What Just Happened Here?
This must be rather boring for most white people. I get that. I imagine this gets filed under ‘who really cares?’ Imagine the aroma that results from a magical spell cast by a character in Dungeons and Dragons, after the character has left the scene where the imaginary spell has been cast. I never gave an imaginary shit about Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, and I am struggling to arrive at the quintessence of the highly contrived ‘I don’t care.’ This is how I imagine white Americans feel when they hear about black Americans pondering racism.
I confess, white people, sometimes you absolutely confound me. I’m well into middle age now, and I have crested the hill where I thought all people would hold hands and sing Coke commercials, and then settle down into an evening camp of mutual respect. Forty years ago, I thought we’d be there by now. Not only are we not there, I don’t see us getting there in my lifetime…if ever. I’m trying not to care about that anymore either. But, I have to admit that there is one aspect of how white Americans think and act that continues to blow my mind. I just can’t quit you crazy accidental racist fuckers. (Sorry about the strong language. Feel free to replace the objectionable word with prejudiced).
Yesterday, a driver for NASCAR got caught in one of those accidental/intentional/accidental/intentional demonstrations of racism, followed by the heartfelt apology. This is where the preju-bigots confuse me.
Let me back up a minute. First, you need some background on this serious/absolutely meaningless event. We…and by that I mean the people of Earth…are now in a sort of quarantine because of Covid-19, a virulent virus that has killed 116, 279 people worldwide as of today. As of yet, there is no vaccine, and no test informed map to indicate where we are safe to be around one another, and where we are not.
As a result of that, most travel, interaction, and business activity is in hiatus. Schools are closed. Many businesses are closed. Restaurants are closed, and operating as take-out where possible. Way down the line of importance is the fact that our multi-faceted sport preoccupation has been essentially shut down. Wait…it gets even less important. NASCAR racers are now spending their quarantine time racing against each other thru online video games. And still more/less…rather than reading books, or maybe building a ship in a bottle, there is a TV audience for these video game/virtual races. We are approaching the speed and aroma of the fart of a magical warrior troll here.
So, Kyle Larson, NASCAR driver in one of these meaningless…yet televised…virtual races, gets online and asks if he can be heard. Presumably he determined that he could not be heard, then he said, “hey, nigger…”. Then, much to his dismay, several of the other drivers indicated that he was heard, and that he was broadcasting to everyone. Larson was then suspended by NASCAR, which, presumably has significant financial penalties for him…for which I really do not care. Some dude said another racist thing. Next?
Here is where these people begin to completely confound me. Larson issued an “apology to his followers” online. He videoed himself in the manner with which we have become familiar in this Silent Spring. In the video he appears very contrite. I don’t know if he is sad about what he said, or just sad about being caught…and I don’t care. What I really do not get is, why did he say it? I don’t understand this any better now than when Sesame Street had me convinced that this sort of thing was seeing its last days.
Practically every racist I have ever encountered denies their racism. This is essentially what confounds me about the Bigotorum. (Often, I am accused of being a racist myself. Some have even floated the not-so-genius ‘reverse racism’ canard. That term exists in a whole ‘WTF’ universe all its own). I was in college before I heard anyone describe Archie Bunker as “right”…as if to say, the hero…rather than an anti-hero. I grew up thinking Michael Stivick and Gloria, and Lionel were right, and Archie was wrong. As it turns out, Archie was far more common in America than I had ever realized. Thirty some years later, we almost elected a 5th Avenue Archie Bunker President…and the Electoral College placed him in office anyway. Now, I know we have had racist, er…Prejudents before, but they weren’t…Trump. Woodrow Wilson was a big time bigot, but he wasn’t a moron like our current occupant of the White House. And with all that said, one can see the method to the racist’s madness most of the time. When you can see the benefit to the bigot, you understand the investment and the two-step about the practice. They want to have chocolate cake, and lynch it too. What I don’t get is when there is no cake.
