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@sillystring@infosec.exchange
I mean look at the turn over. As a business person he is terrible.
I never said he was a good businessman or even a good president. He was horrible at both, Biden just happens to be far worse.
With that said he had a signficantly better impact on both the stock exchange and the unemployment rate than Biden’s run as Vice President, right up until the coronavirus. But it would be foolish to compare a complete economic shutdown under Trump to any other period in time, the fallout from that is inevitable. Even so aside from doing much better than Biden pre-coronavirus his unemployment rate recovery after the bulk of the epidemic was at a higher rate than we have ever seen from any other economic crash in history.
Trump literally hit two records as president that havent been matched in the lifetime of anyone living: 1) he managed to get the unemployment rate to the lowest it has been in living history 2) he managed to see the fastest recovery of unemployment following an economic crash of any incident in history.
While I wouldnt say these two facts make him a good president, credit where credit is due, and there isnt much Biden has ever accomplished worthy of any praise, and a lot he has done horrifically wrong.
Biden is superior by merely not instigating mayhem.
I wouldnt say that describes him or the democrats any more or less than Trump.
We certainly had some isolated cases of violence at teh capital, and that isn’t acceptable, but trump was one of the very first people to get on the TV and tell them that violence was unacceptable.
Meanwhile I spent the bulk of the year watching democrat protests burn down buildings and cop cars in my city tot he point that the sky was black with smoke. I didnt see biden decrying those incidents or calling out the violence at all.
@freemo
Wait, you still believe Trump>Biden? I have hoped a literal coup attempt would be enough to change that.
@sillystring@infosec.exchange @SmilingTexan
>literal coup attempt
50 unarmed people waddling into a building and taking selfies isn't a coup attempt.
@antigravman
1. They were armed enough to kill a couple people and had equipment for taking hostages.
2. The building in question was holding an event that was part of the process of a change in power they disapproved of.
3. They explicitly expressed the intent of killing one of the main people leading that event.
Yes, this was a coup attempt.
@sillystring@infosec.exchange @freemo @SmilingTexan
>kill a couple people
Only person killed with a weapon inside the Capitol Building was one of the protesters.
>The building in question was holding an event that was part of the process of a change in power they disapproved of.
Still not a coup. Unless you think those people were going to somehow replace Congress. In that case you're legitimately crazy.
>They explicitly expressed the intent of killing one of the main people leading that event.
Who is "they"? Where is your source that this was an organized attempt to overthrow Congress and the US government?
@antigravman
So as long as someone is killed without the use of weapons it doesn't count?
I don't know what would have happened if they captured (and possibly killed) the people involved in the certification. I doubt they would have succeeded in keeping Trump in power, but it's not obvious. And a poorly planned coup is still a coup.
The protesters among whom the people who attempted the coup were. If they didn't attempt the coup later I would have assumed this was terrible political posturing (which should be condemned, but is within their rights), but since they attempted to execute the threat it's hard to dismiss it as such.
I can provide sources for any of the facts that I am stating, if you don't believe in some.
@sillystring@infosec.exchange @freemo @SmilingTexan
>So as long as someone is killed without the use of weapons it doesn't count?
You said they were armed and killed people. They weren't and they didn't.
The FACT is the only person besides protesters who were "killed" was a police officer who while away from the Capitol was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher and died suddenly the following day due to a stroke caused by a blood clot.
>I don't know what would have happened if they captured (and possibly killed) the people involved in the certification.
You realize the cops were in and about with the protesters as they entered the Capitol right?
You realize the protesters left after they got bored right?
That's not what happens in a coup attempt.
> I doubt they would have succeeded in keeping Trump in power, but it's not obvious. And a poorly planned coup is still a coup.
You're fucking insane to think this was a coup. This is Q-anon level insane conspiracy shit.
50 unarmed people attempting a coup versus the Capitol Police, DC Police, and Secret Service. And to top it off, instead of a coup they were satisfied and left after party crashing in the Capitol?
Take your meds schizo.
@antigravman @sillystring@infosec.exchange @freemo @SmilingTexan @timorl where do you get the number 50 from?
@2ck
One person in the thread requested being removed from the mentions, please try respecting that.
I'm also somewhat curious, although I don't think the specific number changes much in the interpretation of events.
@antigravman @freemo
Trump madd a literal coup attempt now? Literally the moment there was a hint of violence out of anyone Trump was on TV telling people to respect the law and go home. That would be a pretty ineffective response on his part if his intention was a coup.
