Describe reality.
Make an effort to separate your aesthetic judgements from your observations.
How can I influence others without manipulating them?
211–220 of 232 posts
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go to the shore. Watch the ships. It's not complicated sciencey stuff.
Atmospheric refraction. (See? The flat earther knows complicated sciencey stuff too. You won't accept their complicated sciencey stuff, so why should they accept your complicated sciencey stuff?)
We’re not trying to come up with a convincing argument - there’s thousands - but we’re trying to understand how it’s even possible to conceive of such idiocy for a person who is otherwise reasonable.
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or, making actual choices in reality? Where there are limits to what we can do, but making hard choices well has positive impact. Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics, deontological ethics [1] and virtue ethics [2]. A choice is good and right because it the nature of the choice itself in deontology, or because of how it defines one character in virtue ethics, not because of what effects it may or may not have on…
> Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics From an arm chair perspective, this is a wonderful shortcut isn't it! Roughly, treat everyone how we would want to be treated - or some other limited formulation, with no horizon of thought about downstream impact past that. Presumably, inflexible pacifism would get a sympathetic response from Kantians. A kind of intellectual purity, at the relative cost to others' lives. Inte…
I gave you all of the links you need to read if you want to know more. Suffice it to say that all you're describing is what you care about, which is about as logically compelling an argument about what is good as telling me what deity you believe in. Your random foray into philosophy is not going to solve 3,000 years of ethical debates in a simple quip.
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever met in real life a person who wouldn't lie to the axe murderer, because of their Kantian values? If a Kantian can be put into a situation where their morals would require them to say the word that gives up Anne Frank, we can safely say it's a bad moral system.
> If a Kantian can be put into a situation where their morals would require them to say the word that gives up Anne Frank, we can safely say it's a bad moral system. Not unless you can present some proof of this. Your implicit assumption that we should care about outcomes over principles has its own set of moral failures, like the repugnant conclusion.
Yes yes I'm sure smarter people than me have done lots of interesting logical things to philosophy over the last thousand years.
And I maintain my simple point: if your ethical system doesn't allow the flexibility to not give up Anne Frank, it's a bad ethical system. Unless you believe giving up Anne Frank isn't wrong? Then you're a bad person and shouldn't be considered in conversations about ethics!
Design it in a way to have good outcomes if you're worried about repugnant conclusions. Personally I believe putting it on paper is a fool's errand - vibes based ethics seems to work as good as one can get from an ethical system.
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics From an arm chair perspective, this is a wonderful shortcut isn't it! Roughly, treat everyone how we would want to be treated - or some other limited formulation, with no horizon of thought about downstream impact past that. Presumably, inflexible pacifism would get a sympathetic response from Kantians. A kind of intellectual purity, at the relative cost to others' lives. Inte…
I gave you all of the links you need to read if you want to know more. Suffice it to say that all you're describing is what you care about, which is about as logically compelling an argument about what is good as telling me what deity you believe in. Your random foray into philosophy is not going to solve 3,000 years of ethical debates in a simple quip.
Philosophy has spent 3000 years trying to organize humans well and has apparently failed to solve that problem.
Reframing that reality as "actually it doesn't matter what the consequence is as long as we followed our values to the letter!" is convenient, but in modern terminology, a cope.
I read your links and was already aware of deontology anyway but it was a nice refresher. Yup, you're right, we're describing what we care about! And in doing so we represent the majority of human thinking - maybe not the human thinking that gets written down, but nonetheless.
Why should people care to convince dusty academics what is right and wrong using logical systems and proofs when the dusty academic has lost the ethical debate immediately in the eyes of most when he admits that according to his ethical system, lying to prevent Anne Frank is wrong? This is instinctively wrong to most people, so, why should we care? Rigid logic is worthless when people are looking for something else, and rigid logic alone isn't enough to build a society.
I feel like you got to deontology and stopped. I've never actually met someone who studies ethics who got to deontology and didn't later end up with emergency exit modes, such as the Anne frank scenario. Using ethics to live a virtuous life is well and good, but Nazis don't do that, and you won't convince them using deontology to not round people up. You don't have to go all the way the other way and make "ends justify the means" arguments. Just allow yourself the flexibility to say "in an emergency, of course it's ok to lie," which may not seem logically sound, but society isn't logically nor is it possible to make it purely logical enough to be a valid ground for Kantian ethics to result in actual virtuous people - because the man that gives up Anne Frank telling the truth is not virtuous, he is a selfish monster, sacrificing a human life for his own sense of virtue and preservation of ethical purity, a disgusting trade off.
