PhilosophyMemes

The thing with the slave debate is that for as long as there was slavery, there were people against it, while a minority it shows that seeing slavery as the evil that it is, is not a modern innovation

"Does morality exist if we have no free will" just entered the chat.

Objectively, Crowder is a piece of shit.

Morality IS popular opinion. It's a human construct, it doesn't exist without humans. 

There's no such thing as objective morality. That's a tired and long-discarded enlightenment idea. Morality was invented entirely by people and is entirely concerned with things people think matter.

We are factory-farming, oil-guzzling monsters that will be judged just as harshly as our forbears for our own barbarities as you judge southerners for theirs. The only reason you don't consider this is a one to one deal is because you were raised in an environment that normalizes and excuses what we do to our planet. The same way enslavers and their communities normalized and excused their behavior.

Steven Crowder is a piece of shit.

Through all of time, there were always people who thought slavery was wrong. It has to with our genetics as primates; as an example, even in chimpanzee groups murder (infanticide) happens occasionally, leading to great stress and panic in the group, indicating that on a basic level the primates (as social animals) know it is simply wrong (it is encoded in our genetics). Discussions about morality appear at that exact moment where the hard-coded gets into conflict with the harsh reality of suppression, egoism and social action. Thus, throughout time, when humans acted against our basic altruistic instincts, there were always people who raised their voice against violence, claiming that these actions were “immoral”. Alas, humans have a great capacity to gloss over wrongdoing, as we are also strongly egotistic, and we can actively suppress our altruistic characteristics.

"If morality is objective ..."

Well, there's the debating point.

Morality is just popular opinion

Is there a line though? I feel like owning human beings and treating them with tremendous cruelty cannot be excused regardless of cultural environment, because we have inborn intuitions that strongly tell us this is wrong that can be listened to, that cross cultural boundaries and time. Lots of other things that I wouldn't excuse someone in my own culture for though, I would be more willing to excuse of someone in a different culture/time, because otherwise I'd be basically demanding that no other cultures exist.

Then you have to accept that you are an immoral actor in the present, facing the inevitable judgment of some future which condemns your choices.

And what if some further future decides on a different view? Do you become moral again?

Morality, like history, is but a fable agreed upon.

And rarely agreed upon.

That being said, people who clamor about not judging the past also need to take into account that, if we are regarding their acts to be 'fair' by the standards of their day, we must also account applying our own standards in judgement to be equally fair.

I tend to take a middle ground (yeah, I know, wimp's way out) that while the actions of individuals remain just or unjust according to my moral standards, that historical individuals themselves should be judged by how close relative to the rest of their society they meet my standard. Especially since we, as human beings, largely form our morality according to our environment, as innumerable (and sometimes bizarre) popularly accepted cultural standards for moral behavior show.

The fact that Aristotle wrote a defense of slavery is evidence that there was an antislavery movement in ancient Greece. We can judge them based on modern values because the antislavery movement likely had the same political currents as modernity

is to concede that morality is just popular opinion

I believe the standard response here is: “so?”

This is just a tired grumpy rant.

It's about surprisal mechanics and basic survival. Many people were definitely more concerned than the social preference, but they were successfully filtered out because being the nail that sticks out gets you hammered down. Ask any autistic person what a mountain of evidence is worth verses keeping within the agreed social norms. Also how applied behavioural analysis is just Pavlovian conditioning for "acting normal," to various specifications. Made by the gay conversion people.

There is a complex nuance between being vocal about changing the system verses having the collective weight to affect the system. If you have no weight, your screams of pain and frustration are interpreted as disobedience.

Basically, in a system built on stupid archaic brainwashing, pointing at reality makes you a big target for people who gain extreme power from the archaic system, so any attempt to collectivize progress is slandered in media consumed by people who think with their social brain more than by comprehending the world.

Pointing this out is also social anathema, because people hate to accept that they had blindspots that led to less than perfect beliefs.

Science and Bayesian updating are largely just your ability to hold new perspectives, and solve the inconsistencies while updating to things you're actively perceiving. Too much or too little bias in the wrong place can fuck everything up, yet it's still socially unacceptable to say that people have a social obligation to learn to not ignore dissonance between different beliefs, and how to properly weight reliable and robustly supported beliefs.

Might even include social pressure to learn concepts and vocabulary around the topic. How do you question newspeak if you were born into it?

Adults also have an incentive and obligation to keep learning. Serving your own social script exclusively does not build a functional social organ or body. No wonder a couple power hungry parasites can overpower the masses.

So in such a fucked up system, how do you keep the will to live, serve progress, and justice, and avoid being socially exiled or murdered while incidentally calling everyone out as the self focused ignorant masses that they are? Willful ignorance aside, the real ones responsible are the jerks in charge who defund education, and super fund propaganda for intellectual disarmament.

On a related note, I've been watching the anime "orb" and enjoying the first few episodes so far. Very topical.