Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[CiG]

The existence of a nervous system itself forms the basis of a lot of ethics. Even rabid animal rights activists acknowledge a tier of severity and importance when considering the suffering of animals, based on whether a nervous system exists in the animal and how developed it is, because the more complex a nervous system is the greater the chance to suffer is.

That doesn't get into non-physical pain though.

 

[Einherjar86]

The existence of a nervous system itself forms the basis of a lot of ethics. Even rabid animal rights activists acknowledge a tier of severity and importance when considering the suffering of animals, based on whether a nervous system exists in the animal and how developed it is, because the more complex a nervous system is the greater the chance to suffer is.

Totally. I mean, this is Peter Singer's whole approach to animal rights/ethics.

David Foster Wallace also has a great essay called "Consider the Lobster" in which he meditates on the pain capacities of lobsters. Crustaceans usually aren't associated with suffering, but Wallace makes some compelling points. It's definitely true that pain =/= suffering, but the capacity for suffering necessitates pain. So if we can imagine that an entity suffers, then pain is a no-brainer.

That doesn't get into non-physical pain though.

I'll fully acknowledge that mental pain complicates everything (although, as Dak said, all pain is mental--when you accidentally cut your hand, is the pain in your hand, or in your head? tough question...)

People can experience mental pain for a number of reasons, and the cause is usually impossible to pinpoint. I'm not saying physical pain is definitively identifiable (since it's also mental pain), but it's easier to coordinate.

 

[Dak]

1. All systems of meaning are built on meaninglessness.

2. I said that ethics is based on acknowledgement of pain, not on pain in and of itself. It's our shared capacity for expression that bestows meaning on pain-behavior (Wittgenstein's term, not mine).

I think this A. Makes sense intuitively and B. That's because we have shared culture (it works emically), and that this doesn't work well etically.

Acknowledgement is about socially negotiating the subjectivity of private sensations. I'm going to appeal to an article from a colleague of mine:

This is a central argument in determining ethical behavior.

Clearly there are difficulties that arise when distinguishing between mental and physical pain, and in determining the extent of someone's pain. None of this means that we don't acknowledge pain when we sense it, even if we can't be specific about it. I don't think specificity about quantities and/or qualities of pain is necessary for establishing criteria about acknowledging that someone is in pain. Whether someone's actions cause a pinprick's or aircraft carrier's worth of pain, acknowledging that our actions have caused pain should factor into our ethical determinations.

None of the quote answers why pain should be central to ethics. Sure, we all can acknowledge that there's a thing or things we might call pain, but why should that be the singular focus of ethics? I would counter that this focus on pain is precisely the focus on care/harm that Haidt points out is the distinguishing difference between "liberal" morality and "conservative morality."

 

[Einherjar86]

None of the quote answers why pain should be central to ethics. Sure, we all can acknowledge that there's a thing or things we might call pain, but why should that be the singular focus of ethics? I would counter that this focus on pain is precisely the focus on care/harm that Haidt points out is the distinguishing difference between "liberal" morality and "conservative morality."

I think the why is that acknowledgement coincides with empathy and with the personal identification of what pain is. We may not be able to feel another's pain, but we have the capacity to imagine pain (excepting extreme cases, such as mental disability). Continuing to act in such a way despite knowing that we're causing pain is unethical because we have the capacity to reflect on what it means to cause pain.

I don't see this as a partisan argument. If anything, anarchy permits the apathetic use of harm against others, and conservative ethics argues for restraint based on acknowledgment and empathy.

I realize I'm placing meaning on the act of acknowledgment, but I actually believe there's a pre-linguistic, pre-conceptual motivation to acknowledgment-as-ethics. It has to do with the fact that we're able to identify another person in pain, and empathize with them, without recourse to understanding pain in some positivistic sense. That is, we don't empathize because we know what pain means; we empathize because we experience a visceral identification with the person in pain, even if it's not an experience of that person's actual pain. I think that experience is worth pausing over.

 

[Dak]

I think the why is that acknowledgement coincides with empathy and with the personal identification of what pain is. We may not be able to feel another's pain, but we have the capacity to imagine pain (excepting extreme cases, such as mental disability). Continuing to act in such a way despite knowing that we're causing pain is unethical because we have the capacity to reflect on what it means to cause pain.

I don't disagree in general with this until it's asserted that acting to cause pain is A. always unethical and B. it's unethical because we know what pain is. Point A is addressed below, and point B. is primarily due to all the murkiness of "imagining pain" or experiencing pain.