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Impact is irrelevant in Kantian ethics From an arm chair perspective, this is a wonderful shortcut isn't it! Roughly, treat everyone how we would want to be treated - or some other limited formulation, with no horizon of thought about downstream impact past that. Presumably, inflexible pacifism would get a sympathetic response from Kantians. A kind of intellectual purity, at the relative cost to others' lives. Inte…
I gave you all of the links you need to read if you want to know more. Suffice it to say that all you're describing is what you care about, which is about as logically compelling an argument about what is good as telling me what deity you believe in. Your random foray into philosophy is not going to solve 3,000 years of ethical debates in a simple quip.
You seem to be completely at sea here, for all your knowledge.
Caring about oneself and others' welfare is a direct result of being creatures that must make choices to survive. The compounding positive sums of increasing cooperative behavior are not arbitrary. They pay for themselves, many many times over.
Thus, practical virtue appears naturally, and persists, and grows, regardless of what you want to call it, or alternatives that anyone comes up with.
If you are going to argue about/against that practical impact, at least acknowledge practical virtue has a very special status.
Or you are arguing from (real or posed) ignorance.
The burden us on you, if you want to claim this practical progression should be superseded.
Without that, an appeal to impractical principles over practical good, is very much in the vein of "telling me what deity you believe in".
What "good" is "good" that doesn't reciprocally maximize "good" going forward.
So far your comments lack any grounding beyond itself. Perverse "purity". That relegates virtue to an hermetic aesthetic or OCD tick.
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#217Well, the author certainly lost the ability to influence me with that choice of font.
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think cajoling or persuading others inherently manipulative, but I can think of a lot of examples where doing so feels grimy. What I am trying to do is understand why sema4hacker, and some others, feel that influencing people is manipulative. So if you pop into the conversation and say that you don’t feel the same way that sema4hacker does, that doesn’t really help me understand sema4hacker’s perspective. T…
I'm one of those people-For clarity I'm referring to influence in the active 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' sense. To me "influence" and "manipulation" seem like forms of persuasion but with positive and negative connotations, like "public relations" versus "propaganda". None of them are necessarily bad on their own, but the choice of words seems like it depends on the perspective who is perceiving or desc…
I think manipulation is just negative influence, and influence doesn’t really have either positive or negative connotations.
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the legal system calls certain morally bad killings in peacetime manslaughter that does not rise to the severity of murder, then I think that murder as is commonly used is a specific kind of killing that does not include your example of a wartime killing. Even outside of the courtroom itself, many are also very careful when using the word "murder" when discussing actual killings, because of its severity, and respo…
Murder is when you kill someone on purpose, when you had the option of not. Voluntary manslaughter is when you do a violence on purpose, and the target dies, but your intent was not to kill. Constructive involuntary manslaughter is when you take an action that's against the rules, and someone dies as a result, but you didn't realise you were doing violence. Negligence involuntary manslaughter is when you take an acti…
> Murder is when you kill someone on purpose, when you had the option of not.
Indeed, I think that your original reply would have been more useful and less apparently combative if you had
1. replied with this definition, 2. showed why this commonsense definition that does not definitionally involve morality is useful, and gave examples of it, 3. finally showed marginal cases where murder is not a moral bad according to certain ethical frameworks, 4. acknowledge that it's OK to redefine the word so that it is definitionally morally bad, but since it differs from a commonsense notion, it needs to be signposted,
but I think you had a bit to figure out yourself.
Re: How can I influence others without manipulating them?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the legal system calls certain morally bad killings in peacetime manslaughter that does not rise to the severity of murder, then I think that murder as is commonly used is a specific kind of killing that does not include your example of a wartime killing. Even outside of the courtroom itself, many are also very careful when using the word "murder" when discussing actual killings, because of its severity, and respo…
Murder is when you kill someone on purpose, when you had the option of not. Voluntary manslaughter is when you do a violence on purpose, and the target dies, but your intent was not to kill. Constructive involuntary manslaughter is when you take an action that's against the rules, and someone dies as a result, but you didn't realise you were doing violence. Negligence involuntary manslaughter is when you take an acti…
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