[HN Gopher] Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist
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Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist
Author : gslin
Score : 132 points
Date : 2023-09-28 10:38 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| boffinAudio wrote:
| All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling.
|
| For example - there is no such thing as "Europe", unless enough
| people get together and agree that this thing that doesn't really
| exist, _does exist_ and shall be _named_ "Europe". "Europe" isn't
| a physical element, it isn't a naturally occurring substance - it
| is instead a human cultural construct which only persists for as
| long as the word continues to be used as intended.
|
| Chomsky, who I think understands this very basic principle very
| well, nevertheless seems to dance around this fact because its
| not very savory - it implies that all human life is fiction - and
| nobody gets paid large sums to make that observation by those
| cultures inclined to make their own lies persist longer than
| others - even if its true.
|
| " _Perhaps we do have the freedom to speak, think, and act
| however we wish -- but that very freedom, if Chomsky is correct,
| emerges only within strict, absolute, wholly un-relative natural
| boundaries._ "
|
| Essentially, our freedom is expressed as the ability to choose
| which cultures to perpetuate and which to deny persistence, by
| simply ceasing to perpetuate the lie that is that thing, in the
| first place.
|
| Yes, all human experience is a fiction. It may not be obvious
| now, but I would wager it'll be obvious to every single one of
| us, one of these days, right in the last seconds of our own
| lives, when our own individual fallacies cease to persist... if
| only there were a way for Chomsky to confirm this, when his time
| comes.
| dsego wrote:
| The word you're looking for is ideology.
|
| https://bigthink.com/the-present/slavoj-zizek-ideology/
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling.
|
| This seems wrong. It's not a lie to give something a name. Why
| not say "All culture is a truth which only persists in the re-
| telling", given it is true we call Europe Europe?
| [deleted]
| robotresearcher wrote:
| This is a much better take, and elegantly expressed by that
| flip.
|
| Going further: Europe is a dynamical system that is stable
| enough relative to human experience to have a name. The
| feedback loop that maintains the system that is Europe
| includes human behavior, which includes thoughts and speech.
|
| Chemical elements are also dynamical systems, held together
| without humans in the loop. Everything we have a name for is
| like this. The truth and reality of helium and Europe is the
| same at this level of description.
|
| A problem with this level of description is that it is kind
| of overpowered: if everything can be considered a dynamical
| system, then we aren't saying much about the differences
| between things. Analogously, it's true that evolution
| explains biology. But there's still a useful science of
| biology - we don't just point to living things and say
| 'evolution made that' and call it a day.
|
| Hence while I'm pretty confident about the dynamical systems
| stance being fundamental, there's plenty of room to slice
| things up further with other concepts. They just need to
| bottom out successfully into dynamics. Evolution does this,
| for example. Can morality bottom out this way? Perhaps the
| theory of iterated games is a connection?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I think you're mistaking an arbitrary or relative concept with
| a lie. Culture is relative and amorphous, but it's not a lie.
| It shapes our worldview and it's a framework we can apply to
| our understanding. Just because it is not the unified worldview
| as everyone has doesn't make it false.
| [deleted]
| yakubin wrote:
| There's a class of truths whose source is our belief in them,
| i.e. they are true, because we believe they are true. E.g. in
| most countries there is right-hand traffic, which is true based
| on people's belief that it's true. Of course it's written down
| in law, but the only reason this law has this much power is
| because people believe in it. Similarly Europe exists, because
| people believe it exists. But none of those things are lies.
| They're no less true than the fact that water boils at 100degC.
| In case of traffic you may even check the full power of human
| belief by driving in the other lane. ;)
|
| (There was some clever Latin/Greek epistemological name for it,
| but I've forgotten it.)
| vladms wrote:
| What do you mean by "doesn't really exist" or "fiction" though?
| We use words to describe things and there is always some
| abstraction involved (when you say "this is a rock", by rock
| you mean a complex combination of other substances that I do
| not describe, but have these general characteristics).
|
| When talking about cultures, cultures are represented by the
| people and their actions and both the people and the actions do
| very much "exist". Describing it "exactly" seems something
| impossible (same way you don't include in the definition of the
| word rock how many molecules it must have).
|
| So if your point is "language is fuzzy", sure. But saying
| "culture is a lie" seems just beyond reasonable fuzziness. The
| definition of culture implies a lot of summarization which in
| my opinion excludes an exact definition.
| Varqu wrote:
| I find it troublesome to listen to the person who claims that
| Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in
| their wars
|
| [https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fight...]
| tjrgergw wrote:
| Come on, Choamsky is the ultimate "america bad" man. He
| practically invented it.
|
| "America bad" people are also "Russia not so bad" people. These
| are highly valuable people for Russia propaganda, of course.
| They're literal useful idiots.
| 3abiton wrote:
| Is he a moral relativist?
| fwefr wrote:
| [flagged]
| TheHappyOddish wrote:
| Do you dispute his claim, or do you simply find it distressing?
| It appears to be an accurate one, so I'm curious to hear a
| contrary take here.
| wunderland wrote:
| Maybe this is because you are ignorant to the extent of
| American war crimes?
| tjrgergw wrote:
| Such as?
| krapp wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
|
| Or just a top 5:
|
| - Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
|
| - Battle of Okinawa (and just the habit of American
| soldiers on Okinawa to rape and kill the locals in general)
|
| - No Gun Ri massacre, Korea
|
| - The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam
|
| - My Lai massacre, Vietnam (really, most of the Vietnam War
| and Korea. Americans really do like killing Asians in the
| most violent and horrible ways it seems.)
|
| - Haditha, Iraq (and arguably the entire Iraq war, which
| was waged under false pretenses to redirect American
| bloodlust after 9/11 towards the neocons' existing goals to
| "democratize" the Middle East and distract the public from
| Saudi involvement in the attacks.)
|
| - Abu Ghraib as a runner up just because stacking pyramids
| of naked, tortured prisoners of war is just kind of banal
| compared to everything else.
|
| Now does any of this mean other countries also don't commit
| war crimes? No. But the US has arguably committed more war
| crimes than any other country, going back to the continent-
| wide genocide against the natives. Is this because the US
| is more evil than all other countries? Subjectively, yes,
| but I would argue that the US as a nuclear superpower
| simply has no external limit on its capacity to commit war
| crimes and therefore commits the most evil simply because
| it can get away with it. If other countries were in
| America's shoes, they would probably be committing war
| crimes just as often.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Of course if one is to learn about war crime denialism, who
| better to learn from than Cambodian genocide denialist Noam
| Chomsky?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom.
| ..
|
| Here we have a person denying eyewitness testimony of
| Genocide. Surely we all have to learn from such a great
| individual
| attentive wrote:
| This is only one of the outrages claims he made with regards to
| russia's war in Ukraine. He no longer has any credibility as
| far as I am concerned.
| zilchnotta wrote:
| "Moral" is a problematic word with religious baggage. If you
| exclude the words "right", "wrong", and "ethical" from the
| debate, you make things easier as well.
|
| If you simply use the word "strategy" instead, most heated
| arguments vanish. Yes, there are foundational social strategies
| that exist in every successful human culture. It's pretty easy to
| account for why that is the case, and no reason to oppose the
| idea that such commonalities exist. And looking at the other side
| of the argument, "strategic relativism" isn't that inflammatory
| either, of course you'll find unique and situationally inspired
| strategies too.
| codexb wrote:
| This, exactly. I think most people don't even realize _why_
| they feel something is right or wrong or what it even means for
| something to be "moral"
|
| At our core, everything we feel is based off self-preservation
| -- for ourselves, offspring, family, mates. Instinctually, the
| concept of what is "morally right" comes down to "what strategy
| will ensure my self-preservation best".
|
| Most humans are smart enough to realize that a strategy made up
| of a lot of win/lose confrontations is unlikely to end well in
| the long run. Ergo, morality is simply the current best
| strategy for individual self-preservation given the current
| state of human knowledge.
| aionionio wrote:
| If you refuse to engage with a challenging concept and instead
| talk about something else entirely, you make things easier. Go
| figure.
|
| Strategy helps us decide which actions will help us reach a
| goal. It does not tell us what that goal should be. It has
| practically nothing to do with morality. Human societies adopt
| different means but they also work towards different ends.
| codexb wrote:
| The only goal is self-preservation. It's universal. All
| individual "moral" decisions are based on this one goal.
| ajuc wrote:
| I start to dislike Chomsky more and more. His work in linguistic
| is over my head, maybe it's true, I can't tell.
|
| But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points are
| stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian takes).
|
| Everybody sees faces in rocks because we have brains fine-tuned
| for seeing faces. Does it prove that there's something universal
| in looking like a face or even worse - being a face? Some
| objective "faceiness"?
|
| Or just that we have overfitted neural networks in our heads?
|
| You can get hit in a particular way and stop recognizing faces.
| Or morality.
|
| What Chomsky is saying is that if you include only the people who
| are "healthy" according to some subjective criteria and take a
| crossection of their moralities - the result isn't an empty set.
| Well duh.
| anewhnaccount2 wrote:
| Since people keep saying he's a genocide denier, I'll drop this
| link here https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol14/iss1/8/
| which explains that it's more a matter of semantics. He hasn't
| denied mass murders have taken place. He would probably also
| object to using either "terrorist" or "freedom fighter" since
| using these words emotively serves to obscure what's really
| going on.
| ajuc wrote:
| He argued against stopping it. I don't care how he calls it.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Two for one here: calling him stupid and a straw man.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Chomsky is yet another person, who gained public "fame" for
| expertise in his initial field. And who then went on to believe
| that his newly gained recognition, and expertise in one field,
| qualifies him to reach out into other fields with public
| comments. And since the internet and society works the way they
| do, people assign him authority in those fields as well since
| he's famous. Hence, he became more popular science than hard
| science. At which point it is almost fair to just ignore him.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This is absolutely not the case. His political writings and
| interventions got publicity the same reason as for many other
| people who were in academia in the 1960s: public opposition
| to the Vietnam war. This was a fulcrum in American (and
| western) culture and opposition germinated strongly on
| college campuses, so plenty of people in academia got a bit
| of "fame" as a result of this.
|
| Most people I know who have read Chomsky have read his
| political writings only, and barely know him for his
| linguistics, and he almost never in any of his writings blurs
| the distinction between the two or mentions one in the
| context of the other.
|
| I'd say rather his linguistics career has been mostly
| something that ran parallel to, not intersecting with, his
| interventions in debate about foreign policy etc.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And he if he wouldn't have been an linguist at university
| during Vietnam, just how many people would have read his
| thoughts on policy?
| boppinz wrote:
| I'm sorry but that discredits his wide history as a modern
| intellectual. He did philosophy and linguistics from the
| start.
|
| Like it's fine to not agree with him, but he often offers a
| great introduction to topics like war and labor organizing
| for folks. His pop science is at least based on real science
| and his own reasoning.
|
| And who would you suggest instead? If you say anyone before
| the 1960s but filtered through the likes of Jordan Peterson
| or Steven Pinker I'm going to have a hernia. THEY are pop
| science crap.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Personally, I have a peoblem with all those "intelectuals".
| Most of the time they were never top of the crop in their
| field to begin with, and then switched over to general
| intellectualism using top notch rethoric skills. Peterson
| is living, or already fell off, the extreme end of this
| spectrum. People like Chomsky occupy places on the same
| spectrum so.
|
| And spare me philosophers.
| boppinz wrote:
| Laymen need people who can synthesize the works of
| academics/researchers.
|
| If someone like Chomsky wasn't talking about "faciness"
| and the ethics of ChatGPT, would anyone really bring that
| up? In an academic setting or otherwise.
|
| This again also discredits his work as an academic for
| coining and bringing to light topics like CFGs.
|
| Or in another similar vein: Bill Nye helps to distill
| scientific concepts for children (and adults too). There
| is something to be said for him helping to engage some
| students more in science, AND for whatever interpretation
| and analysis of Creationism vs. Evolution he did at that
| debate with Ken Ham, for the lay people. To a degree, it
| doesn't matter if he got every one of his points 100%
| logically sound, it can be a springboard that hopefully
| gives theists some food for thought on why Evolution is
| the best we empirically have and that the Bible isn't a
| primary source for citing.
|
| So I again ask who you would rather speak to me about
| these topics, or am I supposed to just dig through
| thousands of scholarly articles and hope the ones I
| discuss and cite have the "correct" opinion and
| rhetorical skils?
| hef19898 wrote:
| Bill Nye condenses scietific facts, true. And he does
| that very well. What he does not is selling his own ideas
| on everything.
|
| ChatGPT, well, everybody brings those issues up. But who
| really cares about "faciness"?
|
| Also, evolution is as much a fact as gravity. Pretending
| there needs to be a discussion being had, especially one
| not between biologists and other experts, just gives
| credit to opinions that don't deserve it. But since there
| are people denying gravity, well...
| boppinz wrote:
| 1 - His Ukraine stance is simply that we have had a Cold War
| paradox in our American minds since the 50s, Russia is both too
| strong a foe to ignore and a paper tiger working off of shoddy
| USSR tanks and being beat by some farmers with lock-on
| missiles.
|
| This article helps clarify his points, he absolutely calls
| Russia's invasion barbaric, but he has always vehemently stated
| the West's bloodlust and policing has never helped our case as
| peacemakers: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/noam-chomsky-
| interview-russia-uk...
|
| 2 - Sometimes philosophy is about stating the obvious "well
| duh". Because if you can't establish solid axioms, then how can
| you try to prove a higher-level thesis?
|
| And if the linguistic stuff is over your head, I'm not sure the
| philosophy stuff will be easy for you to grasp either. Unless
| you have a major/minor in dialectics I don't know about.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The problem with the Ukraine stuff is that it falls easily
| into the same crap position as Varoufakis and others on the
| left which is basically a) some kind of "realism" about what
| Ukraine should do [basically surrender] and b) gives credence
| to much of the crap that Lavrov has put out on the public
| stage about this war being somehow about American
| imperialism.
|
| Well, duh, everything is about imperialism, but what's
| missing from Chomsky's analysis is that: Russian imperialism
| is _far far far_ worse.
|
| I am not so much distressed by Chomsky's position on this
| issue as that of many of his followers/fans who seem to lack
| nuance entirely
|
| Lefteast had some good articles on this topic and the crappy
| role many western "left wing" intellectuals have been
| playing. I will try to dig them up.
| fishtacos wrote:
| Chomsky has missed the mark more than once. His response to
| the NATO campaign against Serbia during the Kosovo war was
| what clinched it for me. He's come back to apologize about
| being misunderstood in that he was only opposing NATO
| intervention because it would lead to a response (no shit)
| against ethnic Albanians by Serbs...
|
| Talk about missing the forest for the trees. The ethnic
| cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo had been going on for
| almost a century at that point - not all ethnic cleansing
| is militaristic. It can occur via political representation,
| whitewashing of one's history, meaning, presence, through
| educational systems, sidelined and ignored into oblivion,
| like so many cultures have been.
|
| I think he's taking a similar tone-deaf view of the
| Ukrainian conflict.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Agree 100%. FWIW I was in various left wing activist
| groups at the time and the Chomsky-type position was both
| mainstream, but one I disagreed with and one thing that
| pushed me further away from those kinds of groupings.
|
| It's a blind tribal positioning -- NATO / US bad,
| therefore everything it does bad. But this is in no way a
| materialist or logical method of analysis. Either you
| support the oppressed and minorities (e.g. Kosovan
| Albanians or Ukrainians etc) or you don't, and making
| abstract statements about right and wrong without having
| an actual tactical answer is irresponsible when people's
| lives are on the line.
|
| But, worse, we're finding there's people who not only
| have essentially abstentionist positions but also there's
| a large portion of "the left" that is explicitly pro-
| Russian through some sort of aesthetic and/or cultural
| attachment to some Russophile past related to the Soviet
| Union (e.g. "Tankies"), or just raging anti-American
| positions that push them in that direction (the George
| Galloway types) etc. etc. These people are... really
| messed up, but also way more prominent than I
| realized/feared. There is simply no excuse to support an
| authoritarian, homophobic, violent, quasi-theocratic,
| terrorizing gangsterist regime like Putin's... wow
| johndhi wrote:
| Why is Russia's imperialism far far far worse?
|
| What about the us invasion of Iraq is "better" than the
| Russia invasion of Ukraine?
| snowpid wrote:
| 1.) Iraq was never annexed by USA. 2.) American
| govertment never claimed there is no Iraqi culture. 3.)
| There was no large kidnapping of Iraqi kids. 4.) There
| are no mass rapes made by the American military. 5.)
| Iraqis were never forced to forget Arab and learn only
| English. 6.) Hussein used poison gas on Kurdish people
| and used Zyklon B filled rockets (yes, same gas like in
| Ausschwitz) to attack Israel. Hussein occupied Kuwait and
| attacked Saudi - Arabia. There is no remotely similar
| thing the Ukraine goverment did in the past.
| LindeBuzoGray wrote:
| [flagged]
| za3faran wrote:
| Lots of these are paper arguments. Yeah so Iraq was not
| "annexed", but the west installed a puppet government to
| do what they want, and they attempted to brainwash the
| population with western values. They did the same in
| Afghanistan, but fortunately they failed miserably and
| left in a humiliated manner. Maybe the kidnapping wasn't
| as bad as ukraine, but the hundreds of thousands killed
| and millions displaced and sick and poor and left without
| anything would like to have a word with you. I'm not
| defending Saddam's atrocities, but let's not pretend that
| the US didn't nuke Japan or use napalm in Vietnam. Fact
| of the matter is that the western hypocrisy is now more
| exposed than ever. You think they really care about
| Ukraine? All they see is more room to expand their
| influence and power in the globe.
| 0xDEF wrote:
| >Iraq was not "annexed", but the west installed a puppet
| government to do what they want, and they attempted to
| brainwash the population with western values.
|
| This is a lie. There was a legitimate democratic election
| in Iraq in January 2005 with 58% voter turnout. Because
| of the Shia majority of Iraq they voted into power a pro-
| Iranian Shia-dominated government which is the very
| opposite of a US "puppet government".
| za3faran wrote:
| If you believe that the west didn't have a hand in the
| outcome, I have a bridge to sell you. Plus, we don't
| believe in western style democracy in our tradition, so
| further proof of western destruction and meddling in
| other countries' affairs. Quite the hypocrisy when they
| do it themselves but then cry when another power like
| Russia does it (and I don't condone what is happening in
| Ukraine either, but the hypocrisy must be pointed out).
