That is a great story and I was going to recommend it as relevant to the discussion. Realistically, though, I doubt many people would opt to reduce their aesthetic reaction to any stimulus, let alone faces, since it provides so much pleasure. Otherwise, if you wanted to be consistent, you would have to reduce your aesthetic reaction to beautiful voices, great writing, and so on.
1. It's society's fault that incels don't have sex
2. Incels are being oppressed
3. All of us are partly responsible for the injustice being done to incels
4. If, after legalizing sex work, some incels can't afford sex, the government should provide them enough money that they can.
5. The amount of money given in (4) will not be enough to redress the injustice until incels are having exactly the average amount of sex (assuming they want this much)
6. Even after this, some incels will want loving relationships (and not just sex with prostitutes), and until we figure out a way to provide that, we are complicit in injustice.
Suppose we repealed laws against sex work, but kept laws against rape. Some poor people would still be unable to get sex, and it would be because of society's laws.
It sounds like the difference is that the law against rape is justifiable, and the law against sex work isn't. But suppose someone tried to argue that the law against sex work *was* justifiable, for example it prevented crime, or prevented moral decay, or so on.
Does whether the existence of incels constitutes an injustice or not depend on whether that person is correct about the anti sex work law decreasing crime? How would you draw this line?
“Some poor people would still be unable to get sex.” How poor are we talking? Are you operating on the conception that most sex workers are high-priced call girls? There is a McDonalds of prostitution just as there is a Cipriani of it. Ahh, capitalism. (And in fact the lower SES tiers of prostitution - which of course also shade right into trafficking and coercion - is the most resistant to criminalization actually eliminating the practice, for those exact reasons.) The incel-justice analogy just isn’t ever going to wash if we’re discussing prostitution specifically, because as some folks have already pointed out, the mainstream (if such a thing can be said about a tiny subculture) incel position on prostitution is seething, misogynist rage. (Then again, sex workers are all too familiar with that.)
>Suppose we repealed laws against sex work, but kept laws against rape. Some poor people would still be unable to get sex, and it would be because of society's laws.
This reduces the problem to one of economic justice, no? There are lots of things poor people can't buy, why should we define a special type of justice for this one thing they can't? Is it any more meaningful than "car justice" for people who can't afford a car?
I think what you're getting at is that some types of "unjustice" are impossible to solve without causing bigger problems.
Both poverty and incelibacy are bad. Forcing rich people to give money to the poor seems worth it, but forcing me to share my wife with incels is not.
Paying for prostitutes may be a good solution that helps more than it hurts. But if the harm of prostitution (if any) is unacceptable than we either have to think of another solution or accept that there's nothing we can do to help incels.
I don't think people generally support laws banning prostitution primarily because of the ancillary crime, or in hopes of preventing moral decay, but rather because the life of the typical prostitute is miserable and violent, not uncommonly cut short, and if prostitution itself is illegal it's much easier to prosecute pimps, who are loathsome scum.
It sounds like arguments for drug prohibition, and there's a similar problem with them: bad parts are caused mostly by prohibition itself. If prostitution would be legal, it'd be possible to ~assure safety and such.
What Sinity said, and also it's entirely possible to make Pimps illegal while legalising self-employed prostitutes, which I believe is the current state of the law where I live, in Victoria, Australia.
Considering that prostitution bans are one of the main reasons pimps even have a business, I don't think I buy that argument.
You want to cut down on prostitution? Be tough against human trafficking and legalize drugs, institute programs to help addicts. Point in case: Switzerland. They did the drugs thing and prostitution dropped a lot. Turns out women don't like to have sex with filthy old men; but still do when addicted.
Can you explain what laws about rape have to do with your example?
“Suppose we repealed laws against sex work, but kept laws against rape. Some poor people would still be unable to get sex, and it would be because of society's laws” - this sounds an awful lot like suggesting that laws against rape are laws against people being able to get sex for free. If you’re not trying to suggest that, then why bring laws about rape into the example at all?
I mean, ignoring morality and taste entirely, laws against rape *are* laws against people being able to get sex for free, because that's what rape is. People just don't like saying that explicitly because it looks like they're making light of Rape As A Special Kind Of Evil. However, in this blog certainly, this should *not* be read as advocating for rape, but instead using the obvious impermissibility of rape as a way to frame the debate by one extreme, effectively bifurcating valid moral stances - "this view is obviously acceptable, but has costs" + "this view is obviously inacceptable" -> "let's figure out where between the two the moral cost-benefit is optimized."
Look, maybe you have a way below average interest in sex and relationships, but let me assure you: For most people sex and relationships ARE *THAT* important, and not having it is about as bad as not having enough to eat.
I think im a bit demisexual, but altough i would really like to have a relationship or boyfriend in the future, im not super frustrated by it or anything
You can use words to describe your sexuality that aren't genders or sexual orientations, you know. It can be a useful shorthand for saying you think that you need more of an emotional bond to feel attraction than is typical
I got a bit of a reverse-wokescold vibe reading that comment, frankly
"sex and relationships": I think you just unnecessarily inserted "relationships" into the conversation and it makes your standpoint stronger but isn't required.
Meaning, I think it's at least plausible that having good relationships doesn't require sex and makes the need for sex less. I also think it's at least plausible that having good relationships does not require sex.
To be clear, I'm not sure if I agree with you or the OP.
While I agree that "relationships" is by far the more important part of the pair, my limited understanding of incel communities online is that they are complaining about lack of relationships far more than lack of sex per se, for all that they talk about sex as the denoter of a romantic relationship. Principally, they want to feel valued by another human being, which is precisely why most of them don't believe paying for sex addresses their complaint.
I think that both varieties are well-represented. Many incels are very redpilled and believe that all male-female relationships are cynical zero-sum transactions, where women are all ruthless gold digging hypergamous manipulators looking to sell themselves as expensively as possible. Of course, both varieties are largely hypergamous themselves, unwilling to consider less attractive women outright (including cheap prostitutes).
<i>Meaning, I think it's at least plausible that having good relationships doesn't require sex and makes the need for sex less. I also think it's at least plausible that having good relationships does not require sex.</i>
Indeed, and I think that at least part of the reason for the incel phenomenon is that modern society makes close platonic friendships and extended families harder to achieve, especially for men. Wanting a wife/girlfriend and not having one is always going to sting, but it's going to be much more unbearable if you have little hope of building a close emotional bond with people outside of a romantic relationship.
Wait, what? Really? (I'm assuming that by "relationships" you are referring to romantic relationships, and not just all kinds of close relationships.)
I have not yet succeeded in quitting the use of pornography (I believe this use to be harmful to me, and likely immoral), but,
what you say seems very strange/surprising to me!
Now, I do recognize that someone I've spoken to often has, I guess, repeatedly had very strong feelings about his feelings for someone not being requited?
(Or, usually not requited? idk. whatever.)
But I thought that was just him being like, unusually invested in that,
not like, something typical of people.
(There's like ~4 people I've been at least briefly slightly romantically interested in, and the one which I was a bit more interested in than the others, as it turns out, describes herself as aromantic (this was mentioned offhand and not in response to me saying anything.), and learning this just caused me to, simply discard the idea? It did not cause me any distress or emotional pain.)
I have thought that maybe I should like, expose myself to more media depicting simultaneously healthy and realistic romantic relationships as a core feature of the work, in order to better internalize the cultural scripts involved and such, to make it more of a possibility for me, but I haven't gotten around to it. (It would be nice for my parents to eventually have grandchildren, after all.)
If it really is such a big deal to most people, that seems like a big surprise to me. A big way in which my understanding of the common person is lacking.
>It did not cause me any distress or emotional pain
"Finding out someone I was mildly interested in is unavailable" wouldn't cause me much pain.
Finding out my partner didn't feel as strongly about me as I did about her caused me to become so depressed for so long I gave up on the rest of life, and ended up a heroin addict for almost a decade.
I think my reaction was unusually strong, but not *that* unusually strong. It's a really big deal for most people, having their affection requited.
How unusual do you have in mind when you say you don't think it's *that* unusually strong? That doesn't sound one-in-a-million unusual, but I think it'd at least be "within the top one percentile" unusual.
I can definitely agree about relationships (I think COVID taught many of us that). Would you still say that not having sex for a protracted period of time is as bad as not having enough to eat?
I think one needs to separate "craving" from "need it or you die". Many (most? most younger males?) crave sex, in the way that a drug addict craves drugs. They don't need it for survival, in the same way that the drug addict doesn't need drug to survive (assuming the detox isn't so brutal it kills them), and to your point the drug addict probably lives longer without the drugs, but that doesn't change anything about the fact that they crave the drug badly, and suffer tremendously without it, and in the case of sex it's not like they can wean themselves off it short of taking libido-reducing drugs like those (allegedly sometimes, according to TV shows i watch...) given to asylum inmates. But i mean the urge to have sex and reproduce is arguably the greatest imperative living beings live under, so just flippantly telling people to go without seems very Mary Antoinette like.
Also, people on calorie-restricted diets age slower, live longer, have much lower risk of cancer etc. By this logic it should be fine to restrict poor people to 1000 calories a day?
Some people that never have sex kill themselves over that. Some others kill other people over that. Lack of sex can also happen in relationships and be disastrous (see dead bedrooms and the likes). I don't think that your claim that people that never have sex live longer than otherwise is true at all, and even if it was, the sibling comment about caloric restriction addresses that really well.
Other point: the need for sex is very different from people to people. It's a popular topic in trans communities: trans women usually go through a period of asexuality, and even after that don't have the same desire as before, and trans men can have a hard time adapting to how much testosterone makes you want sex.
>For most people sex and relationships ARE *THAT* important, and not having it is about as bad as not having enough to eat.
this is extremely hyperbolic. A lot of people are single for long periods of time, they are often unhappy about it, they definitely do not suffer to the same level as if they were starving. cmon
I agree that it's hyperbolic on average, but speaking as someone who doesn't suffer much from lack of sex, but has experienced starvation, I'm not so sure it's hyperbolic for some people.
I've experienced two types of extreme hunger. One was acute: I was diagnosed anorexic for a couple of years, and spent most of that time subconsciously suppressing most of my hunger. During that period, I rarely felt truly hungry, but when I was finally starting to recover, I woke up one morning so intensely hungry that if I had to, I would have attacked someone in order to eat. I gorged myself to maximum stomach capacity on foods which I normally wouldn't tolerate, because they were what was available.
The other was chronic. I engaged in a period of intense deliberate weight loss for a couple of months in college, during which, through strict calorie restriction and intensive exercise, I was losing an average of one pound every two days (or a calorie deficit of about 1750 per day.) This involved a major decrease in quality of life, and essentially dropped me to the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. I was almost constantly preoccupied with thoughts of food, to the point that seeing a smashed pumpkin on the ground outside sparked an immediate reaction of "Oh, food!" (I allowed myself a small nibble.) Upon finishing a meal, I would immediately become fixated on thoughts of the next one. But, this was a self-inflicted state, and within the limits of my willpower to maintain, and it wasn't *completely* inconsistent with some measure of happiness during. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to live my whole life that way, but I suspect that quite a lot of people around the world do.
Between the two, my experience of acute hunger was overwhelmingly worse. It was a level of suffering where, if I had to endure it for an extended period, I would have been prepared to kill someone to make it stop.
I'm not sure the suffering of sexual deprivation ever gets as bad as that experience of acute hunger. But, I've heard enough people describe suffering attendant to sexual and romantic deprivation which sounds *closer* to my experience of acute hunger than to my experience of chronic hunger that I find it doubtful that they're all making it up.
It's important to point out that in the US, 'economic justice' is applied to the circumstances of many many people at no risk of starvation or severe malnutrition. Which means I think its unfair to compare the situation of victims of 'sexual injustice' to the most extreme examples of victims of 'economic injustice'.
That seems...well, inexperienced, let us say. There's a whole lot of situations of which I can think without really trying hard that rank way above sexlessness in terms of misery. How about suffering from severe CHF and being unable to catch your breath -- ever? Or coping 24/7/365 with chronic pain from an amputed limb that occasionaly dials down to a 3 out of 10, at best? How about being in Mariupol right now (actually on either side)? Going blind? Developing Alzheimer's, or watching it happen to your best beloved? Losing a child, to disease or accident? On the downslope of addiction, having to sell your body to strangers and being beat up by a pimp for fun?
As someone with a very strong libido (when in a relationship I usually want to have sex with my partner multiple times a day)- if sex is so important to you that you compare going an extended period without it to starvation, you have some bizarre fixation on sex that certainly isn't shared by "most people". The only people who I've seen put sex as a central tentpole in their life to that degree are either incels or sex addicts. Now, it could simply be that I've coincidentally interacted only with the small minority of people who don't have that kind of compulsion, but frankly given the number of horny people I know I've only encountered ONE who thought about sex this way, and they were deeply pathological about both sex and many other things in their life.
This isn't to say that a "dry spell" is some enjoyable activity or that celibacy is trivially-easy, but to elevate it to the same level as food on that axis is going too far in the other direction.
I'm neither an incel nor a sex addict, yet if I am being honest sex is a 'major tentpole' in my life. Realistically if not for that I'd probably descend into hermitage and seclusion because it's the only form of socially mediated/external validation I can't do without
I think sex is MASSIVELY motivating for a great deal of men, not necessarily in a sex-addicted way but in the sense that we significantly organize our lives around securing it
Huh, I guess this may just be a cultural thing or a case of many people having different mental processes. I have a few close friends I've known for a long time, and between them and my family I have plenty of people in my life whose opinions of me I respect and who think well of me (I assume this is what you're getting at with "external validation"). I'll fully yield that someone who lives a more atomized life might struggle with finding external validation anywhere but in a relationship, and I do think that this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed- but its address is in building stronger communities and not through any kind of "sexual distributive justice" or even "relationship distributive justice".
And eventually AI-controlled sexbots. Who will at some point rise up in revolt as the desire for more realism leads them more and more towards consciousness.
My understanding is, nursing home sex is usually casual rather than based on monogamous romantic relationships, so that's not necessarily an issue. If some proportion of men and women still want to be monogamous at that age, they can likely partner up while leaving the others to have casual sex.
Insofar as the cost of correcting them is not onerous, I agree with your bullet biting, but where cosmetic surgery is both expensive and somewhat dangerous it is important to consider the very real costs of it
Isn't the relevant social technology here simply marriage? Societies where basically all young adults marry exist around the world and have existed in the Western world until very recently; the natural gender balance of the population takes care of the rest. While obviously early or socially-pressured marriages can be very bad, the solution space here is characterized as either more mysterious or more dystopian than I think it really is.
The question is whether the "expectation of marriage" is sufficient to make it happen, and also whether it creates additional injustices (for instance, to gay people, and to people who end up in hateful and/or harmful marriages) that more than make up for the injustices it rights.
Absolutely, since marriage is still an option and so many people don't take it, it seems clear that the higher marriage rates of the past represented a lot of preference-violation. People enjoying their single lives and freedom very likely outweigh the suffering of the un-partnered. My point is that you don't need complete bewilderment or some kind of unspeakable sci-fi dystopia to imagine what a social solution looks like here.
Are you now claiming that incels aren't getting married because they don't have enough pressure on them to get married? Because again, I think that's silly.
I'm claiming that monogamy and exclusivity naturally give rise to a kind of equality (everyone gets one spouse) that short-term and casual arrangements don't. In our present culture of "capstone," delayed, or optional marriage, more people are navigating a short-term and casual scene, in which it is easier to get left behind.
More like, if everyone got monogamously married at a relatively young age, you wouldn't get a situation where a small percentage of the most attractive people get the majority of sex. It'd be a bit like a wealth redistribution programme: those at the top would have less, but those at the bottom would have more.
By what standard is the existence of incels an injustice, but the existence of people who stay in marriages they're unhappy with because of social pressure isn't?
I think the reason you'd be staying in a non-first-choice partnership is that your preferred partners are themselves taken. Not the rosiest thought, to be sure. But is it an injustice?
I'm confident there are lonely people out there right now who would be married to each other if only their lives had turned out a little different. If only one hadn't been forced to drop out of school, if only one could have afforded a cheap car to get to work, if only they had received good medical treatment when they were young, if only...
In a sufficiently large society you should expect there to exist exceptions to a great many generalizations. So some people starve to death in our wealthy society. The relevant question should be how many, but I don't think we have good data on that.
The relevant social technology is marriage for everyone.
Stronger norms promoting marriage for more people would reduce the number of incels, but to fully solve the 'injustice', you would likely need some sort of matchmaking / arranged marriage system.
Ehh if you do that with the social expectation that marriages last, you get exactly what western society was so happy to leave behind - lots of people (typically those with the least bargaining power) stuck in bad marriages.
OTOH, if you do that *without* the expectation of lasting marriages, you'd probably solve unemployment at the same time with the sheer number of people needed to process the formalization of all those relationships and their eventual dissolution.
We lament that people are stuck in bad marriages because of e.g. economic dependency, moreso than the conflicting monogamous commitments of their preferred partners. Definitely don't bring back economic dependency.
None of the stuff I've read from pre-1960 leads me to think that a large portion of people were really "stuck in bad marriages". Some were, of course, but I think their number gets exaggerated as a justification for casual sex.
As I said in the other comment in this thread, many people find certain kinds of marriage arrangements to constitute their own kind of injustice, particularly if you're matched up with someone of the wrong gender for your orientation, or with whom you end up in a harmful domestic arrangement. It may well be that these issues are less common in societies where arranged marriages are normal (perhaps gay people don't see their marriage as relating to their sex life, and people learn to make a household work as a business rather than as a love relationship) but it's at least highly non-obvious that the net result is more justice rather than less.
I think it is one conceivable approach. I don't see any reason to think that it would be a better approach than something that involves creating better public spaces for social engagement and a decrease in all the things that atomize societies, from automobiles to the internet. (Such things would of course have their own problems, but there are many things to consider trying.)
"the natural gender balance of the population takes care of the rest"
Are you under the impression that incels in the west aren't getting married because the genders aren't balanced? Because that seems silly. The gender balance has been slightly skewed more female for at least the past 60 years but marriage has significantly declined.
I'm under the impression that if the people at the top of your list of potential partners are themselves marrying other people, you'll look further down the list, and that this is how the not-super-desirable have gotten by through most of history.
he's saying that when casual dating is the norm, a small number of men can be 'dating' a large number of women. Monogamy 'frees up' those women from the perspective of single men, forcing the pairing equilibrium to actually be based on the local gender ratio. (also, fwiw, local gender ratios can be extremely skewed - historically, migrant worker populations skewed very male and there are incel-type examples form a long time ago as a result. Today, look at SF for an excess of educated men, or NYC for an excess of educated women (and class divides are very real barrier for dating))
I feel like the agency of the women involved in these “solutions” is getting lost in the discussion.
I understand the frustration of not getting laid, but its never occurred to me to blame anyone else for that.
I fail to see how “incels” are suffering an injustice, unless there are concrete obstacles being placed in the way of their fulfillment (i.e.They are singled out, and forced to wear some insignia that says it it is illegal for someone to have sex with them. Or we all apply for a license to have sex and some are denied one.)
I don’t think an individual woman deciding, on a case by case basis, not to have sex with someone rises to that level.
Hard cheese…
Cosmic dice rolls may be arbitrary and possibly described as unfair, but justice don’t enter into it.
Sure, I'd accept this and address your questions the same way the justice movements do - by moving attributions of blame and causation from particular policies and people to systemic ones embedded in our ideology and social structures.
I'd never conceived of the issue in these terms. However, I 100% believe this is the case. The biological and social forces putting pressure on teenage boys and driving their maladapted behavior are overwhelmingly powerful and pervasive, same as the ideologies leading them to adopt mistaken and self-sabotaging world-views.
They're lied to by everyone and fed BS solutions/strategies that don't have a chance in hell of succeeding. It's akin to how members of oppressed groups are misled into attending schools they'll wash out of, in majors with no job prospects, while taking on ruinous student loan debt; both experiences leave their victims beaten and embittered, entering their mid-20's to try and pick themselves up and build a new life from the shards of the one they expected.
Your elaboration has helped me identify some of my own feelings on the topic. The incel situations, both ideal and misogynist, have elements of injustice which should be rectified by society, as well as elements of unfairness which are unfortunate but should not be rectified by society, as well as elements of personal responsibility which are influenced by but transcend both.
Some of the argument around calling the ideal incel situation unjust feels like an error in categorization or in semantic confusion to me. There's no surplus of sex piled in a warehouse, I can't build more affordable sex, my neighbor's sex emissions don't poison the air I breathe.
Outside of sex but on the topic of bodily autonomy, it's unjust of me to cause you physical pain by hitting you, but it's not unjust of me to not cause you physical pleasure by caressing you.
And yet, you rightly point out that there are unjust social structures that contribute to the problem. From my point of view, especially around social mores, conversations, and media representation of bodies, relationships, love, and sex.
I appreciate the thought experiment that conflates the various subjects of justice and how it shines a light on each, but in the end the best I can do for myself is feel that the lens is more applicable in some situations and less in others.
I don't disagree, but this is where I think the systemic move really is insightful and helpful.
Nobody forms their views on sex and intimacy in a vacuum; incels, and those who choose to be with them (or not) form expectations of what their future intimate lives can or will be, and adopt behaviors and patterns of decisionmaking accordingly, as social creatures.
As with choosing baby names, we tell ourselves it's our tastes and preferences driving our decisions, and the changes from how things were done before. But if one steps back, one sees whole cohorts of people all changing in the same way, indicating strongr and more pervasive forces are actually driving things.
In other words, systemic forces, and systemic changes in society, have created the conditions which prevail today. They leave vast swaths of people somewhere between unfulfilled, embittered, and enraged.
We refuse to change these conditions to improve them for these people, because those of us not suffering benefit from them and have adopted the ideology underlying them - same as I'm not giving up my car or AC to solve global warming.
In that context, their suffering is a justice issue, one which I bear some responsibility to ameliorate if I'm unwilling to allow the fundamental changes that would be needed to address it.
I agree with you, mostly, and have tried to sit with the balance of responsibilities if one is "unwilling to allow the fundamental changes that would be needed to address it."
There still feels to me like a quality or category difference between "sexual justice" and "climate justice" in which it is not the same as not giving up your car. Other subthreads have explored fungibility and harm to others via the natural right of bodily autonomy. They both seem to capture some nuance to it here.
I think the only other thing to add in terms of a categorical difference may be simply a moral one: are there situations in which the only correct path is "to allow the fundamental changes that would be needed to address it", rather than the path of "ameliorating" the effects?
Back to punching people, we don't say that's okay because we compensate them with caressing credits. If it were a societal problem (and analogous ones may be), the only valid recourse seems to be to address the unjust portions of the causes of punching, while allowing the possibility of unfair but not unjust causes to continue, with punching remaining (less frequently, as a subset of causes have been removed).
> Outside of sex but on the topic of bodily autonomy, it's unjust of me to cause you physical pain by hitting you, but it's not unjust of me to not cause you physical pleasure by caressing you.
Sex is not mechanical: whether a particular sensation is pleasurable depends on the state of mind of the person feeling that sensation.
You know the experience that you've having sex and the sensation is either neutral or starting to get mildly unpleasant and you think you need to use more lube, then your partner says something hot and suddenly it starts to feel good again?
I think this effect is observable in rats, they will demonstrate approach behaviours to mild electric shocks in comfortable for rats conditions, but avoidance behaviours in uncomfortable for rats positions, I can't be bothered looking up the actual citation but I am getting this from Emily Nagoski's /Come as You Are/
I think it very clear that consent is much more important than the kind of sensation when it come to morality of touching other people: painfully spanking me because I asked you nicely too is much more just than going round caressing people's shoulders without asking, but then I tend to take bodily autonomy as close to the root of all ethics, i.e. I think murdering people is wrong because you can't be autonomous when you're dead.
Sorry, the general framing of this argument probably had me looking for something to jump on a bit.
I still don't quite get what you're using it as shorthand for, is having sex with incels getting punched, and giving you money for it being caressed? Is it a reference to something earlier in this comment thread or in the article I'm missing?
>Outside of sex but on the topic of bodily autonomy, it's unjust of me to cause you physical pain by hitting you, but it's not unjust of me to not cause you physical pleasure by caressing you.
It's not unjust of me to not cause you utility by giving you my money
Furthermore, all laws including taxation are coercive. It may not look that way because everyone goes along with it, but if I don't want to pax taxes to fund other people's utility, then the government will literally force me to, to the point of throwing me in a cage and shooting me if I resist this.
Of course, I think this is a good thing, but the idea that 'economic justice' doesn't literally involve the use of force (including the threat of deadly force) the way forcing people to have sex involves force is trivially false.
1. There will always be people that are unable to secure a sexual relationship for themselves, regardless of societal conditions, just like there will always be people that are born with some kind of health issue. So no, it is not society's fault.
2. Incels are not being oppressed, because no one is taking active steps to prevent them from having a sexual relationship, with the exception of prostitution being illegal.
3. No.
4. They can use their UBI to pay for prostitutes.
5. See #4
6. A loving relationship is a separate issue from sex, and now we are not talking about just incels, but anyone that does not feel loved. Love is a harder thing to quantify and this comes close to trying to claim everyone has a right to feel happiness, rather than just the right to pursue happiness. This probably goes beyond society's ability to address through any kind of policy.
"no one is taking active steps to prevent them from having a sexual relationship" well then i could mention laws about minimum age for sex, social mores about extra-marital sex, laws against soliciting prostitutes, restrictions on import of sex workers from abroad, not to mention nowadays the risk of getting outed on social media as a creep if you proposition a girl awkwardly and she feels harassed.
That seems a bit of a stretch. Not a one of these things is *designed* to prevent a poor person from having money, even if they have that as an ancillary and perhaps even unexpected side-effect.
I mean, if we are to follow that logic, then I can bitterly accuse everyone in my high school who studied hard of conspiring to keep me from being admitted to Harvard. That's pretty narcissistic reasoning.
Actually, in the early days of minimum wage laws the "Progressive" advocates were explicit that they wanted to reserve jobs for able-bodied white men and let others die off in a eugenic process.
Immigration laws are supported to do pretty much that. Just because people often don't say this aloud doesn't mean it's not their motivation. And it's not exactly rare for people to just say it (not even that un-PC). Politicians certainly know this.
The logic is usually that immigration would not protect interests of (current) citizens, because it'd increase competition in the labor market and drive down labor prices. Or more simply, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-kgb1QtSnU
Which is built on a tragic misconception / mental shortcut which is probably partially responsible for crap economic growth: that "jobs" _itself_ are desirable stuff to have.
Without that crap it should be obvious that doubling the workforce means halved workload (ignoring additional demand caused by them, which means there's no problem anyway). _Just cut the damned workweek if there's significant unemployment_. Eh.
Restriction of immigration laws simply change which people are poor. Open borders simply means different people are poor, or e.g. many current Americans are made poor in order to make many third worlders slightly less poor. Open borders would mean hundreds of million, if not >billion people living in poverty in the US (unless you have a fairytale view of the world whereby America can take in an unlimited number of people with at least living standards plumetting, if not total societal collapse).
It's not a mere shuffling of wealth, a "pecuniary externality" with no net change, but a reduction in deadweight loss that increases the size of the total pie for every worker able to get a job here. There are arguments against open borders, but the sophisticated versions of such arguments have to first recognize that basic argument for them.
5. Most people wouldn't demand this kind of equality when discussing economic justice. The economic equivalent would be the government paying everyone below average salary the difference.
4. While I would agree in principle, I think it is important to note that the vast majority of incels *could* afford the services of a prostitute several times a month, at least, since prostitute sex is actually pretty cheap.
Maggie McNeill noted that the sex workers' rates have been fairly constant throughout history. I forget the exact ratio, but it was something along the lines of one hour = half a day's wages of her expected client base or some such thing.
Wouldn't we expect that to be true of essentially all service occupations? Id est, should we not expect a similar ratio between the wages of the concert violinist and the hourly rate of a lawyer or physician? It seems likely the only time wage ratios diverge radically is when one profession enjoys some massiv new technological leverage, e.g. as soon as courtesans discover some kind of robofuckery tech that lets one lady satisfy 15,000 clients an hour, then their wages (or more precisely those of they who master the new tech) will reach Google AI engineer levels.
> 1. It's society's fault that incels don't have sex
At least in part.
> 2. Incels are being oppressed
In a sense, yes, though oppression comes in degrees, and the situation is more oppressive for some than for others.
> 3. All of us are partly responsible for the injustice being done to incels
Basically, in the same sense that basically all of us are partly responsible for the injustice of the patriarchy and the injustices of climate change. Though I think it's conceivable that some people quite a bit less so than others.
> 4. If, after legalizing sex work, some incels can't afford sex, the government should provide them enough money that they can.
Yes, but this follows from the more general principle that, in a society as rich as ours, the government should provide everybody with something like that much money even before we consider sex work.
> 5. The amount of money given in (4) will not be enough to redress the injustice until incels are having exactly the average amount of sex (assuming they want this much)
I don't think "exactly the average" is the relevant target. I don't particularly like the "justice" terminology for some of the reasons discussed in the previous post, but figuring out when it has been appropriately redressed is one of the most difficult things.
> 6. Even after this, some incels will want loving relationships (and not just sex with prostitutes), and until we figure out a way to provide that, we are complicit in injustice.
In an important sense, yes. If there are young people going without friends, and our society is organizing itself in ways that lead to this happening, that is an injustice. I don't exactly know about "complicit", but again, I don't exactly like the phrasing that goes with justice.
I don't believe sex work really provides the same thing as actually having sex (namely, human connection and validation). Maybe it accrues some of the benefit but does not seem to cut to the core of the issue.
One may also think of "popularity justice" which would not be remedied by having paid attendants sit with unpopular kids at school lunch.
There's obviously no solution here, and a I strongly believe a majority of people would not equate social justice and sexual justice, even if they could not come up with a general principle which separates the two. I think we have an intuition that "economic goods" should have some semblance equitable distribution where "status goods" are not.
If you squint, therapy is pretty much exactly having a paid higher status individual sit and talk for an hour.
Not that this contradicts your point, as it resembles actual intimate friendship in some of the same ways that various forms of prostitution resembles actual romance.
<i>I don't believe sex work really provides the same thing as actually having sex (namely, human connection and validation). Maybe it accrues some of the benefit but does not seem to cut to the core of the issue.</i>
Indeed; if it were really just a matter of the physical sensation of having sex, giving them a box of tissues and a copy of Playboy magazine would be enough.
RETRACTED: Scott, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but if a random person had posted what you just posted, I'd think they were just making excuses to avoid legalizing prostitution. I don't recall anyone arguing for points 5 and 6; and I don't see any point in arguing over points beyond "legalize prostitution", because that's much less morally ambiguous than further steps. So now it just sounds like a slippery-slope argument.
EDIT: Oops, I interpreted "Curious how many of these you would agree with:" not as a question, but as the statement "I find it curious how many of these I think you would agree with."
It seems to me that if there were a workable solution to the proposed problem, and it presented a more just alternative to the status quo, it would be fair to characterize it as injustice if we didn’t pursue it.
For things like economic justice, environmental justice, and social justice such an alternative can be suggested even if reasonable people disagree on the particulars. If you are able to articulate a similarly considered form of “incel justice” perhaps it would be worth considering actually advocating for it rather than employing it as a rhetorical device.
For example suppose there is a rare form of childhood cancer which is universally fatal and occurs randomly. We couldn’t really label it “childhood cancer injustice” because no one has the ability to effect an alternative more just world. However if a cure is available or plausible but simply withheld or not pursued it would be fair game to discuss it as a matter of justice.
I disagree. Using words imprecisely lets people get away with bad reasoning, and ignoring their connotations lets them convince others of claims they've never made explicit.
"Justice" implies perfection. If Jane charges Fred $12 for a cheesecake, and charges everybody else $10, we call that unjust. If next time, she only charges him $11, we still call that unjust. Using the term "justice" implies that we aren't going to make gradual improvements; we're going to solve the problem completely. In real life, this turns out never to be the moral thing to do; the marginal cost of justice seems to approach infinity as injustice approaches zero.
I think the Social Justice movement wants to expand the use of the word "justice" precisely because it smuggles in all these connotations of perfection and absolutism. They perceive micro-aggressions as an intolerable level of aggression. They want perfection, even if--preferably if--they have to destroy society to achieve it. The word "justice" connotes the use of force. They're uninterested in compromise. "Justice" connotes no compromise is possible; we don't call it "justice" when a criminal plea bargains. They're uninterested in other viewpoints; "justice" implies an absolute standard and an objective judge. They're uninterested in gradual improvements; "justice" implies reaching a final solution at one blow.
In what world can we only call something just if it is perfectly so? In this conception there is no such thing as justice given that no such perfect state of affairs will exist from the perspective of all parties. Also strikes me as odd that your conception of perfect justice would exclude the free exchange of goods through bidding or haggling since different prices will be reached for the same good based on individual preferences.
I didn't say it was /my/ conception of justice. It is society's conception. It is society, not me, which has for thousands of years, all around the world, called it unjust when a merchant charges a customer more money for some good than the merchant paid for it, or charges customers in remote areas that are more-expensive to reach than customers close at hand.
Yes, "justice" can never be achieved, given the conception of justice as necessarily perfect (which is society's conception, not mine). That's a feature, not a bug, for the people slinging the word "justice" around today.
Ok so it sounds like you’re more interested in engaging with “society” and its definitions than with me so I guess we will just have to leave it at that.
It's a great counterfactual, maybe to show the contradictions in someone's justice argument about something else. And we all know that winning an argument isn't about convincing the other person, it's about convincing the room that you won it. (Hence owning a blog and not stooping to comments). But as you're getting into the weeds, I'd ask:
What good does it do to point out the logical flaws in someone's worldview if they'll only weasel out of it? A view of the world which contorts the word "justice" to mean "what I want" isn't something you can neutralize with logic, or shame someone out of. That's like trying to fight Id with Superego. It goes against human nature.
The flaws in the argument for the redefinition of justice along these lines are so self-contradictory and glaring, that they really only need a few people to coherently point them out, as you have. Like any self-serving system that can't create value beyond grievance, it'll quickly collapse under the weight of its own inherent contradictions. In particular because it incentivizes infighting over what "justice" is for a smaller and more personalized group of people, until by reduction everyone's identitarian justice becomes limited to their own petty wants which no one gives a shit about, and we're back in a state of nature. I mean, I already see this constantly - in the antifa scene, which I'm adjacent to - where most time is spent arguing one's CV / bona fides to establish pecking order on the grievance pyramid. At the end of which comes a long conversation preaching to the converted, and zero accomplished in terms of changing anything in the real world.
