and Moral Philosophy

(Don't take me too seriously here...)

1
Politics was a mistake.

2
Rates of happiness or depression and their link to a political system or conditions are not a good argument for why something is bad or doesn't work. I'd rather people are not happy for bad reasons than good ones! (Perhaps the utilitarian replies: "then what is a good reason?" Bah.)

3
Rejecting something because it is given is the same mistake as advancing something new for the sake of being new. Worse, the new thing taken on is even more arbitrary than the tradition.

4
Call me a class reductionist all you want but it really is the most important vector in political decision making. I think we should just give people money. 'Some of us are still Marxists you know!'

5
'The Personal Is Political' while trivially true in some distant sense, is a waste of energy. Especially since it is usually used to justify bringing politics into the most banal and peaceful corners of everyday life. Let people enjoy themselves! The government has actual hard power and there is actual political activism you can do for actual people that are actually poor.

6
Separate the aesthetic from the political. Normatively, the political badges we wear are not for show. You might not like it, but actual praxis is pretty boring!



7
The overlap between professed or diagnosed ideology and the real world is woefully thin. People think when they read those ideological authors that they are putting the, THEY LIVE (1988) glasses on - to pierce through to the truth. Interpretative tyranny ensues—its false consciousness all the way down!

8
Marxist extraction of surplus value is not bad in-itself (maybe, if you accept his strict formulation), it is only bad once it reaches a certain extent. (The idea that the concept of value is best understood as deflationary, an appraisal about a state of affairs, is attractive to me here.)

9
Commentators coined the term 'state-capitalism' (regarding China) as it is supposed to be something of a contradiction. This is only because of the discomfort they feel in predicating of anything 'capitalism', not in the trappings of liberal democracy. It is no contradiction to be both capitalistic and authoritarian; Cold War dualities need not hold.

10
The brutality of inalienable institutions (or binding algorithms) is that of the dictator, with none of the human error.

11
The moral judgement we might make from reading someone's rap sheet of good and bad behaviour will be vastly different and distorted from the judgement we make of that same person having seen each and every act ourselves. (Which is right feels obvious, but is not.)

12
Intentions overwhelm behaviour in our own view of who we are. Other's behaviour overwhelms their intentions in our evaluations of who they are.

13
The trolley problem seems like a dilemma because we focus on the act, not the character of the agent. We find the lever-puller of admirable moral character—he saved more lives in an abstract situation. But we find the fat-man-pusher abhorrent because what kind of person is able to physically push someone off a bridge? The utilitarian diagnoses inconsistency, irrationality—perhaps true regarding the act. But what about the character?

14
Shaming is interesting in the sense that its function is to enforce norms guilt does not; meaning often those shaming are very capable of transgressing that same norm themselves. (That's what makes it beautiful - and necessary!)

15
If you think for a second we could live without shame you must also think Plato was right to trust the Just Man with the Ring of Gyges. If the Just Man is anything like me I wouldn't trust the bastard as far as I could throw him.

16
It's not rare for us to feel it more important to be polite than to be moral.

17
The Principle of No Satisfaction: When asked if they accept Platonism about x, they scoff. ("How strange!") When I offer a constructivist solution to x they ask me where the Forms are! ("There has to be more to it!")

18
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that if you wish to hold a realist, constructivist, or anti-realist position about science, morality, and aesthetics - it must be the same one across all domains. If this is true it really seems that constructivism and realism are the only live options. (Maybe an anti-realist position would be 'instrumentalist' or something, but then what is usefulness?)

19
The friend's argument against utilitarianism: utilitarians do good things, but no one ought to want to be friends with the kind of person who is a utilitarian, we need friends to live a good and worthwhile moral life, therefore utilitarianism is false.

20
Sartre's moral theory is just that: the only thing we have is the golden rule. In legislating the way man ought to be, we are positing that one acts in such a way that he thinks others ought to. Our ultimate freedom and the ensuing responsibility for our choices is the motivating force for acting as such. I find no guarantee in his work that anyone really ought to or will be 'good', beyond standard biologically grounded norms of moral psychology. (Of course, his answer will be the logical error of bad faith.) Psychopaths are either just as justified or, my answer, playing a different game.