Kyle Larson uncorked a “hey nigger” for no discernible reason. Then he felt the need to issue an apology, and appeared contrite while doing so. What just happened here? I confess, you all confuse me.
04/13/2020 @ 6:55 pm
Can’t help you. Got no idea why he said it. Depends on how specific your question is.
Why would anyone say it? Much bigger question. That I can explain, I think, but I don’t know if I’ll be saying anything obvious. I’ve learned a lot from Trump’s success. Whether or not Trump is actually a bigot, which I assume he is, his political success is based on being perceived as one and, perhaps more importantly, protecting bigots and treating their bigotry as a right.
Archie Bunker? Archie believed two things. He believed that minorities were inferior, both in terms of ability and in terms of ethics/morality, and he believed they did not deserve to get government help because they caused their own situation and it galled the crap out of him that any of that help was coming from his own pocket. Guys like him are very angry that money is taken from working people and given to people who aren’t interested in working.
There are obviously a lot of fallacies involved here. The more you know, the more you get exactly how fallacious these fallacies are. However, to know more, to know enough to understand the fallaciousness involved, you have to be willing to learn that you might be wrong. That takes more guts than most people have. It also takes more integrity, as it’s hard to get someone off of an idea that profits them in some way. It not only takes integrity, it takes curiosity, and generally speaking stupid people aren’t curious.
Let me give you an example of incuriousness. Rev. Wright, the former clergyman of President Obama, once said from the pulpit “God damn America.” A lot of people were very upset by this.
You’re a former Marine, as is Rev. Wright. I’m not, but I understand enough about Marines to understand that it takes one Hell of a lot to get a former Marine to the point where he says “God damn America” from the pulpit. My first reaction in hearing a former Marine say that is: What brought him to that point? What delegitimized an entity he was once happily willing to die for to that extent? I don’t happen to know the specific answer in this case but I know enough about how Black people are treated in the United States (in ways mostly unacknowledged by White people) to understand that what brought about his transition probably has to do with that.
When being exposed to enough truth, some people change. However, there’s been a new national development over the last couple of decades and it has to do with Fox News. Fox News has been able to delegitimize inconvenient truths to a large section of the population. Trump has done so even more. Now when truths get inconvenient, there are very prominently placed sources that facilitate denial of such truths. Is a truth inconvenient? Deny it outright. No reason to confront it at all. The President rarely does.
And so, I guess, because I started this by saying I couldn’t explain it but maybe I can explain a piece of it, this race car driver didn’t believe Black people were entitled to protection from this shit, from the language that assigns them inferiority. His apology may be genuine for a part of it. The part that is most likely to be genuine is his shame about his rudeness. Someone heard it who could be hurt. What he’s not likely to really be apologetic about is his underlying belief that there is truth in what he said, that the assumption of inferiority contains truth.
Right there is racism’s third rail. What gets addressed all the time is the unacceptability of this viewpoint. What doesn’t get addressed is the (to use an earlier term) fallaciousness of this viewpoint. What kind of gets addressed is what put people into circumstances where such fallacious assumptions about them became credible. Kind of, nowhere near completely, and it’s addressed more as a series of grievances than as an explanation about how Whites caused and continue to cause situations on the part of many Blacks that Whites in turn blame Blacks for, such as far less median wealth.
The strangest part, the really weirdest part, is that bigoted behavior wouldn’t make any sense if the bigoted assumptions were true. They aren’t, but this brings out the fundamental irrationality of bigotry. Populations are bell curves. They mostly overlap. That makes assumptions about any given individual based on (to use the example in question) race irrational because there are more predictive variables available. One could notice a difference in median anything but bigotry isn’t based on that so much as it’s based on the assumptions that the bell curves barely overlap if at all. This is just wrong. It’s Flat Earth wrong. That’s a failure of education. But as important as it is, I’ve hardly ever if ever seen it addressed. The truth is that the guy you use the epithet on could be smarter than you, richer than you, sexier than you, more athletic than you, classier than you, more capable than you, more ethical than you, more attractive than you, better educated than you, the list goes on. Your assumption of superiority is based on the assumption that the bell curves are largely separate. But life never works like that.