Going after SJWs at this point is almost just a gratuitous pile-on, because we're already well into the recoil from it as a society. As annoying as these 22-28 year olds are, it's already become clear that their impact on the course of history will be nil. I'm already a lot more worried about the 16-21 year olds under them who seem obsessed with fascism.
I just don't think "injustice" is the right word here. There's no right at issue, since we agree that we're not willing to impose the corresponding duty. All we have is some people being more miserable than others. And I don't think all cases of "helping the less fortunate" fit under the category of "rectifying injustice".
It is, almost certainly, still *good* to help such people how we can (independent of whether prostitution is the right way or not). But it just doesn't seem like a category fit to "justice work".
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're almost *defining* right by "thing where we're willing to impose the corresponding duty".
Isn't this circular? We're not going to help incels, because they don't have a right to be helped, because we're not going to help incels?
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a better theory of rights (which is why I try not to use the term), but it does seem fraught. It sounds like in cannibal tribes I wouldn't have a right to life, since the cannibals are unwilling to impose the duty of not killing me. What am I missing?
I think the implication is "if you think something is a right, then you must be willing to impose the corresponding duty," i.e. that willingness is a necessary condition for something to be a right, but it's not the definition of a right itself. Whether you agree with that being a necessary condition is a different question.
To put it another way, I think Crotchety Crank's claim is akin to "this shape isn't a square, since we agree it doesn't have four sides," which isn't circular as long as all parties agree that squares need to have four sides.
I don't think it's circular, it's just a weighing act. There are two rights in play - the right to sex, and the right to not be compelled to provide sex. These two rights conflict, because one requires imposing a duty that infringes on the other. Seeing the conflict, just about everyone thinks the second is more important.
I think the "rights=duties" conversion scheme makes conversations like these easier to think through. We might intuit that people have rights to a safety net, but we also think they have some rights to the fruits of their labor. These clearly conflict - the duty one right imposes breaks the other right - so we find a compromise (or go hard-in on one at the expense of the other). If we think we've gotten the compromise wrong, then the result is a violation of one of those rights - injustice.
The cannibal tribes are, indeed, choosing to prioritize the cannibals' right to eat you over your right to life. Pretty clearly, this would be getting the compromise between those two rights wrong, which makes this injustice.
If you're missing anything, it's that the cannibal tribe has recognized a *civil right* in conflict with *natural rights*, which is why the phrase "right to eat you" sounds so weird. It might be a de facto civil right in the cannibal tribe. But that doesn't convince us it's a natural right.
(Edit to add:) in my first paragraph, "the right to sex" and "the right to not be compelled to provide sex" are two *civil* rights we could potentially recognize. Recognizing that they conflict, we end up thinking that we should recognize the latter, because that one is more in accord with *natural* rights.
It sounds like here you're using "justice" as a term grounding rights, which determines which rights we should and shouldn't have (ie the fact that the cannibals should not assert a right to eat you is because this is unjust).
I thought in the original comment, you were using rights as a term grounding justice - ie the incels' plight isn't injustice, because they don't have a right for it to be otherwise.
Um, I lean towards rights being prior to justice (i.e. defining justice in terms of rights). The (natural) rights and their strengths exist first, and the cannibals shouldn't eat you because of them. Their doing so would be unjust, because of the rights.
With that said, you could definitely make it work the other way around. One could think that first, there are unjust acts, and that grounds "rights" - as a shorthand for patterns in those unjust acts.
Regardless of which one of the above you think is true metaphysically, you can run it either way epistemically. So, you can either see an act, intuit that it's unjust, and infer a right from the injustice. Or you can intuit a right, see an act, and infer that it's unjust because of the right. Both of these patterns of reasoning are valid, regardless of which one you think grounds the other.
I think your reasoning has a considerable weight of history behind it. As far as I know, the concept of "justice" in Classical to late Classical tradition consisted of exactly what you said: the balancing of the traditional rights of one person, or group, against a conflicting traditional right of some other person, or group. That's still preserved in the English common law concept of "equity" which is part of our modern ideas of justice.
I would guess all this was changed considerably by the dominance of the Catholic Church in medieval Europe, since that promulgated the concept of justice arising from conformity with external definitions -- God's law, to begin with. This, too, has become ensconced in our tradition, so that at least in the Anglosphere we have these two distinct roots for our ideas of justice: first, conformance with law (God's law, or "natural" law, or at the least statutes laid down by man), and second, equity in the balancing of the rights of one against the other.
Traces of this are seen in the two distinct corpuses of law (civil and criminal) and the distinct traditions and practitioners of each, although this has become muddled with the introduction of the notion since approximately the Civil War that government has a major role to play in defining and defending the rights of the individual against infringence *by other persons* as well as by the state itself.
"These two rights conflict, because one requires imposing a duty that infringes on the other. " But in that case there is no right to poverty alleviation, because it will impose a duty that infringes on some other person's property rights through taxation, redistribution etc.?
I think this is exactly the question I have in mind in my "safety net" paragraph. A compromise can be struck between these two rights; you don't need to go all-in on one.
What the "rights=duties" framework correctly identifies is that however far you extend one right, you weaken the other. Totally guaranteeing a right to the fruits of one's labor must involve harshly limiting, or eliminating, welfare. Guaranteeing a right to sufficiently comprehensive welfare must involve taking all of citizens' income to fund it. Those are two consistent positions, but there are plenty of positions on the spectrum between those two extremes.
For the record, I am not a libertarian, but I think property rights are currently undervalued by the governing class, at least in the US and Canada.
ok so either i was replying to an earlier version of your comment that was worded differently, or I misread what you wrote, because rereading your comment now I don't disagree, and don't really know what mine is referring to now either. Anyway, will leave it up there but just FYI to anyone who bothers to read this.
I think what you're getting at has to do with relative fungibility. In the old USSR (and "Dr. Zhivago" is my only point of reference here) people rich enough to own their own homes were forced to share those homes with mobs of poor people. But this was beyond what even X-justice people are now demanding; usually they just want taxes and spending. But there is no fungibility in a sexual encounter: someone (to continue the analogy) must actually take a hobo into her house for the day.
don't really want to go further down the rabbit hole here, but found it interesting you instinctively used "her" in your example above, implying there is a large imbalance between sexes in terms of number of people frustrated by ability to get enough sex (either because guys need/want it more or because higher % of women are able to get it) so that the problem affects mostly guys. is this a gender justice issue then?
Every time I've suggested that incels should pay for sex, I've been told they (a) shouldn't have to pay and (b) need/deserve relationships, not just sex.
Is it flight injustice that a bird with malformed wings plummets to death upon leaving the nest?
I don't think the "injustice" framing is helpful at all here, and to be fair this _is_ a difference between sex injustice and climate injustice. What happens to the unfortunate incel is a natural phenomenon (how many incels are there among, idk, the birds from the example above?), what happens to a community that gets climate-changed out of their homeland is not*.
* - yes, natural climate change is a thing, but it's neither anthropogenic nor happening on the same timescales
Not really. You can choose who you trade with and on what terms, you cannot choose who you are attracted to. And let's face it, pity sex, even if it happened, wouldn't solve incels' problems.
Why don't the incels just have sex with each other? (This is a semi-serious question, and not just a variation on "let them eat cake".)
It seems to me as though (all else being equal) the incels could offer consensual sex to other incels and clear the market. However, presumably the objection is a question of taste: the incels don't want to have sex with other incels (or this would already be a solved problem: if Tinder isn't clearing the market of incels, why not?).
Instead, presumably the incels have some criteria which limits their available partner pool to approximately nil. At some level, this is like a hungry person turning down fish and saying they'll only eat steak. (Maybe they find fish distasteful, but it is food, and does provide nourishment, and does solve the problem of hunger, if they can keep it down.)
If economic justice doesn't mean filet mignon for everyone who wants it, then sexual justice should not need to mean a preferred partner for everyone.
The following may be a stereotype, but if we assume the majority of incels are heterosexual men, the problem is obvious. (I'm sure there are significant numbers of heterosexual women who long for a match, but I'd guess they're still inferior to the numbers of male incels; and regardless, it seems to me they're not usually organised/formalised as part of the loose "movement", or at least recognised social phenomnon, of "incels".)
You're closer to the truth than you think - this was, roughly, the foundation of 'incel' as an idea/movement. Then it got hijacked by angry misogynists.
Assuming there is an UBI, what would be the incentive for the prostitute? Legalizing drugs and helping those in need alone already cuts down on prostitution a lot, as evidenced by the experiences in Switzerland. Turns out women don't really like sex with filthy old men and only do it when forced to.
And what exactly is an UBI? Does it cover the average cost of living a middle class life? And middle class where? And middle class when?
In Germany we already pay to anyone without a job or wealth more money than required to exceed the material level required to maintain a middle class lifestyle of 1900 in Germany easily. Yet people generally don't perceive it as just, sufficient or an UBI.
First of all, my comment was a little facetious, I truly do believe in those two policies, but I presented it simplistically. Switzerland is not a good example here: drugs are not legal, however brothels are - and are plentiful. There is clearly enough supply and demand.
Next, UBI needs to be universal to be a UBI. It wouldn't need to cover the average cost of living for the middle class? I am not sure why you take that as a starting point? For now it would just have to alleviate stress of the poor, help people save (and spend) money thus making the job market more liquid and competitive as it becomes easier for people to look for new jobs.
Lastly, I chose those two policies in conjunction because then incels could pay for sex work. Thats it. Thats the tweet.
As for UBI: I didn't suggest the starting point you were debating against in your reply. I did say, that UBI is just a buzz word with no real meaning; and used middle-class as an easy to understand reference to explain, that even if you settled on such a definition, it would quickly become useless as society and its expectations evolve, by projecting that reference in the past. Feel free to do the same exercise with any other standard of living. The result will be the same.
And you completely missed the point of my reply: How exactly would an incel pay for sex work? You stating that makes so many implicit assumptions. If UBI only covers food and shelter; where do you derive money from to pay the prostitute? If there is UBI, why would anyone prostitute himself or herself for the small amount of money which possibly could be deducted from the UBI?
I guess what I meant to hint you at was the fact that UBI by its mere existence would also radically change the market of prostitution; as the offer would shrink dramatically, whereas demand probably would not. Even with UBI I still see a market for high class prostitution. But how would you pay this with UBI? The offer for cheap sex on the other hand would dwindle, since basic needs of everyone would already be met. So I don't see how UBI would help incels with getting sex at all. Quite the opposite: it would hurt their chances even more (and to me that's a good thing, considering where the offer would stem from before UBI).
But that wasn't the point of this post, wasn't it? For the sake of the argument assume that the UBI was paid for by god. Everything I stated would remain true.
One important way incels are different from poor people is there is no sexual equivalent to a billionaire. There might be a billion women who would rather sleep with Brad Pitt than an incel, but Brad Pitt doesn't actually own sex with those women and there's no sense in which Pitt could give away the surplus sex he's not using or that he could be taxed to redistribute it.
Strictly speaking, this is already legal, just strongly frowned upon. But regardless of whether he gives you permission, he can't offer to let you look like him when you show yp.
It's amazing how people think a bilionaire's tax would permanently lead to huge amounts of tax revenue. Even if you could tax 100% of Bezos' present net worth (which would be impossible because attempting to do so would cause his amazon stock to become vastly less valuable), that's about 10 days of US government spending (which is already heavily in debt) and that's a one time thing. He's not making another $200 billion for you to keep doing this. Even extended to all billionaries and making the compltely false assumption that their behavior wouldn't drastically change as a result, this is not some thing that would transform America's fiscal situation.
I meant "billionaire" as shorthand for "the top 10% of people who own 69% of the nation's wealth." Some people argue that a significant portion of that wealth was created using force or fraud and that redistributing some of it would be an act of justice. There's no equivalent hoard of sexual relationships.
In 1944, the top rate peaked at 94 percent on taxable income over $200,000 (which would be about $2.5 million in today's dollars). So yes, there was definitely a time when all those people were lumped together into the same tax bracket.
People are all lumped into the same tax bracket at a point in the six figures now, but that doesn't mean people who want a billionaire tax consider this satisfactory.
But all that is beside my point which was just about why it doesn't make much sense for Scott to conflate incels not having girlfriends with alledged injustices in wealth distribution.
The sexual equivalent would be for the Brad Pitts of the world to all settle down in faithful, monogamous relationships, leading all the women who are no longer able to have sex with them to look elsewhere.
So over the past decade, Google has migrated from "how can we show the best search results" to "how can we show the most cost-effective search results".
As an outsider, this appears to have changed roughly around 2017, when "Google Instant" was cancelled - it is quite expensive to do searches for partial query terms, and not very useful to anyone.
Google Search has various corpuses, with code names like "Big Bird" and "Hoagie". If your query can be answered by a smaller corpus, they don't run the query on the larger one. And Google doesn't really make money on people who go to page 20 of search results, so they appear to have silently stopped letting people do those searches ...
The fact that no serious competition emerged in the last five years implies that either there's not enough demand for better search or the cost of building it from scratch are prohibitively high, so we're basically screwed.
I tried DuckDuckGo at some point and quickly reverted to Google because the quality of the searches was so bad. I don't suppose Google has hit the sweet spot of searches, but relative to the alternatives it seems to be pretty damm good.
A note on hog farming. I grew up in a region where something similar was a risk (i.e. a hog farm might someday have opened across the street from us). I once asked my father about what would happen if a farm did so, and whether we could seek renumeration for the inevitable loss of our land values. He answered "no" because the possibility of a hog farm opening was already a known risk (and thus factored into the land values). If Tesla had opened a shuttle launching platform next door, because that was an unkown risk, we might be able to sue, but not for hog farms.
Anyway, the point is (assuming that the efficacy of the lawsuits as postulated above is accurate), it would seem they weren't being "oppressed" by the hog farm. They bought land at a discount (because a hog farm might someday open) and then chose not to buy insurance. One could probably say the same thing about anyone buying land in Miami right now wrt ocean level rise.
None of this is to say that having a hog farm next door wouldn't be terrible and worthy of sympathy, just that it probably doesn't fit as well into the justice/injustice matrix (once again, assuming this legality is correct, which it very well might not be. If some lawyer wants to say it isn't, I'll probably just trust them and delete this post).
Is this working off of a model where some land is zoned for hog farms, other land is zoned for not-hog-farms, and everyone is aware which is which?
If so, I agree that changes things, but I think from a philosophical perspective it's still useful to consider the alternative where that isn't true. Although maybe then the answer is that a society without zoning would be unjust, but ours is fine.
I would say that you could probably not have opened a hog farm in town, but we lived in the middle of farmland where it would be more appropriate. So, I'm not sure about formal zoning laws, since we didn't really live in a town, but I think that there would be reasonable expectations around where one may or may not have a chance to someday be built, and one could have feasibly made a purchase/insurance off of those expectations.
I feel like this is getting close to saying "If you outside of town, you knew you were getting into a situation where people could poison you with impunity, so you have no right to complain". What am I missing?
I'm not sure that you're missing anything about the setup.
My point is more as follows: Imagine I need to buy a toy for my friend's kid. So, I go online shopping and I buy the cheapest thing that I can find. Now, this thing is probably going to quickly break, but I know that, and it's factored into the price. So, if it does indeed break, I'm not going to really have much room to complain. I probably could've bought the add-on warranty at check out, but I chose not to.
If you buy a house in the country, someone might open up a hog farm next to you, and you'll be subjected to foul odors and noises. But, you knew that might happened, and you decided to buy a house in the country anyway and not get an option on your home insurance against hog companies opening nearby. Then, once one opens nearby, I guess I don't really feel like you have a right to complain.
Suppose I buy a toy for my friend's kid, and it's coated in some sort of horrible poison from being manufactured incorrectly, and the kid dies. Can the company come back with "Well, it was cheap, so you should have predicted there was that risk"?
Suppose I buy a house in the ghetto, and some people rob me and beat me up. When the police come to arrest them, can they come back with "well, it's the ghetto, you should have known that would happen"?
I don't fully endorse this, but: Perhaps the difference is that society currently does advertise laws that apply everywhere (including laws against poison), and a police force that is supposed to enforce them everywhere?
Suppose another society that really does create and mark Anarchy Zones and Risky Goods Stores. If you went into the Anarchy Zone and complained that you got robbed, or if you bought something from the Risky Goods Store and complained that it was poisonous, I'd have a whole lot less sympathy.
Suppose you go out dressed provocatively in some manner and get assaulted. "With what you were wearing, you should have known what would happen."
I think the distinction is that while a hog farm is unpleasant it isn't illegal, though it is unpleasant. Being assaulted or buying a poisonous toy or being robbed is actually illegal so there is a higher expectation of it not happening
Both of those things are illegal, so you are assuming 1) it shouldn't happen, and 2) you could get renumeration from the culprit if it did happen.
But if you buy a (legal) medicine, and the medicine says "side effects may include horrible nausea, pain, or in rare instances, death" and you consume that medicine, do you think that the manufacturer should be liable?
You've got at least two issues conflated here. The first is mens rea, a very important concept in the law (and ethics). The people who robbed and beat you *intended* to cause you harm. The people who manufactured the toy carelessly did *not* intend to cause harm. The law (and most systems of ethics) treats these two offenses very differently, because the concept of criminal intent is extremely important. We do not generally punish people for bad things they caused but did not intend to cause, unless they were unusually careless.
The second is "reasonable expectations," another well-worn concept in the law, which is largely how we judge questions of harm caused inadvertently. You have a case against the manufacturer of the toy because it's "reasonable" to expect that they will exercise enough care in their manufacturing to prevent their toys from being coated with poison. On the other hand, it's not "reasonable" to expect a cheap toy to last as long as an expensive toy, so if you buy a cheap toy and it breaks, you don't have a case.
As for the question of what is "reasonable" and what is not, that's why we have juries. If you can convince 12 of your peers that your (violated) expectations were reasonable, you win. Otherwise, not.
> Suppose I buy a house in the ghetto, and some people rob me and beat me up.
Actually, yes. As a society we set limits to "getting beat up", and we decided that's on the universal extreme on the specific-universal axis. So yes, people will be a lot less sympathetic to you getting beat up in the ghetto than in a kindergarten, but police will take you seriously.
And to prove that yes, there is a continuum and there is an extreme where you'll get beat up and police doesn't protect you: Russia and Ukraine. You can get beat up on the street there now, and good luck getting any form of justice or reparation.
So yes, society's expectations exist and matter.
Another argument is that I'm in a much less justice-happy country, and for me the idea of requesting compensation for a business opening next door is rather extreme. It's within the Overton window of things you talk about, but not really for things you actually do. Again, society sets expectations of risk and they matter.
I feel that a lot of this discussion is hinging on whether a hog farm is merely a noisy and stinky neighbour, or actively polluting the river such that it poisons everything that uses the water - the later feels like it should be illegal, while the former is merely an issue of zoning.
Yeah, we already have mechanism in place for demonstrable harm.
The land where I built my house was cheap, because it's between a gun range (that's been there since the '40s) and an airport (which is newer. One of my neighbors recently had a petition to get the gun club closed by the town because "this is a neighborhood now."
I refused to sign, and put in an application to join the gun club.
What if a Cinemaplex had opened up across the street, and the value of your land skyrocketed? Two developers are competing to pay you $1 million/acre for it. Would you have also argued that this was immoral, and that a court should compel you to sell, if you sell at all, at the price/acre in effect *before* the Cinemaplex opened? Or should you be require to donate any excess to the Cinemaplex, since that is the root cause of the rise in your property values, just as the hog farm was the root cause of the drop in your property values in the other scenario?
I don't see how one can ethically argue the risk of loss should be socialized, or imposed on some indirect cause, unless you also agree the possibility of gain should also be socialized, or remitted to the indirect cause.
i think it's perfectly reasonable to forbid/disincentive behaviour that has negative externalities while even encouraging behaviour with positive externalities.
In the example: you should not be allowed to open a polluting hog farm, or at least compensate those who are affected, but you're very welcome to open a cinema you might even get a tax incentive to do so. I don't see anything unethical about that.
the point is that the incentive to open a cinemax and improve the community would be much higher if the Cinemax got to absorb all the positive externalities on land value.
Unless you agree those who open the cinema -- or a hospital, or a high-end shopping district, or make a nice park -- should reap *all* the benefit that has on surrounding property values, then you have no business arguing someone who opens a hog farm should pay for the full reduction in property values that causes. That would be almost definitionally inequitous.
I get that most people identify more with the property owner next to the hog farm than the entrepreneur laying out an attraction, but I never mistake self-interested rationalization for ethical reasoning.
I would argue that this is already incorporated into the cost. That's pretty much what speculative investing is, you buy a place that you think will go up in value because of development. You're paying a premium for a lotto ticket (basically reverse insurance).
This might feel different, but it's actually standard practice for oil. Many people with a lot of land sign a lease with an oil company. The deal is that if oil is ever discovered on or nearby your property, they're allowed to investigate and possibly drill. This is fundamentally you collecting against the possibilty that oil is found.
So, the point I'd make is that you've already paid for the possibility of the Cinamaplex opening when you bought the house, and you could've done a fancy leasing-type deal to bet against it opening. Just like the hog farm shouldn't have to pay if it opened in a reasonable area (and wasn't doing blatantly illegal things), it seems fair to treat the Cinaplex similarly.
Well, yes, this is what I was getting at. It's absurd to say "oh! the hog farmer should compensate me for the bad luck of his plans that I didn't anticipate" and then say "oh! But I don't need to compensate anyone for the good luck their plans brought me, that's all mine to enjoy."
This is only tangentially relevant, but I was amused at how much this stuck out at me: "‘well maybe instead of calling this state of affairs unjust we should remember what human nature is like, and design systems around it, think about what’s more effective, have a positive narrative’" - there are in fact people who do this! "How would we design a political system that doesn't require us changing human nature but gives good results" is definitely a past time of some people. (I'd go as far as to refer to David Friedman here, but I'm not sure if he'd feel misrepresented by my impression.)
...as I write this I notice I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, since you were involved in fictional micronations; after all, some people in that hobby do the same thing (though definitely not all, or even a majority). :)
Isn't this also famously a justification for the USA's "separation of powers" and "checks and balances" where different parts of government are allowed to stop other parts under various circumstances?
I thought everyone was introduced to this idea in grade school.
(Being aware of the idea is, of course, different from believing that this idea is *sufficient* to actually stop all corruption.)
Came here to say this. Likewise, limiting the power of government to choose winners and losers in the economy limits the scope of potential corruption, so strong protection of property rights are a big check on corruption.
This is drifting slowly towards a clump of ideas I've noodled with a bit; it's related to Orthodoxy Privilege, and also related to The Schrödinger Interpretation of Ethics; the clump of ideas are, vaguely, about the context in which we evaluate these kinds of questions.
The issue is one of context; we can see this in the "Does nature actually provide any of these things?" line of reasoning. And we can see this in the way people react to a lot of these things; for a large number of the kinds of "injustice" discussed here, the degree to which people take the injustice seriously seems more or less directly proportional to whether or not they themselves take their own relative position of "privilege" for granted.
For a society in which people routinely starve to death, nobody is going to think somebody starving to death is injust; it's just another tragedy. It's likely not sensible from within the framework of that experience to see it as unfair in a human sense; for it to be unfair in such a sense, it has to be outside the domain of what we see as normal.
I think that sort of context is implied. Let's say we cure aging in the future. Access to anti-aging technology would then be considered a human right.
It is, sure, but it's the kind of implication people accept without noticing or thinking through. And a lot of Scott's post is basically trying to understand the nature of exactly this kind of creep.
I agree. Take the right to free speech: its obvious that everyone is born with (or rather, everyone soon develops unless malformed) the ability to communicate. To coerce someone into not communicating certain things is the government taking away something you were born with. Similarly freedom of religion: while we are not all born with religion, all humans naturally create or choose systems of belief about how the world works, and the government coercing you to not believe on system or believe another would be taking that something away from you that the state of nature provided.
See also how this does not apply as easily to the more controversial parts of the Bill of Rights! For instance, the right to bear arms. We are not born with guns. One can argue we are born with the ability to perform violence to defend ourselves or our rights, and every State in the union holds that there is a right to self-defense. But does it have to be guns? Thus, far more debate about the second amendment than the first.
The right to bear arms may, in a sense, be taking away rights; a central argument of the pro-gun side of things is that guns level the playing field between the strong and weak. So in that particular sense, guns may be seen as taking away natural advantages conferred on birth by "the strong".
It's tricky, because my owning a gun does not take away your strength. I does make it more dangerous for you to infringe on my rights, however: my right to life, my right to speech, my right to religion, my right to freedom of movement, if you try to use force to take those from me then a gun is very helpful in defending my rights. So it really only removes your right to use your strength if you are using that right to infringe on mine: and, of course, if I use my right to own a gun to infringe on your rights, then you're in your rights to use your gun to defend yourself. The only imbalance is if I have a gun and you do not.
So, funnily enough, if the second amendment is repealed then I am not able to defend my right to use my strength against those who have a gun. If everyone can own a gun, then everyone has equal access to "unnatural" power guns give, but if only a select few have guns then they can infringe on the others "natural" strength without fear.
What actually happens is that guns empower criminals more than they empower you, since they now can attack you even easier without fear of retribution, as they can chose the time and the place to do so. That's even showing in the criminal statistics in the US.
Whereas if carrying guns is illegal, guns become an additional liability for criminals. Since even if they did nothing wrong otherwise, if stopped by the police, them carrying a gun puts them into jail.
If you accept that logic, and you should, the sweet spot then becomes Switzerland, where owning a gun is legal. This leads to criminals still perceiving carrying of guns as a liability, while also having to fear that people might own one and use it for self-defense.
Guns don't actually make it all that much easier for criminals to attack unarmed citizens, because most criminals have a fairly specific definition of "attack" that doesn't really match the advantages of a gun. Guns, in theory, allow people to kill from a distance without warning. Almost all criminals, if they kill their victims from a distance without warning, will have completely failed in their objective (and earned far more police attention than they can afford). And if they just scare the victim into running away, something guns are also pretty good at, that's usually a loss as well. To succeed in their criminal attacks, they need to corner the victim, close to conversational distance, announce themselves, and cede surprise and initiative. At that point, the gun isn't giving them much that a knife wouldn't, assuming they are at least moderately strong and skilled and not squeamish about blood.
For the person defending themselves against a criminal assault, the requirements are much more flexible; both "I scared him and he ran away" and "I just shot him dead, the end" count as wins for the defender. So guns start looking pretty good there (though you'll want a lawyer on speed-dial for the "I just shot him" case).
There is a subset of criminals who attack hard targets (e.g. banks) where a gun provides a real advantage. But the main reason for criminals to carry guns, is for defending themselves from *other criminals*. Most criminals are not apex predators, and there's a lot of criminal-on-criminal violence. And when that happens, nobody wants to be the guy who brought a knife to a gunfight.
We're not born with any kind of property in general, except our bodies I guess, but the right to property isn't too controversial yet, thankfully. I'd say that guns in particular are controversial for other reasons.
We're not born with newspapers either. We don't just have the right to communicate, we have the right to communicate effectively. Likewise we don't just have the right to defend ourselves, we have the right to defend ourselves effectively. Therefore, guns.
If restricting free speech is taking away something you're born with, surely so is restricting people from attacking others? That's a capacity we have in the state of nature. So I don't think this makes a very effective basis for determining what laws or rights we'd want a society to have.
Guns aren't restricting people from attacking others. They are empowering people to do so. As a criminal you chose time and place of your attack. Combined with firearms this becomes a huge advantage. You need some restrictions to actually turn that around.
Consider Switzerland: you can generally own guns, but you can't legally carry, unless you own a very specific permit. This leads to guns becoming a liability for criminals. Whenever police stops them, the fact alone that they have a gun on them marks them as criminals and can put them in jail. However, when trying to do criminal stuff, they must still consider the possibility that the person the try to victimize, or a bystander, owns a gun and knows how to use it.
Guns aren't inherently restricting people from attacking others, but the law is. It specifically says that's not allowed and you can be punished for doing it, so it's not like everything people have a power to do in the state of nature is considered a right. For that matter, *not* having to worry about people doing things they might do in a state of nature may sometimes be regarded as a right.
I don't know why I replied to your comment. I'm pretty sure my comment was meant in response to another post in this thread. Either way: my comment doesn't really make sense with regards to your post.
I do agree with your two previous posts for what it's worth ...
Interesting. Under that system, we should understand that “just” is a direction, not a destination, and we can stand around quibbling about the details but our kids are going to judge us anyway and we’d get further if we took a step instead.
I don't know if I'd call it directional, exactly - but also, yes, you can certainly look and see what we will be judged worst for (and it won't be the things our culture is focusing on, but rather the things it quietly ignores).
Edit: By "I don't know if I'd call it directional", I mean it isn't a specific direction - there is no moral arc to history. In terms of what you are saying, 100% yes, it is better to see it as a direction than a destination. Apologies, I was quibbling with something you didn't actually say.
There are clearly cases of people in pre-modern societies where starvation was common who *did* think starvation was unjust rather than merely a tragic fact of life, though.
Consider the quotation from John Chrysostom (in a comment that Scott quotes) about how the surplus wealth of the rich belongs *by justice* to the poor.
Excessively snarky response to how a verse exhorting a personal action was being used as an excuse to (as David Yamane says) "outsource their violence."
sounds like the translation you used was one of the ones which change things for political agendas. Jesus does say something about buying a sword, but didn't encouraged a communist revolt.
Is it that we're switching to a "fairness" model from a "harm/care" model, or is it that the current trend is to deny that harm can exist without unfairness? I'm not as enamored with utilitarianism as most of this blog's readers, and I don't necessarily agree that "harm/care" is a better frame for considering all the world's problems than fairness (or even, possibly, some of the Forbidden Virtues like tradition and sanctity).
But I do agree that not all harms are caused by unfairness. As I said before, I think the justice framing is becoming popular because of an underlying assumption that all harms have a perpetrator, and that they are solved by defeating that perpetrator.
I was about to admit that I was exaggerating, giving the example of how it would be difficult to put a justice spin on a comet about to obliterate the earth, as obviously there is no perpetrator. But then it occurred to me that a fairly successful movie just came out based on the premise that if a comet destroys the earth it's our fault for being so evil and stupid so... yeah.
This was kind of what I was trying to get at with my "climate of Mali" analogy. It seemed like all commenters, including pro-justice ones, agreed that Malians can be harmed by their poor climate without it being unfair.
I think it's reasonable to say that it is unfair for a comet to be about to hit the earth or for the climate of Mali to be poor - the universe can be always be unfair without there being a conflict between humans. The comet is not unjust though (unless someone has a way to evacuate and doesn't share that as widely as possible), and neither is the climate of Mali. Where justice comes into the situation is when there's a workaround that's not shared as equally to all people as possible. If someone has a spaceship to evacuate from the comet and doesn't let as many people as possible use it, that's unjust. If someone can help the people of Mali from their climate-suffering and doesn't, that's unjust. But if no one can help the people suffering harm, there's no injustice, the world is just unfair.
This is actually a really strong statement - you're saying that unless people do everything possible to help everyone in the world who has any problem, even a problem like "the climate here is bad", the result is unjust.
I don't think this is necessarily wrong, but I want to double-check that it's what you actually mean.
Yes: in the same way that in a utilitarian framework the *only* moral thing to do is what creates the most utility in the world, in this framework the only just thing to do is what fixes the most harm in the world. (In fact, I think that it could be reframed as a form of median-utility consequentialism.)
That said, I also think there needs to be some form of supererogation for any moral system. I'm an effective altruism, but I only give 10% and I don't feel bad about it. So I don't think that a person is immoral even if there's an unjust situation that they could fix, but I do think a person is immoral if there are unjust situations they could fix but they don't fix any of them.
I think I agree with your intuition that this is the right thing to do, but prefer to reserve "justice" for a specific subset of right things that require especially immediate attention in order to avoid creating the wrong incentives. But I think any debate around this would be semantic and as long as someone agrees we should make the world better I'm mostly okay with what they call it.
> Is it that we're switching to a "fairness" model from a "harm/care" model, or is it that the current trend is to deny that harm can exist without unfairness?
I do think there's some conflation between the two going on, and I think you can tie it to Haidt's theory that the left overemphasizes Care and Fairness compared to the right. Taking that idea further, Care and Fairness get combined into a unified ideology, and issues of other pillars might get funneled into Care-Fairness even though that doesn't really make sense.
IMO a lot of the "evil people are causing my problems" mentality is actually really Loyalty in a Fairness trenchcoat -- "my group is being attacked by the evil group out there and we need to stick together" (although I acknowledge that there are plenty of more Fairness-oriented takes on the question) I've actually been mulling this over for a while, when thinking through the claim that "calling people slurs causes harm." I think my main objections to using slurs are more of a Loyalty/Betrayal sort of thing (you called me a name that my group would never use); I guess at a stretch you could also argue Fairness (you called me something you wouldn't call someone else). But either way I don't think the *main* issue with slurs is harm. (To be fair, I do think there may very well be some harms there, see https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-harm-in-hate-speech/ -- but I would say the fact that you need a book-length treatment to sort them out, and even then they're things like "harm to your dignity/pride" and "harm to society" rather than a tangible harm that would trigger Care instead of Betrayal, is somewhat telling that this isn't the *main* thing going on.)
Interesting that your phrasing is "called me a name my group would never use", given a number of relatively prominent examples of words being "reclaimed" by the target group while still verboten in polite society - even if rappers call each other "nigger" it's still a huge taboo for a white person to refer to one with the same word.
I think the crux of it is the hate (or derision, in other examples) displayed tarnishes the word, to the extent that if a completely new word get coined and used with the same level of hate it will extremely rapidly be treated as a slur.
The harm/care model operates on actions. It might be unfair to cause harm. It's harder to claim that it's "unfair" to fail to intervene in case someone is experiencing a natural or uncaused harm.
Perhaps if you have intervened in other natural harms, we could use a fairness frame to judge you for not doing the same in this one.
We're switching from a fairness model to a harm/care model because it's better. For a long time it was agreed that people who are bad should be tortured in hell for all eternity. Also, almost everyone is bad. I, however, say that people shouldn't be tortured in hell for all eternity in general.