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Ok, let's put it another way so we don't play
| whataboutisms, which this is what this is veering into:
|
| Would you rather your country and governance be
| controlled and dominated by Russia or by the EU & the
| west?
|
| I think most people here, if they're being honest, know
| that despite all its issues, political and economic life
| in the Baltic states, Poland, Czech Republic, etc. is
| _better_ in most respects than life in Belarus or large
| parts of Russia, or the Russian dominated states that
| surround it. We can debate why that is the case, but I
| think that 's basically fact. (Yes, I hear the streets of
| Minsk are very clean and it's a "well ordered" society,
| but this is the kind of thing we hear about all sorts of
| authoritarian countries and it doesn't make up for lack
| of basic democracy and individual freedoms, etc.)
|
| In other words: We are not talking in this concrete
| instance about whether "the invasion of Iraq is
| better/worse than Russian invasion of Ukraine", but
| whether Russian dominance and control of Ukraine is
| better or worse _for Ukrainians_ than western.
|
| I think on the whole the Ukrainian people have voiced
| their position on this.
|
| Now, whether life _will_ be better for Ukrainians in a
| post-Russian-control world, I can 't say, because it
| seems the Putin/Lavrov regime is doing its best to make
| that impossible by destroying as much of Ukraine's
| productive capacity and future success as it can. Russian
| strategy seems to have transitioned -- about last fall --
| from _" occupy as much as we can and destroy the Zelensky
| regime and take over"_ to _" retreat to a defensive line
| and f*ck up as much of the rest of Ukraine as we can,
| salting the earth to make it clear what leaving Russian
| domination looks like"_
|
| Clearly the US invasion of Iraq is a historic war crime.
| It should not have happened, and I agree with others that
| the perpetrators should be held to account. But this
| isn't a math equation where we balance the one action
| with the other. We are talking about the physical real
| lives of Ukrainians, and their ability to control their
| own country and trade with who they want, and manage
| their own affairs -- not Iraq.
|
| In other words, it's not US imperialism in the abstract
| vs Russian imperialism in the abstract, it's _in this
| instance for this real world situation_ the case that
| western /EU/US alignment is better in the long run for
| Ukraine than Putin's.
| ajuc wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_genocide_of_
| Ukr...
|
| Let's also remember a few millions of Ukrainians were
| starved to death not 100 years ago by Russians. Ukraine
| is and was the most fertile soil in Europe. Russians sent
| soldiers to steal food and to ban people from leaving.
|
| This is what happens when Russia invades you. People in
| the west have no comparison.
| johndhi wrote:
| Some interesting responses here but imo these sound like
| "worse" but not "far far far worse" conditions to me. A
| war where lots of people are being killed exploded maimed
| raped generationally ruined or traumatized - is really
| horrible either way. It sounds like Russia has somewhat
| worse intentional practices than us but I don't see what
| the us did as okay in any sense.
| ajuc wrote:
| Russians on their TV openly argue for killing "every
| Ukrainian".
|
| The fact we are even arguing about this is the best
| evidence that morality is relative...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And that's just the start. They openly advocate for
| nuking western nations. Imagine if Anderson Cooper spent
| tens of minutes ranting about how we should just nuke
| Russia and China because fuck them
| torstenvl wrote:
| The U.S. could do _better_ about prosecuting troops who
| commit war crimes, but it does prosecute them.
|
| By contrast, Russia openly condones war crimes. Not in
| the debatable "enhanced interrogation" borderline kind of
| way. In the kidnapping children to wipe out an entire
| cultural history and _intentionally_ bombing civilian
| targets kind of way.
| za3faran wrote:
| Why prosecute just the troops and not those in command
| who ordered the war crimes? Starting with Bush sr,
| Clinton, Bush, Obama, and the rest of the gang and all
| the way down the chain of command.
| diegoeche wrote:
| The article is bullshit. He had interesting criticism for
| imperialist policy in the US, but after the 90s it becames a
| tiring "west is bad".
|
| Not only he blames the victim with Ukraine, he did it with
| the Serbian ethnic cleansing and the Cambodian genocide.
|
| Him: On the Cambodian genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
|
| Him: On the Srebrenica massacre
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial
| ajuc wrote:
| Ad 1. There's no paradox. Russia is a paper tiger that barely
| works. But it has nukes and enough conventional army to fuck
| up small countries in Eastern Europe. Hence they seek NATO
| membership. The war isn't about USA, the war is about
| deciding whether Russia can again occupy about 100 000 000
| people living there. Chomsky arguing against west involvement
| is enabling Russia. This isn't rocket science. If Baltic
| States didn't join NATO they would be gone by now. Poland
| would be likely fighting a war as we speak.
|
| Ad 2. I have a lot of people I respect tell me his linguistic
| ideas make some sense, but for me it's just wrong (see LLMs).
| It's not my specialty and it's his specialty so I usually
| resist the urge to speak about it. He doesn't seem to have
| any problems speaking about Eastern European politicis tho,
| without knowing much about it. I'd cry "colonialism" but
| that's cheap.
| snowpid wrote:
| According to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politic
| al_positions_of_Noam_Ch...) ' In October 2022, he called on
| the U.S. to stop "undermining negotiations" between Ukraine
| and Russia.[137]
|
| In an interview with New Statesman published in April 2023,
| Chomsky is quoted in saying that Russia was fighting more
| "humanely" in Ukraine than the U.S. did in Iraq, and that
| Russia was "acting with restraint and moderation" as Ukraine
| had not suffered "large-scale destruction of infrastructure"
| compared to Iraq.[138] Chomsky also asserted that Ukraine was
| not a free actor, that it was the U.S. and then United
| Kingdom which refused peace negotiations to further their own
| national interests, and that U.S. military aid to Ukraine is
| aimed at degrading Russian military forces.[138] Chomsky also
| argued that the applications to join NATO by Sweden and
| Finland had "nothing to do with fear of a Russian attack,
| which has never been even conceived", but instead was to give
| both countries new markets for their military industries and
| access to advanced equipment.[138] ' and that is copying
| Russian propaganda. Not all he says about the war is Russian
| propaganda but more than you claim. Chomsky fan boys just
| start to read the wikipedia articles and stop defending him.
| chromoblob wrote:
| Well, at least it reduces the problem to the criterium of
| "health". At least you can individually decide it and use it to
| accept or reject relativism, treating it as a subjective belief
| itself :)
|
| Hence, why debate relativism at all?
| chomskyole wrote:
| > What Chomsky is saying is that if you include only the people
| who are "healthy" according to some subjective criteria and
| take a crossection of their moralities - the result isn't an
| empty set. Well duh.
|
| Where do you get that statement from? I don't think he says
| that at all.
|
| He says that the idea of morality is bound, i.e. it isn't
| infinite. I think that is easy to agree.
|
| He also says that you can argue morals. So he doesn't argue for
| a cross section of morals at all, quite the opposite: he hints,
| in this short video, that you can analyse sets of morals for
| their consistency.
|
| He uses the example of labour under slavery vs labour under a
| wage contract and how these different arrangements lead to
| different attitudes to labour. Implied is the idea that Chomsky
| is against slavery, but considers certain arguments
| slaveholders made valid.
|
| Are you sure you aren't, accidentally, putting up a straw-man?
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I agree with you. I wish he was a banned subject on hn.
| boppinz wrote:
| nah, I think a lot of armchair philosopher techies on here
| could use some alternate opinions and dialectics.
|
| The primary reason for bringing him up (or any philosopher on
| this forum, really) is the nexus of ethics and AI. Although
| we haven't particularly let ethics stop us from a lot of
| high-tech atrocities throughout the past century, in the
| military field or otherwise (I'm thinking private equity and
| rampant credit use).
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I don't disagree that we could use other useful
| perspectives.
|
| I strongly emphatize he doesn't bring them.
| js8 wrote:
| The problem with ethics is that if you take almost any two
| different moral rules, there are always moral dilemmas where it
| is, for a large minority, unacceptable that we apply one rule
| over the other. So the moral rules of society as a whole form a
| logically inconsistent system, which appears to be only
| consistent within certain boundaries.
|
| Since it is inconsistent system, every moral position can be
| logically invalidated. Therefore, the sensible positions,
| compromises, are also the least rationally defensible.
|
| Now, Chomsky has a humanitarian angle, according to which no
| harm to other people is justifiable to make the world better.
| This means he rejects notion of justified war (which is
| anonymous killing of humans). And from this comes his position
| on Ukraine.
| twoodfin wrote:
| What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective
| sense there is such a thing as "faciness" that our brains
| recognize. In the same way, I hope we'd all agree there's
| objectively a color red--even accepting that it's the structure
| of our optical and neural systems that are the basis for this
| fact.
| roenxi wrote:
| > I hope we'd all agree there's objectively a color red
|
| We don't. For starters there are colourblind people, for
| seconds there is no specific colour that can be called "red".
| There is a large and fuzzy category of red-ish colours like
| blood-red or rose-red.
|
| Even if there is some academic "these light wavelengths are
| the ones" definition of red that is arbitrary. Aliens might
| have drawn the lines elsewhere.
| twoodfin wrote:
| This is exactly Chomsky's point. Try to get through life
| considering the color of the traffic light you're
| approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact.
|
| To pick an example closer to the morality case: Hunger
| could equally be called a subjective phenomenon. Aliens may
| not experience anything like hunger. A rare genetic
| condition might produce a human who experiences escalating
| hunger as an escalating degree of pleasure.
|
| But as humans making our way through the real world, we are
| forced by physical and anatomical reality to see the causes
| and consequences of human hunger as objective truths.
| ajuc wrote:
| Hunger is subjective. Starvation isn't.
| chromoblob wrote:
| Hunger is pretty objective if your body isn't
| malfunctioning (and it never is logically,
| "malfunctioning" body isn't yours). If your body works
| correctly, you are not free to choose whether to consider
| yourself hungry, and this is what I understand as
| objectivity.
| ajuc wrote:
| What I consider hunger someone else can consider the norm
| or vice versa. If you define something that depends on
| the person as objective - then subjective loses meaning.
| [deleted]
| chromoblob wrote:
| I improved my definition of feelings so that they can
| easily be objective.
|
| I define hunger as the _ideal signal_ that corresponds
| exactly to the extent of starvation. 'Ideal signal' is
| almost like sensation or feeling, except it may not be
| always or in full precision accessible by consciousness.
| It is a physical signal, or a function from the physical
| state. Extent of starvation seems objective (after fixing
| its definition), and so hunger seems objective too
| (correspondence is exact). By this definition, if you are
| starved, but don't notice a feeling of hunger, it's that,
| you _still are_ hungry, just don 't notice it.
|
| > What I consider hunger someone else can consider the
| norm or vice versa.
|
| How can that be? Do you mean definition, or something
| else? What do you consider hunger?
| roenxi wrote:
| > ... Try to get through life considering the color of
| the traffic light you're approaching as a subjective
| rather than objective fact. ...
|
| You didn't consider what I wrote - colourblind people get
| through life without considering the colour of traffic
| lights at all. They have to. They are colour blind. The
| colour of a traffic light as a practical matter is a
| subjective fact. In fact, the practical colour of a
| traffic light is _more subjective_ than the philosophical
| take because at least philosophers can be convinced with
| a wavelength argument.
| knewter wrote:
| We universally agree that it is at least "the wavelength
| produced from a well-calibrated display when asked to
| render #ff0000'
| roenxi wrote:
| I mean, ok. But that isn't objective. That is a
| subjective judgement of the display calibration standards
| body, with no reference to what most people think "red"
| means.
| chromoblob wrote:
| If you insist on a definition in terms of physics, there
| may be a universal standard way of interpolating all
| distributed ideas of red into a main definition, even if
| extremely high-tech.
|
| Otherwise, this question comes down to whether the meaning
| of the term 'red' is generated objectively or subjectively,
| which is related to philosophy of language and mind. See
| article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativit
| y_and_the_... .
| ducharmdev wrote:
| It's odd to me that you chose color as an example of
| something objective, since so much about perception is
| subjective.
|
| Even if we think about it in more quantitative terms, with
| red being defined as having a dominant wavelength
| approximately 625-740 nanometres, it's a bit of an arbitrary
| definition isn't it? If we observe a wavelength of 624,
| objectively we might say it's not red, but someone may still
| observe it as red considering how close it is to red. Or
| someone with protanopia won't see anything in those bounds as
| red either.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Color relies on ostensive definition. It's a public part of
| language whether someone is color-blind or not. When we say
| "that car is red" we are, in a sense, pointing to something
| and then using the concept and rules of color in our
| language. We might see something _as_ a particular color
| through perception, but when we see "that --->" we are, in
| a sense, "seeing" in language (including body language, for
| instance. You could ask me which one is red and I could
| simply point).
|
| We, of course, might disagree, but color-blind people learn
| which traffic lights are red, green, or yellow, regardless
| of their perceptual faculties. Because the color is not
| just what you see, but what you say.
| ajuc wrote:
| I use f.lux - it changes the screen color temperature
| through the day to make it easier to sleep.
|
| If I sit late at night my desktop walpaper (which is a
| regular photo with a lot of blue sky) becomes basically
| all red if you look at rgb values. But I still perceive
| the sky in it as blue because other things are "more red"
| so it looks blue, and because I know sky is blue, and
| because I remember how it looked before and the change
| happened slowly.
|
| All of these scream "relativism" to me, in fact the
| mapping to common moral fallacies is surprisingly direct
| :) When law changes around you you might not recognize
| when it got evil. Obeying the law is good because it's
| the law. When everything around is evil - small evil
| seems good.
|
| As for language and law - these are arbitrary. "Yellow
| pages" can be any color, so can "blue screen of death".
| Green traffic lights are actually blue in some countries.
| dsego wrote:
| Does that relate to Plato's world of ideas?
| botanical57 wrote:
| To his doctrine of the Forms, yes I think it does. He
| seemed to think that when humans gain knowledge, they do
| not generate it, but rather discover it. For knowledge to
| be discovered, it must have already existed - in the
| abstract, non-material world of the Forms. Plato had an
| involved epistemological argument for why the human process
| of gaining incrementally less partial knowledge of a
| subject fundamentally must be a process of discovery - but
| I would fail to do it justice.
|
| Chomsky seems to imply that in a moral context, similarly,
| as humans learn abstract concepts and boundaries from
| sparse data, we are also carrying out a process of
| discovery. He seems to skip over the epistemological
| reasoning.
| ajuc wrote:
| The only definition is "most people recognize it" and there
| are people who disagree about it or don't recognize it at
| all.
|
| How does it differ from something that exists subjectively
| then?