04/15/2020 @ 10:25 am
In case this thread gets confusing, I’m responding to the comment ending in getting punched in the face by Mike Tyson.
I’m going to kind of answer your wife here, though I may be restating something you just said. Determinism does not preclude our having a role in our own decisions. However, what we’re likely to decide is a function of what influenced our development, which is its own series of falling dominoes. Someone writes something racist. Someone writes something analytically absurd. The Someone in question is someone we have a reason to observe and find somehow significant.
We are going to refute this in some way. In theory we have a choice as to whether or not we do. In theory we have the choice of agreeing with Someone. But is this a realistic possibility? Not really. In theory our free will allows us to vote for Donald Trump in November and wear MAGA hats in the meantime. But we won’t, and why we won’t could be construed as determinism. A combination of the circumstances of our upbringing, our genetics, and our lifelong exposure to whatever affects us leads us pretty much inexorably to the conclusion that we won’t. All those factors are dominoes. It isn’t specifically that we don’t have free will. No external actor is coming up to us and saying “I command you to act this way.” It’s just that our action is predictable, and a lot of the setting up of those dominoes is deliberate on the part of our parents, teachers, peers, informers (in media as prime example). It is absolutely deliberate on my part in bringing up children. It is deliberate on my wife’s part when she teaches classes and mentors Masters students. In fact one could say that politics is an attempt to set up dominoes. But of course that attempt itself is a result of previous dominoes.
Where does that put free will? In theory, one might say that free will is in reality negated. But what functional difference does that make? None. It’s a way of looking at the world that doesn’t help us act.
And there may be some sort of crossroads, some decision that one might argue is not predetermined because the forces on both sides of a decision are very near equal and the tipping really is up to us because external forces aren’t great enough or unequal enough to push us in one direction.
My use of this imagery is based on my occupation. I’m in the sound business, and eardrums are moved by inequality of pressure – either the pressure outside the eardrum is greater than the air pressure behind it and the eardrum is pushed in or the pressure outside the eardrum is less than the air pressure behind it and the eardrum is pushed out from behind. If pressure is equal, the result is silence, but silence is by no means the lack of pressure. Pressure is so extreme that if you were to dangle an 8 1/2 x ll sheet of paper by its corners at sea level and it were to stay still, the pressure on each side of that sheet of paper would exceed 2/3 of a ton. (I figured that out myself one day fooling with numbers, God only knows why, but I found that result interesting and illuminating.) A lot of what I do for a living involves selling equipment that manages sound wave collisions to achieve desired results in terms of where sound goes, where it doesn’t go, and from what directions a microphone picks up sound. Actually, at this point most of what I do for a living does.
04/15/2020 @ 1:06 pm
I have done some reading of Kant since our last exchange. I think I will be all Summer. In doing so, I have discovered that you, Amy (my better half), and Kant agree about the complexity of reality playing a role in what is knowable. Now, Kant’s problem comes from the fact that his view of ethics is essentially deontological (derived from duty). The categorical Imperative (C.I.) claims a moral duty. Mosaic law claims a moral duty. “Thou shalt/shall not”…etc. Kant also espoused relatively progressive opposition to dogma. More modern thinkers oppose dogma in a variety of ways. One of the most prevalent today is a consequentialist view of right and wrong. (Results matter).
Brandeis updated US Supreme Court deliberations by introducing a consequentialist aspect into a process which had previously been entirely theoretical/dogmatic. Modern banking regulations advise certain procedures which say that banks must act a certain way toward the public, and if the results still deliver certain types of uneven outcomes, they must still make corrections to their processes because the resultant fairness is as important as intent. Many other types of laws now weigh these duty/intent with result aspects in the interest of justice. Murder, homicide, manslaughter, negligence, and felony murder (accidental death while committing other felonies), all make such considerations of thou shall versus result.
