[Cialug] Mandriva - open letter to Steve Ballmer

[Nathan Stien]

On Nov 2, 2007 11:03 AM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Fine, fine.  Whatever.  Then what do you call the thing that makes
> slavery wrong, even in 1700s American South?  Or murder wrong even in
> 1200s Central Mexico?  Where does social "progress" come from at all?
> What powers activists to lobby for suffrage or gay rights?  What makes
> one thing right and another not, if "culture" is the ultimate
> standard?  What makes the Nigerian government wrong to take bribes if
> taking bribes is part of their culture?

As a point of interest, what do you call the thing that makes eating
meat wrong right now?  There are plenty of people who feel moral
outrage at the idea of eating meat, and they think of the meat-eating
populace as cruel, stupid, or both.

(Me, I like a steak.  Mmm meat.)

People who owned slaves did not see it as morally objectionable.  To
them, slaves were just *property*.  Tools.  How can you violate the
"rights" of a hammer?

The indigenous people murdered by the Spanish were also viewed as
sub-human.  Nazis viewed jews as untermenschen.  Some religious people
view gays as abominations in the eyes of their god(s).  The old
testament is replete with orders from YHWH to slaughter competing
religious/ethnic out-groups.

And in fact, I myself view cows as sub-human.  I have no problem
eating them all the time.  Our friend Josh More thinks they have
enough of a nervous system that he personally likes to avoid eating
them.  (Chickens, however, are stupid enough to eat, something we
definitely agree on.)  I have a lot of respect for him, and I don't
think his view is silly.  I just don't completely share it.  Our main
difference is that he estimates cows to be closer to his in-group than
I do.  I have not spent very much time observing them, so maybe if I
did I would change my mind.

When an entity is not part of your in-group, you tend not to care
about extending rights to it.

A lot depends on how you conceptualize the issues.  Moral progress, in
my estimation, is the result of conceptual change.  I like to think
that it changes for the better.  (Our in-groups seem to be getting
more inclusive over time.)  I like to think that my concepts of
in-group and out-group are in some sense more evolved than people who
came before me.  You obviously like to think the same way, Todd.  But
I don't think we can objectively prove it.

This is not to say that I condone a radical ethical subjectivity.  I
can and do condemn my otherwise-hero Thomas Jefferson for owning
slaves.  He may not have thought it wrong, but I sure as hell do.  I
wish he would have known better.  It's not "OK" by me at all for him
to have owned slaves.  But I recognize that his failure to condemn
slavery was because he (like almost all of his contemporaries) was
wrong about whether Africans were full-fledged human beings.

> Saying the culture you find yourself in is the standard of moral
> conduct seems to me just as wrong as saying I make up the standard I
> feel like.

There are a number of approaches to fighting this.  For example, you
can just assert some set of rights as natural, a la natural rights
libertarians, classical liberals, etc.  "We hold these truths to be
self-evident..." The problem is justifying the naturalness of your
candidate rights to people who disagree.

You can also go for some variety of utilitarianism.
Act-utilitarianism has some notorious sticky problems (murder one
person to get organs to save ten people? Nah.), so I find myself
wanting to go for a type of rule-utilitarianism.  E.g., this
particular set of rights leads to overall better consequences for more
people.  But then you still have the problem of justifying that.

Alternatively, you can say that your moral rules were handed down by a
supernatural entity, but then you have to convince people the entity
is real.  And you are then typically stuck with those rules forever.
Moral progress halts, or can only proceed by selectively ignoring the
rules.  (Who stones people to death for working on the Sabbath
anymore?)  Sometimes you can release a patch (e.g., new testament),
but then you have yet more problems with schism, etc.  Very tricky.
Most attempted patches on the Abrahamic religions have been put down
very forcibly, for example.

It's all very sticky and, in my view, and unsolved problem.  In the
mean time I have an ethical system that just seems to *feel* right,
based upon my conception of the world.  I cannot really pretend to
have some concrete and perfect justification, much as I would like
one.

And here I am, talking about this thing I warned not to talk about.  ;-)

- Nathan