|
| I'd say arguing that colors are like morality is pro-
| relativism stance.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Chomsky is a mixed bag, on multiple fronts. He's very strident,
| and especially many his recent takes on geopolitical issues are
| unable to understand the new polarities at work in the world.
| He's been an important critic of American foreign policy, but
| it has blinded him (and his followers) to the absolutely more
| terrible nature of e.g. Russian hegemony. (I actually think
| this turn began for him around the conflict in Serbia.)
|
| _But_ I find him a useful and important antidote to the
| dominance of total relativism postmodernism /poststructuralism
| on the "left" and respect him for doubling down on the
| important of reason, rationality, and an empirical method.
|
| These days, especially in American academia, most people
| preposterously labelled (by conservative opponents) as
| "cultural Marxists" or "Marxists" generally are anything but.
| Marx and many other people in that vein in the 20th century
| were committed _materialists_ -- attempting to ground their
| analysis in rather cold hard economic analysis -- you can
| debate whether they were right or not or using the right tools,
| etc but this was their philosophical position, what they were
| _trying_ to do.
|
| The bulk of today's apparently-left wing intellectuals are
| effectively idealists (in the epistemological sense, not the
| moral sense). They fundamentally believe in the primacy of
| ideas over the material world, but they've done a slight of and
| instead of referring to it as Forms ala Plato, or Idea as in
| Hegel, etc. it's now the "Narrative" etc. I think it is having
| a destructive effect, and has in large part discredited this
| line of though about the people it's supposed to be liberating.
| It's a middle class movement for middle class academics, and
| has little to offer the working class.
|
| Chomsky is a refreshing antidote to this. I can't speak to his
| linguistic analysis, though.
|
| He's also very very old at this point.
| elondaits wrote:
| Chomsky is one of the most internationally-known intellectuals.
| Most people in my country (Argentina) know him for that, rather
| than his work in linguistics.
|
| ... So I think it's very unfair to say he's speaking "outside
| of his niche" here.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I guess one could phrase it like this - his work in
| linguistics was important and somewhat falsifiable. The rest,
| not so much.
| mcv wrote:
| Is anything in philosophy or politics falsifiable? If
| politics is not his field, then whose field is it? Are only
| polsci majors allowed to discuss politics?
| ajuc wrote:
| "Peace for our time" by Chamberline and Germany's
| dependence on Russia are as falsified as you can be in
| politics. Chomsky would probably support both :)
| psychoslave wrote:
| Is Karl Popper's theory on falsifiability as a scientific
| criterion itself falsifiable?
| cracrecry wrote:
| I don't believe that. I have traveled the world and very few
| people I know know about Chomsky.
|
| I know a lot about Chomsky as someone who has studied parsers
| and natural languages a lot and I usually ask people I talk
| with if they know Chomsky so I can explain something I do.
|
| People in Argentina knows Chomsky because he has always been
| Communist and an apologist of marxist dictatorships and
| regimes while a harsh critic of the West values and
| institutions.
|
| Argentina has been a Marxist loving country for a long time.
| I was born in Spain and lived in Mendoza for some time.
| Argentinians also love to feel victims about everything that
| happens to them so they don't have responsibility on it so
| Chomsky message is powerful there.
|
| I am not criticising Argentina, but describing it.
| Gud wrote:
| Chomsky is not a communist, he's a syndicalist. His views
| are more nuanced than you give him credit for.
| [deleted]
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yeah I have to say he's always seemed like he made up his mind
| about the world by the 60s and hasn't really adjusted since.
| His Ukraine takes are right in line with his awful takes on the
| Cambodian genocide, which he still claims didn't happen.
| imjonse wrote:
| which he *never* claimed didn't happen. You are another of
| those quickly educated on PragerU and similar Youtube
| channels but who never go to original sources?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| No he definitely made the claim.
|
| He was quoted saying "tales of holocaust in Cambodia were
| so much propaganda."
|
| He went on to say that refugees were making up the stories
| to please the west. It's in the 1977 article on his own
| website.
|
| Chomsky apologists never seem to be able to admit that he
| carried water for the worst regimes of the 20th century.
|
| To be clear there are nearly 24,000 confirmed mass graves
| accounting for nearly 1.3 million dead. Fully 60% of the
| examined remains showed clear signs of execution with the
| most common method being a pickaxe. Chomsky said the
| refugees made it up. He's never taken that claim back.
| imjonse wrote:
| Due to little info coming out of Cambodia at the time,
| from what I read, Chomsky said he underestimated the
| immensity of the genocide, not that he denied it. Later
| he acknowledged it, you make it sound he's some sort of
| Holocaust denier. Funnily Chomsky gets a lot more flack
| for incorrectly assessing the gravity of the Khmer Rouge
| killings in the late 70s while the US foreign policy
| which was intstumental in keeping Pol Pot in power at
| certain points where it was convenient geostrategically
| are considered par for the course.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This is bullshit. He unequivocally said that the refugees
| were lying for the benefit of the US. Chomsky is always
| quick to shout that anything short of the literal
| Holocaust isn't genocide and doubly so if a leftist
| regime is doing it. He was then and always has since
| minimized crimes against humanity in one direction.
| imjonse wrote:
| "Always minimized crimes against humanity in one
| direction". You haven't read much Chomsky have you? The
| one key point that comes across from his thinking is how
| much we (westerners) minimize our crimes even when they
| are comparable or larger then the enemy. His whole
| manufacturing consent book is about such examples.
|
| And that if you criticize someone it better be your own
| side, where you at least have a slight chance of changing
| something even if democracy is a thin veneer over
| something shady, rather than bravely criticising
| totalitary regimes where your chance of having an impact
| is really negligible. Just like if you have kids you'd
| better make sure you correct their faults instead of
| gossiping about the neighbours' kid's mischiefs.
|
| Chomsky and his cohort was criticizing the Vietnam war at
| a time it was very unpopular to do so at home, today you
| get western people criticizing Putin and Xi as if this
| was some act of bravery and not the pointless navel
| grazing that it is in fact.
|
| Until the West has a shitty foreign policy, and
| increasingly shitty domestic one as well (see
| surveillance, making terrorists of activists or
| journalists) totalitarian regimes can use this a valid
| excuse to shake off any criticism on their part.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I've read quite a bit of Chmosky's commentary, that how I
| knew to reference the old article from his own site.
|
| It's perfectly valid to criticize US foreign policy and
| double so as a citizen. But Chomsky is jut full of shit
| and a liar. In Invasion Newspeak[1] he claims there was
| never any American Danchev with respect to Vietnam. Early
| coverage was actually critical[2], and after the Tet
| offensive it really went south. Chomsky just totally
| ignores this, it's inconvenient to his narrative.
| Moreover, you don't need to call refugees liars to
| criticize the US. You don't need to "well actually" what
| happened in Bosnia. Chomsky is a liar and piece of shit.
|
| [1]https://chomsky.info/198912__/
|
| [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20091211102035/https://ww
| w.museu...
| asah wrote:
| +1 - I got off the Chomsky bandwagon decades ago.
|
| Language is a loose encoding of thought, nothing more or less.
| Want proof? Spend some time with ChatGPT4.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't entirely agreed, as there have been cases where my
| thought has changed because I learned a new word for
| something. I started to see that thing everywhere, where
| before I wouldn't notice it as much, just because I learned
| the word for it.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| He's also a genocide denier.
| dgb23 wrote:
| That's not true.
| snowpid wrote:
| its true. Straight outta wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Political_positions_of_Noam_Ch...
| dgb23 wrote:
| That's not what "genocide denial" means. This was perhaps
| wrong judgement in hindsight.
|
| Calling this or other things "genocide denial" and
| similarly extreme terms is a common tactic in order to
| craft an ad-hominem attack to divert from anti-
| imperialist criticism.
|
| I'm in part Bosnian, so American intervention has had a
| very real impact on my family's well being and even
| survival. So I'm at least ambivalent if not opposed to
| some of Chomsky's views on anti-imperialism, even though
| I respect his principled stance.
|
| But calling him a "genocide denier" is incredibly cheap.
| If you read the rationale behind his early assessments of
| the situation, it becomes clear that it was based on
| (well founded) mistrust of American reporting. As the
| author of "Manufacturing Consent" he has been very
| consistent in that view.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| So, based on your views, socialists are incapable of
| genocide? Since it could be an imperialist smear
| campaign?
|
| Every instance of genocide denial I know of also follows
| this line of reasoning.
| dgb23 wrote:
| > So, based on your views, socialists are incapable of
| genocide? Since it could be an imperialist smear
| campaign?
|
| That doesn't follow does it. Why would you try to assume
| that I don't understand basic logic?
|
| Whether you live in this or that empire, it's people at
| the top telling you what to believe, what is right and
| wrong, while committing the most atrocious crimes.
|
| Socialists are very much capable of genocide and other
| forms of mass killings. In fact, they seem to typically
| start with killing other socialists, especially the
| democratic, libertarian left. That's no coincidence.
|
| > Every instance of genocide denial I know of also
| follows this line of reasoning.
|
| Genocide denial doesn't _follow_ this line of reasoning.
| It presents itself as such in order to hide the true
| intent. It is ultimately a propaganda instrument.
|
| From my understanding, this is not what he did. He openly
| and repeatedly denounced these regimes. Look at what he
| actually said and wrote (sensational YT videos don't
| count). I can't speak for him.
| snowpid wrote:
| 'I'm in part Bosnian, so American intervention has had a
| very real impact on my family's well being and even
| survival. So I'm at least ambivalent if not opposed to
| some of Chomsky's views on anti-imperialism, even though
| I respect his principled stance.' That does not matter.
| It doesnt make your opinion more valid.
|
| 'Calling this or other things "genocide denial" and
| similarly extreme terms is a common tactic in order to
| craft an ad-hominem attack to divert from anti-
| imperialist criticism.' It is very normal to judge based
| on other areas that someone said. He denied the Cambodian
| genocide and never changed his view since 50 years! What
| does it say about him? And why is it ad-hominem? Do you
| even know what does it mean?
| hotdogscout wrote:
| You're lying. It is true and a repeated decades long
| offense. He denies, when asked, each and every genocide
| that harms the reputation of socialism.
|
| [https://youtu.be/VCcX_xTLDIY?si=v99y8DiJidzYOJES]
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| He is pretty open about it.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I don't know why people still defend Chomsky's horrible
| positions on this stuff. Moreover his claim that Leninism
| is distinct from Stalinism was absolutely disproven when
| the soviet archives were briefly opened and scholars
| could read Lenin's letters and memos, but Chomsky holds
| to the claim.
| irrational wrote:
| I have a bachelors in Linguistics. We were taught what Chomsky
| believes, but our professor also made it clear that many
| linguists, including himself, didn't believe it was right or
| true. Though, this was 30 years ago. I haven't kept up with the
| field to know what professors of linguistics think today.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| The concept of an innate, universal language that Chomsky
| came up with is almost certainly true, now whether that
| universal language contains information regarding what we
| call ethics, that is an open question
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > The concept of an innate, universal language that Chomsky
| came up with is almost certainly true
|
| It's important to clarify that Chomsky's argument about
| universal grammar, in that there is an innate universal
| base human language, is not remotely certainly true. The
| existence of a human _capacity_ or _ability_ for language
| is true, but that 's not a really amazing finding. People
| have been talking about that for hundreds of years. There's
| very little actual evidential basis in neuroscience or
| brain research for Chomsky's claim. It also frequently
| falls into private language fallacies, which is a logical
| blackhole he can't really climb out of.
| olalonde wrote:
| His editorial on ChatGPT definitely read like "sour
| grapes"[0].
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-
| chat...
| mcv wrote:
| ChatGPT does feel a bit like a refutation of his life's
| work.
|
| Because whether or not ChatGPT can think, it certainly has
| a good command of language without starting out with an
| inborn sense of grammar. It learns grammar by copying. Just
| like kids do, I suspect.
| benpacker wrote:
| Kids learn grammar by copying, but a group of kids with
| no language will invent one (see Nicaraguan sign
| language), and empty transformer models will not do this.
|
| Kids raised hearing a mix of French and African languages
| will also invent a new language (Haitian creole) and a
| LLM will not do this, it would alternate speaking one or
| the other.
|
| ChatGPT proves that language is not so complex that it
| can't be modeled, but the core Chomsky arguments are
| unaffected.
|
| I haven't looked into the alternative perspectives
| (emergent grammar, etc) in the discipline since undergrad
| so I'm not saying Chomsky is right, just saying LLMs
| don't disprove it.
| theodorethomas wrote:
| I suspect not. Children are exposed to far less text than
| LLMs. LLMs are parlour tricks that teach us nothing about
| how humans do it.
| dllthomas wrote:
| I suppose I can grant "feels a bit like", but unless I'm
| missing something (and to be fair I have not rtfa...) it
| hasn't actually reached refutation. The observation that
| there is enough information to determine grammar rules in
| the training set for an LLM is only very weak evidence
| that there is also enough information in the much smaller
| training set for a typical human.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _without starting out with an inborn sense of grammar_
|
| I'm not so sure though, because it starts by being fed
| sentences assembled by people.
|
| Sort of how we wouldn't say that a book itself has a
| "good command of language", but that the writer has one,
| and put it in the book.
|
| So you might need a seed with "an inborn sense of
| grammar" to create language first and a training corpus
| second, but once that's available in huge volumes you can
| mechanically train an LLM to appear to have a "good
| command of language" just by brute force.
|
| Would an LLM gain a "good command of language" if it was
| just fed all the taling a human hears and the words it
| reads in its first 18 years of life?
| ajuc wrote:
| > Would an LLM gain a "good command of language" if it
| was just fed all the taling a human hears and the words
| it reads in its first 18 years of life?
|
| Depends on what its starting weights are ;)
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Aaaaaaand we're back to inborn sense.
| mcv wrote:
| I think his importance to linguistics is not so much due to
| being he's correct, but due to moving forward the way the
| field thinks about language and grammar.
| maeln wrote:
| > But whenever I hear him speak outside his niche his points
| are stupid (like this one) or harmful (like his Ukrainian
| takes).
|
| Chomsky was always like this. He is an unapologetic hypocrite,
| constantly criticizing the U.S and "the west" while defending
| "socialist" country for the exact thing, and often even worse,
| than he was criticizing the U.S for. Even going as far as
| denying the existence of genocide during the Yugoslavia civil-
| war.
|
| Manufacturing Consent was a very good book, but for me it won't
| change the fact that Chomsky is a genocide-denier tankie.
| imjonse wrote:
| Can you cite him exactly on any of your points or are you
| paraphrasing what you have heard second hand?
| maeln wrote:
| You could just go to his wikipedia article.
|
| Anyway, he tried to downplay the genocide and the violence
| committed by the Khmer Rouge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
|
| He, in the same fashion, downplayed the bosnian genocide:
| https://www.dw.com/en/dissident-intellectual-noam-chomsky-
| at... https://books.google.fr/books?id=7Bl9KT9NME0C&pg=PA14
| 2&redir...
|
| And said that the Russian was acting "with restrain and
| moderation" in Ukraine: https://archive.is/EJp7e
|
| That is how he operate. Whenever there is a conflict
| involving the U.S, even remotely, he is systematically
| downplaying the opponent violence and insisting that
| everyone focus on the U.S and ally violence. This way he
| can always look like the reasonable man, while basically
| defending massacre and dictator. How can he do this when
| criticizing (rightfully so), the U.S for the Vietnam War or
| the Contra, and not see the hypocrisy, is beside me.
| 6stringronin wrote:
| He tried to make sense of numbers, as a point that it
| serves the US geopolitical goals at the time to have a
| distraction from their own atrocities.
|
| "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst
| these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again
| want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters
| through to the American public is a seriously distorted
| version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged
| Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the
| crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment
| that Cambodia has suffered."
|
| Calling it downplaying genocide is a nice strawman. In
| any developing situation the media wants to jump yo a
| conclusion, that's his point overall.
|
| He wasn't denying or downplaying just stating, if its
| happening how can we know to what degree when we have
| unreliable sources?
| LindeBuzoGray wrote:
| > he tried to downplay the genocide and the violence
| committed by the Khmer Rouge
|
| The US carpet bombed Cambodia just like it did Vietnam,
| and Chomsky condemned this.
|
| This nebulous "Khmer Rouge" you refer to was armed by the
| US starting in 1979 and even more so in subsequent years.
| The US worked to put them back in power and put economic,
| military and diplomatic support behind it. As reported in
| the New York Times, ABC News at the time. Chomsky was
| against this.