As I see it, the vast majority of us today make use of some sort of fluid consideration regarding right and wrong in our complex world. Most of us are not strictly deontological as if the law were only…etched in stone. Also, as I see it, conservatives tend to lean toward that sort of rigidity. Constitutional originalists are one example. More conservative aspects of various religions are another.
Racism theory (by the racist) may be some form of deontological racist morality, if you will. Racist orthodoxy which denies experience with social data. Perhaps this is why the racist’s statements are rational within a closed system, and can conflict with the data within the “stereotypes” that it uses as its laws. Perhaps rationality depends upon the size of the factual universe that one takes into account.
04/15/2020 @ 1:35 pm
(4-15 Second response re: Kant)
Going further, the present exists as a sort of event horizon between the unknowable complexity of the past, and the predicability of the future. The specific aspect of predictability going forward is regarding computer programs, programmed machines, robots and autonomous vehicles.
It takes a bit of condensing here, but predictions in programs require essentially a Utilitarian focus. What is the most good for the greatest number. Utilitarian viewpoints become dangerous and onerous very quickly. As one example, utilitarian views tend to validate slavery. Most good to the greatest number. Modern societies reject strict utilitarianism, and programming autonomous machines depend upon it. I wont spend to much time fleshing this out, but if you pull on this thread, you can see how this works for yourself.
So, as we have moved from strict deontological views into consequentialist views as industrialism and population growth advanced, so are we headed for a collision between consequentialism and old utilitarianism as we go forward into the future with autonomous machines.
04/13/2020 @ 7:07 pm
Thanks so much for that response, Kosh. It’s nice to ponder another’s well considered thought.
You used the term “irrational”, and that brought to mind a conversation my wife and I had a couple of nights ago. We were up late into the night, around 2am, discussing our separate views of Kant’s definition of rationality and irrationality. It was in a larger discussion about determinism and ethics/morals, and we went to bed thoroughly confused. To water it down to where it probably should not be, Kant’s view was that the ethical and moral is rational, and the unethical is irrational. What fascinates me about your response is the irrationality and racist occupying the same ethical space. I’ll chew on that for a while.
04/14/2020 @ 12:33 pm
If I’ve got something worth discussing I’ll visit often and I do any time you write.
I’m not sure I get the concept of determinism. If it means what I think it means, and at one point I believed in it (and might still though if I do I think determinism is functionally irrelevant, more on that later), we don’t have free will though we have the illusion of free will. If that’s the case, one could make the case that the categorical imperative is useless because it depends on free will. Unless….
How I view determinism, and I don’t know if it is how Kant views it, is that the world consists of an impossibly complex set of falling dominoes, like a gigantic unbelievable Rube Goldberg machine. Under this theory, if you knew absolutely everything going into a moment, you could predict the next moment accurately. However, the complexity is of such magnitude that it isn’t possible to know everything, so even if true it’s useless. To extend this to free will, under determinism we could in theory have it; it’s just that it’s theoretically entirely predictable how we’ll exercise it. Where does the categorical imperative fit? The cosmic chain reaction results in Kant introducing the concept which in turn triggers its own series of theoretically predictable dominoes. Or, to put it in free will terms, the cosmic chain reaction results in Kant choosing to introduce the concept.
Now I guess comes some sort of definition of morality. My latest stab at it would be Help others, protect others, and avoid hurting others. Thinking about it further, in that order, because protecting others could entail hurting others. As an ex-cop and ex-marine this should sound familiar – Serve & Protect.
In terms of the rationality of this viewpoint, I would call it rational if we take for granted that there should be some sort of a universal single standard. If you come up with a way for everyone to be, this works. But the expectation that that will be taken for granted is not a reasonable expectation, which I guess means I’m just restating something I said in my last comment. If your goal is greatest good for greatest number, sure, but that’s not a standard we can assume is universal, particularly given that at this point we have a dominant political party dead set against it.
