Moral progress is also a matter of opinion. And that is one reason why it’s annoying.
I am interested in moral progress as a person or community’s growing ability to behave responsibly. But what most people seem to focus on is the colonization of a social order by a different social order. That’s not true moral progress— that’s domination.
I roll my eyes not just because I am reacting to a challenge to a norm, but because my norms are as reasonable as anyone else’s. My norms are not second class norms.
Every kind of norm is a compromise among competing values. When you challenge any norm you are attempting to cut a Gordian knot— which is cheating. And Alexander got away with it because he held the sword and the Gordians did not.
Like a multi-armed bandit strategy, optimizing moral progress by balancing exploration (testing new moral norms, even if uncomfortable) and exploitation (building on proven norms). Where the optimal strategy changes over time due to technology and other circumstances.
> When we’re told that something we see as ordinary – like eating meat – is actually wrong, our first reaction is to get irritated and dismissive.
I am experiencing this firsthand in debates about urban transportation policy. One part of the challenging is getting people to recognize the negative impacts of cars (pollution, injuries, parking space) and car-dependent designs (unwalkable neighborhoods, little consideration for mass transit service, no autonomy with a car).
Another part of the challenge is to dispel myths about cycling: that bikes are just for kids, bikes are for exercise and not transportation, bike lanes are a waste of space, cyclists don't pay road tax, you can't bike in bad weather, etc.
> efforts to use the term ‘survivor’ instead of ‘victim’ when referring to people who have been sexually assaulted – were also seen as preachy and annoying
Continuing with my experiences in transportation debates, there are a few proposed changes to mainstream language that I agree with.
One is to never describe a traffic collision as an "accident", and instead call it a "crash" or "collision". This is because these "accidents" happen at a predictable rate and have mundane, preventable causes (e.g. drunk driving, dangerous road geometry, poor visibility, lack of police enforcement, heavy vehicles proliferating, protests against speed cameras, deliberately engineered prioritization of speed over safety in road design).
Another is to stop using the passive voice (almost universally used in news reports), which draws attention away from the culpable driver and makes it sound like a random act of God: "6-year-old killed in accident with SUV" versus "SUV driver kills 6-year-old in a crash".
> When new norms are enforced by the community, it can add fuel to the fire, leading to embarrassment and alienation, which can deepen social divisions and quickly tip into fear, anger and outright hostility.
> I am experiencing this firsthand in debates about urban transportation policy. One part of the challenging is getting people to recognize the negative impacts of cars (pollution, injuries, parking space) and car-dependent designs (unwalkable neighborhoods, little consideration for mass transit service, no autonomy with a car).
I recognize the negative impacts, and yet will happily keep my vehicles because the benefits outweigh the risks and negative impacts. It's a trade-off many of us will continue making because there is no better alternative that checks all the boxes.
> benefits outweigh the risks and negative impacts
This is deflecting a critique of a systemic problem with a defense in terms of individual (and personal) effects. Taken broadly, this statement is utterly wrong, and the benefits come nowhere close to the dramatically negative impacts on human health and life, accessibility, neighborhood cohesion, child development, commute time/difficulty, the local and global economy, the local and global environment, etc.
If the whole system around you were changed, even marginally, toward more efficient and effective uses of land, infrastructure, and resources than a car culture, you would almost certainly significantly benefit (along with everyone else). For problems of this magnitude your personal choice is not really the issue (though there are certainly personal choices you can make which have a slight positive impact in your local neighborhood).
Yeah I understand. I've seen many responses along the lines of "my drive to work is 30 minutes; if I had to take public transit then it's 3 buses in 90 minutes". So far, I'm tolerant to those comments.
What I have a problem with is that instead of saying that a car works for them personally, they start attacking the people who challenge the car-dominated status quo. They propose ridiculous edge cases as gotchas, blithely ignore any evidence presented, and make it clear that you're an idiot for proposing any idea that differs from the norm. Furthermore, they fiercely attack any incremental change - whether it be congestion pricing or upzoning or adding bus-only lanes - even when every time it has been tried the populace is satisfied with the outcome after it gets implemented.