|
| The US establishment was anti-Khmer Touge until 1979,
| then began arming and supporting them in 1979. By the
| late 1990s they began going out of favor in the US
| establishment. Chomsky's opinion hasn't changed, he was
| against the US bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Chomsky is a provocateur. The currency he measures is
| attention. There's some interesting things that he has to
| say, but ultimately, not worth getting your blood pressure up
| over.
|
| It's good to critique the US or the west - you cannot improve
| without dissent. Fortunately, Chomsky is in the US and enjoys
| unimpeded speech and academic freedom.
| maeln wrote:
| > It's good to critique the US or the west - you cannot
| improve without dissent. Fortunately, Chomsky is in the US
| and enjoys unimpeded speech and academic freedom.
|
| That I can fully agree with. My issue is that he often
| criticizing the U.S while downplaying the other side
| violence.
|
| Saying something like "France should not have had a
| military intervention in Lybia" is fine. But saying this
| and then adding "and Gaddafi repression of the Arab Spring
| was exaggerated by the media" is when I know what you
| really wanted to say.
| boppinz wrote:
| I think this is hardly the genocide-denial you think it
| is. In the Gaddafi case, I doubt he really sides with a
| military dictator.
|
| His critique has always been how the West intervenes, but
| mainly for economic security and superiority. We don't
| give much of a rat's-ass about installing a fair
| democracy, if that's even what these countries want, so
| much as installing someone who agrees with us (see:
| Reagan in South America)
| dgb23 wrote:
| You seem to mix things up?
|
| He has been very critical of "socialist" countries,
| especially towards their underlying political ideology.
| maeln wrote:
| Yes, fair enough, it is more that he systematically
| downplayed the violence of the "red" side whenever there
| was a conflict with the U.S. Like how he basically tried to
| deny the Cambodian and Bosnian genocide.
| dhoe wrote:
| Happy to learn otherwise, but everything I've seen follows
| the pattern of briefly paying lip service to the fact that
| some enemy of the US is not perfectly innocent, but well
| we're all human, and here's five pages on how the US is the
| worst.
| miracle2k wrote:
| "My own concern is primarily the terror and violence
| carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one
| thing, because it happens to be the larger component of
| international violence. But also for a much more
| important reason than that: namely, I can do something
| about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the
| violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it
| would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for.
| And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the
| ethical value of one's actions depends on their
| anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy
| to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has
| about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that
| took place in the 18th century."
|
| https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2014/04/01/why-criticize-
| your-o...
| zdragnar wrote:
| Calling for introspection is all well and good, but
| there's nothing ethical about actively denying the
| reality of what is happening abroad.
|
| In the end, it is just an attempt to shore up weak
| arguments with weaker falsehoods.
| calf wrote:
| That's interesting, I'm a millenial aged leftist so I
| don't have the political baggage from the 70s-90s that
| older people have on Chomsky.
|
| And so I find in a globalized, hegemonic world, Chomsky's
| first reason is just as important if not more so than the
| second: Seeing what the larger component is is crucial,
| as a prerequisite to doing something about it.
| fmajid wrote:
| Reminiscent of the famous (if apocryphal) story of Ludwig
| Wittgenstein challenging Karl Popper to mention a moral rule:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_Poker
| scoofy wrote:
| I think that the thing that most people don't realize about
| ethics is the meta-ethical problem that axioms are _by
| definition_ arbitrary.
|
| When we really think about the fact that all of our ethical
| theories are based on arbitrary axioms, suddenly the teeth to
| ethics have a deep, serious problem.
|
| The only argument we have at that point is that the axioms "feel"
| correct, and I have no problem with this basis, I consider myself
| someone with strong ethical viewpoints. However, when the
| foundation of ethics is based on _feel_ , then there are serious
| problems, because it stands to reason that folks who have a
| different feel are entirely justified in their ethical standards
| (assuming good-faith and good reasoning).
|
| At that point, we have the problem that almost every ethical
| theory (I would argue the _concept_ of ethics), must be
| universalizable. That is, if something is wrong for me, it should
| be wrong for someone else in my position (not necessarily
| everyone). This is completely impossible when ethics are
| ultimately based on feel.
|
| Now, Chompsky here is basically saying, come on, we have innate
| instinctual ethical views. I generally agree with him, but it
| ultimately doesn't matter. If ethical theory is simply
| instinctual, the same meta-ethical problem exists, it's just that
| the founding axiom that most folks will have is that the "normal"
| ethical view is the "correct" view... it's a fine axiom, we
| needn't argue about it, but it's still arbitrary, and effectively
| amounts to might makes right.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| The complete sentence is "same meta-ethical problem exists as a
| possibility" but from all possibilities only a portion have any
| chance to be adjusted to reality. Hence, a natural selection of
| all theoretical ideas comes into place and excludes most of
| them (the ones that diverge the reality tests).
| eynsham wrote:
| I think you're confusing epistemic problems for metaphysical
| problems. It's quite plausible that any axioms we come up with
| are merely 'based on feel', but there can be a truth 'based on
| feel' ultimately inaccessible to us except '[by] feel'. That
| inaccessibility does not make the underlying truth arbitrary;
| it merely makes our attempts to work it out arbitrary.
| afwef wrote:
| [flagged]
| lisper wrote:
| > all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms
|
| But they aren't. Morality -- like all animal behavior -- is
| grounded in evolution.
| nmz wrote:
| Morality is set around cultural norms not animal behavior.
| lisper wrote:
| But cultural norms -- indeed, culture itself -- is grounded
| in evolution.
|
| See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
| afwef wrote:
| Only partly, there is still a large degree of
| arbitrariness based on the social environment within the
| biologically constrained bounds
| lisper wrote:
| Sure, all behavior exhibits variation within evolutionary
| constraints. But it is still not the case that "all of
| our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms". That
| is no more true than that the weather is "based on
| arbitrary axioms".
| bluGill wrote:
| To put out two examples: Abortion and Guns are very hot topics
| where people with otherwise similar ethics some on the opposite
| side and refuse to understand how anyone could take the other
| position because whichever side they are on is so obviously
| correct.
|
| Please think about the above next time topics like those come
| up. Once you take a moment to understand the different axioms
| someone puts higher in priority the better you can understand
| what is going on. And that there is no universal means you
| cannot call the someone who takes a different stance things
| like stupid, unreasonable or wrong (they might be - but not in
| relation to this topic). Maybe the world will learn to get
| along a little better if more people will try to understand
| each other. (I'm not holding my breath)
| emptysongglass wrote:
| This is really silly and largely a result of our Western desire
| to turn everything into an impartial science when the
| experience of life is anything but.
|
| Ethics are not arbitrary. If you do violence to me, that causes
| me suffering. If you have sex with my husband or my wife
| without my consent, that's gonna cause me suffering. Both of
| these things are also highly likely to cause _you_ suffering
| because most people who are not sociopaths do not enjoy the
| direct experience of causing someone suffering and suffer guilt
| for bad actions.
|
| The cycle of suffering is universal to all living things.
| There's absolutely nothing arbitrary about it.
|
| Don't do things that are shitty to other people does not need a
| postmodern deconstruction to be understood.
| harperlee wrote:
| Well those are very simple scenarios, but very quickly you
| get to a place where things are not so clear. For example, as
| soon as you need to compare two sufferings, you find trouble:
| is it ethical to kill before being killed? is it the same to
| have your neighbour suffer vs. someone whose suffering is far
| away and you don't perceive? It it better to have a child
| suffer, an adult, or an old man? Two people suffering less
| vs. one people more? Future people vs. current people? What's
| the relationship of not being alive / not being born / dying,
| to the avoidance of suffering?
|
| Different people have different ethical opinions, so it is
| not so clear cut.
| JackFr wrote:
| But basing your ethics on suffering rather than say some
| other model of virtue is arbitrary.
| afwef wrote:
| > Both of these things are also highly likely to cause you
| suffering because most people who are not sociopaths do not
| enjoy the direct experience of causing someone suffering and
| suffer guilt for bad actions.
|
| Why would someone having sex with your wife cause them
| suffering?
| Natsu wrote:
| Some axioms are more useful than others, though. For example,
| Peano axioms can be used to formalize parts of math which we
| use to make models of physics which enable engineering that
| makes all sorts of technology. Many others can't get to that
| point.
| xenocratus wrote:
| Sure, but usefulness is itself an arbitrary criterium.
| Natsu wrote:
| Only in the weakest sense where one can emit other noises
| from their mouth instead. That criteria is an outgrowth
| from our drive to fulfill our own material needs, without
| which one does not do philosophy or anything else, which in
| turn are dictated by the natural world we live in. And none
| of that is something where you can just plug in so many
| other ideas or axioms and get a similar result.
|
| Those and similar axioms were used to develop science &
| technology that provides our ability to even have this
| conversation. Whereas if you give someone a Foucault book
| and ask them to make similar practical use of it, perhaps
| they might keep warm for a night.
| scns wrote:
| Well, since i shed the shackles of religion and am
| diametrically opposed to simply following leaders, i had to
| find my own definition of ethically correct behaviour.
|
| The question i ask myself: "Is my action beneficial to mankind
| and nature as a whole?"
| esafak wrote:
| What is beneficial can be debated, as can how to weight the
| pros and cons of any action. Still, it is a good question to
| ask!
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I share your vector
|
| However the point/problem is that our position has exactly
| the same epistemic grounding as to what is "right" as "my
| philosophy is to Kill all but 10 humans" does.
| afwef wrote:
| That question is not resolvable in any meaningful way. You
| can justify anything with a rationalization
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Is my action beneficial to mankind and nature as a whole
|
| You're going to have to make choices between those two.
|
| Mankind has destroyed how many other species now?
| alphazard wrote:
| Axioms are only arbitrary in terms of the logical system they
| are involved in. If they conflict with other axioms, one of
| them has to go. So the choice of axioms isn't totally
| arbitrary, even at the level of logic.
|
| When it's time to take an idealized theory and use it to make
| predictions about the real world, we first have to check that
| the axioms match our sense data. If they don't, it's not an
| applicable theory. That removes another degree of arbitrariness
| when putting any theory into practice.
|
| "Feeling" good or bad is the bedrock of morality. From the
| vantage point of the human mind, our entire experience is
| colored with judgement. e.g. This is net good, that is net bad,
| etc. There are interesting questions to ask about how that
| evolved, or why it presents itself in consciousness, but it is
| first and foremost just a fact about the human experience.
|
| That isn't arbitrary. A human cannot will their experience to
| stop containing judgements.
|
| So yes, many people have come up with many theories about
| morality, ethics, and meta-ethics, but we can and should
| discard any of them that don't have their axioms satisfied by
| ground truth.
| afwef wrote:
| You're assuming a logical system, but these "axioms" aren't
| like math, trying to find a contradiction is itself a moral
| judgement.
|
| So you're just arguing in circles. None of the grounding in
| reality is actually connected to moral judgements in the
| sense of proving them wrong or right.
| nmz wrote:
| Whatever raises survivability and QOL is ethical. Though there
| is a feeling/emotion when dealing with QOL, it is measurable.
| simonh wrote:
| He's not saying we have instinctual ethical views. He's saying
| we have a biologically determined interpretive framework we use
| to evaluate ethical questions.
|
| This is what he was talking about when he said we make a leap
| from scattered data to specific conclusions, and we all do this
| in a similar way. We all just have different data. However when
| we have very similar data, such as living in a particular
| culture, we mostly come to the same conclusions. The
| interpretive framework sets that reference frame for human
| ethics.
|
| The comparison to visual systems is apt. Intelligent spiders
| would have a different biologically determined ethical
| interpretive framework in the same way that they would have a
| different visual system.
|
| Within the range set by our biology there is a considerable
| degree of arbitrariness, for sure. He spells this out clearly
| at the beginning. He's not arguing there is no relativism. He's
| arguing against the absolute unlimited relativism espoused by
| Foucault because that's what he was asked about.
| bambax wrote:
| > _when we have very similar data, such as living in a
| particular culture, we mostly come to the same conclusions_
|
| That's not my take from the interview, but in any case this
| is provably false. People living in a given "culture" don't
| come to the same conclusions: they come to different
| conclusions -- usually opposite ones.
|
| Politics wouldn't exist otherwise. Or most wars, which are
| almost always between neighbors sharing more or less the same
| "culture" but having values so different they're willing to
| die to defend them.
| wubrr wrote:
| I mean if you recursively generate 'opposite' conclusions
| you still only end up with 2 different conclusions?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Far from being completely impossible, subjective ethics are
| entirely more consistent than the alternative. The important
| thing about analyzing ethical systems is to find axioms _that
| you actually believe_. An unanalyzed moral system tends to have
| false axioms: things that the speaker _says_ are fundamental
| tenets, but on further analysis simply don 't stand muster.
|
| For example, the Commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is anything
| but an axiom. All but the most unreasonable followers will be
| able to produce some circumstance where killing is moral.
| That's not an axiom, that's a guideline.
|
| So why find one's axioms? Ultimately, the entire study of
| ethics boils down to one simple question: "What ought I do?".
| When faced with a dilemma, what should I choose? With the
| understanding of your beliefs, you can make a reasoned
| decision, consistent with your broader choices. If you exist in
| a society, then you will inevitably be forced to react to the
| actions of others, which, in of itself, is a forced action on
| your part. If you don't have some framework with which to judge
| the actions of others, then your ethical framework is utterly
| incomplete.
| afwef wrote:
| > For example, the Commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is
| anything but an axiom. All but the most unreasonable
| followers will be able to produce some circumstance where
| killing is moral. That's not an axiom, that's a guideline.
|
| So can you give an example of an actual "moral axiom"
| mech765 wrote:
| Kant's categorical imperative is a decent attempt at one.
|
| Also (closely related)- "do unto others as you would have
| others do unto you."
|
| They both have holes and edge cases though.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > "do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
|
| This one doesn't just have edge cases, it has a hole
| large enough to float an aircraft carrier through it. My
| grandparents (all deceased at this point) did not want to
| be treated in the same way I want(ed) to be treated.
|
| The much less absurd version is: "treat other people the
| way _they would like to be treated_ ". Still edge cases,
| but the holes are much smaller.
| [deleted]
| riversflow wrote:
| > axioms are by definition arbitrary.
|
| That is very reductive view of what constitutes most axioms.
|
| Merriam-Websters has:[1]
|
| >2: an established rule or principle or a self-evident truth
|
| Etymonline has:[2]
|
| >"statement of self-evident truth," late 15c., from French
| axiome, from Latin axioma, from Greek axioma "authority,"
| literally "that which is thought worthy or fit,"...
|
| So, no, not arbitrary at all. Which particular axioms do you
| find arbitrary? Is game theory arbitrary?
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/axiom
|
| [2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/axiom
| jumpman500 wrote:
| Yea a lot of game theory is built on the arbitrary axioms
| like that people will follow a given strategy with given
| information, or that there's common knowledge. In reality
| people don't necessarily follow the axioms of the theory.
| osti wrote:
| Even in math, axioms are kinda arbitrary. They are mostly
| defined because they can be used to prove stuff that are
| perhaps useful, in this sense, they aren't arbitrary. But
| there are infinite sets of axioms out there for the same
| branch of math, which makes them rather arbitrary.
|
| https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/327201/are-there-
| in...
| effed3 wrote:
| chosen, yes, but -not- arbitrary. Axiom are chosen very
| carefully at the foundation based on all the upper
| knoweledge, based on these axioms -all- above must be
| proved (under Goedel blessing), not -some- stuff.
|
| Change axiom and you end with -another- math.
| diogenes4 wrote:
| > So, no, not arbitrary at all.
|
| Nothing you say conflicts with being arbitrary. Axioms are
| arbitrarily self-evident--they are "arbitrary" because they
| are the result of some person's judgement, not somehow
| produced with some other processes, and they are self-evident
| because they provide the basis for reasoning and cannot be
| contradicted within reasoning parameterized by the axioms.
| lossolo wrote:
| What OP likely intended is that our Western axioms, such as
| considering human life as the most important value, may be
| arbitrary because there are other cultures where it holds a
| lower position in the hierarchy of values.
|
| In Western cultures, the belief in the intrinsic value and
| sanctity of human life is often considered a foundational and
| self-evident moral principle. It underlies many ethical and
| legal frameworks, including principles related to human
| rights, the value of individual lives, and the importance of
| protecting life.
|
| An axiom, in this context, is a fundamental and self-evident
| belief or principle that serves as a basis for other beliefs
| and actions within a particular culture or belief system.
| afwef wrote:
| By axiom OP meant "assumed truth on which we base all of our
| other deductions" not "a self-evident truth"
| firecall wrote:
| For further reading, see Kant's Categorical Imperative.