04/14/2020 @ 1:07 pm
Over time, we each come to our own understanding of what morality is and our respective responsibilities to same. Broadly, they tend to differ very little. Even our laws are written with basic assumptions about what a person should do with words like “expectation”, “reasonable”, and “necessary”. It is understandable how several people in the same historical era, in the same country, have essentially the same view of right and wrong.
Now, your quick assessment of Kant is accurate, as is your quick assessment of determinism. Most of us see a flaw in that it appears to structurally absolve the individual of accountability because decisions are essentially pre-determined. Certain philosophers have taken Kant to account on this matter. Kant, however, sees no conflict between a structural determinism, (which he does not assert), and moral accountability. Kant’s ability is to slice the onion into extremely thin slices, and elucidate distinguishable micro-slices. I have a predisposition much like yours. My curiosity is in trying to see Kant’s position, whether it is right or wrong.
I shared your last comments with my wife last night, and she has a view that I used my own words to describe. She has a view that we have a role in our decisions regardless of what comes before. It is analogous to chemistry with reagents and catalysts. With moral decisions being the chemical reaction or change, there are reagents (which is where Kant and determinism stop), and then there is the catalyst, which is where each individual is inescapably. In other words, we can not separate ourselves from having an effect on the result by being the one who makes the decision. This seems to be intuitively so to me. What I will search for is why this seemingly obvious truth evades Kant. Now, my wife says Kant is also similar to Adam Smith vis a vis Economics. It is great theory until it meets a real world test. I am inclined to agree.
Mike Tyson was once quoted as saying that every fighter has a plan until they get punched in the face. My wife and I reduced that to Kant’s determinism problem seems to have suffered from being punched in the face by Mike Tyson.
04/13/2020 @ 9:57 pm
I don’t know much about Kant or maybe don’t remember much about him. Bad ethics can be rational if you’re looking for power. If you’re engineering a society whose prosperity and health you’re trying to maximize, they are intrinsically irrational.
Expanding on that theme, racism is inconsistent with patriotism. The reason it’s inconsistent with patriotism or, to use our previous language, irrational if you’re trying to maximize the health and wealth of your country, is that the economy is not a zero-sum game. Oddly, this is the mistake Wall Street is making. If the presumed object of the game is to maximize the amount of pie you get to eat (oversimplified and within limits), there are two ways to do that: you can maximize how many degrees around the perimeter your slice is or you can maximize the size of the pie, in which case a narrower but longer slice may mean you eat better. All things being equal, if you’re a patriot you’d rather eat a thinner longer slice of pie than a fatter shorter slice because the former indicates more general prosperity.
A permanent underclass has no advantages to a country but a lot of disadvantages. If our poor had more money, here’s what would happen:
– American businesses would be healthier because they’d have more customers with money. They’d in turn spend more and hire more, resulting in more hiring yet and a still healthier business climate
– There would be less crime and more neighborhoods would be safer. Also nicer. Crime is horrendously expensive in all sorts of ways, everything from enforcement, courts and incarceration to insurance rates, low real estate values, and low tourism.
– American businesses would probably have a larger talent pool of qualified potential employees. If we reduce bigotry, American businesses would use their talent pool more efficiently. This was, unintentionally, an advantage of Affirmative Action, before which American businesses largely ignored more than 50% of their talent pool (including women) which is economic idiocy.
– The tax base would be bigger, resulting in smaller deficits (if any) and the ability for government to spend more on everything from infrastructure to retirement to pollution control to assistance for whatever poor are left
– Government at all levels would have more legitimacy. Less civil strife.
Oddly, the US gets this about almost every other ethnic minority. If you look at immigrant populations, even non-White immigrant populations, the first generation speaks a foreign language and faces bigotry but by the third generation they’re speaking almost entirely English and are so integrated that ethnicity is way less relevant if relevant at all. Blacks and Native Americans are the exceptions and face artificial obstacles generation after generation. There is no advantage to the country of this.
