None of that matters to our conversation:

I say Ethical arguments don’t reach policy conclusions, so instead focus on the minimax strategy and cut a deal.

You say you want to keep making ethical arguments – I assume that deep down is because you don’t think you can cut a deal you’ll like.

I’m trying to get you to understand you can get a deal that’s acceptable, you just haven;t figured out who to partner with and what to sacrifice. Strategy is not your sides strong suit.

As soon as you REALLY want to topple the 1%, you’ll partner with the Tea Party to do it.

“ou really need to take into account the broader range of political experience –not just post WWII US politics –to see how far the US is now from the the war of every man against every man, which is where pure strategic self-interested individualism leads.
Now, you may be right in claiming that Hobbesian state as the next stop (I doubt it, but it is possible) but the point is not to just fight your way to the first car on that train.”

No. I’m saying the FIRST STOP – the foundations of the US, like the foundations of Russia after USSR fell…. the first state – that’s reality.

Period. The End.

After that there were more stops, like ending slavery, etc. Those next stops have the same DNA as the first.

My point, which you;ll likely just skip over, is that NONE of that has anything to do with ethics, ALL of it happened following the same drum beat… not tipping over the apple cart. the Civil War was about the ethics of slavery? C’mon.

So, let’s drop the guile, you aren’t going to score any points.

INSTEAD if you want progress, the left should ADMIT the 80-99% (cal them the Tea Party so it is REALLY hard to do and you still do it) are the A power go to them, and GIVE TO THEM your support such that they will go kick the shit out of the 1% oligarchs.

The biggest winner in the first fight will not be the C power (your team), it’ll be the Tea Party, but the LOSER will be the 1%, as power shifts from B to A.

Look at parliamentary UK or France right now, the far right power is the C power. Sarkozy was the A power, the socialists were the B.

Suddenly the Socialists are the A, and Sarkozy must partner with the C in order to regain A status.

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There is nothing new here EXCEPT that this is NOT how you view how to get your goals accomplished, instead you want to argue ethics.

The policy process is simple: Offer the Main Street capitalists direct specific tax and regulation advantages over the Fortune 1000. Make it almost impossible for the Fortune 1000 to win. The best and the brightest will respond to incentives and go become Main Street capitalists.

This is called Distributism, it spreads the power and money out amongst a far greater number of folks the 1% lose and the 80-99% gain.

In real terms this means a deeper broader base of consumers for service and goods provided by your team – the C power.

To the extent one has something to gain, ok. But what if the Nash equilibrium doesn’t set up just right. It seems all this hand waving about cultural and technological evolution is about setting up institutions that diminish mans need for moral action, of making the Nash equilibriums work out even if we expect the worst. As they say in Brave New World,

“My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that’s what soma is.”

The lack of moral action is assumed. You are nothing more then atoms. Your “decisions” have no moral content. To the extent you act “morally” its merely the fact that your brain chemistry dictates it, and your brain chemistry dictates it based on evolutionary triggers you hope society has found some kind of hack for. Because if the hack doesn’t work, if the people in charge don’t get it just right, you are not capable of genuine moral action based on something more then the makeup of the atoms in your brain.

I agree with the ultimate point on Douhtat; he’s just wrong if we all resort to metaphysical primitives anyway. Whether the (unreflective) secularist method is a net positive (because it lacks the middlebrow history lessons) or whether we should be as (or more) annoyed with secularists who are even less meta-ethically sensitive than Douthat, is a disagreement that could get marginal pretty quickly. FWIW, I’ll drink to fewer middlebrow history lessons.

You can make all the ethics arguments you want, but those like econ policy and everything other soft science either argues for or against players in REALITY. It is all a bunch of self-interested hooey.

The innovation I’m bring to it is that IF you are interested in forming optimal policy you face a choice:

1. You can really accept the foundations for what they are, notice that policy improvements (lack of slavery, women voting, ending prohibition) have actually been rational extensions of simple brutal reality and then FORM POLICY COMPROMISES that don’t topple the apple cart too much.

2. You can be pissed off that the apple cart doesn’t tip on your whim and spend your life trying to turn any and all rhetorical opportunities (claims of any ethics that fit at that moment) into a cheap effort at victory that never comes.