21
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star."

3 comments:

  1. Sorry for the polemics 😫 😩

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1 Interestingly, fundamentalist protestant Christianity judges ‘sin’ as ‘mistake’ and this is why it becomes militant and irrational: people and their actions are judged right or wrong, so there’s no discursive space within which to hold different views and reach agreement. Since that is ideally, the role of politics, to judge politics a mistake is to perhaps correctly judge politicians as practising their craft as if it is a religion. Given the militant, irrational mean-spirited lying and cheating that many do all the time, the claim that politics was a mistake from theological perspectives, might be true; but why the past tense? Is it only mistaken in retrospect?

    2 Whingers are boring and should be ignored. But clinical measures of ‘happiness’ and ‘depression’ need attention, because we collectively mistreat, bully, neglect and demonise suffering from mental illness…

    3 Traditions are sometimes invented, and/or given as canonicity, memory, discovery, etc. But nothing represented as traditional is ever arbitrary unless the reason for the presentation itself is to generate arbitrariness, to distract. But otherwise yes, and in a quote attributed to Adorno by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces ‘pissing on the alter is still paying homage to the church.’

    4 IMO exactly right.

    5 It depends who you are. For people who actually are poor, are black in racist white spaces, visibly, obviously disabled, or just female in a male dominated space, the personal is unavoidably political. Accreted disadvantage also lessens the prospects of speaking for oneself. Advocates and advocacy carried out by the relatively privileged (eg the people running the USA based Innocence Project) make their personal political and save lives.

    6 True! But praxis to the level of virtuosity unselfconsciously re-encompasses aesthetics and transcends boredom.

    7 I don’t know. ‘Diagnosed ideology’ is tricky, because I know others have sometimes wildly misjudged me in ways that really say much more about THEM. But ‘professed ideology’ might reveal a rare level of self-knowledge, maybe even self-criticism. Interpretive tyranny ensues, certainly though, perhaps for the latter, purposefully, deliberately, to shut down discussion.

    8 Me: Yes, interesting.

    9 Yes, exactly right.

    10 Weber’s ‘iron cage?’

    11 Yes.

    12 You can only feel confident in the second assertion if you actually experience the first. This is therefore not generally true; it is only true for those whose personal idiosyncrasies find mirrors; the personal actually is political.

    13 The example of the Trolley Problem given in The Good Place is the salutary example.

    14 Hypocrisy is beautiful and necessary? It’s certainly inevitable.

    15 Yes.

    16 I’m tempted to think manners and morals are synchronous.

    17 I don’t know how to comment on this.

    18 I disagree because consistency does not resonate with complexity.

    19 Without veering to the extremes of relativism, the frameworks of ‘good’ and ‘worthwhile’ and ‘moral’ are not matters of universal agreement.

    20 Yes and irony that Sartre the atheist relies on a theological concept (the golden rule).

    21 Yes, the excellent foppery of the world: astrology (and the astrologer) both function in culture as an object of projection and as a field of displacement. King Lear manipulates his courtiers and his daughters, just so.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for these replies Philippa, very nice haha.

      Would just say a couple things re:

      2. I agree wrt to mental health, I meant that comment to point at people who are tempted to think, with Rousseau, like there could be some primitive golden age that meant people were happier. I tend to think we'll never get off the hedonic treadmill and if there is mental health for no good reason (genetics, chemical makeup etc., bad reasons in the sense they cannot exactly be helped) instead of disease, death, and danger (good reasons that can be helped) thats a good thing.

      3. Excellent quote haha.

      5. Definitely agree with this! (This is the problem with these cheeky aphorisms no clarification) I think I'm replying to a kind banal quietism that people engage in when they invoke something like this when they could be actually doing something. Critiquing those but people but calling them to action to be like their effective peers.

      14. I meant the mechanism of shame is beautiful, in its trappings, maybe I meant just really interetsing to me haha.

      Thanks for your thoughts :)

      Delete