04/13/2020 @ 10:30 pm
Your view and my wife’s view are essentially the same. The reasoning is the same. The takedown of Kant is the same.
Now, I don’t qualify to critique Kant…but here I go anyway. From what I can tell, Kant has a problem, with his view of determinism and moral responsibility. Much of what he constructs says that everything that happens has a cause. He states determinism without affirmatively arguing for it. Then, he essentially argues against it by claiming a “categorical imperative” to do the moral thing. “The Critique of Practical Reason” and “The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” contain the relevant information where Kant sets up his conflict between determinism and the categorical imperative to be moral/rational.
Your view and my wife’s view are the same. There is and must be accountability. Determinism absolves the individual of responsibility. This appears to be a flaw in Kant’s view. Now, with Kant being the genius, and me not, I am not prepared to say Kant is wrong. But, as my wife pointed out, Heidegger and Hannah Arendt agree with you, her…and not Kant.
So…irrationality versus rationality and morality. We may have some time on our hands for the next couple of months. I plan to wade thru all of this at length. I hope you’ll visit often.
04/15/2020 @ 10:39 am
How many laps in a NASCAR race does one have to watch before it occurs to them that they might not be smart enough to do anything else?
04/15/2020 @ 2:09 pm
(Replying to …”future with autonomous machines”)
Learning some vocabulary here, or relearning it.
Utilitarianism. Strictly observed, it’s tyranny by the majority. Utilitarianism is only what we would consider moral with a safety net, a regulated lowest common denominator.
Consequentialist. This is my problem with the Greens and the Far Left in general and why they deserted us to allow Trump to win in 2016. They were so much more concerned with how pure the candidate was than they were about who got hurt.
Deontological. A perfect description of Judaism. Judaism is first and foremost about responsibility, even more than about faith.
Racism and deontological thinking. The problem here is that the deontological thinking is selective and doesn’t acknowledge dilemmas. What happens when a law breaks the law? How can compassion be a theological imperative when some laws are anything but compassionate? If the responsibility encompasses specific beliefs, that can of course lead to trouble. I’ve found this most obvious in the clash between a lot of religions/sectarian movements within religions and gay rights. In traditional Judea-Christian interpretation, homosexual congress is strictly illegal (actually male homosexual congress – at least the Old Testament doesn’t mention lesbianism at all). Its moral underpinning is often based on the proposition that homosexuality is a choice. If it’s a choice, then that kind of sexual conduct is nothing but a swipe at law or worse. In conversations with fundamentalists, where I have been most successful at introducing doubt into their homophobic certainty was in proving to them that it can’t be a choice, at least not universally. Once we get over that hurdle, now we’re criminalizing a way God made some people, people whom this prohibition actively makes suffer, and not analogous to kleptomania or sociopathy because homosexual congress does not involve victims like, for example, adultery does – and it’s distinctly odd from a theological standpoint that homosexuality gets more negative attention than adultery does, in spite of the fact that adultery makes the Ten Commandments.
Like with most forms of bigotry, religious and otherwise, generally speaking the more you know, the less valid it gets.
04/15/2020 @ 2:27 pm
Not to slight any part of that response by omission, but I would like to highlight your insight regarding consequentialism and the far Left. Um…fantastic! Such a great point. Now I have the prism you just provided to go over aspects of perspectives that I have had problems with, but could not precisely say what. Also, it shows a real problem with consequentialism.
Oh, so many thanks!
04/15/2020 @ 3:44 pm
(…..Oh, So many thanks!)