Plus when Trump was elected we were on our third day of violence from democracy 3 days after the count was in and that continued on and off for 4 years. The levels of violence personally witnessed in those 4 years in my town alone were orders of magnitude worse than anything I saw at the capitol.
None of that excuses what happened at the capitol mind you. But in terms of extremes it really doesnt come close to liberals, and in terms of what it means about Trump, well, as I said he was very quick to publicly tell them to stop an go home the moment there was a hint of violence out of them so not even sure how that is Trumps fault rather than the fault of a small minority of republicans.
@freemo
I didn't say Trump did that, although he seemed to encourage it. Mostly by repeatedly telling people who violently opposed his political enemies that he loves them, starting with the "I love Texas!" tweet and culminating in the call to go home which I think you are referring to, where he spent more time telling the insurrectionists that he loves them and reiterating that the election was illegitimate than actually telling them to stop. Unless you are referring to a different appearance?
I'm not sure about the quickness, my impression was that he made his address after it was clear the evacuation was successful, although I'm not quite sure about the timeline. Even if I'm right about the timeline I wouldn't read too much into that as I don't know how long it takes to prepare such an appearance.
There are also the issues with lackluster security and delays in deploying additional forces to control the situation. I hope an investigation will explain what happened there.
Even assuming Trump did not do this on purpose, being incompetent enough to cause a coup attempt by his supporters should be way more than enough to disqualify him from receiving any political support from reasonable people.
And protests, even violent to an extent, are part of a democracy. Trying to throw out the result of an election is not.
@2ck @antigravman
So he loves the groups that vote for him that had some members being violent... sounds an awful lot like what biden did. dont recall Biden down talking antifa when they were being violent even once.
He also never told the insurgents that he loved them, though he did tell a crowd that was mostly peaceful with a few sporadic nutjobs that he loved them if thats what you mean.
Honestly I wouldnt have taken you for someone who would lay on the hyperbole so thick. Generally your not the one exaggerating and taking things out of context quite as much as you see to be.
And no if you thought he didnt speak up until after the evacuations then it is clear you never even watched the events life. It was fairly early on in the event. Shortly after the first unarmed protesters was murdered by police, probably in a bid to calm the violence that was only going to get worse from that incident.
@freemo No, the Texas tweet was explicitly about a violent subgroup, they were the only ones in the video. And you cannot claim that he told the insurrectionists to go home and didn't tell them he loved them if both these things happened in the same address.
I am not using hyperbole right now, I'm choosing my words very carefully. This was a coup attempt, as pathetic as it was, by the group of nutjobs you mention. Trumps first reaction was to tell them he loves them, he is also a natural suspect per _cui bono_, but honestly I hope it's just his incompetence plus other characteristics that sparked this, not actual planning.
I am not using hyperbole right now, I’m choosing my words very carefully.
yes, you are, and there are examples literred all over this post and i dont even need to invoke the coup / insurrection remarks.
Take this:
you cannot claim that he told the insurrectionists to go home and didn’t tell them he loved them
We had a situation where a large group of people were non-violent and actively opposed to the violence (we even hear the reporters saying on the live video how peaceful most of them appear) and a small handful who were being destructive. Even then most of the violence from them only occured after an unarmed protesters was murdered by a cop at the early part of the protest. He clearly told the small percentage who were violent to stop, and refered to the larger group, most of which who were not violent (and happened to include them) that he loved them.
Moreover at the time that he said this those who were being violent were limited to having broken a window, and to have entered the capital buildings mostly non-violently and no indication anyone was armed.. It was however after a unarmed protestor was murdered by a cop. so yea doesnt line up in the slightest with the nonsense your peddling. Hyperbole the whole way.
Its a shame because if we were just talking about the violence and did so in a way that represented it accurately I would have agreed with you that it is uncalled for.
@freemo
It definitely wasn’t clear, even if this was his intention. Read the transcript of his speech if you want – he doesn’t differentiate the groups he is referring to at all. In a very charitable reading he might be doing what you are saying, but he didn’t condemn the people attempting the coup at all, just told them to go home.If he said what you are saying here (denouncing the insurrectioninsts) then it would be clear, buy he did not do that.
And you are trying very hard not to talk about the Texas tweet. It’s very hard to create a charitable explanation of that one. And you cannot take the most charitable explanation of what Trump says all the time, when you already have ample proof that he doesn’t really have a problem with political violence.