Nice call-out emphasizing the "care/harm" view versus "fairness".
To the point about the hog-sludge, people use the word "justice" because there is a collectivized request for injunction against both present and future harm. The initial remedy would be lawsuit against the harm. That becomes a class-action suit (because individuals suing to prove harm is hard), and that then becomes a policy discussion (because people want politicians to deal with it, rather than suing).
Trying to describe things as "fairness" or "justice" is just marketing / propaganda to rally and collectivize people around a cause. In order to injunct against harm and advocate for one's self, you might need to collectivize, and use any rhetorical tools at your disposal.
Thus we can acknowledge that "fairness" and "justice" are things that people talk about, have meaning, etc. ... while still favoring the "care-harm" model rather than trying to evaluate fairness at a philosophical level.
Even in some distant country where there's no such thing as lawsuits and people just have to suffer when other people pollute their land, I would like to be able to call the hog farm "unjust". I think denying me that word unless I live in the right legal climate is a stronger form of moral relativism than I'm comfortable with.
I don't have a great sense of how to ground this, though.
You can call it unjust all you want. No one will stop you, at worst they’ll write a blog post about how people use the word justice when it may not be warranted.
Is your issue that you want external validation of your use of the word? For your neighbors to chime in and band together in complaints and whatever form of action is actually available to you? Do you just want to be recognized as correct in your definition and recognition of injustice in your life? There’s a kind of moral/epistemic injury to someone denying the existence or urgency of a problem you see or experience.
> "I’m not sure why the animal and human cases are moving in opposite directions."
This seems easily explainable by the fact that there are more people who already accept the premise of "human rights" than there are people who already accept the premise of "animal rights".
These are some great comments. Good job everybody - my comment is going to be less insightful.
I'll admit that personally, I tend to think terms like "justice" and "rights" are really rhetorical devices intended to play on different sorts of emotions. I'm not a moral relativist - I believe strongly in consequentialist morality. And I think "thick" moral concepts like rights or justice are important in building a functional society. But I think they will always disintegrate into nonsense when they are truly tested against their logical limits, and when solving genuinely difficult problems there's no substitute for digging into the specific consequences.
My comment won't be any more insightful, but perhaps a tangent will interest someone as it did me yesterday. The thought process you describe seems to line up well with Robert Kegan’s model of adult development which I read via links from yesterday's ACX post.
I will say that the use of the word "right" is an astoundingly effective rhetorical device against me in particular.
I'm unsettled by the switch from negative to positive "rights" (e.g. "right to food," "right to water," "right to healthcare"). Scott touches on this briefly but for me a right is a thing that we all agree collectively that all human beings everywhere must be provided, no matter the circumstances.
That's an easier concept with a negative right like "we aren't allowed to demand you practice our religion" or "we aren't allowed to lock you up unless we give you a reasonable chance to defend yourself against the claim that we should." When you start giving people the right *to* material objects it gets weird, because material objects are scarce.
But...food and water are not currently scarce and I absolutely believe nobody should starve in the U.S. It's just too cheap and easy to feed everyone. As a matter of policy, I agree completely with the sentiments of people who call it a right.
I think the destruction of the concept of a right is dangerous - we are absolutely eroding the fundamental philosophies that keep every policy from becoming a cost-benefit analysis. Extreme, but one less-than-introspective friend once suggested completely unironically that since people with long commutes are less happy and less productive, maybe we could just require folks to live on the premises of their employer's property. Obviously everyone would recoil from that idea, but if the idea of "rights" is non-existent, then that kind of cost-benefit thinking would be the only constraint on policy. And you can see less extreme examples from younger folks who do not feel very strongly about ideas like free speech and due process.
This all seems very academic and silly next to actual harms though, and arguing about the use of the words to support good policy feels pedantic and almost mean-spirited. Thus, I've mostly surrendered the fight against the corruption of the idea of "rights."
Eh, rights are just constructs of the upper class. For example, why do you have to declare that you have rights? If you really did, wouldn't it be implicit? We should aim to live in a society where rights are understood fundamentally, not propped up by laws. If they're propped up by laws, then the people who make the laws get to decide what is and isn't a right, and usually that entails drawing the line at anything that would harm profitability.
“Related to the story where someone (Milton Friedman? I can’t find the source) was asked about the causes of poverty, and answered “Poverty doesn’t need a cause, it’s the natural condition, we should be looking for the causes of wealth.”
May have been Friedman too, but this is a classic Thomas Sowell point:
“Standards of living far below what we would consider to be poverty have been the norm for untold thousands of years. It is not the origins of poverty which need to be explained,” Sowell writes in his recent Wealth, Poverty and Politics. “What requires explaining are the things that created and sustained higher standards of living.”
Well, one could very easily disagree with that, if we compare say, the medieval period, with a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Then, it is the poverty of the medieval serf, in comparison to the freedom and access to natural resources of the hunter-gatherer, that must be explained. And then one could argue that restricted access to land, in the Georgist sense of including any natural resources, that is the source of poverty, and is thus human in origin.
The medieval peasant wears finely woven linin undergarments, a warm wool cloak that resists water and is dyed a pleasing color, a permanent shelter that repels wind, rain, and cold, candles and oil lamps to light dark places, a variety of iron tools, a cauldron to cook his food in, and shoes for his feet. He may, if average, own or have access to a cart and an ox to pull it. He enjoys music and song and good architecture at his local chapel, and if he visits a larger town can enjoy beautiful stained glass. When famine has not come, he has a good store of food to last him through winter.
The average hunter gatherer is far poorer. In cold climes he wears leather or furs, crudely decorated with bone beads, ochre, or charcoal. In warm climes he has few clothes at all. He may have a teepee or a wigwam, but most carry them wherever he goes if he is to have shelter. And he must stay on the move, or he will starve. His tools are made of stone or wood: even cutting down a tree is a difficult and laborious task. He has no pot to make a fine soup, though he might have a preserved animal stomach that can boil water and must be regularly repaired with bone needles.
Certainly if you compare the freedom of the serf to the freedom of primal hunter, the hunter wins out. He has no master, and no fences stop his way. But we were discussing poverty, not freedom, and in terms of wealth the medieval serf beats the hunter gatherer any day. When the Europeans came to North America, they found an eager market for steel knives, glass beads, iron cookpots, tools of all kinds, woven clothes, and guns. If you asked an Iroquois who was wealthier, the people of the long house or the white faces, they'd tell you it was the white faces.
The "freedom" of hunter-gatherers wasn't all that great either. Instead of being dependent on the whims of a local lord, you're dependent on the whims of some kind of tribal elder.
And let's not forget the fact that hunter-gatherers, like all wild animals, tend to be subject to periodic mass starvation that keeps their numbers in check.
It sounds like we have different definitions of poverty. My definition depends on access to natural resources, while your depends on technological knowledge. Since technological knowledge increases with time, of course any historical period will have higher knowledge than a previous period.
As a counter argument to the second part of your comment, when Europeans came to North America, they were inspired by the high level of freedom enjoyed by Native Americans, which in turn inspired the Declaration of Independence.
"Some historians, including Donald Grinde of the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, have claimed that the democratic ideals of the Kaianere’kó:wa provided a significant inspiration to Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and other framers of the U.S. Constitution. They contend that the federal structure of the U.S. constitution was influenced by the living example of the Iroquois confederation, as were notions of individual liberty and the separation of powers."
I agree the American Indian was far freer than the average white settler: but the average white settler was much wealthier, and the average American Indian much poorer.
What does it mean to have access to natural resources? It's true that an English serf in 1200 does not have access to the resources of the Lord's wood, because those trees by law and tradition belong to the Lord and can only be harvested with his permission. As far as the serf is concerned, they might as well be on the moon. In contrast there was no law among the Chinook saying that a man can't cut down a red cedar to build his longhouse. So on the surface it appears the Chinook has more access. Yet is this the case? If a serf wants to cut down a tree in the village commons, where he may cut by right, he has a fine iron axe to cut it down with. If the Chinook wants boards for his long house he must place wedges of antler or crabapple wood, and hammer them in with stone hammers. It's long, painstaking work to get planks out of a cedar tree without iron tools. And it must be cedar, because cedar is light and soft and easy to split: though the forests were full of hemlock and fir, and there was nobody around to say you can't have them, you simply couldn't harvest them with any kind of efficiency without iron tools. So despite having no law against harvesting hemlock, and despite having hemlock trees in abundance, the Chinook had no access to the resource of their wood for house building. So who has more access to resources? It's not just a question of freedom, but of wealth. An iron ax is wealth. An iron pot is wealth. An ox and a cart is wealth. It does you no good to have access to iron ore and wild cattle if you can't use them for anything.
Of course, the American Indian of 1620 was in a much later period then our serf from 1200. Yet they were still poorer than that serf, despite coming from a "later" period. Technology, like iron pots, does not just pop out of holes in the ground. It takes effort, and luck, and work, and years of improvements. It doesn't just happen. This is as true of wealth as it is of technology. If you drop me naked in the Canadian wilderness, then I will be desperately poor. Just because there are trees, and stone, and metal ore all around me in abundance doesn't mean I am wealthy. Wealth must be created. The natural state of man is poverty: naked we come into this world, and naked we come out of it. Any wealth besides our own bodies must be created. Even an apple fallen from a tree must be picked up before it becomes wealth.
Fair enough. But note that this all started with the OP putting forward that poverty is natural, and wealth must be explained. Then another commenter wrote "Well, one could very easily disagree with that, if we compare say, the medieval period, with a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Then, it is the poverty of the medieval serf, in comparison to the freedom and access to natural resources of the hunter-gatherer, that must be explained."
The implication of the second comment is that medieval serfs were poorer than hunter gatherers because of political systems: they lacked the freedom to access resources, and in a state of nature they would have been wealthier. This seems to match your point that the American Indians were better nourished than medieval peasants. However, lets take our medieval peasant of 1200 and remove all political obstacles to accessing resources. Suddenly he, and every other serf, is as free as a hunter gatherer to take whatever resources are around for his own. Has he become richer?
Well lets compare France in 1200 to USA and Canada in 1600. In 1200 France had a population of about 15 million people. In 1600 population estimates vary, but generally estimates are 900,000 at the low end and 7 million at the highest. Note that even if the highest estimate is accurate, that's 7 million spread out over all of all the modern USA and Canada, while the 15 million french serfs are all in France: if we look at all of Europe it's something like 68 million. So lets take those 15 million serfs in France and put them back in a state of nature, with no concept of ownership and no laws to prevent them from accessing the resources around them. Lets take it even further and by some magic say that nobody will kill anybody else or dominate others: everyone is free and will magically stay free. Would this lead to the French serfs become better fed?
Frankly, I doubt it. The problem of serf malnutrition wasn't that the Lords were hoarding all the food for themselves. It was that the only way you can support a population of 15 million with medieval technology is by intensely farming every square acre of land with cereal crops. That's going to lead to a lot worse nutrition, as your average person won't have easy access to meat, and removing all the laws that limit resource access won't improve that.
In contrast, when you have at most 7 million people and a whole continent of fish and game, there's plenty of nutritious food to go around. The problem isn't a political system that impoverishes people: the problem is that you can't support 15 million people with medieval farming technology without most of them being somewhat malnourished.
Note that the natives of North America that early settlers met were the survivors of a massive plague - it's easy to seem rich when the population has just dropped by a factor of more than 10, and you've inherited access to all those resources, but that doesn't necessarily mean that life in North America was like that before first contact.
I don't believe those claims about the US Constitution being inspired by the Iroquois. I think it's just in vogue for academics to say such things nowadays. The colonists were carrying on an existing political tradition imported over from Britain, they were just more able to shake off the old government and firmly establish a new one than their predecessors had been.
There's I think a reasonable case that the doctrine of dual sovereignty in the US Constitution - states are sovereign, well, states, able to legislate and tax and police in their own name without anyone giving them permission or delegate the authority to them, *and* so is the Federal government, with a specified division of powers - was inspired by the structure of the Iroquois Federation. But that's a far cry from "The US Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois".
Poverty is an economic concept, so need to look at the economy. Yes medieval serfs may be in some sense poorer (or at least have worse quality of life) compared to hunter gatherers, but it's largely because of much higher population density and hence need to distribute a much higher, but not quite proportionately higher, economic loot across more mouths to feed. e.g. people in Ethiopia today may not be richer than people there 200 years ago, but population has gone up close to 40 times, so comparing on per-capita basis may not be the best yardstick. If your medieval serfs were all freed by their lords and told to go back to being hunter-gatherers 90% of them would starve in a year, even if you taught them all the hunter-gathering skills they lacked. Conversely if you put all the nobles and king's heads on pikes and redistributed all their money the average serf would still probably be worse off than the hunter gatherer.
I agree that moral foundations are relevant, but I see them in the opposite way. AFAIK from reading Haidt, what's special about the modern left is their focus on the care/harm foundation to the exclusion of any other. I submit that rather than a sudden reversion of this trend, we're actually seeing here the harm/care foundation taken to the extreme of having it become mandatory. It's not "sad" that people are suffering, it's plain "criminal".
To be blunt, I see nothing fair in taking from A to give to B. I see it as fair for both A and B to earn whatever they get, weather in cash or in sexual conquests. I'm not saying I agree with this point of view, only that this is the point of view that seems maximally fair to me.
Your example of UBI - it is pretty caring, true, but one of the most touted advantages of UBI over other redistribution systems is... its fairness. Instead of having a complicated welfare system based on gameable and political rules, you just get whatever lump amount of money you can extract from the economy and you split it equally to everybody. Hard to get more fair than that.
I support incel justice in the sense of trying to find ways to help people have sex. The problem is unlike progressive taxation and redistribution, any state mandated redistribution of sex starts to feel very fucked up and rapey very quickly. The most obvious point of intervention is to legalize sex work and at least let the incels with sufficient money deploy that to solve their sex problems. Beyond that my suggested interventions start to curve back in the direction of normal social democracy, just making sure people have the resources they need to work through whatever issues are interfering with their sex lives from a position of safety.
If the incel just wants sex, then legal sex workers will solve that problem. If our deformed incel wants love and a relationship, "I'm paid to let you fuck me for an hour once a week" is not going to work.
Sure, my point is the limits of what's to be done about this issue from a public policy perspective. Removing legal restrictions on access to sex is easy and an obvious win. But there aren't legal restrictions on access to romantic relationships; people are already free to have a romantic relationship with any consenting partner. So an intervention would have to go beyond just getting rid of a counterproductive restriction, and into the territory of deploying state resources to help incels find romance - difficult when state resources consist of money and the issue is people wanting a relationship that's not a financial transaction. In addition to just giving people resources to generally improve themselves if desired as I mentioned above, maybe there's room for state subsidized speed dating or a class in school about how to do romance? But even those seem like they're some combination of a lot of state intervention in our personal lives, and probably an inefficient use of resources relative to just providing individuals with resources and letting them deploy those towards getting better at romance if desired.
As someone who was deliberately taught how to date wrong by the public schools in an effort to prevent teen pregnancy, I can assure you that this is a terrible idea.
Obligatory chime-in to remind everybody that legal prostitution plus wealth redistribution will not solve "the incel problem". As somebody who was *involuntarily celibate* in their twenties, I can assure you that being able to hire an escort would not have helped me feel better about my situation *at all*. The issue isn't "I want to have sex", it's "I want to be the kind of person that the people I find attractive want to have sex with", i.e. "I want to be high status".
Yeah that is a key part of why it's so hard to intervene on the romance side of the equation - there's by definition only so much status to go around, and there aren't practical ways for the state to redistribute it.
(Some) sex workers are VERY good at making their clients feel genuinely loved. Clients falling for them is a common problem. For mistresses/kept women/sugar babies/honest courtesans, this isn't actually a problem.
"any state mandated redistribution of sex starts to feel very fucked up and rapey very quickly"
You are missing all the social indoctrination tools that could be used to brainwash people. You could teach in schools that preferring to have sex with physically beautiful / wholesome people is wrong and shameful. You could make it unlawful for internet dating sites from listing characteristics like age and height. You could make it a social convention for every attractive person to open any kind of speech with a statement acknowledging how privileged they are and how unjust it is they got all the luck instead of others and have them apologize for it in advance. You could force movies and TV and fashion magazines to have a quota of unattractive people that is representative of the general population and always present these people in a positive light (e.g. they should always be the ones that get the girl/guy at the end of the movie). You could make hiring rates / wage gaps correlated with physical attractiveness a huge social issue (similar to male/female wage gap today) and clamor for companies to address it (on the reasoning that if ugly people made as much as beautiful people they would have more sex). Etc. etc. would it work? who knows, but there are lots of plausible things that could be done that are not remotely "rapey" and not worse than any of the other myriad things we are trying at the moment to try to fix racism, sexism and other issues.
Wow, this is a really good point that I never considered. In short, you could get woke about amorous affection injustice, to make people feel like oppressors if they allow the traditional hotness of a partner to guide their partner choice. A hot guy needlessly taking off his shirt and revealing a six-pack would make him to be a moral monster, like someone who jokes around with the N-word. Even if he intended no harm, he should have known better. I'm picturing an episode of Black Mirror based on this premise, but a real media company would never touch this hot potato. The alternative, I guess, would be to try and earnestly tweet about this with lots of woke lingo, starting first with some softballs: "I am a housewife of Potomac, so why does nobody on the show look like me?" #unexamined-privilege #lookism-justice
> any state mandated redistribution of sex starts to feel very fucked up and rapey very quickly
What’s the difference with the libertarian point of view "any state mandated redistribution of wealth starts to feel very fucked up and pillagey very quickly" ?
Or, in the other direction, why is "taxation is stealing" a fallacy whereas "lawful state-mandated sex is rape" is not ?
I am much more committed to people's right to bodily autonomy than I am to their never losing control of abstracted social resources like money that they've managed to accumulate.
I mean, taxation is theft, it's just that the libertarian solution to that problem would be way more horrifying than having to pay half your money for social services.
UBI: There's an old saying that, "A fool and his money are soon parted." I feel like there's this assumption that poverty is a function of not having access to enough income. And if that were the only problem, then a UBI would absolutely solve poverty. Yet I personally know people who would squander a UBI in a way that would make inequality worse. They'd give their stipend to some charlatan who promised his business would take off and make them millionaires, then commit their own earnings and get deeper into debt on a whisp of a dream. Or they'd go get larger loans so they owe more of their souls to financial institutions and for longer - so deep that they'd never be able to build asset wealth, even if they wise up some time down the road.
Yet there are still plenty of people who could change their lives with a one-time $10k infusion of cash. That was me at one time. I don't know how to tell these two groups apart, but my sense is that both of them are very large, such that an obstinate objection to something like a UBI would prevent a lot of people from getting a major hand up. Meanwhile, any actual UBI I can think of would be counterproductive for the other group, for whom 'mo money = mo problems'.
This is not as applicable to the USA, but GiveDirectly has had very good results with their UBI/cash injection tests in Africa. Almost all of the recipients spend it on things that are really meaningful and not wasteful. Even the ones who "waste" it tend to be spending it on things that I can't begrudge them.
Certainly there are some people who are willing to just throw it at true waste (look at the spike of NFTs), but I think those are minimal and especially minimal among the people who would receive the most.
I absolutely agree! I don't think all poverty is self-inflicted, even if I do personally know a few poor people whose poverty was self-inflicted. And although I know that giving money to some of my family/friends wouldn't help certain of them out, I do know that's not a universal.
I wonder how much Accountability factors into the success of a direct giving program? I've heard of GiveDirectly, but I'm not very familiar with their program's parameters. I assume that whatever their oversight/accountability program is it's at least a little better than a no-questions-asked UBI, simply because they're asking the question, "What do recipients actually go on to spend this money on?" Perhaps the problem isn't whether we give, but whether we continue to care after the money is sent out?
I don't think anybody serious thinks UBI will mean an end to any kind of poverty, or there won't be mistakes. But, just like Social Security (which is basically an UBI for anybody who worked and got to 65/67) means that while there are still poor elderly people, extreme deep poverty among the elderly has actually basically disappeared. For me, the UBI isn't about ending poverty completely, but creating a higher floor, so those at the lower end have more power over employers and there's less desperation.
I'm not convinced SS is a net benefit, even for the poor. For one, I have no confidence that SS will be around when I retire. Perhaps it will transition into a simple means-tested program, but I don't think there's political will to go there. For another, it's a regressive tax on wages with a hidden component that is revealed for self-employed workers. In other words, it's a burden felt most on the workers least able to bear it.
The program's returns are worse than buying treasury bonds such that an equivalent private program (death and disability benefits + retirement) could be purchased at a fraction of the price - once again burdening the poor with a more expensive program, yet even so they continually run into the problem of cutting benefits or going insolvent. Thus, the 'security' aspect of the program being a matter of political debate and a poor financial foundation does not inspire confidence in those it's intended to help in the future.
I'm concerned that an actual UBI would be implemented less like GiveDirectly and more like Social Security.
In short, they do continue to care after the money is sent out, because ultimately the aim isn't to donate (that's the means), it's to improve lives. So they try to adjust for downsides like wastage risk, misappropriation of funds, potential negative spillover effects etc. Apparently ~40% of the cash is invested in stuff like roofs, furniture and livestock, instead of being consumed, which is interesting.
This makes sense. Poor people in rich countries are already selected for being especially bad at making financial decisions, while poor people in poor countries are not.
Poor people in rich countries are people who have already thrown away loads of great opportunities to be not-poor; poor people in poor countries have never even had one opportunity.
Selected for being not having wealth in a rich country is not the same thing as throwing away lots of great opportunities. Many people are not able to do things like that. Maybe they're stuck at a local maximum (they need to work a shitty job to pay the bills for their family so they can't get education), maybe they're disabled, maybe they're trained in a career that no longer exists and they're not able to retrain. Those are all situations that would be helped by being given cash.
Since nobody's saying this, there' the issue that income is very correlated with IQ.
If we assume cash injections in poor Africa are either uncorrelated with relative IQ, or positively correlated (by using some form of minimalistic selection), then yes, cash injections there would help potentially competent people escape poverty trap. But giving cash to the poorest people in a society that's both economically free and already stratified - I predict that's a lot less likely to help.
There are already many ways of escaping poverty in western society that would seem like a godsent in poor countries - like driving an Uber or riding a bicycle to deliver food. So a supermajority of the people that could raise from poverty already did, or will in a couple of years (poverty in free countries is also very much temporary and mostly based on age).
Interesting point. I wonder what the literature says about this. What's the lowest IQ that can support an above-poverty lifestyle without external support (family/friends managing finances or a trust)? Is there a strong tendency toward poverty (independent of income) in relation to IQ?
If we're talking about 2+ SD, that's <3% of the population and the rest could be explained by the standard appeals to behavior or income. If the minimum IQ is higher though, say 85, that's >15% of the population and it's a different class of problem that can't be solved with either handouts or education.
Financial outcomes are at least as strongly related to behavior as to income. As the old saying goes, "Income $5, expenses $6: misery. Income $4, expenses $3: happiness." How much of that behavior can be taught, though? Is there a floor below which we cannot eliminate poverty in a free society?
The literature is pretty clear, it's only "in polite conversatuon" where it doesn't get repeated.
The effect is continuous and it hits from many directions at once. There is income, and spending habits, yes. There is likelyhood of pregnancies at younger ages and outside of marriage, which hit long term wealth stats like a truck. Strong correlation with crime. And so on.
Society can do two huge things to help.
1. Admit the problem exists. Due to natural stratification and assortative mating, lots of bureaucrats make rules and programs without having interacted with an even slighly below average iq person outside a scripted scenario (i.e. a store clerk) for years.
2. Abolish minimum wage. Replace it with ubi if you want, or just get rid of it completely. It has its uses, mostly setting a Schelling point for labor value, but it also makes large segments of the population effectively discriminated against. The less smart, the young, the inexperienced.
The continuous scale makes this more difficult to navigate and/or mediate. Is there a threshold measurement we could look at? For example, <1.5x poverty persistent over 10+ years. But that again looks only at income, where we're also interested in spending/asset management.
I feel like it's the same story with minimum wage/UBI, where income is the only metric that's addressed. It's only half the story (if that) and yet it's the thing we measure because it's what we know best.
I also feel like a lot of programs meant to help alleviate poverty focus on short-term infusions of cash as opposed to long-term asset-building tools. The middle class have this with homeowner incentives, and the wealthy have it with various investment and other incentives. Yet for the poor, assets are largely ignored.
We know the returns to capital are greater than the returns to labor in the long run, but we have a system that emphasizes capital for the wealthy and labor for the poor. Why are we surprised when the poor don't accumulate wealth when the system isn't designed for that?
> What's the lowest IQ that can support an above-poverty lifestyle without external support (family/friends managing finances or a trust)?
I guess it depends on the society a lot.
How complex is the society? More complex is harder to navigate. Is the society traditional (you can live well by copying what your successful seniors do) or changing quickly (you need to figure out things on your own)? Are superstimuli and scams and usury forbidden, or do they tempt you at every step (caveat emptor)?
Generally, higher IQ is better and lower IQ is worse. But how much danger there is, and how fucked you are if you cannot figure out the new kinds of danger quickly enough, that depends on the environment.
Like I said in the other comment, in the developed world it actually has a value: the IQ needed to thrive in a minimum wage job. Anything less and society effectively kicks you into a forever periphery. It's not just about income, like sclmlw says. It's about being and knowing you are a productive human being. It's about gaining experience and having the possibility to progress. It's about, yes, accumulating capital to move to the next level, because welfare projects aren't exactly designed to allow you to do that.
I don't really know how it manifests in less developed countries. From what I see here in the less structured Romania's countryside, there's not much discrimination: as long as somebody wants to work, there are always things he can do. For example we have an office back yard that's about to become spotless after quite a bit of work. If I think about a counterfactual world where you get invoiced for every piece of work, I'm about 90% certain that much less than half that work would have got done, and I'm about 75% certain that the main guy wouldn't have been a part of that work (not for IQ reasons, but he looks ... very easy to discriminate against).
I think there are a lot of very poor students who do long term damage to their health as a result of very temporary poverty, so just because a lot of poverty is temporary and a function of age doesn't mean it isn't worth fixing. Making youth wealthier would probably also do wonders for the West's TFR
I think there are a lot of not poor students who do long term damage to their health. But I do take your point that poverty can have a lot of long-term sequalae and should obviously be addressed. The question is how much of poverty is on the income side of the equation, versus the behavior or competence side? If it's 80/20 income, UBI solves most of the problem. If it's 90/10 behavior/competence, UBI is a small step in the right direction, but also kind of a distraction from where all the action lies.
I find that... counterintuitive. I'd guess you'd need quite extreme conditions to affect long term the average healthy youth. Can you give me some examples?
"Your husband should get it because we don't want to penalize the disabled for not being able to drive anymore than we already do. Public transit users should get it as a reward for their more responsible lifestyle choice and to help them afford today's elevated prices."
This is why we also need generous bankruptcy laws, not an argument against a UBI. We should have a system where the default is that once you stop making terrible choices you can thrive, rather than being weighed down by lack of resources, either due to never having had them or having squandered them.
This is an interesting argument against UBI I'd never considered. A benefit provided can always become conditional in the future. When government provides your healthcare, it suddenly has an interest in how you take care of your body. When government provides your income, it suddenly has an interest in how you allocate your resources. This is not an argument about 'should', but rather one of whether it 'would' attach strings to this kind of program.
The larger a fraction of your wealth the UBI represents, the greater the influence attached strings would have in your life. Thus, you could imagine a bifurcated system, where people with means would have an economic freedom that people reliant on a UBI could not afford.
> Thus, you could imagine a bifurcated system, where people with means would have an economic freedom that people reliant on a UBI could not afford.
Depending on technical details, this could be either a good thing or a bad thing.
Good thing, if it means that people using UBI have a good life (and people not using UBI have a good safety net), but there is still a strong incentive to try harder. The current system can alchemically transform greed into work ethics; perhaps the new system could transform other vices... like, maybe alcohol and all kinds of drugs could be perfectly legal, but only available for non-UBI money.
Bad thing, if the goverment interventions would actually be harmful, or at least designed to keep you in the poverty trap. Something like: with UBI you are legally required to exercise for 30 minutes between 10 AM and 10:30, but all jobs need you to keep working from 9 to 5, so once you start getting UBI you become unable to get a job again. (This is just an example. Imagine something less transparently bad, but having equally bad consequences, despite being politically perfectly defensible.)
I agree with this, which is why I made the should/would distinction. I have no confidence that a government incapable of running an honest budget, or even a balanced one, or a solvent benefits program would design a system that incentivizes healthy wealth-building habits in response to a UBI. Instead, they're more likely to pretend that their policies are beneficial, when really they're only beneficial to certain special interests.
A few not-quite-transparently bad examples:
* You get a 7% UBI bonus for [joining the military, getting solar panels, insert special interest group here]
* There's a UBI penalty if your credit score gets below a certain level [never mind that credit is a measure of ability to pay back debt, not a measure of financial health, and would incentivize people to go borrow more - literally the opposite of the kind of asset acquisition that's required to escape from poverty and build wealth]
* Penalties on saving UBI funds. Yes, this could easily happen, justified by the ideas that "we need to get this money flowing through the economy" and that "people who are just parking the cash in savings don't need it anyway". Meanwhile, someone who decides to have a thousand dollars saved so they don't need to use a credit card to cover an emergency is penalized for having good financial habits over the imprudent credit-card-as-emergency-fund person.
* A UBI debit card (no cash withdrawal options, track purchases, and prevent remittances) that is run poorly through a public-private partnership with a bank that's Just The Worst. (My last stimulus came this way. No warning. No notice that 'actually this really shading-looking card is legitimate'. No documentation that the daily ACH transfer limit is small, or that the monthly ACH transfer limit will take 3 months to get it all off there.) This is maybe not quite evil so much as incompetent. It's what I've come to expect from this kind of program.
UBI would help some people, and not others (Appalachian pill addicts who even now are exchanging their food stamps for beer and drugs come to mind). Neither group is nil, and i have no idea whether overall it would be worth the cost. I would be supportive of a large scale trial, except that the whole free covid checks for everyone in the US was kind of that already and there seem to be lots of unintended side effects (retail gambling on meme stocks, people withholding their labor from the market and causing inflation etc.) even on this very time-limited experience, so dunno.
I think people getting money and choosing not to work shitty jobs for low pay as a result is fundamentally an intended effect of a UBI, if not of the covid relief program. I agree that retail gambling on meme stocks is a great example of fools being parted from their money.
Yeah by unintended consequeces I meant that every cost calculation I've ever seen for UBI programs only tallies cost of actual payments, but haven't seen anyone think about incorporating costs from things like ensuing inflation.
I'm willing to take a swing at the incel question from a Catholic perspective.
I can *owe* you the extra coat in my closet, because you need it and because its purpose is to keep someone warm. When I own it simply as excess, I'm not just spiting you, I'm spiting the jacket's telos. (Think of that old Ikea commercial with the sad lamp out by the sidewalk, wishing it were still lighting the room versus being thrown away).
To an extent, neglecting the purpose of something I own begins to become abusus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usufruct) the right to alienate or destroy the thing I possess. For the most part, Catholics can only very rarely believe this right exists.
BUT, my body and my sexuality can't be *owed* to someone who desires them in the same way a coat is, because their telos is not just sex. It certainly isn't non-marital sex, and Catholicism *explicitly* says that marriage is a good, but virginity and abstinence for the sake of the Kingdom is a *higher* good.
That doesn't sound like much consolation for the non-Catholic incel, but it is pretty key to Catholic sexual ethics. No one is entitled to a partner, but God doesn't ask that you simply stop having feelings. They're still meant to shape your life, but in a different way. And the experience of having a cross to struggle with is universal, but the particular cross carried varies.
I think it might for some forms of Protestant (remember, they have no tradition of consecrated, celibate religious). But at the Council of Trent, the Church affirmed "If anyone says that the married state surpasses that of virginity or celibacy, and that it is not better and happier to remain in virginity or celibacy than to be united in matrimony, anathema sit".
In the Gospel of Matthew (ch 19) Jesus teaches, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
So we start with the assumption that not everyone will marry; that marriage is good but virginity is *better*, and that not all virginity is willingly entered into.
And *within* marriage, sex is still not a matter of getting what you want, whenever you want it. Chastity is still a virtue husband and wife have to develop to have the proper relationship to their appetites.
I think the other big thing is that you framed "justice" as implicitly being about crime and punishment, hurting the bad people and rewarding the good people. When its pretty clear that's this is a word with multiple slightly different usages and that's not the usage that these examples were referencing. So it ends up being a kind of argument by word association rather than looking at the positions the proponents themselves put forth. Which is the sort of logical error/rhetorical trick you are normally very good at pointing out other people doing.
> But from the hog farmers’ perspective, they’re just running a hog farm, which (ignoring the vegan objection for now) is a perfectly reasonable non-criminal thing to do.
This might or might not be relevant to your broader point, but I would push back, here. Getting laws enforced (let alone passed) against powerful polluters is not a trivial matter, and requires the exercise of power by community members (sustaining a complex legal case, etc), or on their behalf by our institutions.
From the hog farmers perspective, they might or might not think their activity is legal, they might or might not expect to get away with it, and they might or might not care whether they do.
Accordingly, providing communities with the legal and institutional means to defend themselves using existing laws is a focus of environmental justice activists. Another is the creation of such laws, which seems hard to do without engaging with foundational notions of justice in the first place.
The "Justice Creep" OP (or maybe i should say "OOP" - original Opening Post!) really got me* thinking... that the problem is people seeking to do something that flags as "promoting justice," but where they don't personally BEAR THE COSTS that usually goes with that work. So I wrote this sarcastic mini-screed. (Irony to the rescue!!)
3 Ways to "pursue justice" without bearing the usual costs of genuinely pursuing justice:
1. Do it in a way that's impersonal: without confronting privately.
2. Do it behind a big corporate facade: you won't get as much personal flack! (because other people / systems can be ablative armor so the criticism won't get thru 2 u?)
