Most violence in the world is motivated by moral sentiments

So many things are arbitrarily framed in a moral context that it seems hard to agree or disagree with this thesis.

For instance, we typically think of gang shootings as violence caused by greed or desire for power. But it's also common to frame it as a moral issue, such as "they shouldn't have been operating in my territory without paying" or "they were going to double-cross me".

Why do we take the moral explanation at face value? Just because the ostensible reason is morality doesn't mean that's the real reason. They may have already decided what they were going to do, and rationalized it with morality later.

> Lastly: From the tenor of your comment, it would seem that my writings have touched a nerve.

Let's establish one thing first, and it's that I'm not a teenager and therefore my command of language is such that I have some degree of control over the tone I convey in writing. It does not take a struck nerve to litter someone's writing with fucks and write pointedly. Your writing style is as artificial as mine and I find its dryness uncomfortable to the eyes.

> So, if I understand your point correctly, it's that the world is so mired in the use of violence, that logical discourse, a respect for facts, and the avoidance of mental patterns of hate is pointless hypocrisy because everyone is essentially either already guilty of being part of the violence or on the receiving end of it. Therefore, there are no moral limits on the behavior or speech of the victims and those who claim to be siding with them.

You have a moral framework. It emphasizes rationality and strongly penalizes emotion. I could write endlessly- but I won't, about how naive frameworks like this can be. I won't say yours is because we're speaking in ridiculous abstractions and I don't have a concrete example. You haven't even named a single instance of outrage on the Internet to demonstrate the validity of your sentiments. So really there's a lot of vague language that clearly resonates with many people but clearly doesn't resonate with me; it's possible a more concrete example would sit better or it might be that I could vehemently disagree with any particular moral judgment you'd like to offer up.

Moral frameworks exist strictly in the mind. This is not to say that morality isn't real. I personally am a moral realist but I acknowledge the epistemological problems inherent in applying a mental framework to the world. When you talk about "logical discourse" you are merely saying that if you disagree with someone, they are being illogical. When you talk about "a respect for facts" you are merely saying that if you disagree with someone, they are being disingenuous about their observations. When you talk about "mental patterns of hate", which is a real mouthful for "hateful behavior", what you are saying is that if someone claims grievance or conflict that you disagree with, they are being hateful.

I am emphatically not saying that there are no moral limits. That's fucking asinine. The issue is, everyone is justified in their own moral framework. Everyone sees themself as logical. Everyone sees the facts as they see them. Everyone thinks their anger is righteous. You have named your values "logical discourse" and a "respect for facts" but that does not say what your values are. It does not say what logical reasoning you use to come to your conclusions. It does not say what your observational context is that determines how you interpret your experiences into facts. Your moral indignation is as petty and boring as everyone else's. You are not taking a high road. That's the point. No one has the right moral framework. The reality of morality is not making judgments according to the right principles because human principles can be internally consistent in one's mind or in a group's discourse without being reified into action consistently.

So when the West bombs Syria to stop Daesh, it is righteous according to their moral framework, but when they ravage the levant, install dictators, deny people their autonomy, reduce their cities to rubble and plunder them of their resources, their morality is deafeningly silent. Your moral framework is just as pernicious and flawed: It cannot police itself from being inconsistent. It cannot verify itself. It cannot claim possession of the truth.

People who engage in 'pseudo-activism', whatever the FUCK that is because it is your description is sorely lacking in specifics and feels like a philosophical boogeyman, they, too believe that they are being logical, and have a respect for the facts, and are fighting hate. It so happens that we were all inculcated in Enlightenment (capital L) values since the day we were born. I believe the difference between you and me is actually quite minuscule, because I wring my fingers over the failure of those values as they are reproduced materially.

I know this is, like, the most offensive word on Hacker News, but it pays to become acquainted with postmodernism. A little, tiny bit of critical theory goes a long way in ripping away the veil of false consciousness every moral framework and ideology creates. There is always a gap between mental conception and material implementation. It is that gap where good and evil fight.

Anyway: People get outraged because they think things are worth getting outraged about. You're not more correct because you aren't outraged. Your values are different. Your experiences are different. A human being is a vast, overwhelming compilation of lived experience. It is a cognitive bias that must be consciously suppressed that we can know other peoples' lives better than they can with a relative paucity of observations. You're not outraged because your values aren't being violated. They are outraged because they are. This is tautological.

Judging people is cheap. Finding out how they think, why they think it, what they see, how they see it, and what they value is difficult. A skillful apprehension of morality is one which enables understanding and communication. Blaming others for their failure to measure up to one's own morality is dry pablum for people who want to be reassured that the world is mad and they are not. It is moral elitism.

Also, those Internet activists aren't killing people. Seriously. There are far greater violations of morality in the world and they are in service of a status quo you take no outrage in. Because outrage is bad or something. Whatever.

People like you have existed since time immemorial. Pick any fight that moved the moral barometer in society towards a more harmonious status quo: There were people like you complaining about fake activists doing everything wrong and being just as bad as their oppressors because you don't like their behavior. You're not as knowledgeable of their motivations as you think you are and the world wouldn't magically solve all its problems if everyone just listened to you. I really hope your biggest complaint with the world isn't that people on the Internet have a greater stake in changing the status quo than you do.

I think that you (or your source) are reading too much into the actions of Quakers in Pennsylvania. Quakers like all people are fallible, and Quakerism especially embraces the idea of continuing revelation and moving beyond previous barbarisms. There were early Quakers who did own slaves for example. While there were actions that us modern Quakers would not condone, I don't know of any interpretations of history (other than perhaps the book you cite, which I admittedly have not read) that indicate that the Quakers of Pennsylvania engaged in some kind of barbaric war with the Scotch-Irish. While they still wielded considerable power they were never the only residents of the colony and it by-and-large still followed the norms of the day. Quakers were proponents of (what were thought to be at the time) humane punishments such as solitary confinement. I'm not going to condemn the idea of pacifism due to the fact that we were unable to obtain complete purity of fact two hundred years ago in an entirely different society.

This comment and the one prior add quite a bit to the dialogue. These downvotes are unfortunate.

"The Toxoplasma Of Rage", an excellent essay[0] by Scott Alexander, points out that sadly there are only two choices for activists today - behave nicely, gather universal agreement to their cause and then get completely ignored, or draw attention to their cause by being so hated by everyone, that half of the audience starts working against the cause just in spite.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/