And this is not just about violence. The people who entered the capitol went there with the express purpose of stopping the election certification. This is what makes it a coup, in addition to the violence. And this is way scarier then even very violent protests or riots.
@2ck @antigravman
I am watching this conversation of yours and it was fun (until one disengaged).
From my perspective, you focused on petty details which might or might not matter, that will be decided by the relevant courts. There are, however, a few elements in this story, which were left open.
First of all a disclaimer. I am not well versed in US law (and I do not care that much in the end), but in the countries I know something about, the stuff below would be a relevant legal consideration.
1.Punching a bloke in a pub is one thing. Punching a bloke in a pub while he wears a police uniform is an entirely different matter. You are attacking an institution of a state. The same way, breaking into a private property and even burning it down is a one type of criminal offence. Doing the same to a state’s parliament building is an attack on its institution and that by proxy is an attacking on the state itself. Especially if this is one of the constitutional pillars of the state, like in this case. Legal subtleties of how this was exactly in this case will be analyses at courts, I am sure. It will be fun to see. And the conversation will not be about “a handful of selfies” in some random building.
- attack on a state can easily be classified as terrorism or even as treason (because there is no legal term like
coup). A citizen owes allegiance to the country and the state (it seems this is the case in the US on state as well as on the federal level). An attempt to change either by means which are out of the lawful paths defined within the legal system of the country (e.g., elections, decision of parliament, government executive decision, etc.) is therefore quite a problem. Now, I looked up the legal definition of treason in the US and it just might be that these acts finally won’t be classified as such, but it’s absolutely not that clear cut at this point.
What I trying to say is that there is a spectrum of “badness” between “regular” criminal offence (like burning down a private property in a random city) and a crime like “treason”. The acts of some of these people will be in the end probably classified closer to the “treason” point than to the regular crime point on the spectrum (which might be the case of for the mentioned BLM riots).
If the prosecution will find good evidence of intent (likely, cf all the social media chatter before the act), proper planning (we do not know yet), organisation (likely as according to news reports several organised groups were recruited and present) and evidence of readiness to use violence and possibly arms (we don’t know yet), this can end up very entertaining. And the fact that they did such a clumsy and poor job, does not change the nature of the attempted act.
I am curiously waiting and watching from a side. :popcorn:
What is or is not illegal isnt really the issue be debated here. Pretty sure both me and tim would agree that from a legal standpoint the group acted illegally.. Terrorism is so loosely defined I would also agree that from a legal standpoint they very well could probably make a terrorism charge stick, but then again people have been charged with terrorism for some pretty absurd reasons, so that isnt much of a measuring stick IMO.
You are using the law as if it is a defacto measure of good and bad. I reject that as an accurate measure of morality. The only place law has any relevance is if we are discussing what the consequences for these people are likely to be, but that is wholly seperate from if these people are good people are not. Or how bad their actions are.
It also depends on if a police officer can or will even find many of them and simply how much is invested in doing so, which ultimately biases any results.
In my eyes burning a building down with people in it, as the liberals did in my city during their riots is clearly and substantially far more immoral than breaking the window of a capitol building, walking inside, and taking a selfie. Yet the people who through the molotov cocktail into the buildings, despite some even being caught on tap, are likely not be persecuted because no time or money was spent on doing so. Yet those who broke the windows of the capitol building will, in all liklihood, have every resource of the FBI thrust upon them, likely being arrested and tried. Yet to me it is quite clear they are not even approaching the level of immorality as burning a building with people in it…
You entire response is pretty much an exercise in Hume’s razor / Hume’s guillotine and I reject it on those terms alone.
You are arguing that what ought to be doesnt matter and all that matters is what is, which is contrary to the very premise of the discussion, which is a discussion about what me and tim feel ought to be the interpretation. Not to mention even a bit Nihilistic as it can be applied to any discussion where one argues an improvement of society by proposing a particularly moral outlook which is not currently the predominating one, creating perpetual stagnation as a principle.
Morality is a very loose concept in that it is very subjective and local to subculture you adhere to.
While the consensus on morality does differ greatly by person and location, and culture, that does not necessarily mean it is subjective, and I would argue it is not.
A great many people believe all sorts of things that is dictated by the culture they are in, for example some people believe the earth is just a few thousand years old, some even believe it is flat. The opinions you get on these ideas are highly dependent on the person you ask and the culture you are in. None of that, however, implies that the “the earth is round” is not an objective truth. Objective facts do not require consensus to be objective.