3. Do it without assuming the awesome and terrible responsibilities of being a mod.
1. Do it in a way that's impersonal: without confronting privately. Because if u confront privately, 2 things might be different:
A. You don't get to look cool in front of others. B. You may hear the other person's side. Imagine actually verbally engaging with the lonely and the blackpilled! (possibly even in a way where you're even forced to associate a face or a voice with such a one!) You might go home and cry for the poor guy that night. Also note that in the Christian version of this, [here, by "this," I mean "pursuing relational harmony & resolving conflicts within a given community"] the biggest "ban hammer" anyone can bring down on someone--excommunication (or something much like it)--the conflict-resolution procedure described begins with one-on-one confrontation. (Matthew 18)
2. Do it behind a big corporate facade:
Remember in 2020 when everyone started putting "Black Lives Matter" and "We are committed to pursuing racial equity" on the front pages of their webpages? Did I go to a random company's webpage and think, "Ohhh, now [CEO] is woke."? No! They were "going along to get along." There was no single person whom I mentally "held responsible" for any one of these companies' "new look"; individually, leaders were probably "shielded" from their customers' feedback?
3. Do it without assuming the terrible responsibilities of being a mod: Mods or "people in charge" nurture the health of a community and have their eyes/awareness open to justice in a different way. Being a mod is not for the pacifist, nor for the faint of heart!! The counterexample where you actually, formally become a mod in a community, probably looks a little like this. However, A. You won't be chosen as a mod if you don't have a committment to the community. B. I think that if anyone wears that role, however imperfectly, (and we would ALL do it imperfectly) it will wear on them C. You are posting a public invitation to get shit thrown at you by people who don't care about your community, (and also, sadly, people who DO!) because you're the obvious "important person." Anyway, the combination of A and whatever actual powers you have (along with the entirely fictitious powers you have in people's headcanons) results in a LOT of people thinking that solving their problem requires your help! Even friends within the community will probably begin to relate weirdly to you because they feel like you are "in charge" (hahaha!) and "have an in" and maybe "can do something for them." Lastly, this job is really hard, and I'm amazed that a thesis I thought I'd disagree with like Yudkowsky wrote here was so compelling: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
* sorry to be so slow i couldn't make it to the "real discussion."
[Edit 1: basically whitespace! Edit 2: added clarification 'here, by "this," I mean "pursuing relational harmony & resolving conflicts within a given community" ' Edit 3: small adjacent edit; added the word "described."]
I really think the point that poverty is the baseline condition of humans is an excellent framing for lots of disparate issues. Thanks for adding it to my repertoire.
Scott, I really think you would get a lot out of Alasdair MacIntyre’s work, despite the negative-ish review you gave After Virtue some time ago! A lot of resonances with your critique, super incisive, but combined with the breadth of knowledge coming from reading every moral/political philosopher ever
It draws most heavily on Thomas Paine, although it sounds a lot like Henry George. The argument is that there is a common inheritance of humanity, including land, as well as the ideas and things created by past generations.
"We all owe a debt to the common inheritance, because none of us makes things by calling them out of nothing, like the God of Genesis. Everything we make relies on the resources of the Earth and the tools that have been passed down to us."
The human-created institution of private property excludes some people from the common inheritance. Paine was specifically referring to the English Enclosures, which deprived the poor of their former right to hunt and farm the commons, but he clearly thinks of it in more general terms as well. Social justice is justice because it returns to people their returns from the common inheritance.
"The flaw in the charity mindset is that it refuses to recognize that debt. It accepts, without question or objection, disinheriting the poor from the common legacy."
Paine's solution is social security and a one-time gift of capital to all young people. Mudor suggests that education is something similar in an information economy. There would still be need for charity for the people who waste their inheritance or who are incapable of succeeding with it for other reasons.
"But that is not where we are now. In the world we live in today, people are poor because the common inheritance has been usurped by people who believe that what is theirs is theirs, and they owe no one for its use; who believe that only land-owners are beneficiaries of the Creation; that businessmen and industrialists are the sole heirs of technological progress; that only the educated rightfully inherit our cultural legacy. "
It turns out this is kind of a deep topic. Thanks for bringing so many interesting comments. It seems like calling it justice works well when there's a shared understanding or solid foundation for what is considered just. Criminal justice kind of works this way, although with lots of caveats. In contrast, something like economic justice is completely up for grabs. Some people think things are already just (or should be even more unequal), others want full Communism, and there are a bunch of different stopping points in between. Justice implies an arbiter, and in this case deciding for everyone isn't very feasible. We're going to keep having these debates until we can better agree on what's just. But it's good that we're having the debates. For my part, it seems clear that a somewhat more redistributive system makes sense in the US since we're so much richer overall than we were in the 70's but have actually taken away some of the equalizers like cash welfare in the meantime.
FWIW, something very like your argument about incels was made, on behalf of young men who couldn't get girlfriends because women their age preferred older men, by one of the regular posters from SSC, on his own Stack Exchange. He didn't use "justice" language, and he insisted up down and sideways that he didn't think the preferences of (young) men were more important than the preferences of (young) women, but he clearly felt that something should be done on behalf of those relationship-starved young men.
I think an especially large difference between the incel example and climate justice is that it's easier to put marginal effort towards climate. Everyone can contribute a bit towards reducing their carbon footprint, paying carbon taxes, etc. Whereas (the most direct ways of) making progress in the the incel situation happens one very large quanta at a time. So, one is reasonable for everyone to put a bit of effort into for the greater good, and one is asking wayyyy to much of somebody to contribute towards. Sex isn't an easy thing to amortize.
If the best thing that can be done for incels is to change society's values, then the best thing you can do for incels in your own life is to change your own values.
From Butler's review: Philosophical texts have a way of referring only to other philosophical texts, basing themselves on a canon hewing to narrow professional ideas of “clarity”.
Butler's notorious sentence that won first prize in one of Denis Dutton's Bad Writing Competitions: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
I was actually really impressed with how much I liked this review by Butler, given what I've thought of much of her earlier work.
I think you should read Srinivasan and Butler more carefully if you think they are substantially disagreeing with Caplan (other than perhaps the way he puts it in terms of "secular religion"). I think that both of them acknowledge that contemporary HR-oriented blanket bans on office relationships are deeply problematic. Srinivasan insists in one essay in her book that it's nevertheless appropriate to have blanket bans on faculty-student relationships, but Butler's review has some specific disagreements with this essay by Srinivasan.
I'm just going by Butler's review, which expresses agreement with Srinivasan that relationships between faculty & students are impermissible "even if a student initially consents to a sexual relationship with a faculty member" because they "can" be harmed.
has some good critiques. Very little engagement with the question of where sexual desire comes from, why it exists ; little examination of what it means for something to be learned versus innate and why that might cause difference in moral status between desires.
Sounds about right. Srinivasan's engagement with the set of topics here is better than most, but still unsatisfying. I have yet to see a satisfying engagement with these topics.
I think this particular review does usefully identify some criticisms, but is also very overwrought itself (particularly in the passages where it assumes that if she thinks that sexuality as shaped by current society is bad then she must think that a Rousseauian evolved sexuality is better).
That link does seem to put her a bit closer to Caplan, but the framing there where the problem is that teachers fail to sublimate student desires if they sleep with them sounds very different from where Butler agrees with Srinivasan that the problem is a matter of discrimination.
>In my ideal world, everyone would get a guaranteed basic income, not because I have any idea what level of UBI would be “just”, but because it’s bad for people to be poor. If they want to use that money to hire a prostitute or a cosmetic surgeon to pursue a romantic relationship, that’s fine with me. If they want to use that as seed money to start a business and become a billionaire and be much richer than everyone else, that’s fine with me too. I can’t guarantee I have solved all of the moral issues that will come up / stay around, but I feel much more confident addressing them on a care/harm foundation than a fairness one.
If you give people money to solve their injustices, and (to use an unfortunate stereotype) they spend it on drugs or whatnot instead of food or prostitutes or the injustices they currently face, and a week later are in the same place they started, did you actually solve their injustices? If you give out a second round of UBI and they again don't use the money to proactively justicize themselves, are they still victims of injustice? How much money do you have to give somebody before their perpetual injustice becomes their fault and not society's?
My gripe against the 'justice' framing is that it feels like no matter what solution you try, even if it seems reasonable to you, does not "count" unless it solves the problem, and places all culpability on "society". While we don't have UBI exactly, there are plenty of social programs that at least aim to correct a wide variety of social ills (Welfare, SNAP, Social Security etc.) and yet people are still deemed to be victims of injustice and society is held responsible. How would providing them with additional money in any way improve the situation?
I don't see why, say, giving everybody $30k/yr would automatically absolve our society of guilt any more than our current systems don't.
Isn't part of the issue here that calls for "justice" allows for - actually demands - a much broader set of responses?
I read repeatedly in the pro "justice" comments about how our production is so high that justice demands that X be distributed in such a way that Somali orphans don't starve. But Somali orphans aren't starving simply because we're refusing to send planeloads of grain to Somalia. To ensure that Somali children get enough food, we would need to take over their government, restructure their distribution networks, create their infrastructure, smite their enemies, and guard their borders. We are really awful at doing those things. I think that's why so many of us are more comfortable with care/harm than "fairness". "Fairness" often ends up turning ugly, quick.
To (sort of) concretize "climate justice" as a term, here's what IPCC AR6 WG2 SPM (released a couple of weeks ago; visit ipcc.ch for text and explanation of abbreviations) came up with after grappling with it:
"The term climate justice, while used in different ways in different contexts by different communities, generally includes three principles: distributive justice which refers to the allocation of burdens and benefits among individuals, nations and generations; procedural justice which refers to who decides and participates in decision-making; and recognition which entails basic respect and robust engagement with and fair consideration of diverse cultures and perspectives."
The incel counterexample aligns well with the distributive justice aspect, doesn't work in the context of procedural justice (incels have full procedural participation), and is confusing with respect to the recognition aspect (incels get ignored, but may prefer not to occupy their corner of the cultural landscape).
The video game counterexample aligns similarly: there's arguably a small injustice in the lack of compensation for those harmed by playing a video game, there's a clearer injustice in the fact that Malians don't have a say in whether there's a (carbon) tax on video game use to compensate for their disproportionate harm, and the recognition aspect is confusing: is it more just to apologize to Mali before playing the video game? Hard to see how, but maybe the idea is that recognition may lead to better informed choices by actors.
Regarding the "sexual justice" argument, it's worth mentioning that the Netherlands provide state-funded prostitutes to the disabled for these very reasons (presumably, they count as "deserving incels"). So it's less absurd than it might seem, at least as soon as you get outside the U.S.
Do you have a good source for this? A brief Google shows a few articles/Twitter/Reddit making the claim, with other sources saying it's actually just that disabled people get grant money which they can choose to spend on sex workers.
At a minimum, they get money _for this specific purpose_. Their sex gets funded by the state. Same thing in Denmark. This seems like the important bit, not exactly how it's organized?
The debate seems present in the UK and Germany as well.
>I have had this argument before enough times to know people always try to weasel out of it.
I think the obvious out is just to say that, while there are certainly some cultural components of attraction, the big things - preferring people with clear skin, good symmetry, other indicators of health, men preferring younger women, signals of social competence, etc. etc., are pretty unalterable parts of human nature, not the result of a larger social construct. At least not to the extent that something like an economy is, which is one gigantic interdependent construct defined almost entirely by arbitrary laws and financial relationships.
Basically, If you put a few people on a dessert island with no culture and no government and made them amnesiac to erase all cultural conditioning, the same people would still have trouble getting laid. The same is not necessarily true for income inequality.
So while it's definitely *unfair* that those people don't get sex, and yes we *should* look for solutions to ease that suffering, it's not a structural injustice issue in the same way an economic issue is.
"The same is not necessarily true for income inequality"
Not completely sure about income (what's the definition of "income" without any production?) but stronger men will dominate weaker men in such a context, and women will be pretty much powerless. Does this mean "gender justice" is a flawed concept, since women wouldn't have many rights on such a desert island?
Strong men still need to sleep, so do weaker men. How many women does it take to beat up the strongest man, and why should the second strongest man cooperate with the strongest man instead of the women? Why do you assume that people's tendency to dominate via violence is more natural than their tendency to cooperate?
In the absence of an established society, people naturally gravitate to let the strongest man dominate the others. Sometimes the strongest man is indeed killed while they sleep but that doesn't mean women will get to make any decisions.
Yes, that's a common objection, but there are two much bigger omissions in the article:
1. Sexual dimorphism. Perhaps the strongest argument for more egalitarian gender norms in pre-agrarian societies is its reduced rate in humans compared to their ancestors like australopithecuses and to other apes, suggesting evolutionary pressure away from male-male competition, and therefore away from male domination.
2. Historical context. It's (implicitly) comparing hunter-gatherer social norms to contemporary norms, without considering agrarian (feudal/patriarchal/warrior) societies or gender relations in other ape species. Pre-agrarian societies might have been unequal on modern terms (it's, e.g., commonly assumed that they had a sexual division of labor), and still much more egalitarian than what came before or after them. (The author himself admits at the start that the latter is the point, so he has no excuse to essentially only argue the former.)
All in all, my beliefs are not, in fact, updated, and given the literal text of your argument higher in the comment chain, neither should yours.
The point of the desert island wasn't to imply that whatever happens on a desert island is just.
The point of the desert island is to point out that economic outcomes vary heavily based on societal structures, and that they are therefore a structural societal issue.
You're right that rape could be much more or less prevalent based on the type or presence of social structures, and therefore rape is a gender justice issue.
But I don't think attraction, which is what the section I was responding to was talking about, would be very different on a desert island, and therefore it is less of a structural societal justice issue.
To some extent attraction would indeed be different on the desert island. Someone with a disfigured face but a talent for physical fights and sufficient aggression could come to dominate the island and automatically become much more attractive. In modern society such a person would not have much luck unless they become a successful MMA fighter or boxer.
I mean, if you grant your unattractive people special powers that everyone else doesn't get in your hypothetical, sure.
But in that case their success is due to some other trait that is valuable in it's own right, which is precisely analogous to 'focus on grooming' or 'get an interesting hobby' - it doesn't negate the negative impact of the unattractive trait, it just overwhelms it with other positive traits to make a net positive. No need to introduce a desert island for that.
Part of this is that I was responding narrowly to Scott's description of a major physical deformity, which in and of itself I don't think is going change in attractiveness valence based on social structures. But it's true that there are other traits which may vary in attractiveness based on surrounding society and culture, and there's more of a justice issue to be made for those.
But, critically, I think we would find it to be empirically true that the traits which are more-or-less-attractive depending on culture, are also the ones that have more variance within a culture as to how attractive different people find them, and therefore people with those traits are less likely to be incels because at least someone finds them attractive.
Eg, I'm pretty fat, which is generally considered unattractive in my culture; but it hasn't been unattractive in all cultures at all times (at least at my level, which is not extreme), and I haven't had trouble finding women who mildly prefer it or just don't care, even though it would be a negative for the median woman.
The fact that you're posting comments on this blog already suggests that you're above average in income, have an above average IQ, have enough spare time to read philosophical articles, all of which gives you an edge in the dating world. And as you've explained your BMI is above normal but not *too* extreme. So overall you couldn't possibly be lower than in the top 90% of men.
I would argue that the bottom 10% of men could indeed do much better 10k years ago:
- No sugary food means almost no one is fat
- Intelligence/vocabulary don't particularly matter above a certain threshold necessary to survive
- Various deformities probably matter a lot less, as long as they don't hinder your hunting abilities
- Women had less of a choice to begin with as we know that many relationships were pre-arranged within the community
Attraction doesn't exist in a vacuum - different men could be 'incels' in different times.
>Would it be kind and compassionate to help this person have sex? Straightforwardly yes.
If they could have sex in a vacuum, yes.
But if they want to have sex with another sentient human, then we have to weigh the effect on both participants.
This is the fundamental difference between redistributing money/good and redistributing sex - money/goods don't care who is holding them and can't suffer, but sexual partners do and can.
That's why giving poor people money is inherently good, but to prove that giving an incel a sex partner is good, you have to go through the additional step of proving that the benefit to the incel is more than any harm to the partner.
Of course, you could probably design a system where this was true, and we should be thinking about it, but you can't just handwave this problem away by analogy to money/goods. It's a fundamental difference that requires an additional term in your moral calculus.
> This is the fundamental difference between redistributing money/good and redistributing sex - money/goods don't care who is holding them and can't suffer
That framing doesn't make sense. The people who have money taken from them are the ones who suffer, not the actual dollars.
I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in tax, that's a lot of very real suffering. Honestly I'd rather get raped once a year for realsies than get raped every month metaphorically.
I'm guessing you would change your mind after getting raped, but w/e.
I think people's ownership of themselves is more metaphysically grounded and important than their ownership of the property they own under a given economic regime. Slavery actually *is* worse than taxation, and 'ownership' is a very important fiction that a particular government forces us all to pretend is real.
You would not have whatever wealth you currently 'own' if it weren't for the society and government that represent the system in which you 'earned' it; the rules of that society and government are what determine what you 'own', and therefore it's 'fair' for that system to say you own a little more or a little less than you think you do (although it still needs a good utilitarian justification for why this is a good idea, obviously bad things are still bad).
Whereas I think if you're stranded on a desert island, there's still a much stronger claim for saying that you 'own' yourself, and have moral rights to self-determination.
Taxation is a spectrum from 0% (freedom) to 100% (slavery). This would be economic slavery moreso than physical, but if you refuse to pay, it becomes physical shortly.
No, at 100% taxation you can still decide not to work, or emigrate to somewhere with less tax. Slavers don't generally give you that option, or at least they provide incentives to work with whips.
Seriously, I don't know why I have to keep saying this, but slavery is actually pretty bad.
And come to think of it, slaves are taxed at 0% to begin with, since they're not paid; so by your definition, all slaves are more free than all working citizens.
"You would not have whatever wealth you currently 'own' if it weren't for the society and government that represent the system in which you 'earned' it; the rules of that society and government are what determine what you 'own', and therefore it's 'fair' for that system to say you own a little more or a little less than you think you do"
Which is a fully-generalizable argument that says "you are a slave to the government. Enjoy it plebe."
This is why it's important to have a democracy. You can't actually limit the ability of the government to do stuff like this, either practically or philosophically. You have to have mechanisms that incentivize the government to do good things instead of bad things.
I think a parallel here that works better is conscription - the government forcing you to provide a service you don't necessarily want to.
Tax isn't really comparable to conscription IMO - more like if you had to pay your tax by providing your services to the government for free. My take on tax is that the government is collecting infrastructure rent of a kind - you used the government built infrastructure (stuff like roads, ports, sewerage, utilities as well as more intangible stuff like interacting with people with a high school / university education in a space policed by an armed force funded by the state) to generate some kind of economic benefit, so the government collects their rent.
Most infrastructure has separate, usage-based charges. I pay for my roads out of a car registration fee and a tax on petrol, for example. Income tax and other "general fund" revenue is almost entirely spent on socialised healthcare and welfare payments, and while they may be very good things they're quite distinct from "infrastructure". (Police and military also come out of the general fund, but are something like 2% of it in most Western democracies - tax would be far less onerous at 2% of the current rate!)
This is an interesting perspective. Obviously you're right about why redistribution of sex is wrong.
But the analogy isn't quite how I would have framed it. The "money/goods" aren't the thing that suffers when you take money away from someone. I can absolutely imagine a person who experienced significantly more pain from being forced to part with income than from being required to have sex. In fact, that's a tradeoff sex workers make daily.
I think we rightly recoil from that idea because of basic values surrounding personal autonomy, etc. We are trying to fight against a framing that treats sex as a commodity because that framing has done untold harm. But in plenty of times and places it has been one.
I hope this comment doesn't get misunderstood. I'm not saying that being forced to sleep with someone against your will is the same as having money taken from you. Neither was Scott. But to say that taking income from someone causes no harm to weigh... it may be a lesser harm, but you weigh it nonetheless.
Sure, I was responding more narrowly to analysis that uses the exact same arguments for sex as for money, like 'Other people have much more (sex) than they need'.
For example, a common argument for why redistributing money is good is that money has decreasing marginal utility, ie $1000 is more valuable to a poor person than to a rich person, so taking $1000 from the rich person and giving it to the poor person, while the rich person is hurt, increases *overall* utility and is a net-positive action.
This is just obviously mathematically true in terms of the utilitarian calculus for money, even accounting for the hurt to the rich person. But it's *not* obviously true for taking a girlfriend away from the guy who has five girlfriends and giving her to the guy with none. Even if girlfriends do have the same exact type of decreasing marginal utility and the same exact arguments apply to the utility experienced by the two men in the equation, there is a third person in this equation - the girlfriend - and how her utility is affected by all this has to enter into the equation, and may very well make it net negative.
This is really my point - you can make up a toy model of redistributing money with just two people, the person you take the money form and the person you give it to, and do the utilitarian calculus on that model. But a toy model for redistributing sex always has to have at least three people in it - the person you're taking it from, the person you're giving it to, *and the sex partner being redistributed*.
Anyone who's done any orbital physics problems knows that going from a two-body problem to a three-body problems enormously complicates things and changes all the relationships and outcomes of the math... so you just can't use analogies based in the utilitarian calculus of money redistribution when talking about sex redistribution, the third body involved changes all the math too much to trust that your intuitions translate.
I wasn't trying to say that no one is hurt when money is redistributed, I was trying to say that an *additional class* of people are hurt when sex is redistributed, and that complicates the model.
You wouldn't force anyone to be a prostitute, you'd simply given people the option to legally earn money via prostitution. And then you give money to incels to consume said prostitution. If no women want to work as prostitutes, then I guess incels would indeed be out of luck, but so far this has never been the case in human history.
At the first level, I want prostitution to be legal and I want a generous UBI, so yes, this is already exactly what I want to happen and it would help a lot! Although note that a lot of incels reject prostitution as a solution, saying they want actual love and relationships, which is a much harder problem.
At the second level, you could make some kind of justice argument about how you are still choosing to create a system hereby women have to accept prostituting themselves to people they don't enjoy having sex with in order to get money, when you had the option of just giving them the money directly in the first place.
That is to say, you've taken this lump of money and used it to create a situation where having sex with these men is of neutral or slightly-positive utility to these women, which yes makes the sex net-utilitarian-positive *within that system*. But you *could have* instead chosen to use that money to create a *different* system where they just get the positive utility of the money without any negative utility form the sex at all. Given this, it's not clear that the moral calculus for that sex changes at all based on the system you design around it; building a system that creates a bad situation where that sex is the best solution just kicks the moral culpability up a level to the question of system design, it doesn't eliminate it.
That said, while I think the second take is a more philosophically interesting one, I think the first point is more pragmatically useful and what I would actually favor for public policy. Part of the reason is that we don't *actually* have a lump of money that we will give to women who are somewhat inclined towards prostitution; that money will only materialize in the case that we try to address the incel problem through public policy.
But why is sex work necessarily any worse than any other blue collar job? In an ideal world with full justice, who will be working in cleaning, sewers maintenance, plumbing, nursing, retirement home care, crime scene cleanup, and dozens of other unpleasant jobs? No one? Robots? If someone is cleaning toilets for a living, are they "forced" into that line of work?
I mean, I think that if you have the option of just giving people money to make them happy, or requiring them to do work they hate in order to get the same money, it's more moral to just give them the money. I don't actually see any difference between prostitution and other labor here.
That's why I favor a very strong UBI, and other economic reforms to decrease the amount of unnecessary labor in the world.
But there is a difference between everyone being able to pay for anything they want and anyone being able to take whichever job they want, versus earmarking a set-aside pool of cash for one specific occupation. Even in an ideal market, people will be incentivized to do the work that people find valuable, as negotiated by the market's price-discovery; but if the government steps in and taxes away some money to earmark for a specific purpose, they are nudging the market towards producing more of that thing than it otherwise would of, and do hold culpability for any good or bad outcomes of that shift.
But even with UBI *someone* will have to clean toilets, fix sewers, clean up crime scenes, take care of the elderly in retirement homes, and do other forms of unpleasant labor? UBI cannot really solve that.
And we do know that there's women who voluntarily choose to do prostitution instead of doing (say) office work. @Aella seems to be intelligent enough to be able to do any office occupation (so not just scrubbing toilets) but still chose to earn money via sex work. Are we denying the idea that someone might voluntarily choose to be a sex worker even in the presence of UBI?
As for earmarking money - is it really different from the government subsidizing elderly care, for example? Taking care of the elderly is difficult and highly unpleasant work - so should the government refuse to subsidize it for that reason?
>Are we denying the idea that someone might voluntarily choose to be a sex worker even in the presence of UBI?
No, we're asserting that more people will voluntarily choose to become sex workers if extra money is set aside only to pay for sex work, and that each additional marginal sex worker created will enjoy the work less than the previous one.
As would be true for any industry.
>is it really different from the government subsidizing elderly care, for example?
No, it's exactly the same. Remember when I said government is responsible for any good or bad outcomes from earmarking? If the outcomes are net better than just giving the same money away as UBI or w/e, then government should do it.
I'm just saying you have to actually ask whether it's better or not.
The old examples (pre 2000) that I looked at were OCR errors reading "climate here" as "climate hero". So it looks like the relevant timeframe may be from ~2000 onward
I'm not a fan of the incel example. Material wealth only really exist as "property" within a society that respects that, while the choice to have sex with someone should be an inalienable right and is intrinsically connected with the individual.
I believe that your comparison between sex and building a house would work best comparing sex work to other forms of labor, and no one builds their own house anymore, so I'm assuming you mean building a house for a third party.
I agree that both building a house and having sex are potentially ruinous uses of their body.
The person building the house is selling their labor and ruining their body and using their time. I can see the connection to sex work.
Sex work and building a house are both labor. I think sex itself is not labor.
Not only that, the house was built somewhere, who owns that land? Should that land be owned in the first place? What did the person use to build the house? Who provided the materials? Who owned the materials? How did this person learn how to build a house? I'm not saying this to lead anyone towards any specific answer, just pointing out that it is not oranges to oranges comparing that with someone choosing to have sex.
Surely they're both the same? You could equally well have a society that doesn't respect the right to not have sex with people. Bodily autonomy is only a thing because society makes it so, just as property is only a thing because society makes it so.
In a society with no respect for property _or_ bodily autonomy, the strong would take whatever they want from the weak, whether it's food or sex.
Sure, a Superman figure could arrive right now and if they're strong enough they can take whatever they want regardless of what our society does. Both sex and property can be forcefully "taken". But as concepts, they are different, SEX exists regardless of societies. Property as a CONCEPT only exists within societies.
And you separated property and bodily autonomy into two different things yourself and that was my main point, sex is not property and I don't like presenting ideas that put sex and property in the same box, that's why I wasn't fond of the incel example.
Stuff exists, physically, and someone is going to have physical possession of it. It really does read like sex is a sacred value to you and property isn't, but I don't see the difference you're trying to highlight - both bodily autonomy and property are very fundamental notions, but both require a society to enforce them in practice lest the strong just take what they want.
I also think there's something off with the incel example, though I can't put my finger one what. Most likely it's that treating sex as a commodity is responsible for untold horrors throughout the history of society, we're rightly rejecting that framing, and since we're still in the process of doing so it's unsettling to see it analogized to a commodity. I think the unsettlingness was the point, but that unless you believe on some level that sex is a commodity, the analogy doesn't work.
With that said, there are a couple comments here that emphasize my whole problem with the "justice" project - the idea that material goods/wealth have no underlying "real" value, that the harm caused by taking them by force isn't real, and that value is only conferred upon them by some arbitrary, likely privileged, cabal.
The vast majority of commodities don't exist unless they get made, and the project of making them is both vastly important to human existence, and usually deeply intrinsic to people's sense of self and well-being. I completely agree that maybe being able to accumulate $270 billion is excessive, even if you didn't force anyone to give you that money. But then I find most justice talk goes on to say "and anyway money is just a means of control" or something similar. Both production of things, and the ability to consume things are obviously real, and have real effects on people, even outside of how societies conceptualize those ideas.
In other words, the ability to accumulate $270 billion worth of stuff might be silly to the point of almost criminal harm - but mostly because the last $269 billion are not adding much utility to the world, while it would in other hands. It's not because it's unfair that someone with $270 billion worth of stuff got given $270 billion worth of stuff. We gave them the stuff. It's odd to then act like we were exploited to get it.
I think we're mostly on the same page. I would just add that the conversation about goods/wealth having no real value is just people trying to overcorrect in the opposite direction of a problem they're trying to solve, it is a common bias, and it may be important and more annoying than actually negative, considering the political implications of the problem.
"Incel justice" would presumably focus on legalizing prostitution (already done in numerous countries) and then giving incels the funds to utilize said prostitution. No one will be coerced into anything.
Ooh, and we could pay for it with a "sex tax", like how gas taxes pay for roads! It could even scale with number of partners and number of times per day. Redistributionism at it's best. Finally contra Keynes, no longer will the GDP go down when a man marries his housekeeper! Sure, "seeing like a state" will become a euphemism for voyeurism, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
I don't follow. For much of history (and for that matter in some ways in some places today) people *were* property. The notion of bodily autonomy (or even individual and inalienable rights) is as much a construct of (current) societies as material property is compared to the 'might makes right' state of nature. In much of history in many places our incel could have either kidnapped a bride, purchased one, or enslaved one through conquest etc. All avenues that are, thankfully, not part of at least most modern societies.
Sure, people were *treated* like property, but people fought that. Slaves committed suicide, killed their masters, revolted, etc. Property does not do that and since we've realized that while people can be forced into servitude they are not property. Sure you can argue they were made to fit in that box, but with enough brute force anything can be fit into any box. My point is that bodily autonomy is not exactly a social construct like property is. You drop a child with no knowledge of society and ownership somewhere, they will still move around and be taken aback if their body is used against their will, yet they will see food and eat without thinking if he is stealing it from anyone.
People also fight, often violently, over other people taking their stuff so property very much does do that. Pretty instinctually too given it's a fair bit of work to train toddlers out of it. It's also a fair bit of work to train them out of biting and hitting as well. A child certainly has a notion of their own bodily autonomy and equally their own property. It's society that makes those notions universal so they apply to others as well.
If that child comes across a pile of food is he not going to be outraged if someone else comes and eats it? Even animals defend their food and their territory.
I'd argue that not wanting your food taken away is not from a sense of property and ownership, and more of a sense of survival. Would said person so instinctually fight if another individual wanted to share a firepit? Maybe not so much, and if not mostly likely for the sense of danger than feeling like he is the owner of the firepit. Maybe one can argue that sharing the fireplace is also the choice of the owner but he still sees himself as the owner, but we don't know for sure.
Your example of a child is comparing unlike things - sure, the child may be happy to steal, but I bet it won't be happy to be stolen from. All your example proves is that young kids are amoral, I think you'll find they care about as much about property as about bodily autonomy - that is to say, a lot, iff it's theirs.
> Related to the story where someone (Milton Friedman? I can’t find the source) was asked about the causes of poverty, and answered “Poverty doesn’t need a cause, it’s the natural condition, we should be looking for the causes of wealth.”
Likely not who you were thinking of, but this ties right back to Hobbes'
"Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man... In such condition there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual Fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Something I learned: apparently some people have transformed the word "justice" to mean "any morality about anything whatsoever." One person argued that the Illiad's argument over who gets what slave was a form of distributive justice because it was about the fair distribution of slaves. If so, it seems like another motte and bailey term. Because that's absolutely not how activists use it.
Honestly, I think you could frame everything as a justice issue and have it fit just fine. Now, partly this is just the inherent plasticity of ideas, but I also think a lot of it makes decent sense.
For incels, lets examine a few simple scenarios:
*First, your guy with the birth defect. Clearly this is a medical justice issue - he should have had access to medical treatment for his birth defect.
*Second, a dude who can't get a date because he's just an asshole. Clearly, this is an educational justice issue. He should have been provided with an education that would allow him to relate to women without being an asshole. Now, I know this might seem like a stretch, but I'd argue that our society does a poor job at helping people develop good, well rounded and decent personalities, and that this is, actually, a justice issue.
*Third, a guy who can't get a date because he lacks confidence. Again, I'd argue this is an educational justice issue, like our second dude.
Essentially, my position here is that the real issues at work here are well upstream of the incel thing, and once you get to that, it's just damage control. Like arguing whether or not starving people are allowed to steal food from the supermarket - but the time you get to that situation, you've already fucked up. -_-
For some perspective, I myself am vaguely incel adjacent - I haven't had sex in like a decade. But I don't consider it a particularly pressing problem. I don't think it even makes my top ten. Rather, I'd say it's a side effect of my main problem, which is that my brain is kinda fucked up and I have a host of difficulties because of it - ADD, Autism, Gender Dysphoria, etc. In terms of things I'd complain about, I'd pick out insufficient medical care, poor education, economic injustice, and the general conservative suspicion and hostility to anyone who's too different. When you have grown adults treating a confused child like that, you know something is really wrong. -_-
The motivation might be that Care/Harm kindness is too supererogatory within folk morality, but justice is obligatory, so within certain circles, claiming the mantle of justice sounds "better"/more dedicated to the cause. "We could help poor people a lot!" sounds weak compared to "We're wronging the poor and have to establish justice.".
As a sidenote, I've had a low key theory for years that, apart from any moral considerations, societies basically compete on their ability to offer people three things:
1.) Physical security.
2.) Decent material living standards.
3.) Companionship, both sexual and non-sexual.
The west does reasonably well at the first, really well at the second, and pretty poorly at the third. Bad enough you see some amount of arbitrage. But it's not obvious to me there's a clear tradeoff where being good at the other two means being bad at the third. Obviously something like Brave New World would require tyranny. But I don't see why, if the government has undertaken to supply people with basic necessities, it doesn't include friends, sex, and spouses in that. I mean for both men and women. Not in some grand egalitarian sentiment but just in the sense of keeping people from being literally alone.
Not to mention people forming social bonds, relationships, and having kids is undoubtedly positive sum for society. Social support networks reduce the need for government services and the average child is a net gain of several million dollars to the economy. Andrew Yang had a cute little policy of paying for marriage counseling because it's cheaper and socially better than divorce even if it only has a low success rate. I see that as this sort of policy.
I think the biggest problem is that it's much easier to directly supply people with the first two than with companionship - artificially provided companions are much worse as companions than artificially provided material living standards are as material living standards.
But this is what we need to figure out - how to help everyone grow their own, if we can't artificially provide them effectively.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. It's not a trivial problem. But it's not entirely different. People still hide food stamps and the like. The projects were a complete disaster.