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| This article really sucks at actually engaging with the really
| extraordinarily interesting debate between Foucault and Chomssky.
| I mean, even the introduction is a giant leap of logic (the
| premise that Chomsky was refering to Foucault as an extreme moral
| relativist).
|
| I think as time goes on, it's been interesting to see more of
| what Foucault was saying as becoming more and more interesting.
| The ability of power to generate the field or domain (what he
| called an "episteme") which defines the unconscious rules for
| research is something I think still being exposed regardless of
| any innate morality.
|
| Besides, I think Chomsky's argument regarding "advancement" of
| morality to be so value-laden as to be sort of meaningless. There
| are more slaves in existence now than any other period of human
| history, and this "advancement" is still barely all that stable
| enough given the politics of Western countries which still
| maintain large (millions of people) cultural groups who
| absolutely would stop or even reverse this advancement given the
| chance.
|
| Also its kind of ironic that Chomsky brings up Turing, because
| what we're talking about here is a scientifically-driven field
| which saw homosexuality as an illness and identified medical
| procedures as the cure which led to Turing's death.
|
| Why is it that every decade we continue to identify fields of
| science, (which in his framework should be at the forefront of
| discovering this innate human nature and morality) that are the
| vanguards of extreme oppression? Why is it that science is
| consistently, across cultures and political systems, a domain
| that is almost always intrinsically tied to the justification and
| defense of the power structures of that culture? Soviet
| lamarckism, American global electronic surveillance, Western
| pathological views of homosexuality and psychology are all
| examples where science was twisted into merely a domain of power,
| exactly like Foucault described throughout history. Most would
| hand-wave these away as "not real science", but what even is real
| science then?
|
| I mean god, we're still discovering new gaps in scientific
| knowledge that are so large and incomprehensible that we can
| barely even begin to know what outcomes they have lead to. The
| reproducibility crisis in medicine, psychology and other domains
| is portrayed as a sort of minor inconvenience rather than the
| shattering of one of the core and principal tenets of science in
| its production of knowledge.
| [deleted]
| dale_glass wrote:
| I disagree. Moral relativism is very much a thing. But it's just
| a muddled matter.
|
| To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that
| different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that
| even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often
| outright undefined.
|
| Pretty much any moral rule you can name has been proudly broken.
| Eg, torture? Take Abu Ghraib for instance. Not only was it done,
| but it was done proudly, with selfies taken for remembering the
| "good times" later.
|
| I find that on the long term the discussion tends to coalesce
| towards children. Well, in most wars out there children suffered
| from it. Even in WWII, you can bet that there was an American or
| Russian bomb that killed a German child, and you won't find a lot
| of either feeling all that conflicted about their actions. The
| atomic bombs are a tad controversial, but still find plenty
| proponents of that the horrific slow deaths they inflicted on
| quite a few people (including children) were in the end for the
| greater good.
|
| So far I think about the closest to an effective "objective moral
| rule" I've heard is that it's immoral to torture children for
| fun. But when I think of it that's almost a tautology -- It works
| out to "It's immoral to cause harm without a good reason", more
| or less.
|
| Or, if the objection here is that a given individual finds their
| own code as rigid and unyielding, I don't think that's really
| true either. Amazing horrors are committed by soldiers in wars
| even well outside of their own direct duty, and moral compromises
| of all sorts have been made for the sake of diplomacy.
| effed3 wrote:
| >Pretty much any moral rule you can name has been proudly
| broken. Eg, torture? >Take Abu Ghraib for instance. Not only
| was it done, but it was done proudly, with >selfies taken for
| remembering the "good times" later"
|
| Sure, can happen, but THIS was recognized as a CRIME by the
| -culture- we have, and some individuals forget/broken/ignored!
| And a decadent society/culture can be flooed with this also,
| and loose the capacity to condems this.
|
| I don't mix single fact/events with the main argument, the
| organized/ritual/specific use of the -force- is universal in
| quite al cultures, is buiding some kind of order in the chaos,
| the uncontrolled violence is a crime in quite same every
| culture, because is disrupting the order.
| manicennui wrote:
| Recognizing that different cultures have different morals isn't
| moral relativism; that is simple observation. One must also
| believe that more than one set of morals can be right or that
| no one is right or wrong.
| lossolo wrote:
| > One must also believe that more than one set of morals can
| be right or that no one is right or wrong.
|
| Exactly. There is no universal right or wrong, it's all
| relative based on hierarchical system of values in every
| society.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that
| different societies had and have different moral ideas, and
| that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid,
| and often outright undefined.
|
| That's just a sociological trick. You redefine X to mean "what
| people think X is" and come to "profound" conclusions. That's
| like saying that the laws of the universe has changed when
| Einstein invented relativity.
|
| Moral relativism is, for example, when you think that being a
| slave owner in 1800 in the US wouldn't be bad but being a slave
| owner in 2023 in the US is bad because of specific cultural
| background that is different then and now. It's not about
| people disagreeing on what constitutes bad actions or
| conditions per se. Everyone understands that people disagree on
| stuff. It doesn't make one a moral relativist in any useful
| notion of that word.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > That's just a sociological trick. You redefine X to mean
| "what people think X is" and come to "profound" conclusions.
| That's like saying that the laws of the universe has changed
| when Einstein invented relativity.
|
| That's exactly what you get under "objective" morality
| though. Everyone agrees "murder" is bad. Not everyone agrees
| on what "murder" means exactly. You don't have to try very
| hard to find people apparently just itching to kill a home
| invader in righteously retributive justice, or announcing the
| desire of going to the border to shoot trespassers.
|
| > Moral relativism is, for example, when you think that being
| a slave owner in 1800 in the US wouldn't be bad but being a
| slave owner in 2023 in the US is bad because of specific
| cultural background that is different then and now.
|
| In a lot of circumstances, yes, that's indeed how the world
| truly works. Morality indeed can change over time, for
| instance using a lot of water on watering your lawn has very
| different moral scores depending on whether there's a drought
| going on or not. So it was perfectly moral 3 years ago and
| now it suddenly isn't.
|
| Regarding slavery, you have to recognize that international
| deals involve quite a lot of interaction with countries where
| people have far less rights than we do -- and this is one of
| the underlying reasons why we buy stuff from them.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > That's exactly what you get under "objective" morality
| though. Everyone agrees "murder" is bad. Not everyone
| agrees on what "murder" means exactly.
|
| I don't see how it is exactly what you get. It doesn't
| matter what everyone agrees or disagrees on. The point of
| moral objectivism is that doesn't matter what people think
| morality is in general just like it doesn't matter what you
| think about the laws of physics--they are still out there.
|
| To oversimplify it:
|
| Moral objectivism: laws of morality ~ laws of physics:
| something that exists regardless of what you think about it
|
| Moral relativism: laws of morality ~ rules of football: it
| is good or bad to do something only by nature of social
| conventions and views
|
| Using lots of water to grow cannabis instead of crops
| during a drought is bad because it could be allocated more
| efficiently to feed the poor -- moral objectivism
|
| Using lots of water to grow cannabis instead of crops
| during a drought may be good or bad depending on whether
| people around you care about the poor -- moral relativism
| dale_glass wrote:
| Rules of football all the way, yeah.
|
| By this analogy, rules of Monopoly. Everyone knows the
| game, but everyone seems to have slightly different house
| rules for it.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It's worth clarifying the somewhat ambiguous subject and
| object of your moral relativism example.
|
| " _Bob_ using lots of water to grow cannabis instead of
| crops during a drought may be good or bad depending on
| whether people around _Bob_ care about the poor -- moral
| relativism
|
| Because there is confusingly similar, yet orthogonal
| concept, ethical subjectivism, which argues that ethical
| statements can be universally either true or false, but
| that the truth value of such statements is tied to one's
| subjective reality. Whereas moral relativism says that
| the moral nature of one's actions should be judged by the
| moral culture they are acting within, ethical
| subjectivism concludes they should be judged by the
| ethics of the person doing the judging.
|
| This avoids the key pitfall of moral relativism: "One
| should be judged on the basis of the moral culture they
| are embedded in" is, in of itself, a universal claim.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _He draws a natural comparison between this process and that of
| language acquisition, which also depends on "having a rich built-
| in array of constraints that allow the leap from scattered data
| to whatever it is that you acquire. That's virtually logic." And
| so, "even if you're the most extreme cultural relativist, you are
| presupposing universal moral values. Those can be discovered."_
|
| I'm not saying Chomsky's conclusions are wrong, but I don't see
| any evidence for them in this article. It seems predicated on the
| above: drawing a "natural" comparison between acquiring language
| and acquiring moral values, but there's no basis stated for that
| comparison. What's "natural" about it? They may be similar
| processes but how are we assuming that out of hand?
|
| Chomsky is a linguist & honestly this seems like a protection of
| realities within his own primary field of knowledge, onto
| separate fields, with scant justification of the similarities.
|
| Again, the fields - and processes - may well be comparable, but
| nowhere does this seem to be interrogated.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| "There are no valid absolute moral positions" is itself an
| absolute moral position. We don't need to appeal to language or
| darwinian survival characteristics or whatever to refute it, a
| reasonably educated 12 year old can understand why it can't be
| true.
|
| Say what one will about "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of
| the law", at least it is internally consistent.
| 31337Logic wrote:
| I admire Chomsky but I'm afraid this particular argument isn't
| very convincing. He merely asserts his position but does nothing
| (substantial) to defend his position. In what way is moral
| relativism a logical contradiction? "...even if
| you're the most extreme cultural relativist, you are presupposing
| universal moral values. Those can be discovered."
|
| That's not true at all. I don't presuppose universal moral
| values. And if I do, they can still be compatible with a
| relativistic description. (e.g. I can say they're relative to my
| current understanding, or relative to our collective shared
| understanding).
|
| And as a linguist, he himself should know best that language
| usage here matters. What do we mean by "discovered" or "universal
| moral values" anyway. Clear all that up first before trying to
| eliminate moral relativism with a broad brush.
| tootie wrote:
| It's funny, I read "universal" and think about the universe.
| Would an alien intelligence recognize our morals? Even Star
| Trek pushed this limit with races like Klingons that honor a
| good death that earthlings find abhorrent.
|
| Here's a though experiment, if I blew up the entire planet and
| left no trace of the existence of humans, did I violate
| anyone's ethics if there's no one around to be upset? In theory
| I destroyed ethics too.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| It's a logical contradiction in a simple way:
|
| If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would
| be a relative claim which would undermine the assertion as a
| universal position.
|
| Further, you end up in a position of equivalence of all claims
| and generate major contradictions.
|
| I will go out on a limb on the universal moral values claim and
| I think again it's pretty simple:
|
| The existence of even the most basic objective truth, such as
| 1+1=2 would imply by its existence a frame of reference by
| which all claims can be evaluated against. This constrains the
| scope of relative claims, as you pointed out, but also implies
| an actual truth or set of standards with which you can evaluate
| anything.
|
| It's not clear what universal moral values looks like, like
| Epicurean pleasure/pain or maybe it stems from thermodynamics,
| or even just mathematics itself, but it is possible that it
| could be discovered.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > It's not clear what universal moral values looks like, like
| Epicurean pleasure/pain or maybe it stems from
| thermodynamics, or even just mathematics itself, but it is
| possible that it could be discovered.
|
| I strongly suspect they come from game theory, although they
| look more like statistical mechanics in that they govern the
| bulk behavior of societies and individuals will have widely
| varying personal moralities (serial killers) just like atoms
| have widely varying individual velocities. There will also be
| some society-to-society variation. Plus the game theoretical
| concerns have probably changed over time (Genghis Khan's army
| raping and murdering 11% of the world population probably
| represents an early peak in the selfish strategies of
| following a powerful leader and subjugating others). And
| those forces will have shaped our biological evolution and
| neural wiring as well.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself
| would be a relative claim
|
| no it wouldn't because meta-ethical statements express
| objectives claims _about_ moral values, they are not
| themselves normative or moral claims.
|
| It is equivalent to pointing out that everyone is a
| relativist in regards to their favorite flavor of ice cream.
| That statement is itself verifiably true or false.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >That statement is itself verifiably true or false.
|
| Is it verifiably true without spending more entropy than
| exist in the visible universe to answer the question,
| because really affects if the answer if verifiably true or
| not.
| westcoast49 wrote:
| > If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself
| would be a relative claim which would undermine the assertion
| as a universal position.
|
| Moral relativism means that everyone views the world through
| the lens of their own experiences. And my statement about
| moral relativism is _also_ , as you point out, viewed through
| the lens of my own experiences (with that particular topic).
| But the second statement does not undermine the first one,
| instead it sort of "recurses" over it.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself
| would be a relative claim
|
| Would it? If we define "moral absolutism" as "the position
| that there exist moral statements that are true independently
| of any observers" then we could define the position of "moral
| relativism" as its logical negation: "there don't exist moral
| statements that are true independently of any observers". Is
| that sentence itself a moral statement? Why? To me it reads
| like a statement about reality, not about what is moral or
| immoral.
|
| >It's not clear what universal moral values looks like
|
| Universal moral values are not the same as absolute moral
| values, though. For example, let's suppose that "murder is
| wrong" is a universal moral value. That just tells you that
| every human agrees on that, but we're still working off a
| subjective, biased system, because every human you could ask
| will evaluate this moral question using their human brain.
| And if you could ask every living thing in the universe, you
| would still have the bias of matter-based life. How could you
| tell a universal moral value is basic enough that it's
| independent of any subjective point of view? The only truths
| I can imagine that could meet those requirements would have
| to be really abstract, like 1+1=2 as you say.
| nico wrote:
| > he only truths I can imagine that could meet those
| requirements would have to be really abstract, like 1+1=2
|
| And that is not even universally or absolutely true, 1+1=2
| is a set of symbols that need to be interpreted by someone
| for them to have meaning, it's a concept made up by people
|
| Hence, 1+1=2 is just as relative as anything else we
| express through language
| naasking wrote:
| > Hence, 1+1=2 is just as relative as anything else we
| express through language
|
| The symbols are relative, the semantics are not.
| nico wrote:
| Well, I can disagree with that, so what can you do then?
|
| If you can't force everyone to agree on the same
| semantics, you can't have absolute semantics
|
| Of course you are free to believe whatever you want,
| including absolute semantics, but that is your own
| personal subjective opinion (even if popular or accepted
| in the mainstream)
| naasking wrote:
| I don't know what "absolute semantics" means. If you mean
| "objective semantics", then yes that's already objective.
| If you mean "universal semantics", well there's rarely
| universal agreement on anything, so I'm not sure why I
| should find the existence of a few contrarians
| persuasive.
| nico wrote:
| So you are essentially saying that you can keep your own
| ideas of "objective semantics" because you can dismiss
| people who disagree with you
|
| Which means you have a subjective definition of the
| meaning of "objective semantics"
|
| Objective doesn't exist
|
| Everyone can assign their own meaning and not agree on
| what something means
|
| We are doing it right now on this thread
|
| You might say that there is an objective reality or truth
| regardless of whatever anyone else says, but you can't
| prove that
|
| Your whole life experience is subjective, and you can
| never detach from it, you (nor anyone) can ever have an
| objective experience of anything
|
| You believing that there is some sort of objective
| anything is just your own subjective belief
| fluoridation wrote:
| "1+1=2" as a string of symbols is open to interpretation,
| however, both you and I understand the idea that that
| string of symbols is conveying, and that idea is true
| objectively.
| nico wrote:
| It's just an agreement that has been pretty much forced
| on anyone that has a basic school education
|
| I can choose to disagree and doesn't matter what you do I
| can assign a different meaning to it
|
| No ideas are objective truth, and objective truth is
| something that can't even be tested
| fluoridation wrote:
| >I can assign a different meaning to it
|
| I don't even understand what that means. Ideas don't
| _have_ meaning, they _are_ meaning. What does it mean to
| assign a different meaning to the idea represented as
| "1+1=2"?
|
| >No ideas are objective truth
|
| No. Mathematical truths are objectively true. Even if
| addition itself is false in the universe, in the sense
| that in some cases you can put one real thing next to
| another and get other than two real things next to each
| other as a result, that 1+1=2 is true objectively. It
| would just mean that the universe is based on an
| axiomatic system that is more lax than our own.