With that said when people do agree on an objective fact, some saying the earth is round, the others saying it is flat, then what you have is peoples opinions as to which of these two facts are true.
Morality is no different, I would argue there is an objective, factual, sense of what is or is not moral, it just so happens peoples opinions about what that fact happens to be differs, and there is no consensus as to which of the many proposed objective moralities is the truth, and factual one.
In my opinion of the fact, however, it is quite easily objectively defined, good and bad is measures by the overall quantity of happiness an action elicits as a result of that action over time.
Since these acts do not touch most of the stuff “universally considered bad”, we do not deal here with universal moral principles, but strictly with normative ones.
that seems like an unjustified leap to me. Because an act does not touch on something considered bad, universal or otherwise that does not mean we have to go an extra step to somehow figure out some reasoning why its really bad afterall. That’s just confirmation bias eagerly trying to find a reason to call it bad “well if this doesn’t determine its bad, lets try another technique that will determine it is bad”
In fact I’d argue much the opposite, if our usual sense of morality, on analysis of a situation, shows us there is nothing about it that would typically be considered bad, then we can stop there and conclude that is in fact, not bad.
So while each of us might call those people “good” or “bad”, that does not matter.
Of course it matters, particularly in this context. The point of the discussion is to decide if we feel Biden has an effect which is more “bad” or Trump. Answering that question requires us to debate if we feel they are good or bad. Falling back to laws does not answer that question for us.
That would be like saying “Slavery was good because people disagree whether slavery is bad or not (re: nazis) and therefore we must fall back to laws. The law said slavery was legal, ergo slavery was good”… the logic is flawed the moment this argument invoked law as an arbiter of good and bad.
The society, through a contract between its members (which we conveniently call constitutions) decided that those acts are bad.
No we didn’t, we agreed those acts should be punished, we agreed those acts should result in consequences like being put in jail. At no point did anyone assert that anyone was “bad” or “good”, the law only dictates the consequences, nothing more.
And you have all right to think that. Yet, what matters in this case is what the society as a whole “thinks”.
“Matters” here is an awfully loaded term, and again not true. Even if we can determine that a majority happen to agree, thats rather irrelevant as we are arguing what ought to be, not what is. Again if we were discussing if slavery was right it would be silly for anyone to argue it was morally justified because the majority believed it to be so.
@freemo Clearly I am bound to lose this 😀 . Still… We might learn something.
While the consensus on morality does differ greatly by person and location, and culture, that does not necessarily mean it is subjective, and I would argue it is not.
And I partly agree. I also believe there is a handful of principles humans deem universally moral/proper. But I argue that the act of entering a parliament at doing whatever inside is not one which can be judged using those universal moral principles.
Putting that aside, the question whether there is such a thing as universal moral principles is not a thing humanity as a whole did satisfactorily solve, at least as far as I know.
A great many people believe all sorts of things that is dictated by the culture they are in, for example some people believe the earth is just a few thousand years old, some even believe it is flat.
Morality is about deciding whether some human act, thought, or principle is deemed good (proper) or bad (improper). And a pure observation of humankind tells us that we quite differ in these judgements. Whether Earth is flat or not is not a question of “good” or “bad” (proper vs. improper) behaviour but of what we can satisfactorily prove to be the case or not in physical reality.
Morality is no different, I would argue there is an objective, factual, sense of what is or is not moral, it just so happens peoples opinions about what that fact happens to be differs, and there is no consensus as to which of the many proposed objective moralities is the truth, and factual one.
Maybe I am missing something, but you are saying that 1) judgement whether something is “proper”/”improper” behaviour is actually objectively decidable; and at the same time 2) except for a relatively narrow set of quite extreme behaviours (murder and such), humans (at least so far) did not find a way how to agree on how to objectively decide it. Well, this would work in a limited religious context, but with me, that’s not what you have.
Of course it matters, particularly in this context. The point of the discussion is to decide if we feel Biden has an effect which is more “bad” or Trump.
Technically, Biden had very little “effect” on history so far (if we omit his previous political acts) as his window of opportunity to have any effect started just a few hours ago. We’ll see.
That would be like saying “Slavery was good because people disagree whether slavery is bad or not (re: nazis) and therefore we must fall back to laws. The law said slavery was legal, ergo slavery was good”… the logic is flawed the moment this argument invoked law as an arbiter of good and bad.