I don't see this as a partisan argument. If anything, anarchy permits the apathetic use of harm against others, and conservative ethics argues for restraint based on acknowledgment and empathy.

I realize I'm placing meaning on the act of acknowledgment, but I actually believe there's a pre-linguistic, pre-conceptual motivation to acknowledgment-as-ethics. It has to do with the fact that we're able to identify another person in pain, and empathize with them, without recourse to understanding pain in some positivistic sense. That is, we don't empathize because we know what pain means; we empathize because we experience a visceral identification with the person in pain, even if it's not an experience of that person's actual pain. I think that experience is worth pausing over.

It's partisan in the sense of placing over-emphasis on pain, and by partisan I don't mean necessarily in terms of US party politics, although at this point you won't find many conservatives in the Democratic party, although there are still liberals in the GOP. I understand the identification, but that's not enough alone to warrant any conclusions. Pain is merely one factor. There are other factors to consider. This is why you would rather take a punch in the stomach than have all your belongings blown up. This is why we have or there will be arguments for similar punishment for both rape and murder. I think of ethics in terms of loss, not pain.

 

[Einherjar86]

But rape strikes me as salient example wherein the victim doesn't lose anything in the same sense they would if all their possessions were blown up. If someone was presented with an ultimatum between getting gut-punched and losing all their possessions, it's like they would choose the former; but if the ultimatum was between getting raped and losing all their possessions, they might very well choose the latter.

Acts of physical violence toward a person's body might vary in degree, and the ethical value associated with such acts might also vary; but when you break it down, presenting someone with an ultimatum between getting punched and losing all their possessions is still an unethical proposition.

To put it another way, I see getting raped and getting punched as similar in kind but varying in degree. The difference in degree doesn't make one act ethical and the other unethical.

 

[CiG]

Getting gut-punched is something friends can even do to each other for fun, or other games where you slap each other in the face as hard as possible, or just punching each other's arm and the first one to give in loses. Nobody does that with rape, even if the rapist thinks it's a joke to rape somebody, the victim isn't in on it and if the "victim" is in on it, it's not a rape it's just rape-play and doesn't come with the severe psychological damage an actual rape does.

Is it unethical to break into a stranger's home even though you don't steal anything, and just leave? Nothing is lost in the material sense, but much like a rape something is lost, or taken more accurately, psychologically. You're never the same again once your home has been violated, even if what was stolen does not measure up to the grief you feel over it. Many rape victims talk about how their consensual sexual relationships suffer dramatically due to being raped, and it's not that dissimilar to someone who has had their house broken into becoming paranoid about people walking by, or shutting all the windows and locking all the doors in a compulsive manner.

Defining ethics by loss, if you mean material loss, doesn't really get at pain related to the abstract.

 

[Einherjar86]

Getting gut-punched is something friends can even do to each other for fun, or other games where you slap each other in the face as hard as possible, or just punching each other's arm and the first one to give in loses. Nobody does that with rape, even if the rapist thinks it's a joke to rape somebody, the victim isn't in on it and if the "victim" is in on it, it's not a rape it's just rape-play and doesn't come with the severe psychological damage an actual rape does.

I agree that there are differences between punching and rape; but just to be clear, friends punching each other for fun tend to have an agreement between them, either spoken or unspoken.

The difference between punching and rape shouldn't substantiate either as an ethically permissible act, though. Just because there are cases in which punching might be socially acceptable, and no imaginable cases in which rape is socially acceptable (obviously there are cultures in which it is, but it shouldn't be), that doesn't mean an unprovoked punching is okay.

Is it unethical to break into a stranger's home even though you don't steal anything, and just leave? Nothing is lost in the material sense, but much like a rape something is lost, or taken more accurately, psychologically. You're never the same again once your home has been violated, even if what was stolen does not measure up to the grief you feel over it. Many rape victims talk about how their consensual sexual relationships suffer dramatically due to being raped, and it's not that dissimilar to someone who has had their house broken into becoming paranoid about people walking by, or shutting all the windows and locking all the doors in a compulsive manner.

An unprovoked punch might register to someone as a loss in much the same way that rape does, albeit to a far lesser degree. I think this marking off in terms of degree just feels slippery and ultimately pretty arbitrary. And it appears to award "loss" to particular acts while denying it to others. I'm not sure what justifies these decisions beyond identifying some acts as quantitatively more harmful than others, and then arbitrarily deciding where to assign the category of loss.