Look, I’m a rapid supporter of small gvt. who’s cozy with granting citizens “rights” to a Guaranteed Income which is a policy compromise for both groups.

This puts real screws to conservatives, once they get to PROVE to the public who is lazy and who is not, they have to support the non-lazy the way liberals believe men should be treated..

Liberals eat the same half a loaf: everyone can gets covered, but the conservatives get to make being lazy incredibly hard.

Real freedom for the lazy only exists outside the safety net.Then everyone can argue back and forth about levels and terms etc.

Philosophically this is way past, “If the big guys have the power to protect, they have the power to take the stuff and leave out the middle man paying them…people notice that and don’t feel protected…”

It’s nowhere near that. In fact: removing the middle man (bidder / seller), is what increases capitalism – this is a high-tech version of Distributism. More capitalists fixes any problem with capitalism.

The brutal reality known to all small govt. conservatives is that Big Govt. = Big Biz. And they’d LOVE to make both eat it at the same time.

Example: progressives could quickly gain grass roots conservative support for tax policy which dramatically favored SMB over Fortune 1000.

Final note: during past decade while Big Gov and Big Biz grew, the top 1% (the B power) gained, bottom 80% (the C power) lost.

Guess who was left unscathed? The A power. The 80-99% the Main Street SMB capitalists who own all the guns and run every small town like Boss Hog in a little pond.

They are the Tea Party, and they did not lose over the past ten years. They have the VOTES and the $$$ to take down the 1%. They are 4-5x richer than the 1%.

But the left doesn’t THINK.

Any rational C power keeps the B power and A power fighting with each other and then switches sides A LOT (see China during cold war)

The C power only gains when the A and B power are locked in a death match. Does it look like the 1% and 80-99% are locked in a death match???

No. because the left, it is just coddles the blue state 1%, takes 60% of their political donations and NEVER sides with the A power.

And what happened? the B power gains, the C power loses, and the A power just gets more aggressive.

Accept reality, shelve the ethical cheer-leading and get down to brass tacks man, how much for the ape?

I agree that there is enough in common between human cultures to recognize different cultures as cultures and (for the most part) different religions as religions —although the line between religious belief and other beliefs is not easy to draw. (If you can’t specify the dependent variable, you can’t identify an independent variable as a cause.)

I also agree that there is a biological basis for human capacities and that the capacities of other creature differ in many respects from those of humans. However it is not possible to state that a particular human capacity has a specific biological basis (gene 6 of chromosome 11, some long list of such data), and there is no reasonable prospect of identifying in this way the biological basis for religion.

More importantly religions may have a lot in common but as we know they differ on such moral issues such as who it is permissible to enslave or kill, as well as many finer points which have and may lead to future misery. So even if we can say what religions have in common as a biological foundation (which I doubt), this tells us nothing about what in a particular religion ought to be regarded as good or bad.
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At scale this means the founders of society who first hire a bunch of big guys to protect their stuff, as they form pacts to create first govt. one of the ways they convince regular folk to accept the proposed governance is extended protection – you don’t get raped without someone getting punished, even if you can’t kill them yourself.

This is not reasoned out morality, CI or otherwise, this is brass tacks how it gets done, then AFTER THE FACT, the moralists seeking a power base of their own, move in and attach philosophy to the reality the market delivered.

It may be that some questions can not be answered with a priori propositions and a rigorous abstract logical framework. The same answers are not as hard to find in the context of empirical examination of what exists in reality, of what human emotions are and how they are tuned to react to various events.

I know this isn’t philosophically appealing, but I think honestly this is the source of religious moral values. In the pure abstract world of a priori logic, one can find ways to justify rape, murder, and other atrocities. The real and powerful range of human emotions, the realities of the human organism and its brain, should not be ignored or factored out for the sake of rational purity. Clearly it’s not adequate on its own, but it seems a useful foundation or starting point.

As a side issue, I think the Kantian line is that we are bound by the categorical imperative insofar as we’re rational; you can’t deny the formula of universal law on pain of contradiction.