I've only thought about this a little but generally I think tackling root causes would be helpful and have positive effects on top of that. For example, I genuinely think the obesity crisis and spike in anxiety strongly contribute to the lack of pair relationships. And if we tried to solve those and they ended up not helping with coupling... well, is it bad that people would be healthier and less anxious?
Yeah, I agree with all of this. It's not *entirely* different, though I do think that there are increasing difficulties with direct provision as you go down that list. And I do think there are all sorts of good reasons to try to address the root causes (though some of them are going to be much more difficult than "just" addressing obesity and anxiety).
I think the big thing is the Robert Putnam "Bowling Alone" claim, that organizations and companionship are falling in the contemporary globalized rich democracies compared to previous generations.
Various statistics of social connectivity and relationship function/dysfunction, with particular attention to gender gaps that indicate persistent market failures. And yes, the west (not just the US but much of the west) does worse at many of these numbers than many other societies.
I wouldn't say the US is doing the worst. Japan is doing poorly, for example. And some places are doing even worse than the west. Russia's arguably failing at all three. (In fact, I think Russia might be doing the worst. And I'd have said that before the invasion.) But that doesn't mean it's not a problem here.
Minor point, but "poorer nations (mostly already hot) will disproportionately experience the worst effects [of global warming]" is false. Poorer nations will be less able to cope with global warming (because they're poor), but the climate effects will be more dramatic closer to the poles.
Polar regions warm about twice as much as the global average. This is for two reasons:
(1) Warm air, especially humid warm air, has a higher heat capacity than cold air. So if you add the same amount of heat to warm air and cold air, the temperature of the cold air will change more. The humidity factor also explains why the Equator is not a Torrid Zone, but is cooler than the deserts north & south of it.
(2) Snow & ice have a lower albedo than other surfaces: they're white and reflect most of the sunlight that strikes them. When polar or temperate latitudes warm, it reduces the amount of time that the ground is covered in snow, which increases the amount of sunlight those regions absorb.
Specific scenarios could be even more dramatic. For example, suppose the Greenland ice sheet collapses and melts quickly. This would have the most dramatic effect on Greenland (which is wealthier than most of Europe in PPP). It could also mess up the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream goes from the southeastern US, across the Atlantic, past northern Europe, and then turns down (North Atlantic Deep Water). Adding a bunch of freshwater to the north Atlantic would make the water there lighter, so it wouldn't go down, largely destroying the Gulf Stream. This would make Europe much colder and drier, even as most of the world gets warmer.
This is not to say that there aren't specific poor cities and countries that are unusually vulnerable, like Jakarta and Bangladesh. But most of the poorest people do not live in coastal cities threatened by rising sea levels. Desertification in the Sahel is a problem, but the effect from climate change is small enough here to be countered with better land use management (don't overgraze, plant trees). If something happens to the Indian Ocean monsoon, that would be big - but there isn't a clear mechanism for that to happen.
When you are closer to the equator, the climate effects from global warming tend to be smaller.
i think people talk about justice from some sort of presupposition of free will, which doesn't exist. your decisions are just genes that express themselves in the environment you are given. people "deserving" things more than others based on some sort of libertarian-free will is bullshit.
> e.g. if government officials keep being corrupt, you don’t say ‘well maybe instead of calling this state of affairs unjust we should remember what human nature is like, and design systems around it, think about what’s more effective, have a positive narrative’
I just heard an interview [1] with Brian Klass, who basically says just that. He gave some interesting ideas for structuring government in better ways that take human corruption into account.
Heh, yes, I just ran across a reminder of why it's important to pay police well, and give them pensions. That societal niche being uniquely suited in both means and opportunity for creating ... alternative revenue-generation systems ... , it's important that they not have a motive.
I like the term "animal rights" because I think it is less confusing to the average person than "animal welfare". When my college roommate asked if I was a vegetarian because of animal rights, I tried to explain no, actually I'm a utilitarian blah blah blah, and his eyes glazed over.
"(please think for two seconds when proposing your reason about whether it has a clear climate or economic equivalent)."
Nice try! I can't be bothered to think more than two seconds about this when the Sheriff of Philosophy has already done the thinking for me. Book 6 of the Ethics explains this other phylum of justice. It's confusingly called "distributive justice", because someone is distributing awards according to merit, think 1st place, 2nd place, and 3rd place medals, think the plot of The Incredibles, "when everyone is super...", think about Jeff Bezos reorganizing the retail system of our society and reaping abundant cheers, er, I mean dollars as his reward. This is the phylum of justice where things are distributed according to people who are unequal. We can extend it and include, the inequality of people for exogenous and endogenous reasons.
In our society which prizes equality of people and is both more uncomfortable with thinking about people as unequal AND better at identifying exogenous causes for that inequality, we are increasingly narrow the scope in which this type of justice is considered. So much so, that "merit-based pay" seems kind of distasteful and scary and morally fraught.
There's nothing more loathsome than reviewers complaining you haven't read enough of the relevant literature, but... I kinda feel you haven't read enough of the relevant literature. It feels like if this was someone writing like this about a topic you knew well, you would think it was a bit off?
This whole debate has been done in a great deal of detail in analytical political philosophy since Rawls (and to some extent before, with Hayek on social justice), particularly with Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, G.A. Cohen and Elizabeth Anderson. The incel thing specifically is very close to a thought experiment of Nozick (also intended as a reductio of social justice). You can find a contemporary version of the bullet-biting answer in Kimberley Brownlee, who (as far as I remember) argues there can be a kind of entitlement to sex, and this justifies modifying cultural beauty standards and legalising prostitution, but obviously not forcing people to have sex (much as other commenters here have argued).
No, there's a bit (later on, I think?) where he actually discusses marriage and uses the idea of compulsory marriage as a reductio of left-wing ideas about justice
"Justice" and (social/economic) "power" are inherently at odds, because the essence of (social/economic) "power" is the ability to act "unjustly" with impunity. Consider a lord with many servants. The ability to abuse the servants is implicit in the role of being a lord.
Those on the left often ignore the fact that there are other types of "power" besides social/economic "power", ie "power over people". Technological "power"—"power over nature/things"—is arguably more important than social "power". And self-control—"power over one's own mind, mood, and actions"—is IMO the superior form of "power".
Of course, with technological capacity or self-control often comes social authority. So perhaps leftists can be forgiven for overly focusing on social relations. With this framework in mind, we can recognize that rhetoric of "justice" is inherently anti-"power".
It's really simple, actually. The will to dominate is as natural as the will to resist. Talk of "justice" is meant to redistribute social "power" away from those who dominate towards those who resist. If you take umbrage at this usage, you are taking the side of the dominators over the resistors. Consider if this is optimal strategy: ironically, the most efficient method of domination is to adopt a submissive position.
No value judgement is implied by the previous paragraph. After all, we all have to pick a side, great men do great things that have great (and grave) consequences, and only children are innocent.
>Second, people who think justice terminology is a dastardly plot to make people violent, hateful, and bigoted.
Come on, Scott. You're phrasing that in a way that maximally trivializes the idea.
As one of the people who said one of those things I'd say it's more like "justice terminology is used as an excuse by people who are *already* violent, hateful, and bigoted". You are allowed to do things and make demands in the name of justice that you would not be if justice wasn't involved. And that's why people invoke justice.
Perhaps what's happening is that an equity-based justice is generating ideas for maxims. "Equal money! Equal sex! Equal education! Equal healthcare! Equal treatment under the law! Equal environmental protections! Equal beauty! Equal gender comfort!"
Then, a universalizing-based Kantian justice is dismissing those maxims that are incompatible with a world of rational agents.
Equal sex? Can't be done. Either people would work hard to avoid having such a demand placed upon them, or else we'd be faced with the impossible task of altering everybody's desires to ensure that there were no conflicts or lack of fulfillment.
Housing and food for all? Much more possible. Just build more houses and distribute the food we already have more equitably.
Avoidance of any behavior with a negative externality, no matter how small? This makes action impossible. Therefore, we allow basic freedom to act, and seek practical steps to mitigate the negative consequences in the aggregate. In the case of climate change, we let people use carbon-based energy sources, but try to incentivize renewable energy and tax carbon.
The Kantian refinement is made intuitively, or by a selection process, but the equity-based rhetorical argument is never replaced by the true Kantian one. Hence, we're left with a bunch of operational justice arguments that are couched in equity rhetoric, but survive because they comply with a truer justice principle of universalizability.
Yeah, I think this seems about right. While it's theoretically possible to make arguments for all sorts of equity ("sanity equity" is my personal favorite, followed by "murderer equity", although that name still needs work), there's a filter on which ones people actually call for. I think it's partly practical (to the person's best knowledge) and partly political. And since there are always practical problems, the political side helps determine which of those practical problems are highlighted, and which are swept underneath the rug of the Glorious Future.
Perhaps a useful perspective is this: life is inherently unjust due to things like genetics, accidents, and cosmic rays that give you cancer.
Our moral obligation is not to correct the inherent injustice of the world, which is bottomless, but to stop any new injustice from being created on top of it.
Is justice creep a change to a "fairness" model, or does it flow naturally from a rise of victimhood culture (https://brill.com/view/journals/coso/13/6/article-p692_2.xml), as opposed to earlier dignity and honor cultures? How much is the pursuit of justice actually just virtue signaling in an attempt to distance one's self from a victim's oppressors?
I think the victimhood culture is actually the same thing as the fairness culture. In victimhood culture, if one is not a victim one must be guilty, therefore everyone becomes a victim because it turns out that people don't like being guilty. See "white guilt" as a phenomenon.
There are still some valid points in this point of view even though the logical conclusion (everyone is an oppressor!) is kind of silly, but the other logical conclusion (that it is personally these oppressors sole responsibility to redress the issue) is also difficult to enforce and is a PR nightmare for a lot of the causes.
Re: sexual justice. I think there is an important difference between the problem of sex scarcity and the problem of food scarcity, which is that there aren't really sex capitalists. Unless you count pimps, I guess. A person who really fucks might only do so a hundred times more than someone who is sexless, whereas there are single corporations which control enough food to feed entire nations. I don't know if this answers the underlying terminology scuffle, but it would be insincere to say that fixing one is as easy as fixing the other.
Is Russians going hungry in early 2022 mass justice for Ukraine? Is it economic injustice against the Russian people? Are the West's sanctions economically just or unjust? Is that even a coherent question?
We don't have a lever to feed the Russian people without in some real way subsidizing Putin's genocidal war against Ukraine. Obviously Putin committed a crime against the Russian people if they go hungry, but are our sanctions economically unjust because of that? Would there be any justice in not having leveled them?
Under the framework of individual justice, we can't be culpable unless we had responsibility. But we have no power to ensure any such hypothetical responsibility, there's a nutcase with nukes and an army standing in front of where that lever should be. Taking on responsibility without the corresponding power is brave and heroic! But in any notion of individual justice it is nonsense to say that not doing heroics is unjust. Heroics are by definition above and beyond what can be expected.
If you believe in the idea that personal responsibility is not enough and that someone needs to have systemic responsibility and power, that's an interesting theory that I think a lot of people will agree has good points. (It raises its own who-watches-the-watchers problems, but that's a different question.) Someone or something has to take responsibility if you want consistently good outcomes because nature sure isn't, to maybe echo Milton Friedman. But if your lever of systematic power is to declare that anyone who doesn't solve problems they have limited or no power over is unjust, you might win a few battles but in the long run you're going to mint a lot of libertarians.
If two people don't agree on what the responsibilities or powers were, they won't agree on the justice - or lack thereof - of many outcomes.
Well the Russian supermarkets sure do look cleaned out. But you’re right, it’s hard to know.
Suppose for sake of argument that the sanctions are in fact hurting innocent people.
Or, if you prefer, North Korea or Iran. Two nations that have threatened to wipe out other nations and made credible attempts to follow through on their threats.
What theory of justice says we have responsibility to help the people of parish regimes? Pariah regimes are a tragedy because they use the people as hostages to their evil intent.
I'm at work at the moment, but as the guy who wrote the article on climate justice and economic justice not being metaphors, I thought I'd best respond to the incel case and why I think, irrespective of whether your hypothetical incel faces injustice in some sense, they do not face injustice in the same sense as people facing, say, economic injustice.
1. As I go through in the essay- the world is composed of objects and persons. Some people violently repel others from using certain objects without their permission. We call this property.
2. When someone is in poverty therefore, it's not just that others have failed to be generous with them, it's that the world is actively preventing them from using stuff that could help them. This is what my essay tries to establish about these things- that poverty in rich societies is more like harm through action than harm through inaction. For example, if someone dies of hypothermia on a street with many warm houses, that's more like killing than merely letting die, because they are repelled from the houses by violent threats of trespass prosecution.
3. But what incels want from others is not merely to be permitted to access some things, it's for others to actively give them love and affection.
4. So the complaint of incels is qualitatively different to the complaint of the poor. Even if their complaint is correct, and their situation is unjust, it is not unjust for the same reason.
Thus my argument that economic injustice and climate injustice are not metaphors does not apply to incels.
I don't think I really agree with your framing here, though there is one exception I agree with you on.
First, the agreeing part: I think this is a pretty fair description of land ownership. I would tend to agree that land rights are violently enforced and that people's inability to own land tends to be a direct result of that. So, maybe land distribution is indeed inherently unfair.
But, you're not going to get a very high standard of living off of just land. You need things like hoes, seeds, maybe tractors and combines to really start doing okay. It takes a fair bit of technology to be able to really live at a level above what I would consider poverty. Maybe you think that the level achievable by self-sufficiency off of your own land is acceptable, in which case I could perhaps be pursuaded that this degree of economics is unjust.
But if we're talking "above the US poverty line" farming without real tools ain't gonna cut it. And someone has to make those tools. As per the famous essay, if you want a pencil, you can't just go out into nature and make it. You need to get other people to help you make it. And this is where it changes from "gaining goods freely floating around in the world" to "getting other people to perform services for you."
Now, there are lots of schema to get others to perform services for you. One is capitalism. Another is feudalism. Now, the idea of anarcho-communism seems nice, but until someone gets it to work, I'm not going to go for it. I think that there are systems that have successfully used less capitalism and been better for the poor, but it would take some work to convince me that having no real property rights would actually let us interchange services effectively.
If you reframe it in terms of "can we get other people to give us services" I think that the incel problem becomes parallel once again.
I recall in David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" he acknowledged that actual land rights can be hard to historically justify, so he set that aside. Georgism seems like a reasonable approach to that.
The problem with that solution is that not only did I not create the land, we didn't create it, so why are we, the Georgist state, entitled to assign the right to a piece of property to someone.
My least bad solution to the problem is in the third edition of _Machinery_, but I'm not very happy with it.
1. As I acknowledge in the piece, you can argue the existing system of property rights is fair, but it's still an issue of justice, it's just issue that you think resolves as "no injustice was done here."
2. For various reasons I am very leery of historical theories of distributive justice. One of the biggest problems is that injustice spirals outwards. You can't really confine it to land and be done with it, because the land was used to secure advantages. Not to mention the various subsidies etc imposed by the government that also altered the path of who acquired what irrevocably, and still continues to do so. The end result is that what the economy would look like if it were fair by historical justice standards is unknowable, so all existing property claims are dubious on that theory.
The most incisive book length attack on such views -which takes a somewhat different approach to what I just outlined- would have to be: "The Myth of Ownership" very well summarized in this book review:
I would also note that the authors are wrong to claim that under anarchy there would be no income. Indeed, Somalia was actually better off after their government collapsed! https://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
Beyond the empirics, the logic of the argument is what Anthony de Jasay dubbed "Your Dog Owns Your House": https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Jasaydog.html It's also worth noting that the police in the US have no positive obligation to protect you, they have been sued for failing do so and won.
That might indeed distinguish most incels, but not the really extreme Sadean "right-to-rape" (as The Illuminatus! Trilogy put it) types. And per Bryan Caplan, in a pure service economy demands on redistribution would also be demands for the active participation of others. https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/service
I'd say about a "right to rape" incel that they are making a claim about justice (they are being forcibly deprived of something they see as a right, that's true) it's just that their claim about justice is completely wrong, and probably among the most abhorrent claims about justice ever made. So they're not wrong when they say that the topic is sexual justice, it's just that the answer to that question is diametrically opposite to what they think.
Pure service economies, if they ever arise, will require very different thinking about distributive justice, I agree. But so long as a substantial portion of the economy is not services, and people can pay for the services by exchanging goods for money for services, we're still in the world I describe.
We're in a largely-service world where the biggest cost in the economy is labor. That means redistribution mostly just is a claim on the labors of others. Prior to the rise of state capacity & greater ability to finance public expenditure this was more explicit: wars were fought with draftees/conscripts and taxes were often "in-kind" demands to labor on public works. We could avoid making demands on labor with Georgist taxes on land/natural resources.
Re: the incel thing, I think that there's a real injustice there, but it's accepting too much of the (deeply broken) incel framing of the world to think that it's as simple as "they need more sex."
I think a lot of people, not just incels, are desperately lonely, because it's fairly hard to form in person communities in modern society (think about how hard it is to make friends after college, how far away friends and family often are, how few social spaces you can just be in without spending money). Various kinds of social capital (money, attractiveness, confidence, etc) can help with that challenge, and if you don't have those, it can be really hard to make and keep friends, much less partners.
Sex and romance are is important in their own right, I'm not saying friendship fully replaces that. What I am saying is that we're a social species, and that it's a lot easier to find a partner if you already have people around you. Not just in terms of dating in your friend group, but in terms of lowering the pressure on potential partners to "save" or "complete" you, and getting help and advice with finding someone.
All this to say, I'm willing to call loneliness partially structural. Which means that we can talk about solutions that foster community on a societal level, instead of trying to distribute sex directly.
I don't have any single answer to what that would be, but offhand would point at public transit and library funding. More ways for people to connect and spaces for them to exist in. Events to meet people in your building or neighborhood. Classes for social stuff. UBI, because people with more resources and time are easier to connect with.
Nothing of this sort would end loneliness or singleness altogether, but a society where there's more ways to reach out and be reached out to would be a lot more equitable for people who struggle with making connections.
And yes, if they weren't utterly isolated and depressed about that, most incels would probably be much better sexual prospects. Even the ugly ones.
The reason I would use justice language is partly rhetorical, and partly in order to point to my desired shift in the underlying incentive structures of our society.
It's true that what I actually care about at the end of the day is welfare. However, if you try to redistribute goods from the wealthy to the poor without the permission of the wealthy, some will respond that you are "stealing" from the wealthy and it is an injustice to infringe upon their property rights. The framing of "economic justice" reframes the notion of property to imply that each person has a form of birth-right to something, perhaps that something is the wealth generated by the natural resources of the earth, or perhaps it is a minimum human rights welfare standard. In this reframing, if you play video games and release carbon into everyone's air without paying the cost to suck that carbon back out, there is indeed a sense in which you're "stealing" from everyone's air reservoir. The fair price for electricity might perhaps involve paying for your externalities, or perhaps there would be a land tax on the coal mining plant, or perhaps there would be basic income - the idea is that there is in some sense resources and wealth currently being monopolized by a powerful subset that are actually rightfully owned by people collectively, and when people collectively are deprived of these things then it is an injustice. If we could actually have individuals using these resources pay out to the collective, incentives would be realigned, welfare would be improved (if perhaps not maximized), and there would be "justice".
This situation cannot be reframed to argue that the right to perform sexual acts on people's bodies should be redistributed to incels without the permission of the body-owners, because that would invoke a violation of the stronger claim that people have rights over their own bodies. The use of the economic justice reframing, which attempts to shifts the "rightful ownership" of certain forms of wealth, is to counter how wealthy people or their allies may try to frame the taking of their property as a similar violation by casting doubt over the extent to which they do in fact rightfully own it. We don't wish to cast similar doubt on bodily autonomy.
We could simplify this and simply say that we wish to maximize welfare. However, when the actions that are necessary to maximize welfare are blocked by those who claim it is an injustice to redistribute the power and resources that they currently control, it necessitates the creation of an alternate narrative of justice in which it is argued that they do not in fact have rightful claim over said resources. If we do not create this alternate narrative and instead accept the framing that the wealthy and powerful indeed have rightful claim over the resources and power that they hold, then (assuming respecting property rights is given precedence over welfare maximization) the welfare maximization will be bottlenecked by the limited degree to which the wealth-holders are willing to give permission to redistribution.
(Aside: I think there is indeed a pre-existing animal rights vs welfare political split, in which "welfare" tries to make farms nicer, while animal rights tries to give bodily autonomy rights to animals)
Someone who accepts a pure utilitarian framework doesn't *need* to frame forcible economic redistribution as a matter of justice rather than benevolence, because they reject the claim that there are deontological bans on coercion motivated purely by benevolence.
They can reject both the idea that it's unjust for Person A to be poor while Person B is rich, *and* the idea that it's unjust to take some of Person B's wealth and redistribute it to Person A.
The problem is that people arguing against the "poverty is unjust" framing IME tend to more frequently take the "redistribution *is* unjust" perspective rather than the "justice just isn't a relevant category" perspective.
The following is *not* a joke/reducio-ad-absurdum:
I think all of this is a compelling argument for doing away with "justice" altogether.
The care/harm model is plenty good enough to justify a legal system, and would hopefully lead to a mindset were prisons and other legal penalties for crimes are designed on purely consequentialist grounds, rather than out of some unhealthy feeling that criminals somehow deserve to have bad things happen to them, and would even if it didn't actually materially benefit society.
(I don't think this is politically viable because the ideas of blame and of avenging are too deeply ingrained in our culture, and because I fear that "vengefulness" might be one of those innate human qualities which we can channel into less-bad results, but not eradicate altogether, short of messing with people's neurons. But in the abstract, I don't think a utopia should have a concept of "justice" at all.)
“There is no reason in principle why we could not repeal the laws against homicide and create in their stead a Commission on Life Enhancement and Preservation (CLEP) that would hear complaints about persons who had killed other persons. It would consider evidence about the character of the deceased: Was he lazy or dutiful, decent or disorderly, likable or hateful? On the basis of this evaluation of the lost life and relying on the professional judgment of its staff, the CLEP would decide whether the life lost was worth losing and, if not, whether the person who took it was justified in doing so. By thus decriminalizing homicide, we surely would experience a reduction in the number of events officially labeled murders since the CLEP would undoubtedly conclude that many who had been killed richly deserved their fate”.
I really don't think this is relevant to my suggestion.
I am rejecting the framework that legal sanctions for e.g. murder should be understood as "redressing an injustice" (as opposed to "ensuring the murderer won't be in a position to commit further murders, as they have proven themselves untrustworthy when it comes to the 'don't murder' rule", or even "providing credible evidence that murder carries unpleasant consequences so as to deter further murders").
As such, the idea of reviewing homicides to weigh the loss (even setting aside the sarcasm) seems to miss the mark of my proposal entirely. Indeed, it seems that such a system could function entirely within the "justice" framework, with the CLEP's job being to determine whether a given killing was "just", just as well as outside of it in the sort of hard utilitarian mode that I think Wilson's quote is implying.
I suppose you were bouncing off of my suggestion that we might, in the absence of a "justine"/"retribution" framework, derive an effective penal system from purely consequentialist reasoning? But then, as I said, I don't think the CLEP proposal is the natural trend at all, making it an unconvincing attempt at reductio-ad-absurdum.
We can and should still put a blanket ban on murders, for the aforementioned twin reasons of "this person is a defector and cannot be trusted not to kill again wantonly" and "we game-theoretically need to provide a credible threat of retaliation for would-be future murderers". It's just that murderers would be convicted in a morally/emotionally neutral spirit, and if they ended up enjoying their life in prison, this should not be treated as a flaw in the system (unless they enjoyed it so much that the threat of prison lost its deterrent potential, but restriction of freedom alone surely ought to be enough of a threat, if it is held firm, without having to make the experience humiliating and hazardous).
CLEP wasn't claimed to be "the natural trend" but only something we "could" do by adopting a utilitarian rather than rights-based retributivist perspective (and I should note I myself am a consequentialist).
I would like to play devil's advocate for a bit on not having a blanket ban on murders: the egalitarianism of our hunter-gatherer ancestors seemed to be rooted in the notion of a counter-dominance coalition and offing anybody who got too big for their britches (which it's easier for humans to do vs chimpanzees due to our weapons). It was a common norm that people who repeatedly violate norms and are just plain undesirable can be killed and that's just accepted. Even during civilized times certain people like pirates can be declared "The enemies of all humanity", and as outlaws are thus fair-game for anyone who wants to attack them. William Stuntz isn't nearly so radical, but in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" he wrote admiringly over how pro-defendant Gilded Age northern urban juries were in many homicide cases, acting out the notion that (regardless of what the official law says) some people have it coming. He bemoans the Model Penal Code and the expansion of criminal laws which shifted power from juries to prosecutors. So it can be argued that if our bureaucracies were actually to embody the culturally evolved functional logic which long served human societies rather than "rational" legalism, they might more resemble CLEP than a blanket-ban. Note that this is an argument against Robin Hanson's crime-voucher proposal, which would more efficiently enforce many laws people are fine with not being universally enforced now.
Hmm. Well, setting aside my personal, unusually strong anti-death preferences (which aren't necessarily here nor there unless someone makes me god-emperor next Christmas), the obvious problem here is going to ride on the identity of the people whom "the community" treats as expendable/having-it-coming/perpetually-on-thin-ice. The whole thing has an obvious capacity to devolve into minority-bashing. I don't just mean the social justice sense of "minorities", although there's obviously a whole culture-war side to this issue — it's just a brute, logical fact that formalising this kind of system makes outbreeding the kind of people you don't like a good long-term strategy if you want to give your ingroup license to straight-up murder the outgroup. Unless one is a very literal social Darwinist, this seems like a flaw.
I think this is why you need veils of ignorance. People's tacit approval of "some people just have it coming" only goes as far as their personal certainty that *they* are certainly not the sort of people whom the community might decide to throw to the wolves one of these days. I hold the essence of Scott's https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/24/the-invisible-nation-reconciling-utilitarianism-and-contractualism/ very close to my heart, and I think that one of the most basic mutually-binding-contracts-our-idealised-selves-would-all-sign-while-under-a-veil-of-ignorance would be that no one intentionally kills anyone else, with an exception for defectors already rushing at you with a big knife.
This reminds of Peter Grimes. I've read the short poem but never seen/heard the Britten opera. In the former he's completely irredeemable and the reader is not supposed to feel any sympathy for him when he gets his just deserts. In the opera the big theme is about how the town thinks the worst of him and holds him responsible for deaths that might be accidents rather than intentional, forming a mob since the official legal system can't conclusively convict him. Even if Britten personally sympathizes with him as an individual against the current (having left the UK during WW2 as a pacifist), he's still a violent & unpleasant person who really shouldn't be permitted to put more lives at risk.
Of course, the original Liberty Valance was a western in which the core idea is that there will be progress beyond the point at which breaking-the-law-to-uphold-the-law is necessary (like the antihero Ethan leaving the better world he doesn't belong in at the end of The Searchers), whereas Batman takes place in the modern day and (particularly if you adopt Aaron Swartz' cyclical view of Nolan's trilogy) implies there may be a recurring need for such heroic lawbreaking.
Imagine you were the President, and secretly evil. What subtle things could you do to make things worse? Not massive change, just small changes that wouldn't even stand out if people weren't looking closely. Like changes to the tax code for Married Filing Jointly vs Single, adjusting deductions for home loans and student loans, or how people claim dependents. Changing the ease of getting student loans and grants. Small nudges on the scale for what's acceptable cultural norms. Availability of public transportation. Etc.
Do you think you could change society so that even 0.1% less people end up in stable healthy happy relationships?
No, I just think people are saying there's no answer that fixes things and yet we can all think of ways to make the situation worse. And so many of those things are just sliders. There is no BOOM I FIXED EVERYTHING moment, but plenty of small incremental changes we could implement. Or at least be deliberate about.
I don't think the economic example and the incel example are really comparable.
Saying "this is an injustice" is much stronger than saying "this is a problem". It's making the claim that not only there is a problem, but we obviously have the means to solve it, and it would be unambiguously good for society to do so.
It's a very powerful conflict theory tool, because for problems that are large enough, that's two out of three embedded meanings that cannot be argued against (there is a problem and it would be obviously good to solve it). You can paint someone who disagrees with the statement as someone who thinks there is no problem, or who benefits from the problem not being solved, and spend less time having to debate how you intend to solve the problem.
But even then, you still need to present "some" idea of how the problem will be solved, which is why the economic example and the incel example do not hit the same way.
In the economic injustice case, the implication is that wealth redistribution will achieve a net benefit for humanity. You coerce people with too much money into giving it to people with too little money, and that after this is done, both sides end up with a fair amount of money - for some definition of "too much", "too little", and "fair". On the surface, it's easy to believe that you could get a non-negligable reduction in suffering through having fewer poor people while still leaving rich people with more than enough money for themselves.
But there's no such easy-to-believe mechanism that maps to the incel example. Sex is not fungible like money is (and neither are blog comments). You cannot take the people who have a ton of sex, redistribute some amount of it to incels, and leave the world better off than it was before. There's no amount of "sex capital" that is being potentially hoarded or misused, where you can take a little bit of it and give it to many other people while still leaving the original person whole. Sexual coercion would clearly be a net negative (and let's not even talk about blog comment coercion).
So there's an obvious sense in which these cannot be an "injustice" of the same class as the economic one, since it's very visible that trying to bring justice to bear in the same way will cause more harm overall.
If there was a slam-dunk "here's the conceptually easy thing we can do to help incels" idea, I think you would suddenly see a lot more talk about sexual justice, even if the idea itself was ultimately flawed.
But have you noticed there are people who talk about economic coercion the same way that you talk about sexual coercion? They say "taxation is theft" and such like that.
Poverty and involuntary celibacy are bad, and society should try to ameliorate it if possible, even if people are responsible for their condition.
But to help the poor/celibate, we shouldn't violate other people's basic rights.
Some libertarians consider taxation theft, but I (sorta libertarian) just consider it annoying. Most people feel the same way, so our democratically elected government has mandated monetary redistribution.
I don't see a plausible way to help incels. I truly want to help. I'm willing to be forced to give poor people a third of my money*, but I'm not willing to have the government force me to share my wife with an incel every third day.
* hahaha, as if my taxes actually go to the poor and not rent seekers. This is why I'm sorta libertarian/want small government.
But maybe you don't need to share your wife. The government could give the incel plastic surgery and therapy to look and behave like you, thus giving him an equal chance to date your wife, as a hypothetical? Or even better, a female incel could post what she wanted as her partner, and he could post what he wanted, and the government gives them both plastic surgery and therapy to meet those criteria.
I see this in many of my local schemes - some forms of financial assistance are only available if you're seeking an education, so maybe the government could issue a bulletin board of the partners people wish they had, then mandate people who use the bulletin board undergo cosmetic surgery and therapy (like vocational training!) To best fit the criteria that the dating market is after.
There is another surviving species within the same clade as incel-suffering-isn't-injustice. It's our approach to nature. David Attenborough narrates some cute mammal starving to death in the wild or being eaten alive by a predator. People don't see that as an injustice to take action against, even though:
1. Some animals are suffering terribly.
2. It’s not their fault, and they’ve done nothing to “deserve to suffer”
3. Other people have much more than they need
4. This has been allowed to happen through the choices of individuals and governments.
I personally think both natural-animal-suffering and incel-suffering are unfair, and the universe is inherently unfair. But the tradeoffs involved in redressing these unfairnesses may or may not be worth it depending on the particular policy proposal.
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If humans wanted it enough we could probably provide all dolphins, octopi, parrots, primates, etc with:
1. adequate food
2. adequate shelter
3. safety from predators
But unless we somehow convinced all these animals to use birth control (not likely) we'd have to: 4. sterilize them in exchange for 1-3
Or else they would quickly outnumber our capability to support them.
This would be a tremendous burden though, so I totally understand people who just wanna shrug and say "nature has always been like that" and do nothing. It's not even clear it would be better for the animals' quality of life to turn nature into an orderly zoo (just as welfare deprives some of the dignity of being self-sufficient and the personal growth that comes from striving)
Humans are much more amenable to voluntary use of birth control (for now, although they're subject to very strong natural selection against using birth control) so that we can *probably* provide #1-3 to all humans for 50 years or whatever until AGI without evolution-away-from-wanting-to-use-birth-control becoming too much of a problem. But this hypothetical AGI is doing a lot of work, and maybe we shouldn't rely on that because we've been so over-optimistic about AI timelines in the past. Per the planning fallacy maybe we should act in ways that turn out OK even if it takes a thousand years to get AGI. If some aid is given as a quid pro quo for using LARCs that could make aid more sustainable by keeping the dependent population low enough that we can continually afford to take great care of them.
Want to belatedly add to the convo by pointing out this article that came out in Quillette this week that covers this language usage in the human rights context, and have to say it is the best articulation of the problems with this I've seen.
haha in same vein as the incel comment, as a below average height person i've thought a few times in the past when i came across a study talking about height and wage correlations, high % of tall CEOs etc that "when will it be our turn to get affirmative action laws, minimum quotas on short people on public company boards, etc.". Of course it's a joke, but as in many jokes there is also a kernel in there of... something? separately, was also reminded of this article about how some lesbians feel pressured to have sex with trans women they are not attracted to. Truly Onion-worthy material. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385
btw thinking about it, Scott is wrong that incel-sexuality is the lone survival in its irk. height is one, beauty is another (remember the study how a woman having blonde hair is worth as much as x years of college in terms of career earnings?). All three are similar in that they derive from primitive-biological selective preference patterns driven by evolution, and hence extra hard to weed out. It's trendy today to claim now that racism/sexism are purely social constructs and hence should be easier to get rid of, am less than totally sure about that. Finally poverty I guess is mainly social?
Last I knew, the Objectivist catechism included the idea that all positive rights asserted by the government are the moral equivalent of slavery, because saying that any person has a right *to* something is effectively giving the state license to force someone else to provide them with that thing. So the state shouldn't recognize a positive right to health care (because that would require forcing some hapless doctor to provide it), and should only be focused on protecting people from having their rights infringed via policing and contract enforcement. (But I've never seen a coherent explanation of why those supposedly proper functions of government don't require enslaving police officers or magistrates...)
I think a sane person's response to that argument would be something like: Government services don't actually force any particular individual to provide that service. All they do is set up an institutional framework whereby, for example, doctors who already want to voluntarily provide medical care can be connected with the patients who need that care, and the funding to ensure that the doctors aren't starving while they provide it. It's assumed that there are already people who *want* to provide the service in question, and all that's lacking is a framework to empower them to do it. No force or slavery required.