You seem to be forgetting that a societal consensus of what is proper and what is not changes. I’d probably have a good time watching you explaining how slavery is a bad thing to a Roman senator some 2000 years ago, or to a Greek before that. And reversely, most people living in Europe for the last 2000 years would be appalled by how families are formed and dissolved today and what moral principles we apply to e.g., divorce. What is deemed proper today, might be deemed improper 100 years from now. There is an element of universality to these things (protection of life, etc.), but most of it is a social agreement existing in a given time and space.
No we didn’t, we agreed those acts should be punished, we agreed those acts should result in consequences like being put in jail. At no point did anyone assert that anyone was “bad” or “good”, the law only dictates the consequences, nothing more.
From my pov, exactly because we cannot decide what is good or bad explicitly. But we can agree that certain behaviours are deemed improper and thus punishable at a given (our) society and history point (now).
Clearly I am bound to lose this . Still… We might learn something.
I suspect this is a joke, or at least in jest (a half joke). But just to be clear I never consider these sorts of discussions about winning, even if I might feel my stance is unlikely to change without some strong arguments, it is still about exploring my view and yours and seeing what each of us can take away from that, if anything.
I also believe there is a handful of principles humans deem universally moral/proper
I think this wording is problematic, and at a minimum it doesn’t really represent what I was trying to say with my last rebuttal. There is almost nothing, no opinions on anything (and that includes opinions of facts) that are universal when it comes to humans. We cant even agree the earth is round in today’s day and age with all the evidence we have. Sure we like to think all the humans agree o it and that flat earthers are some extreme minority. But the truth is people with very different opinions from each other tend to drive each other away, or just cause people to suppress those views. They are far more common than you think. I am shocked how often I come across them or the people ive seen on my timeline for years who turn out to be one but just never said so (due to the ridicule they get)
If we cant even agree on the earth being round there is very little, I’d go so far as to say nothing at all, that is universal about human opinions.
In fact it is quite possible that whatever the true objective morality is, it may very well not be particularly popular at all, let alone universal. But it doesnt make it any less true.
Putting that aside, the question whether there is such a thing as universal moral principles is not a thing humanity as a whole did satisfactorily solve
I solved it :) The only thing I havent been able to do is to convince you and everyone else of that. Of course I half joke, it is certainly true that should there be a objective moral truth it is clear that we have not reached a majority consensus on what that is, so on this we agree.
Morality is about deciding whether some human act, thought, or principle is deemed good (proper) or bad (improper). And a pure observation of humankind tells us that we quite differ in these judgements.
Again I agree on this point (though I would not use proper and improper to mean the same as good and bad, but thats not core to your point).
Whether Earth is flat or not is not a question of “good” or “bad” (proper vs. improper) behaviour but of what we can satisfactorily prove to be the case or not in physical reality.
This example was not given to be an example of morality, it was given to show that even when we have more than enough evidence to accurately determine objective truth, you will still find humans are in disagreement about it in large numbers.
As for the earth being round being provable (falsifiable being the technical term), I think we both agree that it is. But by the same token go back just a few hundred years and it was no longer provable with the technology of the time. Yes you hear of early scholars measuring its circumference, and the techniques they provided to do that certainly was evidence in favor of the earth being round. But to understand the time period there were also other experiments that even today seem perfectly reasonable that suggested the earth was flat. It wasnt until our scientific understanding advanced far enough to understand why those experiments were incorrect that we could truely prove the earth was round. so while even though, at the time, it was not able to be proven it was none the less falsifiable, objective, and provable at a later date. More importantly though the scholars at the time with limited evidence were able to argue to that the earth was round, use evidence to do so, and while they couldnt prove it or be in the majority they were right and their perspective.
The point here is that the fact that no one could agree that the world was round, lack of universality, didnt make a lick of difference on either 1) the importance of aruring for the truth even when they were a minority voice or 2) the actual fact that they were right.
Maybe I am missing something, but you are saying that 1) judgement whether something is “proper”/”improper” behaviour is actually objectively decidable; and at the same time
proper and improper was your wording, wording I rejected early on and already provided an objective definition of good and bad.. good and bad is quantified by the overall happiness over time that an action creates in the world. In other words, if you literally scanned everyone’s brain and looked at how happy everyone feels, and average that out over time then you are measuring the amount of good in the world, and since it is measurable and tangible it is an objective measurement.