| nico wrote:
| You can believe whatever you want, assign any meaning you
| want
|
| I can say that 1+1=2 means it's lunchtime on the moon
|
| I can also say that 1+1=11
|
| I can't force you (nor anyone else), to accept or agree
| with those meanings, but I can definitely assign any
| meaning I want
|
| No ideas, nor meaning, nor formulas, nor math are
| objective truth
|
| Just the fact that I can disagree with you right now
| means there isn't an objective truth. If there was, then
| we wouldn't even be able to disagree
|
| And the universe is not based on any axiomatic anything,
| maybe your models of the universe are, but those models
| are just a subjective approximation to whatever the
| reality of the universe is, which we all perceive and
| experience differently in a subjective manner
| fluoridation wrote:
| >I can say that 1+1=2 means it's lunchtime on the moon
|
| You're still confusing the symbols with the meaning.
|
| >Just the fact that I can disagree with you right now
| means there isn't an objective truth. If there was, then
| we wouldn't even be able to disagree
|
| Please explain how objective truth existing would prevent
| people from disagreeing with each other.
|
| >And the universe is not based on any axiomatic anything,
| maybe your models of the universe are, but those models
| are just a subjective approximation to whatever the
| reality of the universe is
|
| Yes, that's more or less what I said. However, those
| models contain _objectively_ true statements with regards
| to themselves. According to the theory of relativity no
| object can go faster than light, correct? A sandwich is
| an object, correct? Then it 's objectively true that
| according to the theory of relativity a sandwich can't go
| faster than light. It doesn't matter whether sandwiches
| actually are capable of going faster than light, that the
| theory of relativity states (indirectly) that sandwiches
| can't go faster than light is an objective truth.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| So for the first point about 'moral relativism is true' yes
| it's a meta-ethical statement, but at the same time,
| logically, you're affirming the set 'moral relativism'.
|
| And the second point, I would argue that 'universal moral
| values' arise from 'absolute moral values', whatever that
| might be, if it's even possible to know it.
|
| I also don't think that moral relativism is a logical
| negation of moral absolutism, more like an opposing view.
| fluoridation wrote:
| But my point is that the existence of universal moral
| values do not prove the existence of absolute moral
| values, because universal moral values can also arise in
| the absence of absolute moral values (or it would have to
| be demonstrated that they can't). That every moral agent
| agrees that murder is wrong does not prove that murder is
| wrong independently of any point of view.
| voxl wrote:
| Yes, there are physical facts, most moral relativists are
| physical realists.
|
| But that is also exactly where the moral relativism
| originates. You _do_ have physical laws, you _do not_ have
| moral laws. You can _test_ physical laws, you _can not test_
| moral laws.
|
| Once you axiomatically ordain some set of rules as "moral
| truths" or some measure of "moral truth" then the physical
| apparatus comes in, and you get to use it. But you have to
| pick the framework of morality first!
| naasking wrote:
| > But that is also exactly where the moral relativism
| originates. You _do_ have physical laws, you _do not_ have
| moral laws. You can _test_ physical laws, you _can not
| test_ moral laws.
|
| First, this assumes a very specific kind of moral realism,
| but does not describe all forms of moral realism. Second,
| we do just fine testing mathematical laws by checking for
| consistency without any tests of the sort you're
| describing.
|
| Finally, these sorts of arguments against moral realism
| have been discussed for decades, so I'll simply leave this
| here for people to assess:
|
| A Proof of the Objectivity of Morals - Bambrough (1969), ht
| tps://www.dropbox.com/s/p9v7qt23p21gfci/Proof%20of%20the%2.
| ..
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Second, we do just fine testing mathematical laws by
| checking for consistency without any tests of the sort
| you're describing.
|
| So is there some axiomatic system that can elucidate
| moral truths, such as the wrongness of stealing, from
| first principles?
|
| >A Proof of the Objectivity of Morals - Bambrough (1969)
|
| Quickly skimmed through it, but: awful, just awful. I
| challenge Bambrough to prove to me that I have two hands.
| naasking wrote:
| > So is there some axiomatic system that can elucidate
| moral truths, such as the wrongness of stealing, from
| first principles?
|
| Read Kant.
|
| > Quickly skimmed through it, but: awful, just awful. I
| challenge Bambrough to prove to me that I have two hands.
|
| Clearly you missed the entire thrust of the argument, and
| Moore's before it.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Read Kant.
|
| Nah. And either way following such a reasoning would just
| tell you whether a statement meets a condition defined by
| an arbitrarily chosen axiomatic system. Whether someone
| chooses to call that moral or not is still subjective.
| Look, I can do it right now:
|
| bool is_moral(string s){ return false; }
| naasking wrote:
| Math is also composed of arbitrarily chosen axiomatic
| systems, and yet math is still objective. I'm afraid such
| trivial arguments aren't much challenge to moral realism,
| which you'd know if you actually bothered to read
| anything about it.
| btilly wrote:
| Let's see if I can achieve the same tone that you just
| did.
|
| _Math cannot be proven to be objective. Therefore a
| trivial appeal to the objectiveness of math don 't make
| your case. You'd know this if you actually bothered to
| read anything about it. I suggest that you start with
| Godel._
|
| Seriously, no matter how much you might know about the
| topic, this is not how you make an argument that
| convinces anyone else.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Yes, but math just seeks to find truths that are
| internally consistent. is_moral("not murdering people")
| is objectively true in the exact same sense that
| mathematical truths are true. Yet this tells us nothing
| at all about whether not murdering people is moral.
| btilly wrote:
| Ironically I talked about Kant with my son 2 days ago. He
| literally couldn't get through the first sentence without
| disagreeing. Kant argues that the only thing that is good
| in itself is good will. However it is trivial to find
| ways in which good will leads to bad things, and
| therefore having good will is not necessarily good at
| all!
|
| From my son's perspective, the argument did not improve
| from there.
|
| So people who disagree with you are not necessarily going
| to be convinced by an appeal to Kant.
| jmoss20 wrote:
| > The existence of even the most basic objective truth, such
| as 1+1=2
|
| You might be surprised that even this is a relatively (sorry)
| controversial view. Many (most?) practicing mathematicians do
| not hold it.
|
| Even if it were, then you get the is-ought gap -- the
| existence of objective / analytic / verifiable / what have
| you facts doesn't obviously imply anything about moral
| "facts".
| pixl97 wrote:
| >It's not clear what universal moral values looks like, like
| Epicurean pleasure/pain or maybe it stems from
| thermodynamics, or even just mathematics itself, but it is
| possible that it could be discovered.
|
| So if you want to take thermodynamic morals for a spin, the
| answer is complete chaos.
|
| In the case of humanity we are just a waveform, a state,
| running from low entropy to high entropy. The only outcome of
| any open universe long term thermodynamic equation in itself
| is entropy maximization.
|
| Mathematics seems like another dead end here. Mathematics is
| both incomplete and paradoxical. My assumption is any
| mathematical system that attempts to answer morality
| questions will quickly fall foul of Russel's Paradox.
|
| And as of so far no one has any proofs that morals/morality
| is a reduceable problem. If morals are NP hard, then it is
| not a problem with findable solution, one could exist, but
| finding it would be random chance. And for example said
| morality solution could have hash conflicts, any reducible
| answer could be one many potential random answers.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think the point is that if you're a moral relativist across
| the range of morals encountered in human societies you're
| hardly a moral relativist at all because from the space of all
| possible moral positions you've accepted as equally valid the
| tiny subset that have organically originated from the extreme
| restraints of human culture. It's far rarer to see moral
| relativists for example who think the moral positions of serial
| killers and humanitarians are equally valid, but even that
| range is small across the landscape of all possible moral
| positions.
| tety wrote:
| [dead]
| vehemenz wrote:
| Moral relativism is the most absurd form of moral realism, which
| is itself an absurd position. I'd be more interested in an
| explanation for why so many otherwise intelligent people, who are
| more than capable of reasoning for themselves and holding well-
| defended, sensible positions, find themselves attracted to moral
| realism, a truly mystical belief that offends science, reason,
| and grade school grammar.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| Why do you think it is absurd? I'd think a moral relativist
| could support science, reason, and grade school grammar while
| also believing it's due to cultural factors that are not
| inherently true.
| vehemenz wrote:
| > believing it's due to cultural factors that are not
| inherently true.
|
| Moral relativists are moral realists, meaning that they
| believe that moral truths are dependent, in part, on the
| culture in which the truths are being evaluated. So I don't
| think what you're talking about is moral relativism but
| rather, the fact that different cultures may have slightly
| different moral beliefs, which is obviously true.
|
| For actual objections to moral relativism, aside from the
| usual objections to moral realism that undercut all of these:
| https://iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#H4
| hotdogscout wrote:
| You're right, I assumed moral relativism meant something
| else. Thanks.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post in the denunciatory style, but rather
| make your substantive points more informatively?
|
| I understand the temptation to put down a view and/or people
| that you think are wrong, but a comment like this doesn't help
| the rest of us understand anything; it's just a sequence of
| boos.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| I agree that moral relativism is absurd, but I don't see any
| problem with moral realism. I think many intelligent people
| understand the boundaries of our knowledge in the domain of
| consciousness, cognition and agency and thus they don't jump to
| conclusion that morality doesn't exist on the grounds that
| there is no equation for it in string theory.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| [flagged]
| some_random wrote:
| [flagged]
| epups wrote:
| There almost certainly isn't a universal moral code. For every
| abominable act you can think of - murder, slavery, even genocide
| -, we can find examples of human groups that glorified them,
| usually by evoking religion, group affiliation or a mix of both.
| dotsam wrote:
| If there is a universal moral code, we can never know it for
| certain. Moral knowledge, as well as all other kinds of
| knowledge, is always open to criticism and being proven wrong.
| But nevertheless we can make moral progress, just as we make
| scientific progress. We can find good explanations for why
| killing and enslaving people is wrong, even whilst we can point
| to countless examples where killing and enslaving people has
| been glorified. This is David Deutsch's principle of optimism:
| "All evils are due to a lack of knowledge".
|
| Commitment to solving problems entails a commitment to
| knowledge growth, which in turn involves a commitment to
| certain values, such as valuing truth and being open to error-
| correction by debating and criticizing ideas. Killing and
| enslaving people is the opposite of this.
| epups wrote:
| There is a big difference between morality and science
| though. The physical reality around us does not depend on our
| opinion of it, and we can design experiments to test it. You
| cannot "prove wrong" a set of moral rules without agreeing to
| a set of subjective principles first.
| dotsam wrote:
| Can we agree that solving problems = good? If you grant
| that, the rest should follow.
| tivert wrote:
| > Can we agree that solving problems = good? If you grant
| that, the rest should follow.
|
| What do you mean by "problems"? And _whose_ problems? My
| solution might be the source of your problem, and why
| should I care if it is?
| dotsam wrote:
| > What do you mean by "problems"?
|
| In David Deutsch's terminology, a problem exists when a
| conflict between ideas is experienced. It is worth
| reading his books to understand more on his view. He
| builds on Karl Popper's work, which is also worth
| reading.
|
| > And whose problems?
|
| Everyone has their own particular problem situation.
| Here's some relevant things Popper has said about
| problems and solving them:
|
| > All things living are in search of a better world. Men,
| animals, plants, even unicellular organisms are
| constantly active. They are trying to improve their
| situation, or at least to avoid its deterioration...
| Every organism is constantly preoccupied with the task of
| solving problems. These problems arise from its own
| assessments of its condition and of its environment;
| conditions which the organism seeks to improve... We can
| see that life -- even at the level of the unicellular
| organism -- brings something completely new into the
| world, something that did not previously exist: problems
| and active attempts to solve them; assessments, values;
| trial and error.
|
| And lastly
|
| > My solution might be the source of your problem, and
| why should I care if it is?
|
| How to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for
| me is itself a problem that we can create knowledge to
| solve, perhaps e.g. by creating a legal system that
| discourages you from doing the thing that made my life
| worse.
| tivert wrote:
| >>> Can we agree that solving problems = good? If you
| grant that, the rest should follow.
|
| >> My solution might be the source of your problem, and
| why should I care if it is?
|
| > How to 'make you care' about you creating a problem for
| me is itself a problem that we can create knowledge to
| solve, perhaps e.g. by creating a legal system that
| discourages you from doing the thing that made my life
| worse.
|
| I think your use of "we" presumes some value of
| universalist cooperation (I'm no philosopher, so I'm just
| throwing around words to express what I'm feeling), which
| I don't think can be assumed. I think the more accurate
| statement is: "how to 'make you care' about you creating
| a problem for me" is a problem for _you_.
|
| My gut feel is the only way to really to prioritize
| concern for others is a moral framework that says so (and
| offers a compelling reason to follow it), or some kind of
| finely-balanced anarchy where no person or group really
| has the power or opportunity to force problems on others
| (which seems impossible to maintain in practice).
|
| Also another reason I think I can't agree that "solving
| problems = good" is there once was a problem labeled "the
| Jewish Problem" and the "final" solution to it is
| literally the epitome of evil.
| dotsam wrote:
| I put 'we' because institutions like legal systems are
| fundamentally collaborative, unless enacted by a total
| dictator.
|
| Popper's grandparents were Jewish and he wrote one of his
| major works which explores these topics, The Open Society
| and Its Enemies, as an urgent response to the
| totalitarian ideologies and atrocities of WWII.
| Totalitarian ideologies do not permit open, critical
| pursuit of the truth, and so they cannot create knowledge
| to solve problems in an unbounded way. Free, open
| societies can, where ideas can be freely exchanged and
| people have the freedom to criticise institutions without
| fear of violence. The values of an open society are the
| values needed for knowledge growth. And the reason we
| want more knowledge is to solve our problems.
|
| I am wondering if it would have been better if I had
| written 'solving problems is on balance a good thing'? Or
| do you think solving problems is on balance bad, or
| perhaps neutral?
| epups wrote:
| I don't believe it does, at all? How do you "solve" the
| moral problem of, say, whether we can breed and kill
| animals to eat them?
| dotsam wrote:
| What I mean is: solving problems is good. Solving
| scientific problems is good, solving moral problems is
| good. If you do not think solving problems in general is
| good, you will not think solving the killing animals
| moral problem is good.
|
| The only way to solve problems is to create knowledge. We
| need to create good explanations of what is there, what
| it does, and how and why. The only we know to create
| knowledge is through creatively guessing things and
| checking our ideas against criticism.
|
| To solve the moral problem of whether breeding and
| killing animals to eat is wrong we need a good
| explanation of consciousness, and whether animals are
| conscious, and if they suffer. We do not have a good
| explanation of consciousness or suffering yet. Any ideas
| we do have we can improve upon, endlessly.
|
| Edit: I should emphasize that we can never be certain
| that we've really 'solved' any given problem: we could
| always be wrong. This is why we should always be open to
| criticism and better ideas.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _What I mean is: solving problems is good. Solving
| scientific problems is good, solving moral problems is
| good. If you do not think solving problems in general is
| good, you will not think solving the killing animals
| moral problem is good._
|
| Not necessarily universally: one can have a philosophy /
| worldview where dealing with your problems is a way to
| spiritual enlightenment and getting rid of the problems /
| suffering prevents you from achieving higher spiritual /
| intellectual levels.
|
| > _Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction
| between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser
| divinity (sometimes associated with the God of the Hebrew
| Bible)[1] who is responsible for creating the material
| universe. Consequently, Gnostics considered material
| existence flawed or evil_ [...]