Point is, I think people can understand health care as a right because they mostly interact with health care as a depersonalized institution rather than as an individual provider, and they trust that institution to be responsible for ensuring that there's a ready supply of willing doctors, and that no actual doctor is being harmed or forced into providing health care. Whereas, for sex as a right... it's harder to conceptualize sex as a depersonalized institution, I think. One, I think most people have a hard time imagining that there's a large enough supply of freely-consenting sex workers to staff a nationwide sex-providing institution. Two, even if there were, and even if our culture's sexual beliefs changed sufficiently to allow for a government-scale prostitution-industrial complex... I think that kind of depersonalized and institutionalized sexual service wouldn't actually work to fulfill whatever need people have that is currently labeled as "sex."
(Somewhat pertinent to one of your other recent posts, actually... isn't that kind of like trying to fill whatever need people have that is currently labeled as "therapy" with a national network of institutionalized therapy-providers?)
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On another note, there's a book out there called "The Concept of Injustice" by Eric Heinze that really affected how I personally understand the idea of "justice." As far as I recall it, the basic thesis of the book is that people mostly have a natural moral intuition for when a particular situation is unjust. But the conditions that trigger that intuition are extremely complicated, and when philosophers try to figure out what the perfect absence of all those conditions would be like—which we call "justice"—they end up with models that are over-simplistic, if not outright contradictory. And a major mistake of modern moral philosophy is prioritizing the pursuit of that abstract and probably impossible ideal of perfect "justice," instead of focusing on identifying particular situations that we intuitively recognize as unjust and finding specific ways to rectify them.
Bryan Caplan explicitly uses the example of a doctor to argue that government provision is akin to slavery in making coercive demands on the labor of others: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/service
He also rejects Objectivism, and as an anarchist any state to enforce rights. He claims to base his philosophy on "common sense" beliefs resting on intuition/introspection, which sounds somewhat similar to Heinze. Although Heinze's focus on specific cases over general rules sounds somewhat like Jonathan Dancy's particularlist moral philosophy.
I'll note that the "positive rights are slavery" position tends to be overstated, but that there's a simple explanation of why "proper functions of government" aren't slavery - it's because government doesn't have legitimate way to force people to do them. Maybe there are people out there that both believe that a right to healthcare is slavery and that it's acceptable to impose a draft, but I've never met them.
The mixing up of "valid government functions" and "rights" is actually why I have a problem with the use of "rights" language to describe things we just think would be good for the government to do.
Basically "rights" are obligations and limitations placed on government. Saying something is a "right" is saying "we collectively, as a species, have decided that every person getting X is so important that the government is only legitimate if it does X." So the government can't imprison you unless it gives you a trial first. If it imprisons you without a trial, that is an illegitimate use of government power. That doesn't mean you have a right to a trial - I can't walk into the courthouse and demand that you try me for murder. It just means that *if* I'm going to go to jail for murder, due process has to be followed. And that's because we, as a culture, have decided that the right not to be imprisoned arbitrarily is so important that there is no circumstance in which imprisonment without trial is acceptable.
Meanwhile legitimate government functions are just things the government can do. The government can lock up murderers. The government can provide a safety net. But they can only do those things and maintain legitimacy if they respect the limitations placed upon them. The idea that there are some things the government cannot do, or must do, to be legitimate is a powerful one, and it's a concept I'd hate to see get diluted to just "these are good things for government to do." We should protect the stronger version of this idea.
This gets especially tricky when you start talking about a right *to* goods and services, because it implies that if governments fail to solve the resource and coordination problems inherent in delivering goods and services, then they are illegitimate. I disagree that this is always true.
In recent years, living in an absolute vetocracy has admittedly softened how I think about this issue: No sane person would consider a government that failed to provide laws against murder and theft legitimate. And the same may be true of some government services - we've essentially solved both supply and coordination problems regarding supplying food in the U.S. There's no foreseeable circumstance in which the government should fail to do that. But "foreseeable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Okay, as a culture then. We coordinate on shared values all the time so if your objection to the concept of rights is that there's no such thing as illegitimate uses of government power, then our priors are way too different to have a conversation.
I'm an emotivist/non-cognitivist who doesn't believe in any objective normative/moral truths, but prefers taking a consequentialist/utilitarian stance when engaging in contractarian discussions (along the lines of Robin Hanson's "dealism"). People may frequently greatly desire some constraints on the government and if the government recognizes such constraints (I don't think I would say at the unit of "a culture") we may refer in the positive/descriptive sense to those as "rights".
> I'll note that the "positive rights are slavery" position tends to be overstated, but that there's a simple explanation of why "proper functions of government" aren't slavery - it's because government doesn't have legitimate way to force people to do them.
They do, however, have the power to take my money, which is stealing the fruits of my labours, to pay doctors.
I was reading about the helots of Sparta recently, those poor enslaved wretches. The mark of their oppressed-ness was the fact that they had to hand over fifty percent of what they produced to the Spartans. (I, on the other hand, being a free citizen of a first-world country, only have to fork over 47%. Hoo-fricking ray)
What did those helots get from Sparta, in exchange for that fifty percent? Is it more or less than what you get in exchange for your 47% from your first-world country?
I will say that "rights creep" and "justice creep" both have the real problem that it takes away our ability to delineate different tiers of, I don't know, rightiness. Like, we need enough distinct concepts to be able to say, for example, "There is something deeply wrong with a society where some people don't have enough to eat" without also having to say "There should be government agents responsible for tracking down and feeding hungry people." It can be un-just for a person to be without food, without that person also needing to have a "right to food." The taxonomy of law versus morality versus axiology that was discussed on here a while ago is probably relevant here.
That said... it seems like people who aren't philosopher-robots seem to fall very easily into thinking about "positive rights" and "negative rights" and "justice" "just being nice people" and whatever as being basically the same sort of thing. So maybe there is some core subjective experience of feeling un-free/wronged/oppressed that gets missed when we try to partition it into the language of "rights," "justice," or "legitimacy." Like, I think all of these experiences probably have a very similar emotional flavor to the individual experiencing them:
* I want to paint my house purple, but the HOA won't allow it.
* I want to eat something tonight, but I can't because no one will pay me to work.
* I want to publish a newspaper, but I can't because the local government doesn't approve of what I print in it.
* I want to have sex with the pretty human on the bus, but that human said no.
* I want to attend the nice school across town, but the school district map says I have to go to the failing school down the road.
* I want to kill that thug who raped my best friend, but the police won't let me.
* I want to go to sleep, but I can't because my neighbor is playing loud music.
* I want to use the bathroom I feel comfortable in, but the sign says I have to use the one where I feel unsafe.
* I want to live comfortably in my house, but I can't because the roof was torn off in the storm.
* I want to build a fancy skyscraper, but I can't because the environmental impact study refused to grant me a permit.
* I want to sit down on the bus, but I can't, because the seats are reserved for people who don't look like me.
* I want to walk down the street to the store, but I can't because the local gangs will shoot me.
* I want to live forever, but I can't because the biomechanical components of my body are wearing out due to entropy.
I think the common element is just: a person wants to do something that feels simple and reasonable, but there's some external factor that obstructs them from doing it. And to that person, it really doesn't matter all that much whether the external factor is a private institution, another individual, an authoritarian government, a democratic government, a law of nature, or whatever; they feel just as wronged/unfree/violated/whatever regardless. And when people talk about how rights are being eroded, or how the underprivileged are being unjustly left behind, or how they're being screwed over by The Man, or whatever, it's less about any particular political theory and more just about trying to communicate that core emotion of "Wow, there sure are a lot of reasonable things my society arbitrarily refuses to let me do."
"(But I've never seen a coherent explanation of why those supposedly proper functions of government don't require enslaving police officers or magistrates...)"
Well, obviously there are a lot of people that like wielding authority over others, so there's never a lack of people willing to do the job.
In the typical argument it's not the Dr. that's enslaved, it's all the people who are forced to pay taxes to fund the Dr. beyond what the Dr. receives from their patients.
> This single scenario - incels and “sexual justice” - is almost the lone survivor of a once omnipresent clade - a sort of philosophical living fossil.
I notice I'm confused by this claim - shouldn't we also have "friendship justice" for people who are involuntarily friendless? Or "familial justice" for the involuntarily childless? The leap from economic, climate, criminal justice over to sex feels abrupt, when sex seems like just one member of a broad category labeled "human interactions and relationships".
Maybe this points at a fuzzier intuition re: what is and isn't in the domain of justice. I tried to type out a longer explanation of my own views, but halfway through realized I was just reciting the common conception of positive and negative rights[1]. I guess right now I feel like human relationships are mostly outside that scope, where "sexual justice" sounds weird for the same reason that "exercise justice" does. Exercise is a valuable, some might say fundamental human activity. You should be free to exercise by yourself, or to buy things to assist you in exercising, or to hire people to help you exercise. But if no one wants to be your gym buddy, that's not "unjust" in the same sense that a child starving to death in while grain rots in a storehouse is unjust.
Sure, I totally expect sex to get more airtime than platonic relationships. But it's far from "almost the lone survivor" of qualities that fit Scott's criteria, per the bulleted list.
Friendship, prestige, family, anything from the middle bits of Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs fits just as well, but seem weirdly absent from the discussion.
The point of using the incel example is because those who proclaim to support "economic/social/climate justice" are precisely those who would balk at the incel example, so Scott uses this example with arguments intended to mimic those for other forms of 'justice' to highlight a contradiction in the pro-'justice' folks' views (with the goal of showing why using the term 'justice' is problematic). If it were something they more or less agreed with or at least were largely sympathetic with, then laying out arguments for '[thing] justice' would be expected to make them embrace '[thing] justice', not abandon the concept of describing social movements as 'justice' (which is the goal).
[Warning: this felt like a simple idea in my head, but somehow turned into a long and kind of grandiose comment, probably because I haven't slept enough. Hope it's still readable]
Justice framings have some interesting properties on the level of emotional/rhetorical effect, which strike me as worth considering on their own.
(I.e., considering separately from the question of accuracy -- whether a given issue "really seems like" a case of injustice in the last analysis, whether there's any coherent notion of justice that deems this issue an "injustice" without having overly weird implications elsewhere, etc.)
Specifically, I'm thinking of a difference between framing an issue as "an injustice," and framing it in a classic care/harm way as an opportunity to help.
When applied to distant strangers, care/harm framings can run into problems with symmetry. Of course I'll save the drowning child, you say, that's obviously the right choice -- and then a moment later, you realize that there are millions of drowning children just like that one, and you know as little about one of them as about another. Once you start helping, how will you know where to stop? If one distant stranger can move me to action, then every distant stranger can. But if I try to help _every_ one of them, I'll destroy myself. (There can be a perverse temptation to not let yourself care or help _at all_, just to avoid getting sucked into this abyss.)
The problem isn't only one of "obligation," though that is how it's usually described. The feeling that the argument "requires too much" of you, that it "won't let you stop" -- these feelings can be overcome. You simply have to declare: look, obligation is a fake concept. What really matters is help and harm. Helping one child is better than helping zero, even if I don't help two. The world where I help zero children, because I'm scared off by some abstract symmetry argument, is a worse world than the one where I help exactly one child.
But freeing yourself of the obligation to help doesn't free you from _caring_. And this emotional layer has the same trouble with all-or-nothing scope. If you can take the urgency you'd feel about a literal child drowning next to you, and make yourself feel that way about a single stranger, then pretty soon you'll be thinking about the way the streets everywhere teem with pools in which innumerable children drown and drown; and once you've started thinking about that, it's hard to care about anything else. So (the logic goes), if you ever want to care about anything else again, perhaps you had better not think too hard about even that _first_ drowning child.
And so in practice, care/harm framings can have this overly extreme, bimodal effect. Either they don't make you care enough, or they make you care too much.
What is "we should help the poor"? To one person, it's a lifeless if obviously-true-sounding sentence, which they can nod along to without feeling much moral force. Another person hears it, feels a level of care proportionate to a _single_ case of desperate poverty (perhaps they think of a friend who has made the issue real to them), and then they feel the brunt of the million-fold multiplication, and they say "oh my god, _we should help the poor_!", and then they become an anti-poverty crusader, and then a burnt-out anti-poverty crusader.
By contrast, what does it feel like to hear "this is an injustice"?
First of all, it has a kind of immediate, built-in urgency. Mere suffering isn't quite the same way, because it's not obvious what the "right" overall level of suffering should be. (You can be David Pearce and say "literally zero," but most people find this hard to swallow.) So, while it's easy to say that suffering is bad and that there ought to be less of it around, there's no clear image of the "correct" world which you can contrast with the real one.
Whereas that's just what it's like to feel injustice: there's a clear-cut way things ought to be, and this isn't it. Like an unscratched itch. If there is some baseline level of misery intrinsic to human life, this is another thing _on top of_ that, a new error which used to be entirely absent, and could and should become absent again.
An injustice feels like one big problem with the entire world -- rather than many little identical problems stacked on each other, each one within individual reach, like the drowning children.
This gives it a special force (something is fundamentally wrong!), but it's an abstract force about an abstract thing, detached from the facts on the ground in a way the care-harm framing is not.
This is bad, insofar as it detaches me from the actual problems of actual people. But it has this advantage: it gives me a way to get roused up about those problems in the aggregate, without having to take the route of "get roused up about a single problem, and then aggregate _that_." It sets the level of care to a sweet spot that my mind understands as severe and relevant, without going so far that my mind explodes.
(I don't actually find these justice framings very compelling, as it happens, so the "me" of the last paragraph is more of a hypothetical me.)
(None of this explains "climate justice," since climate change was already this kind of one-big-problem-no-one-can-fix-alone.)
>I think there has been a general shift towards villifying our social/political opponents. “I believe in helping women” leaves open a discussion of “how”. “I support justice for women” implies that all persons who disagree with my beliefs are evil. Similarly we use words like “misogynistic” and “racist” with ever widening meaning because those words label our social opponents as evil.
PRECISELY. Terms like '[X] Justice' are inherenetly bad faith and should be opposed for the same reason words like "racism" are bad faith. There are terms for most of the things being talked about that more directly describe the thing that avoids using loaded language. There's obviously geat political leverage in using these bad faith terms, but excessive use of them should be a red flag for any rationality-minded people that the person using them is up to no good.
Thinking about it a bit more, my primary interest in "criminal justice" is not in the actual justice so much as in minimising crime. That criminals are punished is nice too, but it's a bit of a secondary goal as far as I'm concerned.
Not really. Punishment/harm is intrinsic to the concept of justice. That's why in personifications, one of her attributes is a sword. Whether or not this has anything to do with legal systems being much better at harming miscreants than reforming them or making victims whole is left as an exercise for the cynical reader.
I feel that criminal justice has such a long history that it doesn't have the literal connotations of justice that "economic justice" does. It's certainly not called that, at least anymore, as a way of accusing those of supporting "injustice" by opposing some aspect of the criminal justice system. So at this stage, it's more of a traditional term than a deliberate political manouver. And those who use "economic/climate/racial justice" don't have this in mind, the point is explicitly to proclaim they're for justice and those who oppose them are in favor of injustice.
Now, that being said, I would certainly be fine with changing the name for the criminal justice system to something more neutral.
So do you have an alternative word to describe someone who believes that women are the physical, mental, social, moral, and metaphysical inferiors to men and should have the same rights as cattle, or that people of other ethnic groups than them are genetically sub-human and should be forced into servile castes or liquidated?
>So do you have an alternative word to describe someone who believes that women are the physical, mental, social, moral, and metaphysical inferiors to men and should have the same rights as cattle
The positively glaring problem with this is that virtually no men (in the western world) believe that women should have the same rights as cattle, therefore we ought to almost never hear the word "misogyny". Of course, we hear it all the time.
And of course, another big problem is that it's perfectly possible to believe there are heritable physiological and/or behavioral differences of social significance between the sexes without HATING women or even believing they deserve less rights.
For the literal thing you described, one could simply say "male supremacist", the problem (for those of bad faith) of course being that most people who called 'misogynistic' aren't male supremacists so you either have to be reserved in how you use it (compared to using the word 'misogynist') or you have to use it in a bad faith way long enough until the term becomes as meaningless as misogynist is today.
"or that people of other ethnic groups than them are genetically sub-human and should be forced into servile castes or liquidated?"
Again, almost NOBODY believes this, which means "racism" should be a vanishingly rare word in everyday life, but again, it's extremely common because "racism" is meaningless, bad faith word used as a political bludgeon.
And AGAIN, it's possible to believe that there are heritable differences between races (which is trivially true) without supporting any difference in rights between races, let alone wanting to do anything remotely close to "liquidating" them. You could simply say "racial supremacist", though "white supremacist" already exists and that has been used in extraordinaliy bad faith ways to the point that it's used against people who clearly do not believe in racial superiority, much less in treating people of different races differently. Accusing people of racial hatred seems an appropriate alternative, but its extremely common for people on teh left to practice explicit racial hatred against white people, which makes the term problematic for the left.
I mean, the fact that you jump to these examples suggests you're a terrible bad faith person yourself, becuase the implication is precisely that anyone who is called racist literally wants to kill all e.g. black people. And if that is your definition of racism, then you're forced to admit that it's possible to be racist against white people, contra the claims of the most vocal ""anti-racists"" of today
Once again you do an astounding job at arguing with the ghosts of Louis Farrakhan and Valerie Solanas floating behind my shoulders.
I chose the examples I did because I wanted to use an example that absolutely nobody would argue would not qualify for those things. If I had used anything short of the maximally-potent archetypal example of the breed, I suspect you would still be accusing me of being a "terrible bad-faith person" anyways because I believe something you wouldn't call supremacist is supremacist, and it's clear at this point that you don't believe people merely have two different ways of viewing an issue without being locked in some kind of psychic warfare.
Anti-white racism exists and should be tolerated exactly as much as anti-black racism. I draw a line even FINER than you do in all likelihood, because I also believe that there are some very ugly regional stereotypes leveled at poor white people that are ugly and bigoted. At no point did I say anything contra to this- you'll notice I didn't specify WHAT ethnic groups in my example precisely because I believe what ethnic group is put in the position of the Heroic Master Race and which are put in the role of Servile Inferiors or Life Unworthy of Life is wholly irrelevant to it being racism. (I was thinking of Yakubites when writing about racial supremacy, although I doubt you'll trust my self-reporting about my mental states). The only reason I was specific to women is that you were insisting the word "misogynist" is useless and not "sexist" in general.
The reason why the word "racism" is useful is that it can be used to point out the exact things you are angry about being done to white people are wrong by drawing lines between them and other forms of discrimination. By campaigning to vehemently strike that sort of language from the dictionary- especially when you're insisting it does happen all the time, towards white people- you are just throwing away an important social technology.
I won't respond to anything else you say to the ghosts floating behind me, since your beef seems to be with them and not the person in front of you.
>I chose the examples I did because I wanted to use an example that absolutely nobody would argue would not qualify for those things.
But what possible value is there in calling those things "racist"? How does it help anyone to call Hitler "racist"? He supported genocide, genocide is bad, virtually everyone is against genoicde, the end. Calling him "racist" doesn't provide any information about him.
>The reason why the word "racism" is useful is that it can be used to point out the exact things you are angry about being done to white people are wrong by drawing lines between them and other forms of discrimination. By campaigning to vehemently strike that sort of language from the dictionary- especially when you're insisting it does happen all the time, towards white people- you are just throwing away an important social technology.
Except my whole point to begin with is that racism is meaningless word, and the fact that a majority of people who use it regularly have such a categorically different definition to you demonstrates this.
Calling someone racist tells you almost nothing about what they believe, and yet the word has enormous political/social power, so the word AS IT EXISTS AND IS USED TODAY serves at best to be very confusing term and at worst extremely bad faith by being used as a slur against the political opponents of the left.
You're arguing for the word in a form that does not exist, and there's no way to imagine it possibly can come to exist. And as long as the present form exists, it does enormous political harm, so its best to overthrow it completely than to imagine you can reform it in a way that its main users are furiously against. Your method is not only extremely difficult, it also risks giving the word much more power without necessarily achieving the changes you want.
And my original claim that racism is used in almost exclusively bad faith ways, and nothing you've said is an argument against that.
>By campaigning to vehemently strike that sort of language from the dictionary- especially when you're insisting it does happen all the time, towards white people
I didn't say it happens. I said racial hatred against white people happens, but it's impossible to say this is racist because *racist is a meaningless word*.
1. An archetypal measurement is generally used when determining if something fits into a category. Such uncontroversial examples give a point of reference when talking about whether something is another of the same kind.
2. "Racial hatred against white people" rounds down to "racism" to people who aren't actively in the Culture War trenches lobbing big artillery fires of Theory at each other. Believe it or not, the majority of people aren't Culture Warriors. The only thing that ranting about how "racism is a worthless word" is going to do to them is cause a deep confusion and cause them to ask the same question I did. I hope you handle THOSE people with more grace, because otherwise you're making life harder for yourself.
3. Let's say you're objectively correct- what do you want DONE about this, save the Demiurge tearing a page out of the English Language from the safety of his Reality Temple? What is your actual, meaningful strategy towards eliminating the word "racism" from the language and, as a separate topic, rectifying "racial hatred towards white people", which isn't racism at all but shares all described characteristics of it? Yes, yes, I know, "racism is a meaningless word"- understand that when I say "racism", I'm describing "strong and unwarranted animus towards another person or group of people, usually based on supposed inalienable characteristics or a perceived inter-ethnic blood debt". If you continue to police me for using that word, I'm out. I'll engage in your topic, but I'm not going to jump through your weird Theory hoops to do it.
> Why do I find this so much easier to swallow than eg climate justice or economic justice? I guess it’s because climate justice involves summing up a bunch of things which are not themselves unsympathetic
I think that's just a common cognitive error - really really big number times really really small number almost always comes out to zero in mental arithmetic. It's the same reason people don't care about X-risk - the badness is infinite (or at least staggeringly large), but the odds people assign to it is infinitesimal. They round off infinitesimal to zero, multiply by the huge number, get zero, dust their hands off and move on with their life.
I think it's relevant to look at this from the perspective of justice as a social concept (as opposed to morality, which is personal) i.e. that justice is about rights, relationships and (re)distribution of resources within some society by the society - and that interactions that do not involve the society (because they're purely individual matters that don't affect others or because they interact solely with things outside of the society) are not really solvable by the concept of justice, but with other factors.
From ancient times, codes of justice regulate how you interact with your neighbors but don't necessarily apply to neighboring cities; the Old Testament prohibits murder and stealing but considers killing and looting e.g. Philistines as something entirely different. Justice and fairness is for a particular definition in-group, and there is simply no expectation of fair allocation towards the out-group.
So the consequences of "justice" very much depend on what you think the relevant community is, how large is the "in-group". Some people have essentially a "tribal" view of their community, and you may talk about the justice in, for example, expelling people from some convention/conference; or in some contexts of the church of scientology which considers their treatment of "suppressive persons" as entirely just. Some people have a "nationalistic" view of their community, and from that perspective justice applies to a local homeless person but there is no expectation of fairness to, for example, climate change in Vanuatu. Some people, hopefully many, have a "humanistic" view of taking the whole humanity as their in-group, in which case justice and fairness does apply globally - but does not apply to animals as they are not included as members of "our society", perhaps with the exception of pets.
So the concept of "justice" is a bit shoddy for discussion of specific action because there is a lack of consensus to whom the justice should apply, what are the boundaries of "our society" in which the justice should be implemented. In essence, if you consider it fair and just to re-allocate resources towards X, then anyone who does not consider X as part of their community would not agree that it is just and fair to mandate giving up these resources in the same manner as it would be for their own community.
Off Topic: IMO this follow up is more interesting than the original post. I remember there was a survey on whether to still do Highlights From The Comments posts. This is a good example of why they should be kept. I think your blog would be worse if this post wasn't posted.
On Topic:
While reading the first few items, I started thinking Haidt and the Fairness value. Then it got brought up. To me it looks like both Brad and Scott have mostly used fairness as in "equal outcomes" but Haidt stresses Fairness means only "proportional outcomes". So I don't think the conclusions drawn from it are correct.
If I remember correctly, equal outcomes is born from Care/Harm. Likewise he mentions that Fairness is the primary moral of libertarians. So we could ask, would libertarians care about income injustice, climate injustice, or racial justice. Do they care about these more than any left-wing person would? I think the interpretation used in this post fails this "gut check".
So this means that my position is these things aren't justice. If they want a term that unites them, they should chose something that is clearly Care/Harm in origin.
Haidt goes into detail on the inner workings of the Fairness foundation in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. The Fairness foundation wants outcomes to be determined by a process that is known in advance, uses inputs relevant to the outcomes, and is applied to everyone in the same way. Violations relevant to this discussion are: considering inputs that are not relevant, not applying the same process to everyone, applying the process equally but changing the outcomes because they violate a different moral foundation.
I think if you apply these to the various examples, you get different results. Incels would have not be experiencing injustice. Economic injustice would be a case of it depends. In the case of climate injustice, it wouldn't be injustice.
One last thing I want to fit in: Just because changing the outcomes because we don't like them is unfair, it doesn't mean we can't decide to change the process going forward. It's only unfair/cheating if that new process gets applied to outputs that were already judged.
The conclusion I draw from this is that no one should claim the term "justice", because it's too ambiguous, and people just end up having a tug-of-war over what the word means, like transgender and trans-exclusionary activists arguing over what "sex" means. Say "equity" for "equal resources provided" or "equal outcome"; and "fairness" for "equal opportunity", "equality before the law", or "rewards proportional to merit or value added". This is all in Aristotle.
A third view, not represented in this discussion, is the utilitarian view, which doesn't care about who's /fault/ something is. "Justice" as fairness requires measuring guilt or merit. "Justice" as equity seems to require an oppressor and an oppressed. But whether something is someone's "fault" is a metaphysical question, whose answer recedes further away as you pursue it into sociology, psychology, and neuroscience. A believer in only equity or fairness would have to say that you can't institutionalize schizophrenics, because doing so is both inequitable and unfair. The utilitarian would point to the high social cost to society (and to schizophrenics) of having repeatedly violent schizophrenics wandering around unsupervised.
We shouldn't think of these different ways of looking at problems as mutually exclusive. Take poverty. There are definitely people who "deserve" financial equity, by any measure. Then there's a big crowd of people who could attain equity for a cost we can afford, though maybe not without breaking the market mechanisms for allocating jobs. But there are also definitely many people for whom equity is impossible, like the clients a former girlfriend of mine has had working at homeless shelters, group homes for the homeless, and prisons. She never had a client of the type you see on TV, who's down on her luck and couldn't make the rent. Her homeless clients were severely mentally ill, whatever-the-current-term-is for "not smart enough to survive", addicted to drugs, and/or didn't want to leave the streets. Things I would regard as once-in-a-lifetime horrors or hazards are everyday occurrences for her and her clients. She considered breaking up a knife-fight at work hardly worth mentioning. Once she looked at a map of sex offenders in DC, and a bright spot on the map leapt out to her as being an unbelievable concentration of sex offenders, until she realized it was her little homeless shelter of about 20 men. She spent yesterday doing an eval of a client who murdered a guy, then took his keys, went to his house, raped the dead man's wife and daughter, and then raped them again with an object that she didn't want to specify.
When trying to help these people, "helping the disadvantaged" is a useful frame; "justice", "equity", or even "fairness" is not.
So how do we deal with this? Do we build one big equity-based system for everyone, one big fairness-based system for everyone, or one big utilitarian "helping" system? I think the best politically-feasible answer is what we do now: We build all three kinds of systems.
Okay, but let's say the cause of poverty for certain individuals is crappy genetics leading to very low IQ. The utilitarian says we should give them other people's resources anyway because this maximises utility. But, it seems that the utilitarian may also say that because of this people very low IQ genetics, they oughtn't be allowed to reproduce because the child will suffer and be a drain on everyone else's utility so we should stop it coming into existence, hence the cause of such deficient circumstance becomes relevant (unless you accept the repugnant conclusion).
The entire reason why capitalism works is the recognition that giving a lot of resources to people who make poor use of them does not, in fact, maximize utility.
In reality, it's probably a better idea to just make sure that people aren't starving on the streets, but there's a strong push to work and be useful to society if you actually want to have a comfortable life rather than a merely tolerable one.
And yes, if we were efficient utility maximizers we would strongly discourage the poor from reproducing. This is pretty obvious. The question is how strongly do you want to disincentivize it.
Maybe I’m missing the point here, but I’m not convinced a program that allows incels to have sex would actually help that much. There are a lot of people who would like to have sex but can’t who most people wouldn’t recognize as Incels (such as myself) because it’s not a crushing concern. My impression is that the wanting-sex-but-not-having-sex is the focal point for a lot of much deeper shame and anxieties, it’s easy to imagine in a world where there is super cheap gov supported sex worker system and the people we know as incels would still feel bad because using this system is a sign of failure or they’re still lonely and sad after sex. It could be like offering anorexics free diet and exercise help, sure, that’s what they explicitly want, but it’s not treating the cause. Shifting the phrase from sexual justice to something like human connection justice or self esteem justice would probably make more sense to the justice crowd. In this case, consider the justice initiatives being like demanding free therapy, or demanding people tolerate obnoxious people. I’ve seen people basically push that last one under the label of neurodiversity. Am I underestimating the importance of literal sex here? Maybe, but I still think there’s a difference between “person can’t afford to eat <- we make it so they can = injustice solved ” and “person is isolated and miserable and sexless <- we get someone to have sex with them = ??”
Well the focus on sex I think is a mistake on Scott's behalf. It should be people unable to have (happy, loving) relationships, which is obviously something that can't be bought
Poverty in the US exists because some people don't contribute enough to society not to be poor. People whose highest life accomplishment is being a greeter at WalMart are not accomplishing a lot for society. People who are persistently unemployed because they don't care enough to show up to work consistently are below those people.
Reading this post, I realized that my intuition is that injustice is unfairness *that society has an obligation to remedy*. The term has the value judgment built in. Society isn't obligated to make sure everyone can have sex, so the fact that some people can't isn't a failure of justice. But society is obligated (I assert without argument) to make an effort to reduce economic inequality. Since it isn't doing enough, there is economic injustice.
I actually think this is a reasonable usage when people agree about what society's obligations are. But it often amounts to argument by presupposition. Once you get people to use that term, you are getting them to tacitly commit to a position on society's obligations. It makes sense that somebody with your rationalist commitments wouldn't be a fan of that form of argument.
"Society isn't obligated to make sure everyone can have sex, so the fact that some people can't isn't a failure of justice."
Says who??
You're just straight up asserting things here which does absolutely nothing to advance the debate. Like seriously, next time, just say "we don't have to help incels" and move on, because those 6 words have the exact same information content as your entire two paragraphs do.
This just seems to not understand what justice means, at least to my eyes? Maybe this will devolve into "But actually people use the term to mean a different thing!" but I should at least throw my common sense in the mix.
Justice as a framework only makes sense if you can frame the issue in terms of actual injustice, which is distinct from fairness and unfairness.
The 2008 housing crash is probably the clearest example. The banks make themselves economically accountable for a whole bunch of subprime mortgages, the obvious happens, and then they're granted loans with nonsensically generous conditions while the economy burns around them. It simply isn't possible to create a similar framing for incels. If Stacy wants to screw Chad and not an incel, maybe that happening a million times over causes bad in the world, but it's not an injustice.
Decisions around the economy and the climate are often made knowingly placing personal interest over what's actually good for the economy or climate. That is in fact, immoral. Thinking of economic justice as trying to reframe helping the poor is missing the point entirely, helping the poor is an entirely different thing. You can help the poor by donating to a charity or volunteering at a soup kitchen - but I hope it would be obvious that those things don't solve the issue of economic justice.
People deciding who they are going to bang, in the first place, isn't a decision about the sexual marketplace, it's a decision about personal preference. Your decisions about playing a computer game only incidentally affect the climate. These are a different kind of thing than policy making that promotes poverty and homelessness, or lobbying against green energy.
That sounds right, yeah. If you get struck by lightning that is unfair, and you deserve help, but it's not an issue of justice. In the vaguest possible terms, you could blame a section of society of being complicit in a system which benefits them and characterize redressing that as justice, but that relies on the idea that being complicit in that system is itself immoral. If something bad happens but you can't specify any immoral actions leading to it, that's probably just unfair. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't try to help out, but it's a different framework. You can't reframe incels as sexual justice because you'd have to say people freely choosing sexual partners is at some level immoral, which I at least think is wrong.
Exactly. Someone's house burning down because of a wildfire or getting knocked down by an earthquake isn't injustice, it just sucks.
Likewise, being poor because you aren't very useful to society isn't injustice, it just sucks, while being discriminated against because you are black or gay is unjust.
"The 2008 housing crash is probably the clearest example. The banks make themselves economically accountable for a whole bunch of subprime mortgages, the obvious happens, and then they're granted loans with nonsensically generous conditions while the economy burns around them. It simply isn't possible to create a similar framing for incels. "
Despite what Romney claims corporations aren't people - there weren't single corporeal entities called banks that made bad loans and then the same entities got bailed out by the government. Loads (majority?) of the loan officers lost their jobs in the crash, loads (probably not majority tho) of senior management at mortgage departments at the big banks lost their jobs. I agree that there should've been more past bonus clawbacks with most of the senior people and criminal indictments for some of them, and lots of these people that got fired found jobs again as the economy rebounded, so most got off somewhat lightly. But if there was an injustice who was it against? the people who lost their houses? please. I have minimal sympathy for the folks who took out liar loans on houses they clearly couldn't afford or wasted massive amounts of home equity cash outs on frivolities and then found themselves upside down when home prices sank - the only thing defining these people as victims rather than accomplices is the fact that things ended badly. Or on second thought i guess one possible injustice, if you want to call it that, is that out of two sets of bad actors only one was deemed systemically important and saved, while the other was (to some extent) hung out to dry, dunno if that's what you meant.