2) except for a relatively narrow set of quite extreme behaviours (murder and such), humans (at least so far) did not find a way how to agree on how to objectively decide it.
this point would seem apparent and obvious. People obviously disagree on what is good and bad, just as people disagree on other objective truths like if the earth is round.. but people disagreeing really has no bearing on the purpose of this discussion (exploring what ought to be, not what is).
Technically, Biden had very little “effect” on history so far (if we omit his previous political acts) as his window of opportunity to have any effect started just a few hours ago. We’ll see.
Same can be said of Trump, if we omit his previous political acts to date Trump has had very little effect on humanity in the past day as well.. not sure why that is relevant, obviously we can and should consider both their past political pasts and I see no reason to limit the scope to the last 24 hours as both have had significant time to exercise political power in their respective histories.
You seem to be forgetting that a societal consensus of what is proper and what is not changes.
I am not forgetting it, I never said or invoked anything about what is proper, you did, and as far as the definitions I already laid out when I first used the terminology of good and bad then what is proper has no relevance or relation to anything I said, as that is not what I said those words meant.
I’d probably have a good time watching you explaining how slavery is a bad thing to a Roman senator some 2000 years ago, or to a Greek before that.
I would likely have a tremendously difficult time explaining it to them, and in fact most people would likely disagree with me. Though how many people agree with me has absolutely no bearing on the fact that I would, all the same, be correct. Just as someone arguing the earth was round to a roman senator, even if they wouldnt agree, would be all the same correct.
What is deemed proper today, might be deemed improper 100 years from now.
Of course, but what is “proper” has no relevance to what is “good” or “moral” so that is a moot point.
There is an element of universality to these things (protection of life, etc.), but most of it is a social agreement existing in a given time and space.
If by universiality you mean “lots of people agree” then no, not really. There are tons of people who do not feel protection of all life is a is a good thing… If by universiality you mean what is objectively good regardless of how many people recognize it or not, then I’d say yes, all things that are good or bad are objectively so (see my earlier objective measure of it).
From my pov, exactly because we cannot decide what is good or bad explicitly.
We can, I already did decide, and I gave an objective measure for it. If you or anyone else chooses not to agree with me, that’s fine, from my perspective that just means you are unable to recognize a clear and obvious (to me) objective truth about morality.. but from my POV the objective more truth is all the same there regardless of you or anyone else not being able to agree on it.
@freemo
I feel the ground beneath my feet shifting. If we can’t agree even on the basic vocabulary of questions and answers, no wonder that it remains very difficult to question others to learn oneself.
But okay, let’s play a game. So far people spend immeasurable time and effort to define what is morality and the outcome was a relatively short Wikipedia page exactly using the words proper and improper as probably the most neutral terms out there. So if you deem that vague definition not good enough, I invite you to provide a definition of what is objectively moral or immoral to you so that we can at least discuss, if not persuade each other. You claim you know what the objective morality is, so it should not be too difficult to work it out for me.
Yes, I’ve stated what that is twice.. Good is that which produces net happiness over time, bad is what produces net sadness over time.. Morality is acting on good things and avoiding bad.
Ergo if I can look back on an act and see it produced happiness in the world, then I can claim it is objectively moral.
To go back to the example of explaining slavery to a roman commander, I can with certainty assert that when slavery is legal the net sadness this produces is significant but due to the extreme suffering of the slaves, as well as the callousness for life and harshness it promotes in its master (which pours out and effects other people and generally promotes a world where there is little value for life even outside of slavery and thus much sadness is produced).
Therefore the objective measure I have of good and bad would show that even though in roman times the vast majority might disagree with me on the fact that slavery is immoral, the objective measure of morality I defined shows otherwise.
@freemo Thanks. That is good enough definition we can explore.
You seem to be a physicist, so this might speak to you:
“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world. ”
― Archimedes
My vector of challenge is that you do not have that fulcrum, that fixed point you need so that you can use happiness as an objective measure. I claim that it is a relative measure (this is more happiness than that), not an absolute one.
Now, I am only an amateur philosopher, but one thing I know from experience: happiness is deeply subjective.
Your happiness is easily my unhappiness: c.f., any social situation which boils down to a zero-sum game. Winning a war is happiness for some (often more than the number of unhappy ones!), deep unhappiness for other.
Two “happinesses” often sum up to a single big unhappiness: just look at almost any divorce. They started with attempts to make each other happy, only to deeply harm each other in the end and on top of that their innocent children too.