You said that it was a problem that secular realists want to be unreflective about their own beliefs while scoffing at Douthat’s realism at the same time. I’m not sure that it’s such a problem, since, in just about any conversation where neither party is a Kantian, the dialectic is pretty shallow: the religionist appeals to divine command or religious experience or some other conversation-stopper re metaethics, the secularist responds with some equally unenlightening appeal to rights as metaphysically basic or etc., and then we look to harm reduction plus good feelings (or some other utilitarian calculus) to get the policy right, just like we always do.

So the fact that the unreflective sexcularist gets the policy right without all the middlebrow history lessons looks like a net positive. Douthat’s claim that religionists (including prosperity gospel and new age people) have a “metaphysically coherent picture” while secularists do not is just wrong if everyone ends up making huge appeals to metaphysical primitives anyway.

Prolix but lightweight, nonetheless.

In debate, Should is a statement of best policy choice defined by outcome. Ought speaks to the morality of a free choice – ought implies can, if you can’t do something, you have no moral obligation to do it.

Should assumes you can do anything – treat people as animals,etc. etc. and then asks what is the best policy effect of doing so.

This is where is gets fun, since what you should do is measured by if the policy works, the morality established and held by everyone else around you has great, GREAT weight.

As such, religious folks can argue that the morality they impose on the secularists are the only reason the god-less ever reach the right conclusion.

But in fact it runs the other way, Jesus stole Easter from the bunny.

To me this is proof, almost all religions diarized on a set of morality that just so happened to work in practice – don’t eat the rotten pork, god hates pigs, or breed a lot, whatever.

Which would indicate that what we should do as optimal policy is the foundation that we used to form our morality.

Morality changes to celebrate the best policy choices.

Take “absolute human equality in evolutionary theory”

I don’t know about the “absolute” part, but…

Evolution can totally accept that once you start taking care of the smallest, dumbest, and weakest and continue to have them breed, that evolution slows down or starts to track towards things like beauty – which favors mixed race marriages.

Why would that violate evolution?

And why isn’t rape wrong because if you do it, I will kill you? Why isn’t that policy fact the highest order, around which religions can go sell god?

When accompanied by fictionalism or something like constructivism (in the hands of Rawls, for example) meta-ethical issues are either deflated or avoided and intellectual virtue has been gained. But I don’t think this avoidance or deflation accompanies most attempts at giving moral reasons or everyday arguments from secular moralists. I think the Categorical Imperative, if thought to give overriding reasons, is just as arbitrary as divine command theory. I don’t know enough about Kant to say, but perhaps the Categorical Imperative was always constructivist (IIRC, there is some debate over this) but either way I don’t think most people would realize that, and secular people usually just appropriate secular-morality-talk into their common realist instinctual background, nonplussed, irritable, and incredulous when questioned on meta-ethical grounds. Of course most people are this way; I guess it just matters to me who puts the most pressure on themselves by the intellectual standards they claim, but I realize many people find this to be a provincial concern of mine.

From observation (and even in quite a bit of research) it appears that human beings will blindly and happily conform themselves to whatever their culture – or an immediate “authority” – tells them about morality. This may even be the single most glaringly obvious fact about human history; we are scarily conformist, for good (sometimes) and ill (often). )

(I guess I wasn’t so succinct this time either)

Thank you for your reply, but, do you see fictionalism as a way of preserving common sense moral instincts (religious or otherwise) about ethics? For whatever it’s worth, I do not. In other words, if you could get the average person to watch a documentary about genocide, get them all riled up about it how wrong it is, explain fictionalism to them, and then ask them if fictionalism does justice to their instincts about meta-morality, do you think they would be satisfied with fictionalism?

I’m not sure if we’re going to have the space (or time) to hash it all out here, but I do not think people are prepared to be so philosophical practical and unsentimental, fictionalism not being a literal form of realism and all.

If I’m right, then the difference between Douthat and secular (philosophical) laypeople is that Douthat realizes that moral realism imposes some kind of burden, such that an explanation is required (I suppose some sort of divine command theory or religious telos is what he would offer) and (many) secular people are unwitting moral realists who have yet to relaize there’s an epistemic issue at all.

No. Nobody felt bad for treating gay people (for instance) as subhuman until about 10 minutes ago. Likewise, lots of people didn’t feel bad at all for treating black people the same way (until about 20 minutes ago).

Some people felt bad about these things – but some (many? most?) didn’t even notice…..