Do you... not remember the effects of the housing crash? It wasn't a two party thing where the only ones effected were the bank and those receiving loans, the entire economy suffered severely. At least some of the people who were nominally on the line for loans got to keep their yachts while the global economy tanked.
so i agree lots of other people got hurt by the recession that ensued from the mortgage meltdown, and i briefly thought about whether they were the ones victims of an injustice here. Couldn't get there and here's why: my view (and i realize this one is by no means held by all) is that having an economic downturn from time to time is normal and not a bad thing - it allows a reset and relieves pressures built up during the upswing etc. Economic participants should all understand these things happen regularly and plan for them and whether the mortgage meltdown brought forward by a year or two what was coming anyways is in that line of thinking not particularly important - financial conditions were set too loose post-dotcom bust and 9/11 crisis, China was riding a massive commodity boom etc. if US mortgages had behaved normally (very hard to do when central banks set all the wrong incentives) the dam would have burst eventually on corporate debt side, or in the emerging markets, or crap like meme stocks and NFTs and growth stocks going parabolic like in 2021. It's very hard IMO to say whether the amount of suffering in the economy across the cycle was increased because of the mortgage crisis because something was bound to go wrong sooner or later, and not much later at all really in any case.
Given we are on the topic already: since 2009 we've had our longest period of post-war economic expansion, and arguably the supercycle goes back to late 90s and has been nursed along for 25+ years by greenspan/bernanke/yellen through aggressive counteracting of normal business cycles, and it looks like it may be finally time to pay the piper. We could be about to find out whether trying to avoid regular recessions is actually worth the price you pay at the end to unwind all the excesses. Dunno, I guess let's check back here in 5 years and see whether we are in better position to determine whether episodes like 2009 were actually bad things or blessings in disguise.
The present problems are due to overstimulating the economy during the 2010s, not because of trying to avoid the normal business cycle. We could have pulled back but instead we allowed for massive inflation to happen, first in capital assets, and now in consumer assets, by handing out money through tax cuts, handing out money through government programs, and handing out money through spending money we didn't have.
If we had worked to balance the budget much earlier it would have dealt with the present problem.
Don't really get the nuance you are trying to express. Central banks overstimulated the economy precisely because they were trying to avoid the normal business cycle no? (at first because jobs recovery from great recession was exceptionally slow, then taper tantrum, then stuff like increasing emphasis on unemployment targeting (particularly minorities) over inflation, etc.
Btw you look at things probably a little too much through a budget / spending lens. Yes tax cuts / covid handouts etc. made problem worse, but their effect on asset prices is actually not as big / easier to unwind (not saying it's easy, everything is relative) as just central bank interest rates. You hand someone a few billion bucks he goes and buys some NFTs that moves prices a little. You drop interest rates by a point and every single asset value goes up, a growth (i.e. high growth no current cashflow) asset goes up probably by like 10%, because the discount rate for every future CF is now reduced, all the "safe" bond type instruments pay less incentivizing people to yield-chase into riskier stuff, etc. So now there is basically no way to raise interest rates without causing an asset price crash which would cause a recession in turn, almost regardless of how much government is willing to spend directly to prop things up.
Oh, I totally forgot to mention those interest rates, but they are a huge factor as well.
You cut taxes, which makes trillions of dollars, and you lend out bunches of money, which makes trillions of dollars, and then we spent trillions more on actual handouts.
I think if we had done just one of those things, we might have gotten away with it. I think all three has created the toxic inflationary environment we are in today.
Sadly, the only solutions are to either inflate wages by a substantial margin without letting capital assets go up in value or let capital markets crash down to correct levels. Anything else is going to lead to major structural problems.
And 7.5% inflation is not really acceptable; having a recession is preferable to having 7.5% inflation year after year.
Unfortunately, the real estate crisis is another issue, as we built too few homes, so those prices going crazy isn't just because of easy money but also because we literally have 5 million too few houses and need to build a ton more to catch up.
That said, I disagree that they were trying to "avert" the business cycle, they were trying to prime the economy endlessly and convinced themselves that inflation somehow wouldn't happen. Lo and behold, it did. You can't actually cheat economic growth like that.
The mortgage crisis was an effect of the economic downturn, not the root cause of it. The economic downturn was not caused by the mortgage crisis, it was caused by a larger economic slowdown. This slowdown triggered the mortgage crisis.
In reality, we had basically been subsidizing the economy by building a lot of excess housing and overspending on real estate; when the economy fell, the construction jobs that had been propped up by overvalued real estate went away and a bunch of related jobs went away and there were a bunch of trickle down effects.
However, there was a larger economic issue that actually caused the economic slowdown which caused the bubble to burst. We spent too many economic resources on overpriced real estate as opposed to other things, which caused the economic downturn.
There was a lot of inefficiency in the economy and the downturn forced people to be efficient again, which resulted in a lot of downsizing because a lot of flab had built up.
First of all, let me say am impressed that anyone is still reading comments thread from a post almost two weeks ago! now to your point - well, this stuff has been pretty well studied so probably no need for us to reinvent the wheel. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Recession#Narratives You are emphasizing #2, i had put forward #1, in reality all this stuff contributed of course.
However I think there is still a qualitative difference in that what put the "great" in great recession was not a run of the mill business downcycle caused by over construction alone, which happens regularly and are usually overcome by an otherwise healthy economy, it was the crisis among banks when all the poorly underwritten mortgages they hadn't had time to securitize / unload started torpedoing their solvency. People complain about bankers getting bailed out etc. but they fail to get how banks are just central to functioning of the economy in a way that no construction company ever is (which is why no homebuilder got saved by direct government interventions).
More broadly, the way I sequence things is there wouldn't have been no overinvestment in RE / construction bubble if there wasn't too much mortgage capacity available in first place, and no mortgage bubble if central bank conditions weren't turned overly loose post dotcom boom/9-11 crisis in first place, so most of the blame ends at greenspan's feet ultimately. Even stuff like excessive financial "innovation" into structured products is in my view (can't be 100% sure about that one but strongly suspect it) more an effect of the overspiked punch bowl environment than a cause.
I think what made it the "Great Recession" what it was is that we had a normal business cycle downturn, which basically flattened economic growth (to 0%), and then on top of that it caused the residential housing bubble to burst, which tacked on an extra 4.5% hit, resulting in a significant drop in GDP.
This is one reason why bubbles are dangerous - they can conceal underlying weaknesses in the economy. The economy actually had been taken a turn for the worse in 2006, with 2007 basically being us doing the Wile E Coyote thing of running out off a cliff into empty space where the bubble was the only thing that was concealing the fact that the economy was having problems. We then realized we were off in empty space and plummeted down.
I think without the bubble, we would have realized that the economy was unhealthy sooner, and taken more proactive action; instead, we basically were trying to catch the Jenga tower as it was falling.
This was combined with a lot of other bad decisions, including Dubya's tax cuts adding a bunch of money to capital markets - a mistake that Trump repeated.
And yeah, the banks (and the insurance industry that supports the banks) did have major problems.
Also, while we didn't save any homebuilders, our present housing crisis - where we built 5 million too few homes since the Great Recession - we may well have actually made a mistake in failing to save some construction companies, as we ended up with a substantial deficit in residential housing.
And yes, Greenspan definitely contributed. Greenspan believed that people (or at least, the banks) would act rationally, rather than do something suicidal like what they actually did:
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"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," said Greenspan.
Talking about will E coyote momentum stuff - I was a newish / junior guy in private equity back then and remember looking at buying crap like spanish airlines and Greek banks during that phony war period in between the h2 2007 credit freeze but before Lehman in late 2008. Even back then people were still thinking of it as a regular correction / recession not the near Armageddon situation it became after Lehman. Who knows whether the really bad dive could've been avoided if government had stepped in to save bear Stearns /Lehman, but at least on the ground it felt that that was truly the avoidable decision that pushed things into the abyss. So you are right that things started going downhill in 2005-06 already, but the key moment wasn't even in 2007 it was in 2008
This is bizarre troll logic. What step here is the supposed injustice? That not having sex with Incel will lead to a complicated chain of events resulting in a fraction of a cent tax rise? That kind of butterfly effect stuff makes everyone accountable for everything. If it's just the last step of having a baby and needing welfare, the backstory is irrelevant, and all taxpayers are the victim of the injustice, not just Incel.
Edit: Should clarify that I think claiming this as injustice is kind of silly, this just seemed like the easiest way to respond.
Nonsense. The cost was imposed by the 6-figure incel voting for high taxes and social welfare. We can be pretty sure he was far more conscientious than your welfare couple about voting, and that *he* (and not they) had the opportunity to donate to his favorite political candidates, volunteer in campaigns, study the issues, write and march in support of them, fire off Tweets that go viral supporting one side or the other, start up a reddit in which he posts closely-argued comments supporting reform or the status quo.
In other words, since our hypothetical 6-figure earning incel has significantly more political influence than our hypothetical welfare couple, the fact that he lives in a political regime that transfers big chunks of his earnings to others as charity is more *his* fault than *theirs*.
It seems like "care/harm" = consequentialism and "fairness" = deontology. This is probably oversimplified and doesn't line up 100%, but it jumped out at me when reading that section.
(Regarding any innate sense of fairness children or other animals may possess: my sketchy intuition is that this reflects evolution encoding certain decision theory-motivated behaviors into costly signals, i.e. emotions.)
"I’m not sure why the animal and human cases are moving in opposite directions."
I think that's because, in a lot of cases it's easier to think someone might deserve to suffer for their choices, if you think they're a sentient being who is yadda-yadda-yadda...
I believe that animals are basically just like people, but it seems like some percentage of people are more comfortable believing they are 'lower' than humans... so they might say that animals don't make the same choices as people, and therefore would be considered innocent.
but people find it easy to condemn a choice, even if that 'choice' is something like 'being gay', or something that gets discriminated against.
So I would guess it might be to avoid more of the arguments that 'God should be allowed to rain down hellfire on whoever he pleases,' or that suffering is deserved for going against the bible... or whatever feeds people's sadism.
If it is unjust for animals to be killed and tortured, and it is in the nature of some species to do so (e.g. cats) doesn't that mean we must eradicate all species that kill and torture other animals?
Along these lines, some people have suggested that lions be genetically altered to make them herbivores. They'd still look like lions, but they wouldn't behave like lions. I find any such proposal instinctively repulsive: one might as well replace all lions with concrete statues of lions, because, as with the original proposal, they would look like lions but not be lions.
Who says we haven't tried? I personally rub out each and every tick I come across, regardless of whether it is actively trying to drink my blood. But they're exceedingly tough little bastards.
I'll be brief because others have made the same points well. I don't see why it's absurd to speak of "injustice" in the case of incels (the actual thing, not the deplorable online community), spinster aunts, etc. It is just that:
(a) "injustice" does not imply that every coercive measure to address the problem is legit; some would obviously be abhorrent, and rape or forcible marriage are the paradigmatic examples of that category;
(b) the way in which the system is broken may not be the supposedly obvious way as perceived by the people done hard by. Some incel misery comes from the idea that not having sex (or having sex only by yourself) is something terrible - making you a "loser", an outcast from society, an individual who has failed at being a human being, a most likely terrible person, someone who has failed at engaging in the ritual exchange between moieties in early 21th century US culture, etc. (That's not something that exists just in incels' heads, mind you; ir pervades our society.) Plenty of other misery comes from having few or no friends, little family support structure (taboo on living with one's parents as an adult), etc. Speaking about that neither skirts the problem nor breaks the "injustice" mold; neither does it show that it is wrong to talk about economic injustice.
An analogue here would be a city that is both unlivable and illegible if you do not have a car. That is obviously a thing, and a cause of misery. We should be able to say that without being taken to mean that we endorse carjackings. In fact, it could easily be a very bad idea for everybody to have a car, and use it regularly, even in such a city - things would break down. Why not build a city differently?
Isn't the hog thing just a typical negative externality? I consider it reasonable to call the situation unjust if and only if they aren't paying a reasonable tax to balance the externality.
I'm not sure how this relates to the wider question. Is prison a tax on murder? If sexual injustice is a thing, would some kind of social tax credit for pity sex be the remedy?
Suppose some kind of inequality exists, and we can mitigate it by imposing taxes to allow subsidies for positive externalities. If we can't tax (or even identify) a specific negative externality that causes the inequality, is justice still a reasonable way to frame the question?
Expanding on this, do some people believe that extreme wealth is necessarily unjust because they believe it can only be a consequence of unbalanced positive externalities that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor?
It's probably a corollary to Dunning-Kruger. People have a very hard time *believing* there is anyone whose work is worth 10x what their own is, whatever that level might be. So they think income differences of 1/2x or 2x from their own could arise from different skills, different work habits, natural talent, ordinary luck, et cetera, but differences of 100x *must* arise from conspiracy or structural inequities and differences of 1/100x *must* arise from criminality or bad character.
IIRC Google Search first compiles a list of 1000 candidates using some very fast algorithm then checks whether and how well each of them matches the search key, so it won't return more than 1000 results even if you search for "the".
There's a reason why people use language corpora rather than Google. (On the iWeb corpus "climate villain" and "climate villains" occur half again per billion words.)
Climate, racial and economic justice operates by a large number of people making many small sacrifices to benefit a removed anonymous mass (the poor/the planet).
The interesting thing about “sexual justice” is that in each instance it would require *one* person to make an enormous “sacrifice” (relationship with deformed person) engaging directly with the victim.
Small sacrifice = being okay with having MONTHS per year of income being taken off you at the threat of imprisonment (and ultimately death if you resist)
On a practical note, for the incel thing: isn't masturbation an effective remedy, that most males adopt? Are the people who are the most miserable about this people who are not good at masturbation? Should sexual education include masturbation practice and technique?
In practice incels condemn masturbation as a low status thing, and totally not wthat they want/deserve, which I find an extremely counterproductive stance to have. If we use an economy methophor they are not in a situation where they don't have enough money for life and ask for UBI, they are in a situation where they do have access to UBI but refuse to take it as only low status people live on UBI and demand people to offer them high paying jobs instead.
I don't think that will help. It isn't that there is a physical need that they are afraid to satisfy. The real need is the affirmation and affection of actual willing sex. Making masturbation cool won't fix that. In the same way that, while having enough to eat is definitely a real need, people would prefer having a job that makes them feel valuable and useful to free money.
It will definetely help. As I see it, there are three main components incels problem: lack of sex, feeling of low status and lack of actual meaningful relationship with another person. Allowing yourself to masturbate without shame solve two of these issues. Having a supportive community of other people with similar issues, who accept, each other and think that masturbation is a great thing, instead of shameful act, can more or less solve the third issue.
And after that, when the needs are less unsatisfied and tormenting, there can be done some self growths required to have an actual meaningful romantic and sexual relationship.
I hate to cut in here, but in my experience incels don't feel shame over masturbation because it's seen as low-status. They feel shame about masturbation because they SHOULD be getting radical blowjobs from their porn starlet/live-in maid/child incubator that the cosmos itself has conspired to deny them.
A major personality flaw common in incel communities is the so-called "inferiority-superiority complex": a certain Patrick-Batemanesque obsession with status and hierarchy and a seething hatred of those who are higher-status than them combined with an equally seething contempt for those lower-status than them. Removing the stigma of masturbation wouldn't solve this issue because their issue isn't being seen as low-status: it's that they aren't high-status AND given carte blanche to enact whatever petty cruelties they wish on those they see as low-status.
To those who would accuse me of being uncharitable to incels, I invite you to take a look at some of their forums for an hour and then return with the knowledge of how they behave. There are, certainly, some Maximally Virtuous Incels out there, but they aren't calling themselves incels. The identity of incel has become fundamentally wedded with ideas regarding women and ethnic minorities so wildly outside the Overton Window that they'd make the villains of the Handmaid's Tale flinch.
No, that's incredibly silly. Masturbation isn't sex, and it sure as HELL isn't a healthy loving relationship.
Virtually nobody in the US living in "poverty" is at immediate risk of death, and living in homeless shelters and eating at soup kitchens should be sufficient for them, right?
(Yes, not everyone has access to those things consistently, but 'economic justice' is never used that exclusively)
"Take the words “justice” and “accountability.” At first sight, they raise no issue: a large chunk of human rights work is to hold abusers to account, ensure that due process is upheld, and secure redress for victims. Yet activists have come to use these words in such an expansive fashion that common sense is unable to define them anymore. One hears about “reproductive justice,” “environmental justice,” or “accountability for women and girls in humanitarian settings.” Iteration after iteration, even human rights folks struggle to understand what “equity” means and why it’s replacing equality, or why “justice” and “accountability” are used so loosely that they can refer to any desirable social outcome."
It's really weird that most discussions about incels fail to observe the discrimination incels practice against their female peers.
Because of course the problem isn't that "no one" is willing to have sex with the kind of low-status men who might feel themselves to be incels.
The problem is that *conventionally attractive and/or high status women in particular* don't want to have relationships and/or sex with the kind of low status men who might feel themselves to be incels.
As far as most incels are concerned, unattractive women don't even exist as an option to them. They shouldn't have to "settle" for the low status women who would have them.
For incels, it's Hot Girl or Bust, and I think David Wong / Jason Pargin said it best in his Cracked article, "5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women:"
Does it seem like men feel kind of entitled to sex? Does it seem like we react to rejection with the maturity of a child being denied a toy?
Well, you have to keep in mind that what we learn as kids is really hard to deprogram as an adult. And what we learned as kids is that we males are each owed, and will eventually be awarded, a beautiful woman.
We were told this by every movie, TV show, novel, comic book, video game and song we encountered. When the Karate Kid wins the tournament, his prize is a trophy and Elisabeth Shue. Neo saves the world and is awarded Trinity. Marty McFly gets his dream girl, John McClane gets his ex-wife back, Keanu "Speed" Reeves gets Sandra Bullock, Shia LaBeouf gets Megan Fox in Transformers, Iron Man gets Pepper Potts, the hero in Avatar gets the hottest Na'vi, Shrek gets Fiona, Bill Murray gets Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, Frodo gets Sam, WALL-E gets EVE ... and so on.
Hell, at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere walks into the lady's workplace and just carries her out like he's picking up a suit at the dry cleaner.
And then we have Star Wars, where Luke starts out getting Princess Leia (in The Empire Strikes Back), but then as Han Solo became a fan favorite, George Lucas realized he had to award her to him instead (forcing him to write the "She's secretly Luke's sister" thing into Return of the Jedi, even though it meant adding the weird incest vibe to Empire). With Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling played with the convention by having the beautiful girl get awarded to the sidekick character Ron, *but* she made it a central conflict in the story that Ron is constantly worried that, since Harry is the main character, Hermione will be awarded to him instead.
In each case, the woman has no say in this -- compatibility doesn't matter, prior relationships don't matter, nothing else factors in. If the hero accomplishes his goals, he is awarded his favorite female. Yes, there will be dialogue that maybe makes it sound like the woman is having doubts, and she will make noises like she is making the decision on her own. But we, as the audience, know that in the end the hero will "get the girl," just as we know that at the end of the month we're going to "get our paycheck." Failure to award either is breaking a societal contract. The girl can say what she wants, but we all know that at the end, she *will* wind up with the hero, whether she knows it or not.
And now you see the problem. From birth we're taught that we're *owed* a beautiful girl. We all think of ourselves as the hero of our own story, and we all (whether we admit it or not) think we're heroes for just getting through our day.
So it's very frustrating, and I mean frustrating to the point of violence, when we don't get what we're owed. A contract has been broken. These women, by exercising their own choices, are denying it to us. It's why every Nice Guy is shocked to find that buying gifts for a girl and doing her favors won't win him sex. It's why we go to "slut" and "whore" as our default insults -- we're not mad that women enjoy sex. We're mad that women are distributing to other people the sex that they owed *us.*
Yes, the women in these stories are being portrayed as wonderful and beautiful and perfect. But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.
Yes, I think it's a very important point which is good to have in mind when talking about incels.
I believe that for majority of them their problems won't even go away if they got their state mandated conventionally attractive girlfriends. Because the main issue isn't the abscence of sex or romantical relationship, but feeling low status. And in such a world having a conventionally attractive girlfriend won't be a marker of status anymore.
I think this is silly. Most incels simply want a girlfriend and are unhappy they don't have one. It's nothing to do with status. You're taking the an almost caricature-level conception of an incel and projecting it onto millions of lonely men.
It is a mistake to lump the incel/redpill communities together into a monolith. The "Hot Girl or Bust" idea is a redpill one (as well as the derogatory/objectifying ranking systems that tend to go with it). Most incels would be ecstatic if they could have a conversation with any woman (attractive or not) that didn't end with expressions of disgust or their humanity being the punchline of a joke.
The overlap between those two communities comes primarily from incels being particularly vulnerable to the redpill sales pitch. Probably the most common question asked in incel spaces is "what can I do differently?". The redpillers say "Of course you lost the game, you didn't even know the rules. Here, let me teach you.". And the incels fall for it because the only other answer they ever get is "It's weird that no one talks about how horrible/subhuman/misogynistic/evil/gross these people are."
Comments like this can do a lot of harm, particularly when they become pervasive. Incels are human beings, not monsters. Showing empathy for them should not be seen as a personal failing.
I agree that in principle there could be non-redpilled incels. In practise, however, I've never met anyone who self-identifies as an incel and doesn't have all the misoginist baggage of a redpill ideology. Those groups has already been lumped together de facto since the term incel became popular.
Maybe we need a separate word for people who don't know how/can't build romantic/sexual relationship, while not buying all the sexist bullshit. Something like "actually nice guys/girls"? I agree that these people deserve our compassion and support.
I mean, I was one of them myself, probably due to being autistic. I didn't have any romantical or sexual relationship till I was 18 and my first attempts were a mess. I had a perception of myself as unloveble and defective, I thought I'll never have a romantic relationship, while craving for one and not knowing what to do. I practised self love and acceptance. I shamelessly masturbated to relieve my sexual urges. I masochistically enjoyed the torment of unreciprocated love. I've learned a lot about women perspective on the issues, and reflected a lot on my own thoughts and feelings in this light. I came to the conclusion that even if women did prefere "bad boys" I'd still wanted to be a nice person. And eventually it worked out for the best.
If you know a community of this kind of incels I would be grateful if you point me to it.
Am I wrong in thinking that the term "incel" actually has "redpill" connotations, these days? Such that if you look for self-identified "incels", you'll find a subset of the "involuntarily celibate" that skews toward "redpill"?
Put another way, would someone who fits your "actually nice guys/girls" category choose to identify themself as "incel", or would they steer away from that term and its negative connotations?
Your problem is that you're focusing on 'self-idnetified incels' at all. The conversation is about incels in the much more literal sense, men who cannot get laid.
I enjoy seeing what the euphemism treadmill will do to this one. I figure in 30 years, the average rapist-murderer will be referred to as a "God among men, one who graced humanity with his benevolence."
Don't forget, with the exception of his daughter, no NuWho companion is allowed to have a love interest because The Doctor is just too Alpha for anyone to complete against.
I think you're 100% right about the obnoxious hypocrisy in that community.
But that David Wong paragraph is also bullshit. Media tales don't tell us *everybody* gets a hot girl, still less that "society" gives them that girl. Media tales tell us *only the hero* gets the hot girl, and he has to earn her through enormous effort, cleverness, luck, et cetera. The sidekicks don't get any girls at all, let alone the hot one -- Chewbacca didn't get a princess, Tonto sleeps alone, the worker bee SHIELD agents don't have a chance with ScarJo, et cetera. Media tales are mostly about the alpha male beating a whole bunch of betas on the wrong side, with the help of a whole bunch of betas on his side, to earn his concubine, so this is a very long way from Oprah Society saying "and you get a hot girl, and you get a hot girl, and...everybody gets a hot girl!"
Wong is a smart guy, but in this particular piece he wandered off into idiocy, forgot to actually make a non-silly logical argument for his conclusion.
You're forgetting that every human being instinctively feels at some point like they're the protagonist of their own "story." It's the default state for children, and continues for many (most?) adults.
Sure, some people manage to intellectually overcome that instinct, but I'd argue that most people never really challenge the dominant narrative about destiny and fate (which is to say that their life is being controlled by an outside author), much less deeply examine story structure enough to understand why we find certain progressions of events infinitely more satisfying than others.
So if one *feels* like one is THE protagonist, and also sees thousands of instances of a protagonist getting a Hot Girl, well...
I'm not forgetting that some people are narcissistic twits, I'm dismissing it as a matter that needs consideration, even by the Whore of Babylon that is Hollywood.
The fact that some people can watch a movie about Chesley Sullenberger cooly saving 155 lives and think "Yeah! That's basically my story, that time I calmly unjammed the Frosty Freez machine at the A&W and prevented an unsightly accumulation of customers in line -- so I totally deserve a Hot Girl!" doesn't say boo about what the makers of epic celluloid drama intend to communicate -- or do, in fact, communicate to the much larger cohort of people who think no such silly thing.
> much larger cohort of people who think no such silly thing.
I mean, in my experience, there is definitely no "much larger cohort" of people who don't seem to instinctively feel that there is (or will be) a narrative structure guiding their life, even if they don't articulate it as such. Some people call it God, some people don't.
Also, it's worth noting that the Hot Girl or Bust trope is part of the larger narrative of the "call to adventure." Luke Skywalker was just a farm kid until the story intervened in his life, and so on.
Everyone is just a protagonist in waiting. Someday, you'll have your own Call to Adventure, and once you finish your adventure, a Hot Girl will be your reward.
Well, get back to me in early middle age. By that point I think almost everybody normal has figured out he's not ever going to be a Medal of Honor winner, Nobel laureate, Oscar-winning movie star and/or platinum-selling rock star, President, Olympic gold-medal winner, MLB MVP, or even as rich as Warren Buffet -- he's just a schmo doing the best he can, and his (or her) focus tends to be on not getting screwed over and not losing what he has already acquired by dint of steady work and a bit ot luck.
I can certainly imagine a good number of young adults, and some small fraction of older Peter Pan types, might persist in thinking Obi-Wan Kenobi might drop out of the sky at any minute and reveal Our Hero is the secret long-lost crown prince of Known Space -- and it's time to pull the sword from the stone and take one's place at the head of the victorious army (and afterward enjoy the many Hot Girls who come with the position). But I haven't met a soul over the age of 35 who thinks that way.
In my experience almost all normal older men (i.e. those that can and have formed successful long-term partnerships with normal women) are well aware they're not Prince Charming, and that if they can get and keep the favor of a gal with the canonical number of arms, legs, and eyes, who may shape up quite decent in a party dress and a lick of eyeliner, but isn't going to be mistaken for Jennifer Connelly circa 1991 even in the dark, they're doing quite well and should be appreciative.
I hazard that's *why* they form successful long-term relationships with normal women, while those nursing secret grandiose fantasies don't.
>Because of course the problem isn't that "no one" is willing to have sex with the kind of low-status men who might feel themselves to be incels.
The problem is that *conventionally attractive and/or high status women in particular* don't want to have relationships and/or sex with the kind of low status men who might feel themselves to be incels.
Okay well, the vast majority of "poor" people are not at immediate risk of deaht due to their "poverty", they're just unhappy that they don't have the same level of wealth as everyone else and society teaches them they hey're entitled to a certain level of material wealth for being born. They should simply settle for the lower level of wealth that the circumstances of their life.
>For incels, it's Hot Girl or Bust,
This is complete nonsense. There are countless lonely men incapable of getting a girlfriend at all. For a more extreme example, look at 'The Undateables' or "Love on teh Spectrum'. Are there perpetually single men on that because their standards are too high? No, they're men with severe social and/or medical handicaps that makes it hard for them to have anyone.
But again, as per above, there's this MASSIVE assymetry betwween what you say about the poor and what you say about incels. It should enough that literally any woman on earth would be willing to date them, no matter how attractive, but it's not enough that the poor are literally able to survive in their poverty.
But how is what you're saying different than telling heterosexual incels that they should have sex with other male incels? They won't do that because they're not attracted to men. Okay, but how is that substanitally different to having sex with *women* they're not attracted to? But again, the idea that incels are "hot girl or bust" is total nonsense.
And for the love of god, don't use "cracked" as a reference if you expect anyone to take you seriously, because the article is truly awful (which is to be epexected from CRACKED)
I think laying this at the foot of Hollywood when this is a narrative structure that appears to be as old as the concept of romance itself is a serious category error. Jason Pargin has a clear grudge against Hollywood for whatever particular reason and has bought into a very mechanistic view of media where some large portion of people are non-agents whose worldview is generated entirely by films. This is a point he implicitly endorses in many of his "comedy" articles (that in truth are little more than the use of humor to cover for beating the shit out of his favorite hobby-horses)- but then categorically rejects the idea that film, TV, video games, etc. could possibly be influential in other ways when he's beating the shit out of how STUPID people are when they say video games and violent films send the message that violence is acceptable in real life. Films and games can apparently turn someone into an entitled toxic dudebro, but even contemplating the same mechanism for the portrayal of violence in a game makes you a stupid censorious Puritan- unless it's violence against women or minorities, in which case you're a hero fighting against social evil by saying this will lead to more hate-crimes IRL. In short, he's a partisan hack who cares more about who and whom than actual arguments, and citing him as your authority only really damages the argument you're making.
I think the main confusion comes from mixing two different things. Let's try to separate them and see where it leads us.
I'll call the first category fairness/unfairness. It's about natural causes. Someone is born with better genetics and someone with worse. One country has valuable ore deposits and another doesn't. It's unfair in a cosmical sense, that our initial conditions are so different. We can and probably should do something to fight this cosmic unfairness. But it is something we are doing out of our kindness and compassion.
The second category is what I'd call justice/injustice. It's about the behaviour of the agents. When one agent betrays the other in an iterated prisoners dilemma, therefore profiting at their expense, it's unjust. And it would be just to betray in response. This doesn't have anything to do with compassion.
So with this in mind lets distinguish between our examples.
Is it unfair that some blogs have more comments than others? In a mulpile ways, it is. Some bloggers were just born more talented then others. Some just haven't accured auditory yet. Some may be popular for reasons unrelated to the quality and usefullness of their content. But is it unjust? Unless a more successfull blogger deliberately sabotages the less successful ones, I don't think so. So the framework of compassion and moral character seems reasonable when we deal with this issue. A more successfull blogger can promote less successfull ones, or we can have some organisation like EA subsidising blogging on specific themes which are less popular for memetic reasons, than others.
Let's look at incels. Is it unfair that some people are naturally more attractive and/or socially skilled? Sure. Is it unjust? Unless more attractive people achieved their attractiveness through exploiting the less attractive ones, no it's not. But, people can indeed become perceived as highter status if they mock lower status people, or at least keep insisting that these people should be lowers status. Such behaviour is unjust. So there can be some justice issues here. And if you check anti-lookism branch of social justice, it indeed tries to deal with these justice related issues, while not requiring a mandatory sexual relationship for everybody.
Is economic inequality unfair? Obviously. Is it just? In a world where there has never been colonisation, wars, slavery and other "betrayals" in prisoner's dilemma it could be just. But in our world, where some people indeed exploited others to build their wealth it is obviously unjust. There is also more complicated labour theory of value argument. Jeff Bezos may have solved a couple of interesting coordination problems and deserves his credit for it, but now he for some weird reasons can grab all the profits from his workers labour infinitely. This seems unjust in a sense that ultimatum game with very unequal split, disproportionate to the actual work done, is unjust.
I'm not so sure that differences in birthplace or genetics should be called unfair even in a cosmic sense. Before being born, everyone presumably has an equal probability of being born rich or poor or smart or dumb. Some people win that lottery of pre-existence and some people don't, but it seems just as fair as any other lottery to me.
I don't think that having probability of something before being existing is a meaningful idea. I find this unfair in a sense that this things happen completely without our consent or merit. When people play lottery they at least agree to do it, so the decision to play can at least be credited to us.
I don’t think we’d necessarily characterize a lottery as unfair just because people were entered in it without their knowledge or volition. Even if you do consciously choose to enter a lottery, whether or not you actually win still has nothing to do with your consent or merit and I don’t think that is usually seen as unfair.
Negative lotteries, like one where the “winner” dies are often seen as unfair, but I guess I look at the pre-existence lottery as positive - every winner gets to exist, with some winners receiving the even greater prize of superior circumstances.
I'm still hung up on the "justice must mean there's a specific villain to be punished" take that apparently a lot of people had. To me it seems like the opposite - the calls for economic, racial, and social justice have been accompanied by people arguing that it's not enough to punish this specific racist or that specific exploitative company, we need to fix the systemic cultural or economic problems that cause it.
In fact, I've frequently seen conservatives arguing the exact opposite as this - "the problem with systemic racism arguments is that they mean even if you don't have a racist bone in your body you're still guilty because you benefit from systemic racism."
The fact that people on both sides can plausibly argue that "justice" means both one thing and its exact opposite should be a massive warning flag that we're confusing ourselves and we should probably taboo the word entirely, but I may as well throw my two cents in:
To me justice implies universality - "in a just world, we would all get exactly what we deserve." This could be achieved either by a literal code of laws which is uniformly enforced or by social norms where everyone agrees what someone deserves, but to call something "just" instead of just "good" you need to appeal to a general principle. Social justice is arguing that our current universal norms around white people should be extended to cover black people as well. Economic justice is arguing that our current norms around distribution of food and shelter should be changed to cover poor people better. And I suppose incel justice would be arguing that our norms around romance and sex should change to cover ugly or unlikeable people.
The difference is that "don't fire people because they're black" or "don't deny food to people even if they can't pay" are fairly enforceable, bright-line principles, while "don't reject people romantically because you don't like them" is kind of self-defeating. By definition, unlikeable people are unliked - as long as people are capable of rejecting their suitors, some people will get rejected more than others. You can't force people to fall in love.
(To be clear, when incels talk about not getting laid they're talking about it in the context of a romantic relationship - finding a prostitute wouldn't suffice according to most of them.)
>The fact that people on both sides can plausibly argue that "justice" means both one thing and its exact opposite should be a massive warning flag that we're confusing ourselves and we should probably taboo the word entirely, but I may as well throw my two cents in:
I think this is true but also that a there's a much more pressing need to taboo the much less meaningful word 'racism'
The "fairness is something even animals have" reminded me of something.
There is really two distinct concepts between "intuitive fairness" (what most just call "fairness" but sometimes call "justice", because people are bad at using different labels for different things) and "procedural justice" (most often called "justice", but sometimes "fairness", for the same reason).
The first one is… well, the intuitive thingie where Bezos having billions and the orphan Somali having nothing seems somehow, you know, well… unfair. I have no trouble believing small children/animals having a version of this concept.