Happiness is ephemeral and changing: small doses of hedonistic happiness every day can easily make for a single unhappy life (look at many people who sooth their sorrows and pain with food, become obese, suffer in result and become deeply unhappy. Or many people with a burn-out: attempts to make themselves happy and satisfied turned into one big lump of unhappiness later on).
And so on, and so on. How do we measure that happiness?
Just to finish it off, take Epictetus who was one of the biggest stoic philosophers. Yet he was a slave. Given what we know about his philosophy, I highly doubt he considered himself unhappy. The point is, if you are a fatalist (typically because of God), being a slave does not necessarily feel all that bad after all, so there is a lot of space for happiness in such a life. And this is not just a pointless jab. Every day many people look into themselves and try to accept their emotional pain and find their own happiness nevertheless. And many succeed. Happiness is a deeply subjective concept, not an objective one. To achieve it, you need to change something about yourself, rarely something about your external environment.
Just consider Huxley’s Brave New World. If there’s any objective measure of happiness, Soma would be the sole biggest gift to humankind. Is that what you meant by objective happiness?
You seem to be a physicist
Nah, not a physicist at all, though I do have RF EE background which has some deep physics roots. But I would not call myself a Physicist.
My vector of challenge is that you do not have that fulcrum, that fixed point you need so that you can use happiness as an objective measure. I claim that it is a relative measure (this is more happiness than that), not an absolute one.
Sadly I do not have the time or energy right now to invest in your entire post or the discussion, its a busy day. But I do want to comment on this one point as I was thinking about it all night as I slept.
I strongly disagree with the idea that happiness is not an absolute quality and lacks a fulcrum point. I suspect what you are confusing it for is an unbounded, yet absolute, quality. that is there is always someone who can be more happy or less happy than you,a nd likewise you can adjust to your level of happiness to the point where it feels less rewarding than someone who just came out of a depression. But it is an absolute quality with a fixed “fulcrum point” as you put it.
I would express this assertion by the simple fact that we all know and easily identify (I would think, at least I feel I can) what that 0 point is. There is sadness (negative happiness), there is happiness (positive) and then there is feeling nothing, neither happiness or sadness, this is the 0 point. If i am in an emotionless state at the moment I dont think i could ever confuse this for happiness or sadness due to a relative comparison with a prior state or someone else. If i have no emotional stance at the moment but am in an environment where everyone is sad, I wouldnt say “I feel happy”, I would still be fixed at 0 with no emotions.
I think the problem is just that the language is nondescript when it comes to this. If i say “I am very happy” this may mean something very different for someone who is usually depressed (as a little happiness feels like a lot) than someone who is normally happy.
This doesnt mean that happiness is not absolute, it just means that at present time we lack the physical tools to measure it quantitatively, we lack the ruler for happiness. But just because you lack the ruler doesnt mean that length is relative, nor does it mean happiness is relative. I would imagine if an MRI were sufficiently advanced to measure neurotransmitters accurately, and our understanding of that were advanced enough to determine a persons happiness from an MRI scan (which we are getting surprisingly close to doing) then we could measure happiness in very specific quantitative terms.
@freemo 👍
But just because you lack the ruler doesnt mean that length is relative, nor does it mean happiness is relative.
Just a day or two ago, in that other time space dilatation conversation you (BTW very skillfully, kudos!) explained to somebody else how length actually is relative. 😀 Maybe similar arguments (who is an observer and how they move) apply to happiness too (this time in the engineer space)…
Let’s call it a day.
Hahah, very true, length is actually relative.
Good conversation, look forward to the next one.
@freemo Thanks for your response. We do not disagree in principle. Just a few remarks:
Morality is a very loose concept in that it is very subjective and local to subculture you adhere to. Since these acts do not touch most of the stuff “universally considered bad”, we do not deal here with universal moral principles, but strictly with normative ones. And that societies encode as their law.
So while each of us might call those people “good” or “bad”, that does not matter. The society, through a contract between its members (which we conveniently call constitutions) decided that those acts are bad. That’s it. It sounds like a technicality from an individual perspective, from the perspective of the society which defends its survival, it’s a major issue.
And you have all right to think that. Yet, what matters in this case is what the society as a whole “thinks”.
On the other hand, the healthy dose of subjective (even if inconsequential) judgment makes for a far more entertaining conversation than a litigation.
@timorl @2ck