
“Ethics” as signaling - networked
https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/buddhist-ethics-is-advertising/
======
intopieces
This article puts into words a conglomoration of experiences and thoughts I've
had over and over, but never really considered together as a concept.

"To be middle-middle class, you need to have all the correct opinions.... This
requires memorizing endless lists of taboos and shibboleths, which is a
conspicuous waste of time. “The news” and the political internet are tools for
this. The high cost of keeping track of all that meaningless noise, and the
ease of verifying it by asking your opinion of last night’s synthetic outrage
event, makes it an effective signal.

To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what
would be the correct opinion about things that are new to you. This requires
conceptual sophistication: years of study not only of details, but also of
ways to think. That is what a liberal arts education used to be for."

To take this further, I think the New Upper Middle Class signaling strategy is
to be conspicuosly ignorant of the latest "synthetic outrage" \-- "I don't
have a TV" is a refrain that comes to mind. "I don't have Facebook" is
another.

Then again, I find myself directly in between these two: a news junkie devoted
to understanding "what really matters in the world." That is, my signaling
strategy is to have the _right_ opinions about the _right_ topics while
publically rejecting the _wrong_ topics (and, in a non-confrontational way,
the _wrong_ opinons). It's a way to signal opennesss (an agreeable trait)
while maintaining sufficient cost.

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hosh
Wow, something from the Meaningness blog got onto the front page of Hacker
News. I did not expect that.

I want to make a note of something here. The author is a practitioner. I don't
know how he thought up of these things, but what he says here and in many of
his other articles are worth listening to because many of the things he says
here seem to come from practice on the cushion -- at least to me, he does.

It's the meditative experience itself that loosens up beliefs and opinions.
When they arise and you pay attention on the cushion, things you take for
granted get seen in a new light. Many of the deeper observations result from
seeing things that you'd rather not see. What's ironic is that, for some
reason, many folks in Consensus Buddhism will have these strange, adverse
reactions to this very questioning of the core beliefs of Buddhism, even
though the meditative methods taught at the core of Buddhist practices will
open up the questioning process. If you're practicing correctly, you'll run
through layers of personality and deeper into tightly-held beliefs and world
views. Releasing and opening those are often one of the hardest practices.
(But hey, you can take what I just said as the ethical posturing; I get that
reaction a lot too).

This method does not apply to just Buddhist beliefs. It can apply to any
belief system (religious, political, social, etc), including Atheism (Yeah
yeah, atheism is an "absence of belief"; but not after you find out what
beliefs really are on the cushion).

So, while the insights in this article might be interesting, even practical, I
doubt you'll really get it's full potential unless you replicate it by sitting
on the cushion yourself.

Just saying.

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RockyMcNuts
Maybe 'religious labels as signaling' would be a better title.

Religion is a rather complex institution, involving metaphysics, ie a
dichotomy between the sacred/holy/divine and the profane/ungodly; human
organizations and activities and social hierarchies; rituals; and yes, codes
of behavior.

Ethics is the study of moral principles that govern choices and behavior. I
like to think that there are some universal moral principles that are
instinctive or even game-theoretically necessary to cooperative human
activities, and there are other ethical principles that particular societies
or religions choose to agree on.

To the extent someone views ethics as a signaling mechanism, it no longer fits
the definition of ethics.

~~~
lsc
>I like to think that there are some universal moral principles that are
instinctive or even game-theoretically necessary to cooperative human
activities, and there are other ethical principles that particular societies
or religions choose to agree on.

A lot of people think this... but the claim only seems to hold up if you speak
in broad truisms rather than details.

I mean, it's generally agreed that murder is unethical; but when you look
deeply, this is largely a meaningless tautology, because it's only murder if
it's wrong; two people can look at the same act of killing and one can call it
murder, while the other can call it something just.

Even within my own country; hell, within my own family, there's a lot of
disagreement as to what murder actually is. Is abortion murder? Is killing in
defense of property murder? Is killing as a judicial punishment murder?

People I know and consider to be reasonable people disagree rather strongly on
those details.

Now, everyone I would consider to be reasonable, and nearly all current
Americans would agree that killing someone for the crime of speaking out
against a religion is murder, but there certainly isn't a global consensus on
that; and really, not so long ago, there was something approaching global
consensus that killing someone for the crime of blasphemy was a reasonable and
just thing to do.

You can claim that all people share a instinctual belief in a set of core
ethics, and I'm not going to say you are wrong, but you have a lot of
convincing to do.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
people feel empathy without being taught, for people and even animals they've
never seen before.

they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if
they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. they
share the notion that there is some kind of reciprocity, or social contract,
even if they differ on the details of what the contract allows.

see also

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103849/Research-
sho...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103849/Research-shows-
toddlers-understand-right-wrong-just-19-months.html)

animal experiments in fairness, etc.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_mora...](https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=en)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds)

~~~
lsc
If you are saying that believing in something like morals or ethics seems to
be a universal, then I agree with you; it does seem to be a universal.