 

[CiG]

Unlike material loss, abstract loss is subjective and entirely dependent on whether the person tells us or acts as if there is a loss. This is further complicated by the gains a traumatic or criminal event can give us, which is also subjective. The nature of experience is to measure losses up against gains in the wake of an event.

 

[Dak]

But rape strikes me as salient example wherein the victim doesn't lose anything in the same sense they would if all their possessions were blown up. If someone was presented with an ultimatum between getting gut-punched and losing all their possessions, it's like they would choose the former; but if the ultimatum was between getting raped and losing all their possessions, they might very well choose the latter.

Acts of physical violence toward a person's body might vary in degree, and the ethical value associated with such acts might also vary; but when you break it down, presenting someone with an ultimatum between getting punched and losing all their possessions is still an unethical proposition.

To put it another way, I see getting raped and getting punched as similar in kind but varying in degree. The difference in degree doesn't make one act ethical and the other unethical.

I'm not arguing at this point for what is or is not ethical behavior, or offering dichotomous ultimatums. I'm talking about where to start from in trying to figure what is or isn't ethical. You submitted pain (although this whole discussion is a large tangent from respect, but it's conceivable or allowable that respect is involved in ethics) as a starting point, referencing other philosophical ethics discussions. My point about receiving a punch vs losing all your possessions (by explosion no less) is that one is an experience of physical pain nearly all of us can directly empathize with, and the other involves no pain, and most of us at this point in the west can't empathize (vs sympathize) with such an event. Yet, I imagine that to a man (or woman), we would rather take the punch.

I struggle with putting rape and punch as different in degree vs in kind, but even allowing that, I think both still fit within a loss framework. It's just that loss is as subjective and as slippery as "pain" in instances of physical harm, whereas it has at least some concrete applications in other material conditions (as opposed trying to quantify the "pain" of loss, which psychology has been trying to do for a long time in the field of loss-aversion studies). You can even be raped and it theoretically not involve any pain at all (e.g., while drugged), yet there can be tremendous psychological loss.

Is it unethical to break into a stranger's home even though you don't steal anything, and just leave? Nothing is lost in the material sense, but much like a rape something is lost, or taken more accurately, psychologically. You're never the same again once your home has been violated, even if what was stolen does not measure up to the grief you feel over it. Many rape victims talk about how their consensual sexual relationships suffer dramatically due to being raped, and it's not that dissimilar to someone who has had their house broken into becoming paranoid about people walking by, or shutting all the windows and locking all the doors in a compulsive manner.

Defining ethics by loss, if you mean material loss, doesn't really get at pain related to the abstract.

I mean both material and psychological loss. There may be some outlier example I am not considering, but generally speaking, psychological pain is in response to loss, whether in terms of material goods/health or in beliefs about the world (i.e., that the world is a mostly good place, that you are secure, etc.). That's why I think loss is a more fundamental place to start.

 

[Dak]

https://www.themoneyillusion.com/just-do-it/

Very fucking interesting post. Basically Sumner is suggesting that a gold standard w/ordered 2% inflation is optimal. This isn't an option I had considered, but haggling about the percentage of inflation aside, kind of makes sense from a population growth and money availability perspective.

 

[The Ozzman]

5 hours of greatness

 

[CiG]

I thought Alex Jones was going to destroy Joe?

 

[The Ozzman]

I thought Alex Jones was going to destroy Joe?

They made up to each other. The discuss it within the first minutes of the podcast.

 

[Einherjar86]

Speaking of batshit theories...

 

[CiG]

"Batshit" is too moderate a position for Alex.

They made up to each other. The discuss it within the first minutes of the podcast.

Probably did it for views, pair of mongs. I still hope Joe finds a way to headkick Owen Benjamin straight into a morgue.

 

[Dak]

I'm unsure at this point whether Jones is just jacked up on roids or something or he's just ramping the act up intentionally.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

I'm unsure at this point whether Jones is just jacked up on roids or something or he's just ramping the act up intentionally.

A little bit of both, I think

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

this hilarious alex jones thing happened that i didn't know about till just this second

Alex Jones’ Infowars pushes weather weapon conspiracy theories about Hurricane Dorian to discount climate change | Media Matters for America

 

[Dak]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/...riedman-gary-becker-minoritarian-governments?

Interested in @Einherjar86 's take. I haven't read enough Foucault or on Foucault to have a sufficiently informed opinion here.