No problem. Once you gave me the name of the concept of Consequentialism, for which I thank you, I knew how to apply it because I’ve had this conversation a lot. I just didn’t know the concept had a name. I used to have these knock down/drag out fights with SBA over the Democrats. Her point was all about Lesser Evilism, viewing morality through a dualistic(?) lens or what I’d call a bipolar model, not bipolar in the sense of disorder but bipolar in the way one analyzes opposites. Some opposites are cleanly opposites, some are not. For example, hot/cold and dark/light are based on varying amounts of a single commodity, in this case heat or light. And they can really be based on context – what a person would consider hot to live in could be considered quite cold when looking at the operating temperature of an automobile engine. If, on the other hand, we look at magnetic positive and magnetic negative, they’re opposite with no middle ground. The model contains two poles, two polar opposites, and I mean bipolar in that sense.
The people I know and know of on the Far Left tend to look at good and evil as bipolar rather than as various degrees on a continuum. That means that people are good or they aren’t. From that perspective, Lesser Evilism makes no sense; it’s either evil or it’s not. What matters from this perspective is where you stand. Consequences are irrelevant because the impure candidate is evil so the conversation stops as soon as we acknowledge that. When I first encountered this and realized exactly what it was, that consequences were irrelevant, I couldn’t wrap my head around anyone thinking like that. Once I understood how many people did I understood that the Far Left were not allies but phony allies and couldn’t be relied on for the simple reason that they’re too naive. They didn’t owe us their votes because they weren’t really moral in the way we were. Their morality was an illusion.
This explains their candidates. If you think back to Jill Stein, 100% of what they talked about was issue stands. Nothing else. This is a woman who was handcuffed to a chair during a Presidential debate to keep her off stage and who couldn’t even generate press coverage over the event. I can remember looking into her background at the time because I realized she wasn’t being evaluated on anything we normally evaluate about candidates. How unqualified she was for the Presidency came as a shock. Her administrative experience was negligible, her foreign policy, military, and business experience were nonexistent, and her only elective office consisted of being elected to the equivalent of a town council where her vote total – not vote margin, vote total – was at best under a thousand votes. Well under. Why would anyone assume she’d have a clue how to handle anything once she arrived at the White House? How would she handle Congress? How would she handle the military? Intelligence? The Federal bureaucracy? Lobbyists? Wall Street? National crises? The only way these questions could be ignored is to be entirely non-Consequentialist. Personally, I didn’t only view this as irresponsible, I viewed it (and continue to) as highly immoral, probably on the grounds that it’s irresponsible. You have to take care of people or you’re politically worthless, and you have to know how to get people to do the responsible thing or you’re logistically worthless.
I’m just grateful that I have a thing to call it. This all reminds me of a comparison of American and German surgeons from over a century ago I once read, I have no idea where. The protagonist wanted to be operated on in America because if the operation was done properly in Germany but the patient died on the table, the German surgeons would consider the operation a success.
04/15/2020 @ 4:17 pm
Incidentally, the Far Left and the far Right meet in consequentialism. They are only distinguishable by the grocery list of items that they place in their respective carts, but joined by where they shop, and the currency they use to pay for their items. Ethically, they are nearly indistinguishable. They progress morally or ethically by being willing to compromise. Begin and Sadat at Camp David. Nixon and Mao. Grant and Lee at Appomattox. Was Grant more ethical than Sherman? Probably. Was Lincoln more ethical than Buchanan who failed to engage? Possibly. Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki utilitarian? Likely. Were they consequentialist? Also likely. Were they deontological? Almost certainly not. Were they ethical?
04/15/2020 @ 4:24 pm
Hiroshima, probably not. Nagasaki, almost definitely not. The more we know now, the less necessary they look. At the time to the American public they made complete sense. You have to know behind the scenes to understand why they weren’t.
Of course the firebombing of Edo/Tokyo killed more people.
04/15/2020 @ 4:40 pm
If I am thinking clearly here, the story of Lot pits the deontological view against the consequentialist view. Lot, for his “faith”, is rewarded. His faith is observed/measured by his actions. Lot’s wife was destroyed. And if I am not mistaken, the role by God is consequentialist.
04/15/2020 @ 6:38 pm
The question is whether God wants the people to be Consequentialist
Then I don’t know. At that point, the path to ethics was faith. A cruder time.