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
|
| Any worldview (Buddhism? Hinduism? that treats the
| material world as 'bad(-sh)' or an illusion would be
| 'susceptible' to this line of thinking.
| dotsam wrote:
| Even gnostics have problems they have to solve in their
| day to day lives, and the only way to solve them is by
| creating knowledge.
|
| Appeals to the supernatural or dogma are bad
| explanations, and they should be criticised and improved
| upon. They are bad explanations because they are not hard
| to vary, and can be easily modified or replaced by any
| other supernatural or dogmatic entity or force without
| affecting the phenomenon they are supposed to explain.
| They are essentially arbitrary and unfalsifiable
| assertions that do not increase our understanding of
| reality.
|
| Also note, you never get rid of problems, there are
| always more. New knowledge creates new and better
| problems. Running out of problems would itself be a
| problem.
| Flimm wrote:
| The idea of moral progress implies that there is objective
| morality, and that we can improve our knowledge of it.
| Progress implies a destination, it implies a standard against
| which the progress is measured, at least in principle.
| dotsam wrote:
| That is correct. In this is view, all evils are the result
| of a lack of knowledge, and so moral progress is achieved
| through the growth of knowledge. All knowledge is fallible
| and therefore uncertain, so even if we stumbled on
| objective truth (the destination which we are error-
| correcting towards), we could never know it for sure.
| debok wrote:
| How do human groups glorifying immorality imply that there is
| no universal moral code? If the universal moral code exists
| outside of those groups, then it can be applied to their
| actions, and we can call them wrong for the thing they glorify.
|
| Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are
| calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong. By which standard
| do you know them to be wrong? Such a standard must necessarily
| exist outside of the groups that glorifies the things you
| correctly call abominations.
|
| Edit: typos
| epups wrote:
| > How do human groups glorifying immorality imply that there
| is no universal moral code? If the universal moral code
| exists outside of those groups, then it can be applied to
| their actions, and we can call them wrong for the thing they
| glorify.
|
| Those groups would also call us wrong. If groups of humans
| tend to display very different and incompatible moral codes,
| that's a strong argument against a universal morality.
| Another argument against it is that most people in groups
| that glorified what terrifies us lived and died without
| showing an ounce of remorse for their actions.
|
| > Your very sentence implies a universal moral code. You are
| calling murder, slavery, and genocide wrong.
|
| Not at all. I used those examples because I know that most
| contemporary readers would agree. The fact that there is no
| universal moral code does not mean we can't have a moral
| code.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| You use your time machine to travel back to the year 1350 and
| make contact with a Mesoamerican society that just _loves_ to
| capture, torture, and execute their neighbors en masse,
| because doing this is a Good Thing. It pleases the gods or
| whatever. You think it 's a Bad Thing though. You are now
| outnumbered 100,000 to 1. How do you prove to them that your
| moral code is the Universally True one, and not theirs?
| hotdogscout wrote:
| If there are states/governments where Murder, Slavery and
| Genocide are fine, can you say it is universal if it cannot
| be applied in that place?
|
| What are the conditions for a universal morality?
| debok wrote:
| What do you mean by "cannot be applied"?
|
| Of course it can be applied. We know that those states and
| governments are wrong by the universal moral code
| condemning murder, slavery and genocide. We would have no
| grounds to condemn these things, if it wasn't for a
| universal moral code.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| With that definition any moral code can he universal.
|
| I can support legalized murder and condemn everyone who
| doesn't, therefore creating the grounds to condemn
| anything else.
|
| Some religions practice human sacrifice, including of
| children.[1]
|
| My opinion is we're better off arguing there's a better
| moral code based on a number of arbitrary parameters
| (freedom, resource creation, comfort, longevity,
| equality, merit, envy management, violence management,
| respect for tradition, respect of minorities, etc). I
| can't see how you can declare a universal code of
| conduct, I can see how you can declare a technocratic
| liberal one.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Az
| tec_cul...
| robotresearcher wrote:
| So what fraction of dissenters are allowed before the
| universal code ceases to be universal?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I've read that Chomsky can be pretty nasty to his debate
| opponents, but he's amazingly congenial in this video. It really
| makes me wish I could spend hours and hours chatting with him.
|
| I've run across a handful of philosophers: Chomsky, Peter Kreeft,
| etc. who can stay really chill during a debate. It's seems like a
| superpower for keeping discussions productive.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| He's very dismissive and disrespectful to anyone who isn't
| fawning over him. If you interview him and interlace praise and
| admiration for him, yes he's gonna be congenial.
| pydry wrote:
| Dismissive and disrespectful to people who are dismissive and
| disrespectful of him... what a monster.
| rfrey wrote:
| Not being a sycophant is not the same as being dismissive
| and disrespectful.
| 6stringronin wrote:
| His debate opponents seem to be pretty nasty with him and come
| out the gate swinging. Why blame him for doing the same?
| Krasnol wrote:
| For me, it's because you expect a mature discussion when it's
| philosophy and not some immature US-News shouting contest.
| naasking wrote:
| Philosophers can be pretty vicious.
| aa1234556 wrote:
| [dead]
| tjrgergw wrote:
| Why are we talking about Foucault anyway? Anything written about
| ethics before 1859 was missing a piece so crucial, it's garbage.
| dundarious wrote:
| I don't think Chomsky is so old to have debated _that_ Foucault
| on Dutch television.
| tjrgergw wrote:
| Ok just found on wiki. Paul-Michel Foucault. Never heard of
| him.
|
| Thanks for the correction.
| dundarious wrote:
| The video is linked in TFA.
| coldtea wrote:
| "Chomsky offers facile counter-argument to a much more nuanced
| take by Foucault, who he'd never be able to really grasp because
| of his continental mindset"
| randomcarbloke wrote:
| [flagged]
| notShabu wrote:
| All societies worship life differently, all death cults are
| alike.
|
| Seeking absolute consistency logically leads to worshipping Shar
| lsy wrote:
| It's weird to hear Foucault described as "amoral" when he himself
| claimed to be a moralist [1].
|
| What is meant by moral relativism in this case I think is merely
| that morals do not come to us handed down by God or Nature as
| Chomsky claims, but are a constant choice made by people over a
| potentially infinite range. But to assert that the morals don't
| come from God is not to say that morals are not valuable or worth
| having.
|
| As Foucault puts it, "What is good, is something that comes
| through innovation. The good does not exist, like that, in an
| atemporal sky, with people who would be like the Astrologers of
| the Good, whose job is to determine what is the favorable nature
| of the stars. The good is defined by us, it is practiced, it is
| invented. And this is a collective work."
|
| 1. http://www.critical-theory.com/read-me-foucault-interview-
| in...
| jancsika wrote:
| > What is meant by moral relativism in this case I think is
| merely that morals do not come to us handed down by God or
| Nature as Chomsky claims, but are a constant choice made by
| people over a potentially infinite range.
|
| I didn't get the sense he's saying morals are handed down by
| nature, rather that the potential range is not infinite.
|
| E.g., consider that research where the primate gets angry and
| starts rejecting its boring food pellets-- and in fact
| _throwing_ them at its handler (!)-- because the other primate
| is consistently receiving all the delicious grapes. We humans
| surely share and exhibit some similar social behavior. That
| truth doesn 't determine exactly how a culture will
| conceptualize and enforce a sense of morality. But it does mean
| some theoretical moral systems just won't work in practice.
| E.g., history hasn't left us with examples of well-fed kings
| with no king's guards during famines.
|
| So if you're a radical whose theories rely on humans asblank
| slates on which infinite moral systems may be applied (after
| the revolution, probably), you're going to have a bad time in
| the real world.
|
| Digression: I have no idea how this truism fits in with
| Chomsky's political ideas about anarcho-syndicalism.
| lsy wrote:
| But what you are saying is just that the "range" of morality
| is handed down by nature. And the idea that this range is
| "naturally" limited is too often used, as it is in your
| comment, to make an argument from nature's authority in favor
| of certain applications of power that may or may not be good
| for people. What I think relativism does is restore
| accountability to the individual and the society for moral
| decisions, rather than appealing to natural or theological
| authorities to absolve people and institutions of
| responsibility for their choices.
| jancsika wrote:
| > But what you are saying is just that the "range" of
| morality is handed down by nature.
|
| Yes, but for the _generous_ interpretation of what I wrote.
|
| E.g., you can't build a moral system that requires
| cordoning children off in individual stalls (one child per
| stall, no direct contact with other humans), feeds and
| virtually teaches them the rules of the society, then when
| they reach the age of 18 and pass a test get released into
| the wild to socialize with other humans for the first time.
| What we know about child development tells us that this
| system will be an utter failure.
|
| If you can imagine accepting at least some version of that
| paragraph as supported by the scientific evidence for how
| humans socialize, then you agree there are some hard limits
| on what kind of moral systems humans can thrive under.
|
| If you don't accept there are any limits whatsoever, then
| you fall into self-contradiction and incoherence which
| AFAICT is all Chomsky is pointing out.
|
| Edit: clarification. I don't think it's necessary to use
| the "most generous" interpretation of what I wrote, just a
| stock generous one.
| thsksbd wrote:
| Well, after raping countless boys in N. Africa and helping
| introduce HIV in the continent, I'd say he's IMmoral.
|
| EDIT Add citation:
| https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-...
| rovolo wrote:
| Foucault was working in Tunisia from 1966-1968. HIV is
| thought to have spread to NYC in '71, and SF in '75 which is
| where Foucault probably was infected. AIDS was first
| clinically described in '81, and Foucault died in 1984 from
| AIDS.
| [deleted]
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I must not be getting it.
|
| "how does a person acquire his or her culture? You don't get it
| by taking a pill. You acquire your culture by observing a rather
| limited number of behaviors and actions, and from those,
| constructing, somehow, in your mind, the set of attitudes and
| beliefs that constitutes culture."
|
| If you grew up in a different culture, you would have different
| attitudes and beliefs.
|
| That's...moral relativism, as far as I understand it. What am I
| missing?
| avereveard wrote:
| Nothing much. There's lot of extrapolation done and that
| "rather limited" is doing a lot of work here, as if one is not
| embedded in his own culture daily.
| mushufasa wrote:
| I think what Chomsky is saying here "rhymes" with his theory of
| Universal Grammar (UG).
|
| The UG belief is that there are a finite set of "primitives" of
| language, and all human languages have grammar syntax that are
| the permutations of those primitives. This is actually pretty
| clearly the case for programming languages -- primitives like
| addition/subtraction, methods, objects, etc. -- are chosen by
| language developers in different doses, and we group languages
| together based on these grammatical syntax choices (e.g.
| functional family of languages, declarative/imperative
| languages).
|
| It sounds like Chomsky is claiming morals work the same way;
| there are a finite set of things that humans find reprehensible
| or good. Per that, certain cultures at certain times may have
| different permutations of what they group into the 'reprehensible
| bucket,' but the set of choices is constrained.
| voxl wrote:
| Even if you admit the hypothesis, that there is a finite set of
| _expressible_ moral statements. That does not impose a
| universality to a particular selection.
|
| Just like there is not one-true-programming language,
| regardless of there being a finite number of them, there is not
| one-true-moral truth.
|
| You could say "well just combine _all_ the programming
| languages!" and you will have almost everyone hating it (except
| perhaps you yourself), just like with moral codes.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, this sounds like they are trying to say that the halting
| problem is reducible.
|
| Simple finite components can generate infinite, non-halting
| answers.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm not educated in philosophy, except my interest in natural
| philosophy, so I may be completely confused here.
|
| My sense is that morals are based on values that were instilled
| in humans in the evolutionary milieu. Half a million years of
| living as bands of Hunter gatherers. But these values are not
| completely consistent. For example, we think that stealing from
| others is wrong, but we also think that not sharing is wrong.
| These are rules of thumb that evolved in Hunter gatherer
| societies.
|
| So we have inconsistent values, and which values are most
| preeminent differ depending on what society we are in.
|
| On top of this are sex roles and sexual morality that were
| developed because of the needs of agricultural societies, which
| were very different than what was needed to survive as Hunter
| gatherers.
|
| So there are a wide variety of moralities that individuals can
| settle on as they try to make sense of all these contradictory
| impulses.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I don't believe morals have much to do with an inheritance of
| values, mostly because mankind, from civilization to
| civilization, has largely kept the same set of basic morality
| regardless of where they are or what religion they possess.
|
| Sure, some things change, but theft, murder, lying, etc...
| they're pretty universally seen as wrong. And in the instances
| where they AREN'T seen as inherently wrong, it's usually a
| class-based stance that still sets them apart. Even if you
| steal from other groups, don't steal from OUR group.
|
| Even if you wiped away all knowledge but the very basics on
| survival, these would come back in short order as societal
| hierarchies are redeveloped.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| > mankind, from civilization to civilization, has largely
| kept the same set of basic morality regardless of where they
| are or what religion they possess
|
| > murder ... pretty universally seen as wrong
|
| I have no idea how you could be even passingly familiar with
| societies like the Mongols or Aztecs and believe this to be
| true.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Religions require people to do stupid and harmful things
| all the time. They are extant to proper morality. People
| weren't just wandering around those societies and murdering
| other people in the same group without justification or
| punishment.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It's interestingly how you silently show that 'group'
| classification of humans allows any person to do any
| action they want to another person as long as they can
| find a means of putting them in a particular group.
| HerculePoirot wrote:
| The main question of the second essay is the ethnocentrism often
| criticized in my anthropological perspective. Those who protest
| against "Western ethnocentrism" willingly imagine that they owe
| nothing to the West since they vehemently attack it. In reality,
| their perspective is the most Western that has ever existed, more
| typically Western than that of their opponents.
|
| The revolt against ethnocentrism is an invention of the West,
| nonexistent elsewhere. Its first great literary success is the
| famous essay by Montaigne on "The Cannibals," which is already
| over four hundred years old. The author's anti-Western rhetoric,
| not always in good faith, is the starting point of a long war
| against only one ethnocentrism, of course, that of the West
| itself. This endeavor produces its most beautiful masterpieces in
| the 18th century and resurfaces, more virulent than ever, after
| the Second World War.
|
| What characterizes the most recent phase is the abandonment of
| the elegance and humor of the great ancestors, in favor of very
| 20th-century neologisms, such as the word "ethnocentrism" itself.
| The rococo trinkets of the Enlightenment era are covered with a
| slightly thick veneer. Where Montesquieu said, "How can one be
| Persian?" our contemporaries roar "against Western
| ethnocentrism." The essence of the debate has hardly changed.
|
| "This debate is, moreover, legitimate. Western culture is
| ethnocentric too, it is obvious, as ethnocentric as all the
| others and in a more brutally effective way, of course, because
| of its power. It is not a matter of denying this, but why not
| also recognize an irrefutable historical evidence at the same
| time? Unlike all other cultures, which have always been
| straightforwardly and unapologetically ethnocentric, we
| Westerners are always simultaneously ourselves and our own enemy.
| We are the supreme Majesty and the opposition to His Majesty. We
| condemn what we are, or believe to be, with often ineffective
| fervor, but at least we try. What is happening today is another
| example of the passion for self-criticism, which only exists
| among beings touched by Judeo-Christian civilization."
|
| Excerpt from "The One by Whom Scandal Comes" by Rene Girard
| olddustytrail wrote:
| That doesn't sound like Irish culture at all. Or Hebridean. Or
| Icelandic.
|
| By Western, does he perhaps mean "almost Western but then a
| little bit East, and not all the cultures obviously" or
| something?
| [deleted]
| taylorbuley wrote:
| LLM language learning has showed that many of the "strict rules"
| of modern linguistics are both contrived and unnecessary.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| [dead]
| jebarker wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the point being made. Chomsky seems to
| be saying that since we learn the prevalent morality of our
| culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal
| morality. But how does that allow for the fact that different
| cultures do have different moral codes and that those do change
| over time?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think he's proposing a universal moral grammar, or something
| to that effect. I'm not sure it's particularly convincing but I
| can't say I take a particular side on this.
| reedf1 wrote:
| I think his point is not that there is an absolute moral
| landscape or that moral relativism can't exist in abstract. But
| that morals are so deeply held, that they shape your being and
| understanding of reality. So on a day to day basis you would
| feel revolted against something that appears to be immoral in
| another culture despite being able to logically pare out that
| it is okay in their system of morality.
| jebarker wrote:
| Ah, I see. So you can understand why another culture holds a
| particular moral position but you still _feel_ it to be
| immoral yourself. That makes sense. But how does that tie to
| the sparse data and acquisition of morality?
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| I don't think it's that radical in a sense but trying to
| argue it is.
|
| When you think about it though, we kind of know that e.g. the
| founders of the U.S. had some sort of guilty conscience going
| on with regards to slavery. So we have folks like Washington
| freeing the slaves in his will, which of course his wife
| walked back on, and he probably had an idea that she might do
| that too.
|
| And yet people are able to jump through mental hoops to
| justify it anyway. We tell ourselves, well it was okay during
| their time. They probably said the same thing to themselves
| too. One day I'm sure our ancestors will curse us for
| bringing about the environmental disaster that was the end of
| days.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _we kind of know that e.g. the founders of the U.S. had
| some sort of guilty conscience going on with regards to
| slavery_
|
| From where did that secret sense of guilt come?
|
| Maybe there was no sense of guilt at all and it was all
| performative, cynically done for the sake of his
| reputation. But perhaps the arguments from contemporary
| abolitionists were secretly eating away at him from the
| inside, inspiring a real sense of guilt. I think that is
| congruent with the theory that some small kernel of
| universal morality exists in all humans capable of feeling
| empathy, derived from that innate empathy instinct. People
| can be conditioned to ignore it, and this explains much of
| the variability in human morality across cultures. A slave
| owner can ignore that part of his mind that empathizes with
| the slaves because ignoring it is socially and financially
| convenient. Some can be needled and prodded into
| acknowledging it, while many go their entire lives with
| this empathy buried and ignored. But however ignored, that
| kernel of universal morality still exists in them. It's
| universal to humans because we're all the same species of
| social ape evolved to have instincts which facilitate
| social cooperation, particularly empathy. This morality is
| universal in the sense that all humans have the theoretical
| ability to access it within themselves, but actually doing
| so obviously isn't universal.
|
| (Actual psychopaths, if such people even exist, may be the
| exception. If they truly lack the ability to empathize they
| would be unable to tap into this otherwise universal
| morality. Furthermore, the empathy instinct is not as
| perfect as might be wished; in almost all people empathy is
| felt more strongly for people who are close (socially and
| geographically.) Less empathy is felt for people who are
| distant or "other". Innate empathy has limits, and
| therefore universal morality is woefully flawed and
| incomplete.)