I am speaking of the composite opinion of Toronto (in-person consultations and Facebook groups/people/threads), Canada+USA as represented in mainstream news and social media, and Reddit/FuckCars (with a big North American and youth tilt).
Indeed it was :) Although for what it's worth, the Aeon piece has also changed my own thinking quite a bit, even as one of those progressive bogeymen with blue hair and pronouns. (Okay, no blue hair, but still.) I sometimes find myself falling into kneejerk patterns of "Ugh, I was fine with X, but Y takes things too far..." in situations where it's totally unfair of me to think that way, and often notice my progressive peers doing the same. Everyone is susceptible to cognitive bias!
Skip the article and just read the study (barely) linked in the second paragraph. I Ctrl+F'd for "dero" and was surprised/disappointed it wasn't mentioned by name.
I'd like to highly and thoroughly endorse utilitarianism as the best moral / ethical theory / framework to live one's life by. For an up-to-date introduction at a college level of exposition please visit https://www.utilitarianism.net/
I don't particularly care for utilitarianism. It can make the fairly obvious cases rigorous, but it doesn't do a good job of drawing fine distinctions -- for example, the variations of the Trolley Problem. When two utilitarians disagree in their cost/benefit function, utilitarianism doesn't provide a mechanism to resolve it.
That's not meant to discourage anybody from utilitarianism. There is no obviously better system. And we do need some basis on which to make decisions. I am just wary of utilitarianism for myself because I distrust its potentially confident-but-wrong conclusions.
I do think it's a very useful framework for elucidating the problems. Why is it we are willing to pull a lever to let the train kill one person, but unwilling to push a fat guy in front of it? I think that utilitarianism highlights the differences for exploring the moral intuition.
I have a poorly-elaborated notion that the moral intuition has some kind of universal, biological basis -- perhaps similar in origin to Chomsky's Universal Grammar. If that's true, we might be able to learn something from the neurobiology of moral decision-making. And that might in turn put utilitarianism on a firmer footing, or prove that no such footing is possible.
I developed my own internal system of values or ethics when I was in high school. I thought it was great. Then I went to University, read Hume, Mill, et al. and realized that my thoughts were not original at all. That didn't make them less relevant, just made me a little disappointed. I spent a disillusioned year or two thinking University was just going to be giving proper names to thoughts I'd already pondered.
I used to be a utilitarian 15-20 years ago after reading the work of Peter Singer and many others. These days, I have to admit its application has been almost without exception backwards if not reprehensible. It seems to lead inevitably either to (obviously repugnant and utility-destroying) communism or a strangely twisted and fruitless hyper-rationality (think contemporary Effective Altruism).
In the end, and perhaps in service of my original utilitarian impulses, I feel that entirely abandoning utilitarianism is the right path. This is sometimes referred to as `esoteric utilitarianism`, something that Sidgwick wrote about — suggesting that even teaching people about utilitarianism (himself being a utilitarian) might be immoral. Virtue ethics has been particularly appealing!
I'm baffled by your claim about Effective Altruism (EA): "fruitless hyper-rationality (think contemporary Effective Altruism)." Fruitless? You mean the (movement of) people who have contributed billions of dollars to some of the most cost-effective charities on the planet; many of who give at least 10% of their income to such charities ... fruitless? How did you form your opinions about EA?
Utilitarian analysis inevitably is coopted by those in power to frame "good" as what the powerful want.
For example, some say it's more important to keep people's stock-invested retirement accounts solvent by increasing stock prices rather than take corporate profits and pay people who can't even afford groceries or rent, let alone invest in a retirement account.
How can the version of communism one arrives at through a utility-maximizing manner reasoning itself be "utility-destroying"? Surely whatever principles one derives out of of it has more utility than all other alternatives.
Unless you are being facetious in your characterization.
I am interested in moral progress as a person or community’s growing ability to behave responsibly. But what most people seem to focus on is the colonization of a social order by a different social order. That’s not true moral progress— that’s domination.
I roll my eyes not just because I am reacting to a challenge to a norm, but because my norms are as reasonable as anyone else’s. My norms are not second class norms.
Every kind of norm is a compromise among competing values. When you challenge any norm you are attempting to cut a Gordian knot— which is cheating. And Alexander got away with it because he held the sword and the Gordians did not.