However, if we talk about any moral or ethical value or set of values, I still
don't see any that are universal in any meaningful way. Across time and
culture they are so different that what is the greatest good can be the
greatest evil and vis-a-vis.

>they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if
they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason.

I'm taking this as "everyone thinks killing a human is a big deal" (implicit
in your statement, I think, is that reasons like "because it gave me slight
pleasure" or "because they slightly inconvenienced me" count as "no reason" \-
because otherwise the statement has no meaning. There's always a reason, even
if it's a bad one.)

My counterargument is slavery. Even Aristotle, the father of western
philosophy, thought that slavery was a perfectly natural thing; that humans
could, in fact, be property.

Yes, I know, not all systems of slavery were absolute to the point where a
master could kill a slave with the same ethical and legal consequences as I
would face for destroying my old laptop rather than passing it on to someone
would could make use of it, but in all systems of slavery, killing a slave was
much less of a big deal than killing a noble, and in many systems, it would
qualify as "not a big deal"

I also point you at "ethnic cleansing" and religious violence, though part of
that is that is my own values; _I_ think that killing someone for their race
or religious affiliation is killing for a trivial reason. I'm sure the people
doing or organizing that killing disagree with me.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death
camps.

Kant did a pretty good job with this stuff

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative)

~~~
lsc
Kant was quite a writer, and yea, an innovator for his time, but the idea that
you should act in a way that, if everyone did it, would turn out okay was
radical in his time, and still not generally accepted.

If anything, your categorical imperative is another argument that people don't
agree on what is right across time and culture.

In fact, considering his socioeconomic position at the time, I highly doubt he
lived anything like a life that could be lived by everyone. We talk about
economic inequality now... but in his day the difference between the rich and
the poor wasn't the number of dollars, it was who had access to food and who
did not, which I personally think is a much greater inequality than any amount
of dollars.

> once you 'other' someone, you can justify anything including torture, death
> camps.

The point here is that you can go back and rationalize people's actions like
that, but to say those people are acting on the same ethical principles that
we are makes a mockery of our modern ethics. If you have rules about what you
can and can't do to a person, as we do, and you re-define person to not
include a bunch of humanity, you are no longer following the same ethics we
are following now.

------
colanderman
I've always thought this is partially why people of mainstream religions are
often so scared of atheism: they subconsciously interpret the statement "I am
an atheist" as "I do not subscribe to your ethics" and assume the speaker is
liable to kill anyone at anytime.

~~~
taliesinb
I think that's totally at odds with the OP's argument.

Under the OP's view, atheists aren't scary because they might be violent --
most people aren't psychopaths, that's not what social signaling is for -- but
because they've chosen to chuck out a large chunk of the signaling machinery
that the "middle middle class and below" have habitually relied upon.

In other words, if you've sworn off the dominant canon of ethical and social
judgements, your position now suddenly requires just-in-time evaluation by the
other, and that is threatening to people who don't trust themselves to
reliably pull it off.

~~~
colanderman
I'm not sure how you interpreted what I said, but I meant it to mean exactly
what you said! Isolated atheists have no signaling mechanism, and thus are
often assumed to have no, or a very different, moral code. ("Else why would
they not subscribe to my religion?")

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hliyan
I tried reading this article. But even as someone raised as a (Theravada)
Buddhist, I found it confusing. Perhaps because it addresses something(?) that
troubles mostly westerners? Even though I no longer subscribe to the
rebirth/karmic aspects of the religion, the core of Buddhism is fairly self-
evident to me. This article made me question my own understanding, and did so
with a handling of the English language that, well, did not exactly help.
Perhaps this kind of analysis comes across sounding different to those from a
Buddhist background?

------
backpropagated
"What is “I am a Buddhist” supposed to say about you? ... it signifies
particular personality traits such as openness and agreeableness."

Interestingly, the present Dalai Lama is ranked as low on both openness and
agreeableness.