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, yea, trying to use the internal feeling of guilt as
| a basis is a path to complete failure in my eyes.
|
| This overlaps with the quest for AI we have and Chinese
| Room arguments. We can't even argue that people have the
| same sense of guilt. Is guilt in some people performative
| for social gains? Do other people feel guilty on things
| that at least to me make no sense?
| the_gastropod wrote:
| > He identifies "a tendency to move from the uncontroversial
| concept of moral relativism" -- that, say, certain cultures at
| certain times hold certain moral values, and other cultures at
| other times hold other ones -- "to a concept that is, in fact,
| incoherent, and that is to say that moral values can range
| indefinitely," tethered to no objective basis.
|
| The existence of a tether is what he's focused on here, it
| seems to me.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Regardless of whether there exists any underlying universal
| morality, why would shifts along cultural and/or time axises
| preclude it?
| LindeBuzoGray wrote:
| It can be seen in an individual. A boy is raised in rural
| Oaxaca, Mexico. He works on a farm, speaks Copala Triqui and no
| Spanish. Then when he's 14 his family moves to east Los
| Angeles.
|
| As he adjusts to his new situation, his behavior changes. The
| moral code of rural Oaxaca is different them that of east LA.
| His moral code changes. Perhaps he always gave a great amount
| of help when needed to neighbors in rural Oaxaca, but stops
| doing that as much. This changes. In Oaxaca, he did not steal
| from his friends, nor does he in LA. This does not change.
|
| It's obvious even in US culture. Two students go to Harvard,
| one goes into engineering, one diplomacy. What group are the
| moral traits of candor, frankness and directness valued? What
| group are the moral values of politeness and courteousness
| valued? Morality can be relative, depending on the situation.
| But for some situations it is not, the more universal things.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I think you described manners rather than morals.
| jebarker wrote:
| I don't think it's obvious that those traits, e.g. not
| stealing, are universal or part of some fundamental moral
| grammar. It just means they're common and widespread.
| LindeBuzoGray wrote:
| Not stealing, but as I said, stealing from one's friends.
| Most cultures frown on that.
| ars wrote:
| I can easily imagine a culture where it's only OK to
| steal from friends. Because a friend would "obviously" be
| happy for you to have it, but it's not OK to steal from
| anyone else.
|
| Like how it's OK to prank a friend, but not a stranger -
| but the friend doesn't actually _want_ to be pranked
| (i.e. the friend does not want to be stolen from).
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _I can easily imagine a culture where it 's only OK to
| steal from friends._
|
| It is easy to imagine contexts in which _taking
| something_ from your friend is morally permissible,
| because in that context you know the other person won 't
| mind that you've done so. But because they don't mind,
| it's no longer stealing. Taking becomes stealing when you
| should reasonably expect the other person to feel hurt by
| the taking. Hurtfully taking things from your friends is
| universally immoral in all cultures, but different
| cultures have different expectations and standards for
| what kind of taking causes hurt feelings.
| epups wrote:
| If you had to qualify it with "most", then it isn't
| universal. Moreover, I don't think morality is what
| applies only to your friends.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| Well the qualifier could be the writer's way of stating
| that he or she lacks knowledge of every society. After a
| brief search I can find no society that approved of
| stealing from peers.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| People from which it's okay to steal aren't peers.
| Supermancho wrote:
| "good artists borrow, great artists steal." - Pablo
| Picasso
|
| "You believe stealing is wrong, but if your family was
| starving and could not afford bread, wouldn't you say
| it's okay to steal a loaf to feed them?" - A.J. Darkholme
|
| etc.
|
| The basis of a morality may start with a simple set of
| propositions. Life ensures that the unknown unknowns that
| you encounter morphs them into an ever-evolving ruleset.
| [deleted]
| momirlan wrote:
| in a commune there is no concept of "stealing" because
| there is no private property
| mcpackieh wrote:
| In communes without private property, there is generally
| still _personal_ property. Taking somebody 's personal
| property is theft if you had reason to believe their
| feelings would be hurt by the taking.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property#Personal_
| ver...
|
| Even communal property may be stolen if there are any
| sort of expectations about one person having temporary
| exclusive use of that item. Maybe you and I live in a
| cult compound where literally everything is communally
| owned, even the cult robes on our backs. Now suppose that
| when you step into the shower, I take the robe you were
| wearing, the clean robe you were planning to wear, and
| all the communally owned towels as well. I have violated
| your reasonable expectation to have temporary use of
| those communal items. I have therefore stolen from you.
| Maybe our cult has a different word for it, but
| fundamentally I have stolen from you because I've
| deprived you of something you had a reasonable
| expectation to possess.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Take the idea of a post-singularity culture. To an
| individual in this society (if the idea of individualism
| still existed) have a moral framework anywhere near ours?
|
| What is stealing if I can push a button and said object
| can be easily duplicated?
|
| Does pain exist if I can turn if off an the level of my
| brain? Is death horrible if I can reconstitute myself
| from a backup?
|
| The idea of a universal set of morals, and that humanity
| could even come close to finding them at our point in
| development is just not something I believe in happening.
| We are enslaved to our emotions and bound to our physical
| meat.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Seems very close to his argument about the innateness of
| language structures. I can rephrase your question replacing
| moral* with language:
|
| > Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent
| _language_ of our culture through sparse data there must be an
| underlying universal _language structure_. But how does that
| allow for the fact that different _languages_ do have different
| _grammars_ and that those do change over time?
| msla wrote:
| Which, again, is a poor argument in that Chomsky never
| demonstrates his central conceit: _Is there_ a poverty of the
| stimulus? Here 's a review of a book that makes the case that
| children need, and use, plenty of stimulus to learn new
| linguistic constructions:
|
| https://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/so-much-for-
| chomsky...
|
| > It's been noticed that children rarely learn a new pattern
| that's demonstrated in front of them, which has been taken as
| meaning that they don't imitate adult speech. But now we see
| that they don't do it because a single instance isn't enough
| data for them. They don't venture to use a new construction
| till they've heard it many times and know how to use it.
|
| > A nice confirmation of this: children learning inflectional
| languages don't learn the six person/number combinations at
| the same rate. They first master the ones with the highest
| frequency in adult speech- e.g. 1st person singular, rather
| than 3rd person plural. Again, they're learning by imitation,
| and it takes a huge amount of repetition for them to learn
| something. They also seem to learn each verb paradigm
| separately- it takes a long time before they start
| generalizing.
| empath75 wrote:
| I think he's making two slightly related points.
|
| 1) That while it's possible to talk about moral relativism in
| the abstract, nobody in their own life is a complete moral
| relativist, which is to say that they will have _some_ moral
| system that they live their life by, even if they completely
| recognize the arbitrariness of it.
|
| 2) Moral systems have large degrees of freedom, but they _are_
| constrained, and he thinks some of those constraints might be
| innate. For example, while all forms of violence can be
| approved of in some society, it's always _conditional_. You
| could _imagine_ a moral system where arbitrary extreme violence
| against anyone and anything including yourself and your family
| would be perfectly moral, but you won't see that in any real
| society. There are always some conditions under which violence
| is acceptable.
| roenxi wrote:
| Possibly the article is poorly written? It doesn't seem to make
| sense. Either Chomsky is saying something quite academic or the
| article hasn't captured the point.
| gnramires wrote:
| Here's my take on the problem.
|
| Say there's are a pair of cultures, each celebrating a
| celestial event like Equinox or Solstice. In culture A, the
| tradition is that at solstice you should wear red shirts.
| Suppose they're not extreme about it, but they may look at you
| concerned or disappointed that you're not respecting their
| tradition for wearing a red shirt on that day. In culture B,
| the tradition is to wear a blue shirt instead.
|
| If you go to culture B (from culture A), and wear a red shirt
| at the day, people will find it strange and be disappointed.
|
| Does that mean one of those cultures is right in an absolute
| sense, and the other is wrong? I think at least in a "good
| enough" sense, maybe not. I think in many cases it comes down
| to non-unique solutions -- more than one culture can be good.
| Either case may be fine.
|
| However, I think we can with progress in philosophy, science,
| etc.. critique cultures as a whole: we can try to define _what
| is good_. Not only that, but I think in the sense of _what is
| good_ , then yes: I think we should converge on common, more or
| less universal principles. Within the same principles, a
| universe of cultures can exist; furthermore, variety itself is
| arguably part of goodness. If everything is the same, then we
| might be missing out in serious ways, both in immediately
| practical terms of different viewpoints fostering new
| innovations (if everyone thinks exactly the same... everyone
| has mostly the same ideas), and also in a cultural, aesthetic
| sense of life being more interesting with more than one
| 'cultural way', so to speak. Yet cultures should mostly agree
| on common universal principles (at least in some 'assymptotic',
| aspirational sense -- principles should be agreed more and
| more, and disagreements ought to become more minor).
|
| You may observe 'Ok, but those principles are just the product
| of the culture you started with!'. I think that's somewhat
| fair. But I think universal principles are kind of 'natural' in
| a certain sense -- I think there is a unique set of principles
| that is capable of unifying concepts like science, truth,
| morality, sustainability, art, culture -- as far as reason can
| go. If you look at mathematics, it is universally agreed
| whether a statement should be true or not. And we don't expect
| a different culture to find it differently. It's really
| surprising, I think, that reason should be able to tell
| anything about culture, but, although it's in some senses
| extremely difficult (specially if you're thinking of proving
| anything practical/concrete, like whether an art piece is
| beautiful or not), those things should all be accessible to
| reason. This is in no small part because the processes that
| happen in our own minds can be studied -- and the study of
| mental processes is in the end what can provide a great
| unification of all sciences and arts (although in practice like
| I said it's too difficult in the near term). We can understand
| the nature of happiness, unhappiness, beauty, motivation, and
| so on, in a very solid way, in the same way we can study the
| behaviors of particles, control systems, processors, materials,
| knots, and so on (there are some important details to this
| study that are too long for this discussion[1]).
|
| (I think _both Chomsky and Focault_ would probably agree on
| this point eventually)
|
| That's not to say you can't have cultures that refuse all that,
| potentially until they 'die'. It's also not to say you couldn't
| have some weird culture that does mathematics in a different
| way and they try to persistently live with grave
| inconsistencies. This would make their mathematics fragile, and
| probably far less useful -- the point where we call it 'totally
| unreasonable, pointless'. But it doesn't seem impossible that
| they could be totally unreasonable. This seems to undermine the
| notion of universality. If universality doesn't mean all
| cultures share the values, not even that all cultures would
| converge or even agree on those values, what could it mean? I
| think universality only means (in the context of ethics) that a
| culture with a sufficient set of tools/principles, procedures
| and systems do eventually converge on common principles. It's
| basically a basin of attraction of principles (and practices),
| that needs a minimal set for bootstrapping.
|
| So what is this minimal set? And critically, do we even have
| it?
|
| I think it can be summarized as consistency, or truth. By
| requiring that language be logically consistent, and enforcing
| the notion of truth (across reason[2], individual and
| collective decision-making), plus of course being sentient
| beings ourselves (that allow us to recognize and understand
| truths related to sentience, which I think are at the root of
| all that matters[3]), we get science, we become able to talk
| with each other reasonably, we become able to agree, we become
| able to investigate, etc.. By demanding that ethical principles
| have some (and eventually rigorous) consistency, we can get to
| moral truths: if my (literal) brother and my neighbors are both
| human beings, why should I only help my brother and not my
| neighbor? How am I fundamentally different from others that I
| should be more important? (egotism), etc.. What makes it hard,
| fundamentally, is that sometimes those demands come into
| conflict with our instincts, or even major aspects of our
| society, so we can dangerously veer off this path.
|
| I think we have it, and another name for it might be
| Enlightenment, both in the sense of western culture, and
| eastern cultures (e.g. in buddhism). Are we enlightened yet? :)
|
| (I would say we're mostly on the path to enlightenment,
| although we haven't yet been able to discover and agree on some
| principles and truths that are very important to our lives --
| we are on the path but still far from the ideals)
|
| This is such a beautiful and important notion to me, I think it
| might be worth it to call this God (i.e. this enlightenement,
| this path to truth/science/everything that is good that can be
| known) -- with capital G, and why not worship and protect this
| notion.
|
| [1] The difference is that you need sentient beings and our
| experiences of ourselves to be able to understand truths about
| sentience. In a way we are, and have to be, both subject and
| scientist, and this is a little different from strict views of
| science.
|
| [2] I've talked so much about reason/truth that I think I
| should mention intuition too. Intuition is the practical means
| of thought. Intuition can be thought as large leaps of logic
| that may be uncertain and/or non-trivial. Most of our language
| statements don't actually follow from one another immediately
| in the sense of logic, instead they tend to jump many steps at
| once, or we even make propositions that are unproven (in
| mathematics we tend to use intuitive leaps to find proofs and
| then fill in the gaps with formal statements). Many things in
| life are actually not so important that we need to prove an
| ideal solution, usually good enough is enough. Still, this
| process and language itself relies on the infrastructure of
| logic, truth and consistency to work; and in many cases,
| involving important decisions, we can reduce uncertainty and
| improve decisions by refining our steps, and giving more solid
| arguments (approaching truth with greater confidence).
|
| [3] Just to be clear, I'm far from proposing we become naive
| logical machines. Those would probably be both ineffective, and
| neglect taking into account _the experience of being_ itself.
| Even fantasy is important in this sense, but I think we should
| be careful to keep fantasy separate from reality as much as
| reasonable (phenomena like 'Santa Claus' and psychological
| quirks notwithstanding). Fantasy is good and reasonable in a
| way! Same goes for things like arts, games, sports, leisure.
| Should be made from self-sustainable good feelings.
| some_random wrote:
| [flagged]
| effed3 wrote:
| Agree. probably morality is deep rooted by evolution, is basic
| for -survival-, even today, is a necessary tool to build social
| structures where we can live better. skepticism is shallow, can
| express only in a more limited contingency, and in small doses
| serve to build deeper knoveledge, and maybe a deeper morality.
|
| Different cultures appear to differ at surface levels, having
| different habits forged by different local environments, but
| being stables (or slow changing/adapting) this set of
| ideas/knoweledges reveal a wide similarity at deep level: this
| deep level is not relative, is just on top of levels like dna,
| cells, anatomy, is the ability to develop knowlewdge, can be the
| language, the walking, the relation is a group..
|
| relativism is shallow in the big perspective of evolution, a deep
| relativist probably is an extinct one. But today extintion come
| from the opposite direction, not nature but ourselves.. but this
| is another story.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Morality is a mechanism that helps with following some rules
| within a society without spending excess resources on enforcing
| them. It evolved in small groups (in comparison to the size of
| societies today).
|
| If you accept this view on what morality is then it's pretty
| obvious there ought be some universal rules as human groups have
| a lot in common and some rules universally help with survival of
| a group. "Don't kill your peers" is one example. "Don't take
| their property without their consent or some process" is another
| although it can only arise in groups advanced enough to come up
| with the concept of property. Then there is a whole set of rules
| related to sex and reproduction which are again pretty
| universally needed for the group survival but can be established
| in various way - there more than one solution giving a chance for
| group's survival unlike in "don't kill your peers" case.
|
| I am yet to meet a fundamental moral relativist who claims we can
| adopt any rules we please but a position that there are many set
| of rules that arised to help with the purpose of group's survival
| is both common and imo obviously correct. There is in fact an
| underlying mechanism for moral rules (group survival) which those
| rules stem from in one way or another. There might be better or
| worse set of rules and they might be different depending on
| environment a given group exists in. "Don't kill your peers" is
| going to be there but "Don't kill the weakest members of the
| group so the resources can be saved" not necessarily so.
|
| It seems to me that Chomsky is arguing against a very narrow and
| strict definition of moral relativism here or I am not getting
| his point.
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