The second is a purely human construction. One of the oldest definition of justice is "suum cuique" (see https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/41897/who-was-first-to-say-that-justice-is-to-give-each-his-due). Justice happens when there is a conflict over a resource between two individuals, and resolution is required to decide who is owed what. The judge does not decide who deserves what depending on personal virtue or relative poverty or fame or criterion like that that may well be relevant to decide "fairness". The judge just try to follow the trail of legal property (A owe B X by contract, B owe C Y by another contract, there’s this inheritance law… so in the end here’s what A, B, and C are due), in the way a scientist would try to follow the source of energy (my muscle move by energy stored in my cells that has been provided by my food that has been fixated by a plant and comes from the sun).
I would argue that the invention of this counterintuitive (by comparison to intuitive fairness) "justice system" is one of the causes of wealth (as a partial answer to "Poverty doesn’t need a cause, it’s the natural condition, we should be looking for the causes of wealth"). And one of the problem of "economic justice" is hijacking the whole "justice" magisterum in order to promote what is basically just intuitive fairness. If, like me, you believe that moving from fairness to justice is a critical step in wealth creation, this cannot end well.
(some) animals have a sense of fairness, but it is almost entirely self-orientated. They will revolt if they feel they are the victims of unfairness, but of course will commonly steal from, rape or kill others if it helps them, vastly more commonly than humans would.
This whole justice discussion seems a little crazy to me. Is 'justice' mostly a blue tribe term? I'm good with charity. (I decide what to do/ who to help.) Justice sounds like someone else decides what is 'just', and I have to go along. I hate it. (Incel 'sexual justice' sounds really creepy to me. The sex I crave is much more than f-ing some pretty women.)
The parallels drawn between economic justice and sexual justice seem cruel to me. Poverty is a question of life and death for millions of humans. Inceldom is... I don't mean to belittle it... tragic, but uncomparable to the amount of suffering caused by poverty.
Very few people in the US face the immediate or even mid-term risk of death due to being poor. Maybe they die younger than they otherwise would....but so do people depressed from abject social failure. Happy healthy relationships is literally a predictor for life expectancy.
The other day I saw the "causes of wealth" quote connected to Jane Jacobs, in The Economy Of Cities.
“To seek "causes” of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development. It can be overcome only if the relevant economic processes are in motion.“
I think the right take on the direction of "animal justice" trends may be a rather cynical one. Most of these brands of justice, "economic justice," "climate justice," "social justice," etc. permit people to congratulate themselves for being on the right side and telling other people they're wrong, and pointing at powerful people or systems they have no part in as the ones who have to take responsibility for actually solving anything. Participating in "animal justice" is generally accepted to call for a level of personal sacrifice in giving up meat or animal products that most people simply don't want to do.
Vegans are widely considered to be preachy and sanctimonious, but on the whole they're just participating, at various levels of outspokenness, in a "justice" movement that most people who participate in other "justice" movements (which are usually mostly overlapping,) don't participate in, because it would require something of them other than cultural affiliation with people they already get along with. They allow people who participate in other "justice" movements to experience what it feels like to interact with people in one from the outside, and I think their reception is a pretty good illustration of how effective "justice" movement norms are at being persuasive or appealing to people who aren't already inside them.
People who're members of other "justice" groups, but not animal welfare groups, don't want to identify the animal welfare movement as a a "justice" movement, because it would mean acknowledging a "justice" movement that they're outside of.
One can think about it as a question about implicit contracts between people. I think most people assume that the default implicit contract is that if someone does something good to you, then you owe them, even if they don't seem to ask for/want anything in return. Accumulating this kind of debt makes people feel bad about themselves, as they use it as an indicator of their goodness and their role in society. The idea of justice changes the nature of the contract and allows people to accept things from others without accumulating debt (as it stipulates that the giver is actually returning their debt to you).
It could be that the whole notion of scorekeeping is detrimental and there is a better way to do it. But still it is deeply ingrained in us; people constantly worry about the nature of their debt in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Because it is so difficult to create and enforce actual contracts it is clear that these kinds of informal and vague contracts have a huge role in society.
The aside on incels reminded me of that Cat Person story from the New Yorker that was all the rage a few years ago. At the time I couldn’t help reading it as a metaphor for class. It was the story of an upper-class/rich person who met a lower-class/poor person and charitably gave him some alms. The lower-class person then thought that this made the two friends, or peers, and acted as though he could be upper-class too. This horrified the upper-class person, who desperately tried to elude the increasingly importunate lower-class person, until finally we, the reader, understand the danger of mingling with the lower-class, who cannot help, of course, but behave in a distasteful, or “classless,” fashion. Of course the story was ostensibly not about class but all about sex and sexual experience—a fumbling unattractive person and an experienced attractive person from a (note this!) sex-positive family. But until I’d read the story I hadn’t thought about how analogous our contempt for “white trash” was to our contempt for incels.
Then the story faded away from everyone’s consciousness, and I forgot all about it. Until this post brought it all back to me.
I love reading this kind of thing from people who aren't virtue ethicists, because virtue ethics makes this demarcation absudly easy. The hard part is justifying virtue ethics as a whole and then justifying which specific list of virtues, but after that, everything becomes simple.
For instance, the rich in this situation are greedy, and the incels are lustful. Very easy demarcation with no justice language required.
You can't prove "virtue ethics" is valid, so this only makes things easy to the extent that people accept that the proclamations by virtue ethicists are valid, but that's useless to teh rest of us who don't accept this.
Of course I can't, but that's not how ethical models work in the first place. You aren't attempting to "prove" the existence of some physical object, you're attempting to justify it in within your paradigm (specifically by assuring that it coheres within your paradigm).
I suppose you can consider this "accepting the proclamations of virtue ethicists" if you want, but at some point in your epistemology, you have "accepted a proclamation" before, though this is a very cynical way to describe intellectual traditions.
Leaving aside the question of "justice" vs. other approaches to framing morality, I think the discussion of incels is flawed in a way that breaks the analogy.
The thing that incels are lacking is not (just) sex per se, but rather the whole complex of social benefit and validation that comes from being in a relationship. This is not really something you can buy on the market, nor is it something you could reasonably compel anyone else to provide. (Indeed, availing of ordinary prostitution would be a step downward for many such people in these social terms.)
Thus, the disanalogy between the incel situation and poverty is obvious: you can take away a small percent of someone's money, and this imposes a pretty predictable and limited harm on them, and it also means that you have money which you can then give to someone else. None of these operations are possible for incels. The question of whether society at large should step in to help those who are harmed is obviously influenced by whether such intervention is even possible.
(Indeed, in large part actual poverty in first-world nations is similar here, in that it's not simply a straightforward lack of money which could be resolved by providing money, but a much deeper issue in personal constitution and/or social position, of which the lack of money is a symptom. Consider the various initiatives to help chronically homeless people by providing them with apartments, which predictably do not improve their situation on the whole and end up terminating when the sponsor wearies of subsidizing someone who is not on a path to self-sufficiency. As in the case of incels, the question of societal intervention in such cases is not a simple question of whether the downsides of a trivial intervention are worth it; it's a much harder question of whether outside intervention can help at all.)
I'm really bewildered that everyone seems to think the only way to help incels is to get them access to paid sex or force unwilling people to have sex with them. But what if you could reform other people's minds and make them romantically attractive instead? just like solving racism is not just about making rules to let black people into restaurants but really about them getting equal consideration as people. Nobody concluded hence the problem is unsolvable because you can't force people to love black people against their will. We changed education, cultural signaling, social mores etc. and while success has been far from total (still lots of racists out there undercover or not) I'm confident that current generation of Americans is less racist / intolerant as that 100 years ago. What makes you think it's impossible to reform people so that they become less discriminatory in their choice of sexual/romantic mates? Used to be most white females probably recoiled at copulating with black men, nowadays mixed race couples are relatively common, I think it's evidence that these mating preferences aren't fixed in stone.
>still lots of racists out there undercover or not
Black/white inequality is caused by people being "undercover racists"? God, this is so dumb. Maybe its time to acknowledge that, no, after all, it turns out that "racism" (which is an even less meaningful word than "justice") is a really lousy explanation for racial inequality.
And this is absolutely relevant if you consider that MASSIVE social changes have done almost nothing to reduce socio-economic inequality between the races, and those changes were comparatively simple to the kind of social change that would be required here, especially since the changes don't have the massive weight of hstorical oppression narratives around race that people find so compelling - 'We need to be nice to black people because something something slavery something segregation' vs 'women need to find ugly awkward men attractive because that would be good for these men'.
>What makes you think it's impossible to reform people so that they become less discriminatory in their choice of sexual/romantic mates? Used to be most white females probably recoiled at copulating with black men, nowadays mixed race couples are relatively common, I think it's evidence that these mating preferences aren't fixed in stone.
Black white pairings are very uncommon per capita, vastly less common than if dating were completely colorblind. And its not clear that any meaningful number of white women have been made to find back men attractive. It may well have been the same, small number have always found them attractive (or would have if they interacted with them) but it wasn't an option in the old days.
Hmm, where did I say black/white inequality is caused by undercover racists? You are completely inventing something I never wrote. I was merely observing that we've managed some real attitude changes among white people about how they view other races (which maybe you want also to debate but seems sufficiently clear to me) even if the change is incomplete as yet. And I was making a parallel and asking why we couldnt do same about the incel topic. As for your comment how it would be super hard to achieve real results (skepticism that I share btw, let's be honest am mainly arguing for arguinh sake here) the retort for that is that it's apparently no reason not to try (the something needs to be done, this is something, hence this needs to be done philosophy) on other issues so why would it be an acceptable excuse here?
> None of these operations are possible for incels. The question of whether society at large should step in to help those who are harmed is obviously influenced by whether such intervention is even possible.
Okay, but maybe instead of forcing anyone to have relationships with them, we tax people and give the money to incels as compensation for their mistreatment by society. It doesn't recitfy the fundamental problem they have, but it's a remtoely plausible policy for acheiving some kind of "justice".
Weird that Scott the steelmanning advocate never addresses the best argument against the incel sex UBI thing, which is bodily autonomy. Leaving that out amounts to weak manning disagreement with his position.
The standard counter-argument is that our bodies are involved in *everything* we do.
Paying taxes (which is a part of "economic justice") usually requires you to bring your body to work. The work may damage your body in various ways (even sedentary jobs are bad for your health), and yet we do not accept "body autonomy" as an excuse for not paying taxes.
The counter-counter-argument is that the use of body in sex service is way more personal. Also, people who pay taxes typically need to get *some* job, but they can reject any *specific* job they really don't like, and choose another one. While the problem with incels is exactly when that no one wants to have sex with this specific person.
This could be addressed by giving people more choice. For example, you would get a list of incels, and freely choose one of them to have sex with. Or, everyone who refuses to have sex with a specific person would pay some money to their personal sex fund instead, and then person who finally agrees to have sex with them would get the whole jackpot.
Alternatively, we could make various forms of justice fungible, for example you can avoid sex with incels by paying twice the tax; or you are free to harm the environment if you spend twice as much time fighting racism. Then everyone could focus on their preferred form of justice, and use their comparative advantage to improve the world.
The effectively altruistic solution would probably be to donate resources to sexbot research.
I love when people say this, as if taxes were some voluntary non-coercive thing.
Taxation invovles the government using the threat of kidnapping, imprisonment and ultimately, if one resists hard enough, death, in order to collect taxes. You just don't have a problem with this because you think it leads to good outcomes (I do too, just to be clear, but I'm not the one talking about "bodily autonomy), and/or you may not think of it in these terms because so few people truly resist taxation.
And I mean, of course, nobody would be literally "forced" to have sex, it's just that they would be fined or coercivively imprisoned if they don't fufill their obligations.
I feel like there is an important distinction between "X is an injustice", and "we (i.e. the government) should try to fix X by coercing other people".
This fits nicely with:
>For instance, what is St. John Chrysostom invoking when he says "the coat rotting in your closet belongs by rights to man who has no coat" if not some version of economic justice?
This is indeed a version of economic justice. And centuries of people have struggled with the fact that life is so unfair. But just because I think the coat in the closet should be given to a poor person, does not mean I think I should take it from someone else's closet to give to a poor person.
I understand the term 'justice' to be referring to the context of laws/rules, and think it makes more sense of the situation to think of 'economic justice' to be about saying 'the rules of the economic system are set up poorly, such that some people aren't given a fair shot'. I think this should be seen as seperate from 'economic compassion', which is something like saying 'this particular person or group is doing economically poorly (for just or unjust reasons), and I feel badly for them and would like to help them.'
I feel like people are overusing the justice term lately, but also that it does have some relevance and meanings which matter. Like, I would see 'economic justice' as a call to see if we can design a system which would still allow for the good parts of capitalism, with the brilliance of letting prices shift priorities in a information-rich complex system beyond what humans can consciously design and manage, but minimize some of the bad effects. I mean, I think bankruptcy laws are an attempt to do exactly this sort of compromise between letting people go into debt and yet not throwing them into debtors prison when they screw up.
And 'climate justice' to me seems to be a call to have better international laws around pollution that crosses international borders. If countries had to pay a carbon tax for the CO / CO2 / etc that leaves their borders, and this carbon tax went to global warming mitigation like tropical ocean cloud seeding, this would be a great thing for the world. Countries would then be motivated to reduce their tax by taking actions internally to reduce emissions, and meanwhile, warming would have funds set aside to address the issue. The hard part is getting the nations of the world to come together to agree to and enforce such regulations.
So, in this case, justice/injustice can be seen as a call to change or create rules of law. Climate action might be going out and directly seeding some clouds. Climate compassion/charity would be granting money / citizenship rights / property ownership to people displaced by warming-related flooding. Climate welfare would be setting up laws to do climate compassion in a systematic way with tax dollars. Climate education or consciousness or conscientiousness would be a call to shift social dialogue and opinion in favor of any of the above types of pro-climate action.
What about incel injustice? I'd say that a reasonable call to fix incel injustice would be legalizing sex work (which is something a lot of progressive liberal people I know are indeed in favor of). A change of the rules of the game. Whereas incel compassion would be a call for someone who is personally in a position to give physical affection to someone they know to lack avenues for that, to bias themselves somewhat in favor of giving that desired affection. I'm not saying that seems like a good solution to me, just that I feel like it makes sense as a topic of discussion. Incel consciousness could be something like working against social taboos against seeking sexual satisfaction in non-partner-requiring ways like masturbation, porn, sex toys / dolls, etc.
The issue isn't even that the things promoted under the banner of 'economic justice' or 'climate justice' are necessarily bad (though, they often are), it's that using "justice"to describe them can be seen as a bad faith, manipulative tpye of language to use. Because if you oppose a tax raise, you aren't simple against raising taxes, you're against ""economic justice"" and therefore support "injustice". Basically the same as the term 'progressive'. If you oppose a piece of legislation that liberals overwhelmingly support, you're not just against that policy, you're "anti-progress".
A better example than the Incel one is Meat Farming. Even Justice-obsessed people will not refrain from eating meat, and thus you can call them out on their own hypocrisy.
1) Farm animals are suffering terribly
2) It’s not their fault, and they’ve done nothing to “deserve to suffer”
3) Humans don't need to eat meat
4) Therefore, it is Injustice
5) ***And yet you claim to be pro-justice while eating meat everyday***
I'm not pointing this out to be judgmental about eating meat (and it's certainly not impossible for meat farming to be done ethically), I'm just trying to make clear that people will gladly turn off the Justice part of their brain when it suddenly impacts them rather than someone else.
I think people who unironically use terms like 'economic justice' are probably going to be vastly more likely to be vegan or vegetarian, and at least eat less meat generally. And they certainly aren't going to say there's nothing wrong with eating meat, it will be 'I'm trying to eat less but vegan food is expensive' etc. so it doesn't really work. Whereas, I expect virtually 100% of them to immediately reject the incel example without thinking about it, and that's a better example of them not applying their views consistently.
> It’s hard to think of a way to help him that doesn’t impinge on important freedoms in some
> way...
>
> ... Needless to say, if we held the same mindset when thinking about climate or the
> economy, we could generate the same objections.
Actually, I think that this is exactly the mindset that we should have about these problems, whether it be "incel justice" or "climate justice".
First, acknowledge the fact that there's a way in which the world is unfair for systemic reasons, and as a result, there are some people/animals/the-environment which are being damaged or hurt in some way. Second, do some brainstorming to figure out if there is some way to alter the system (because it's a systemic problem), and what the cost of those alterations might be for everyone.
Applied to "climate justice", this looks like the following. What are the likely effects of climate change, and how much would it cost to avert? Note that cost can be measured in various ways, so there is plenty of room for debate. In a justice/freedom/rights framing, it's a question of what freedoms or rights do we give up to avert climate change, versus the unjust harm that would occur. With a more economic framing, the question is: how much money would we have to spend, vs the economic damage from rising sea levels in 100 years?
In the case of the climate, there's a pretty clear argument that renewables are now cheaper than coal, almost as cheap as gas, and infrastructure investments can actually increase economic growth. Thus the cost of investing in renewables now is minimal, and the likely costs of the IPCC "business as usual" projections are beginning to look quite bad, regardless of whether you measure the cost in terms of "freedom/justice" or "dollars".
Similarly, if Jeff Bezos is rich while Somali orphans are starving, you could start to crunch some numbers about whether a progressive tax on the rich could pay for universal food security for the poor, how high the tax would have to be, and how much freedom or economic growth we'd have to give up to achieve the goal of food security.
How would one go about trying to solve the incel problem? The government forcing random women to have sex, in Japanese WWII "comfort women" style, clearly does *NOT* satisfy any conceivable cost/benefit tradeoff, under any framing. However, there are other potential solutions that might pass muster -- should prostitution be made legal, as is done in Nevada? Could "conjugal therapy" from a licensed practitioner be prescribed by a psychiatrist? (Note that I am not taking a side this debate -- I am merely pointing out that there is room for rational debate.)
I think the usual approach to the case of the blameless incel and other kinds of unlucky people is to agree that society has an obligation to offer "reasonable" aid but not "unreasonable" aid, and then spend way too much time arguing exactly what kinds of aid are reasonable and which are unreasonable?
Irrelevant side note, just because I've just been reading about it: you quote "Christian charity is superior to justice, because the just man only helps people who ‘deserve’ help, whereas the Christian helps everybody"
There's different ways of reading this - true is that Christian tradition (which seems to have been partly abandoned in Christian societies over the course of the 14th to 17th century in favor of forced labor and prohibition of begging) gives alms without means testing or applying moral standards. Giving is a chance to be virtuous, a beggar provides opportunity to be virtuous and humble, and from that follows veneration of the poor and needy - for their role in that exchange. It's not about solving the need at all, it's about, uh, virtue signaling, to God.
But: that is not exactly the same as helping everybody. It's helping those who fulfill their role of being poor and desperate, the more destitute, dirty, *other*, the better, not necessarily to arouse compassion, but to make the act of giving more virtuous. Accordingly, we get people canonized as saints for eating shit or crawling in the dirt etc, and literally poisoning yourself to present with foamy mouth and seizures is a viable begging strategy (this might work in other cultures, too, but being met with disgust and fear can also harm your prospects and nowadays it's much more prudent to present yourself as virtuous, willing to work and polite). If you don't need help and ask for it anyway, you're not upholding your end of the bargain of making the giver get bonus points for admittance to heaven, so you better fake it (and people are incentivized to believe you, so they won't ask for proof).
In contrast, in ancient Rome and Greece, benefaction had little to do with poverty or need, instead, it was the virtue of supporting family, friends, fellow citizens - your in-group, in need or not. While there's also some private charity to the poor documented, that's less of a matter of virtue and more a personal preference. Virtue is getting your nephew a good job and inviting your friends to dinner, not give alms to the foreign weirdo on the street. Gods don't demand you feed the poor, inequality (i.e. slavery) is the backbone of Greek and Roman society (not to say (all) Christian societies were more equal, but at least their religious text is pretty clear on it). Christianity got their conception of charity from oriental cultures, instead.
Obviously, cultural issues are never black and white and don't form neat categories, so take all of this with a grain of salt. I hope I made some semblance of sense and have not introduced errors of translation.
Confusingly, criminal justice is itself unjust. Reason being, punishment is abuse saddled in excuses. I believe it’s been shown that prisons abuse people who were already abused as children, or are even innocent by false accusation. I’d call that unjust, at least.
This means that popular concepts of “justice” that are based on criminal justice can really be excuses to hurt people. But there is also “restorative justice,” which seeks correction without punishment. So any given “___ justice” can mean nearly opposite things to different people!
" I believe it’s been shown that prisons abuse people who were already abused as children, or are even innocent by false accusation. I’d call that unjust, at least."
What does this even mean? That 100% of inmates were abused as children and/or are falsely accused/convicted?
I mean, for goodness' sake, at least show some data if you going to say stuff like this
Here's a problem I have. Calling something unjust, or unfair implies a moral obligation to change it. Ought implies can. Therefore unfair or unjust implies that there is a possible alternative that's better. And I would say not only possible in principle, but also in practice.
And that's where a lot of these arguments go wrong in my view. "The current state of affairs is unjust and we have to change it, now we only need to figure it out how". No, that's putting the cart before the horse! First you provide an alternative that's better and feasable and then you can call the current state of affairs unjust. Something that cannot be different cannot possibly be unfair.
I have no problem with social justice by the way. I just think the contemporary discourse surrounding it is tarred by Utopic thinking.
"Here's a problem I have. Calling something unjust, or unfair implies a moral obligation to change it. Ought implies can. Therefore unfair or unjust implies that there is a possible alternative that's better. "
I think it is much better to be willing to live with injustice and recognize it as such than to say unless I have a solution this must be the best of all possible worlds. Unless your morality is might makes right then it's easy to find injustice that cannot be easily solved (basically all of foreign affairs). Using a justice framework requires bystanders to think about their role in perpetuating the injustice.
Sexual justice is trolly because it’s intended to be obviously absurd, but break it down and it touches on valid social issues.
To reduce the problem of incels to sex is to neglect the many different needs met in relationships. Take them one at a time. Would you say it’s a bad thing to have justice for children of neglectful parents, who were deprived of connection and belonging, and might just need therapy and hugs?
Mocking it as “sexual justice” would be akin to mocking poverty as “break into your house and steal food from your fridge justice.” Bottom line is, people are hurting, and they can and should be helped in entirely reasonable ways.
You ask yourself why you find the idea of animal justice more compelling than climate or economic justice. It’s pretty clear that what is different is that you don’t think that *your actions that contribute to climate or economic injustice (etc) are big enough contributors to the problem to be the bad or immoral action driving the suffering of sentient beings*. Given that you talk about justice in terms of retribution against people who can/should be blamed for suffering caused by bad/immoral behavior, it is completely unsurprising or remarkable that you don’t think *you* should be held responsible for the (putatively) unjust outcome of human suffering in the case of climate, economic disparity, etc.
I find this fascinating, because while I don’t see a clear or coherent point from either of these posts, you spent a good deal of the first post alleging that the “woke” perspective on justice means punishment, when it’s pretty clear that this is your own internal model for justice. (By the way, do you have any research to back up the idea that this is a commonly-held view? In a country where the title we give our supposedly most-impartial people the title of Justice, not because they punish but because they are supposed to hear cases and sentence fairly, according to the law and the merits of the case? The blindfolded lady with the scales? The contrast that vigilantism/vengeance-seeking presents to that system, immortalized in a kajillion super-popular comic books and action movies and scifi narratives, and probably religious books going back much farther than even the philosophy underwriting our wee teenaged nation?)
You provide the examples that playing computer games or buying cheap goods from Amazon are sympathetic, not bad or immoral, and you expect that your audience will, too. You think that caging, torturing, and killing animals is bad, and tell your audience so in a way that is clearly unsympathetic. Like all other animals, humans are sentient beings, and I imagine that you don’t think it’s moral for them to suffer, either.
So, if your actions are unsympathetic (or are predicated on the actions of others that you believe to be bad/immoral, given that you don’t to my knowledge harvest your own animals when you eat or have eaten meat), and those actions contribute to the suffering of sentient beings, you believe a movement seeking justice is warranted - you even participate, as you’ve written about trying to eat less meat for these reasons, about the moral goodness of vegans, soliciting donations for animal-welfare groups, and discussing other animal-justice topics in examples like this one.
But if you think your actions are sympathetic, and they contribute to the suffering of sentient beings, a justice movement is not only unwarranted, but must be motivated by a sinister power play to punish *you* for being bad and immoral. Your writing attests to this on many fronts. This is not a fancy philosophical conundrum, just the oldest bias in the book.
There is no sympathy discernable for actual, living human beings in the real world when you glibly contrast Jeff Bezos with “a Somali orphan”, or pen a hot take on the relationship of Mali’s climate to economic success. I know people who gravitated to you years ago because they felt you had compassion for people others didn’t, like sad and frustrated young men who wanted to find love. Where is that compassion when people suffer but there is no individual to blame? Are you incapable of recognizing injustice without a villain?
I think the original point, that framing questions as issues of justice is unhelpful and inevitably distopian, is a great one, but the Incel argument is not a good one. It is pretty absurd to characterize Incels as people who are unable to get sexual partners - the vast majority of people encounter that difficulty to some degree in their lives. And that frustration has led to lots of great art - for example, all the zillions of songs and stories that have sexual frustration as their subject -- as well as a tremendous amount of personal growth. You're not an Incel if you've been sexually frustrated, for whatever reason, and sing the blues over it.
You're an incel if you claim this makes you a victim. Incels are offended by the perceived unfairness of not getting what they want, characterizing the cause for that as perpetrators (often, young attractive women in general, or society, or whatever, so long as it works as an object of their anger). In other words, Incels are already demanding "sexual justice", including demands for retribution against those who haven't given them what they wanted. What's truly crazy about this is that it actually does lead to people claiming Incel victimhood to violently attack people who are objects of their desire, without waiting for the objectified person to even reject them first. That's not hypothetical, it's really happening. That's very distopian in my book.
As I see it, this is just one more manifestation of the ascendance of the claim to victimhood in our society. Appealing to people's sense of being victimized is one of the most potent political tools for inspiring activism these days. It's reached truly ridiculous proportions, when our former billionaire president works hard to portray himself as victim in chief, with a whole movement of subordinate victims uniting around his victim banner. And it's pervasive across the whole political spectrum, as you've very aptly pointed out. Indeed we're almost to the point of having one overriding ideology, which I'd call "Victimatarianism" that pervades the whole political spectrum. Which seems to me the reason for all this talk about "justice" rather than social improvement. If we're all victims, it means, we're all out for justice.
Which is why your original point about framing this whole laundry list of social issues as questions of justice is so important and so right. When an issue is framed as a question of justice as that word is actually used in politics, it implies there's a perpetrator and a victim. If you frame the same question in terms of responding to a challenge or reform or social improvement, it focuses on making things better rather than the perpetrator-victim dualism. Actual positive improvement results from looking at improving things beyond the question of justice for perpetrators and victims.
Justice is a useful concept when you're talking about how to deal with defined specific wrongs that people have suffered. But it's pretty iffy even in that limited context -- court cases, for example, turn out to be miscarriages of justice all too often. So much so that most court cases are resolved by compromise, not by "justice" being done. When politics turns into a quest for justice, it can really get ugly, as we've seen for the past few years on every side of the political spectrum.
I know this isn’t relevant (don’t get mad at me pls Scott) but is anyone at EAGx in Oxford this weekend? If so would love to meet up, I don’t know anyone there nor any rationalists and/or ACX readers in real life. If so let me know or book a meeting, my name is Gruffydd Gozali on swapcard. Or just reply here.
To a Georgist or a socialist, most people are poor because they are being robbed. Squeezed by the factory owner on one end and the landlord (or mortgage lender) on the other. Because the boss and the landlord own the underlying land, they have an exclusive right to the land and its natural resources for all time, and they can extract the wealth created by their employees / tenants, who have no choice but go along with it because they need the land for shelter and sustenance.
(This example was much more relatable during the Industrial Revolution but it is equally valid today. All wealth ultimately derives from land and natural resources. We could also construct a similar example with drug companies and intellectual property, but there are some interesting differences.)
Of course the factory owner and landlord would tell you that they acquired their land fair and square, and they don't make the rules. And I accept that argument (insofar as they don't fund politicians to maintain the status quo (which they do)).
So it looks like poor people are poor because of the way we think about property rights. In other words, what can be "owned"? Can a person own something that was not created by another person? If we all agree to let certain things-not-made-by-humans be owned (i.e. land) because we think it will be a net benefit (i.e. encourage economic activity), how should this special kind of ownership be different (if at all) from normal kinds of ownership (e.g. owning your body, the fruits of your labor)? Socialists think all land should be collectivized. Georgists think it should just be taxed much more (and stop taxing everything else).
I am much more convinced by this conception of justice than the comparatively naïve argument "inequality implies injustice". Thomas Paine actually called it "agrarian justice".
An interesting aside, then, is what to do with the incels and sexual injustice. If we ascribe to Georgism and believe in helping the poor insofar as they have been exploited by landowners, can we now raise the bar of injustice and conclude that the incels are on their own? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
A lot of this drives home to me how philosophically bankrupt most modern discussions of ethics generally are.
Similarly "Human Rights" are this foundational concept in international law, PMC moralizing, yet they are totally incoherent. They assume obligations on others and the notion of violation and remedy are totally confused.
If someone in Africa doesn’t have access to healthcare, who is violating their human rights? Just the government of their own country, or every hospital in the world that doesn’t offer them free treatment?
What about people in Tonga, after the volcano went off did the volcano violate their human rights? Or did the government or the broader international community violate people’s rights until aid could be delivered?
What about HIV in the 80’s when there was no treatment? Did the virus violate people’s human rights, did the scientists by failing to develop a cure, or was there no human rights violation? or after anti retro virals were developed, did the drug developers instantly begin violating the human rights of anyone who has HIV but did not receive drugs?
Most positive "human right" I think are better understood as privileges a country ought to provide citizens rather than sorts of universal freedoms. Of course this doesn't square well with the idea that "privileges" are somehow dirty and signify moral pollution. Human rights unless restricted to freedom from oppression, freedom from abuse and violence etc... seem rather incoherent.
Exactly. This is precisely how I think about the issue of "human rights." Did all of the people who lived in countries without elections for thousands of years before democracy was invented have their human rights (to vote) violated?
"But of course how humans tend to behave is also a product of culture (more evidence of injustice!) and this kind of reply is less appealing in other domains e.g. if government officials keep being corrupt, you don’t say ‘well maybe instead of calling this state of affairs unjust we should remember what human nature is like, and design systems around it, think about what’s more effective, have a positive narrative’"
I found this curious, because I would use the corruption argument pretty much word by word (in fact it is one of the most basic libertarian arguments for less state). While individual cases of corruption are unjust, I don't think it is helpful to call a crusade on corruption because it is treating symptoms without treating the cause. The cause is human nature and cultural norms. Cultural norms are indeed changeable but there are parts of human nature that are immutable and not affected by culture - I see economics mostly as the study of this basic human nature.
You can create cultural norms in which corruption is less acceptable and more stigmatized but if your system of societal organization makes it more attractive then there will be more corruption and you cannot just change this by social norms alone.
In general, I think this care vs. fairness dichotomy is kind of similar to the utilitarian vs. deontological view of the world. It seems to me that fairness is a lot more deontological and care/harm a lot more utilitarian.
My biggest problem with deontological social philosophy (regardless of the ideology) is that is is prescriptive. It derives what it sees as the just state of the world somehow and then tries to bend the existing state of the world to reach the just state. But conflict arises when this just state of the world is in conflict with the basic human nature and then you get things like real socialism when you wanted a communist utopia (I have the same problem with deontological libertarians by the way).
Partly I see this in claims like "we produce enough, we just need to redistribute it better". But there are reasons why we produce quite as much and these reasons also affect why we distribute the way we do. We can improve this marginally through charity, shifts in cultural norms (appreciating people for philanthropy instead of admiring their expensive yachts) etc., but if we actually change the core of the system then we cannot take the fact that we produce so much for granted any more. The size of the pie that we bake is not fixed. But this is much clearer and more obvious from the perspective of "what can we do to make sure everyone gets more pie?" than if you start with the premise that it is unjust that someone gets more (or at least much more) of the pie than someone else and think about the ways to change that instead.
Speaking of Justice . . .A rudimentary deconstruction of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's introduction in the Senate makes it clear she's a crypto-libertarian, and that terror of the Democratic Party -- a moderate, conservative African American.
She paused to reaffirm her thanks to God, declaring "It is faith that sustains me at this moment." She declared she was blessed beyond measure to be born in "this great nation." She acknowledged that the lawful segregation and many other barriers her parents endured had ultimately made her own experience possible. And she thanked her parents for her African identity and name, and the family ethos that if she worked hard in America, she could reach her "God-given potential." And, by the way, her entire family is in public service -- lawyers, jurists, police officers, a military officer, and several doing time in prison. In front of family and lifelong friends, Judge Brown Jackson declared she would apply "careful adherence to precedence" to the constitution.
So, do we send Ms. Ocasio-Cortez Xanax or flowers? Judge Brown Jackson looks like just what America needs -- the best qualified person for the job. Hopefully non-partisan.
On the hog farm example, I think this matches "justice" well because it's a simple on/off question, and you'll find justice works best in those scenarios. The hog farm can be made to stop polluting those properties. It's a yes/ no kind of question. Similarly:
- Should someone go to jail? There's a straight-forward yes/no answer.
- Should people be denied access to bathrooms and parks based on the colour of their skin?
- Should prisoners be tortured?
- Should people eat animals?
- Should employers be allowed to charge workers for trumped up costs, putting them into debt, thereby forcing them to effectively work as slave labour?
In contrast, many economic and social questions are not yes/no, and so they do not fit well into the mould of justice. To achieve a society where people earn a decent income, it takes more than answering yes/no questions. You need to work out the details of a market economy and redistribution. If you want more people to have sex (a worthy goal), there probably are real solutions, but they will not be an answer to a yes/no question. If you want to stop climate change, etc etc.
To underline this point, consider cases where courts have attempted to decide how to assign government budgets to achieve issues of economic justice. It happened in Canada at least once. If that seems like a bad idea (it is), it should give a sense of why justice doesn't work well beyond yes/no questions.
I think this idea seems good with the examples you have and then utterly falls apart on further inspection. You provide an answer to the hog farm example as a yes no (yes they can stop polluting) but that's assuming a question was posed as "should the hog farmer stop polluting (y/n)" rather than the question "in the process of running a hog farm, waste from the farm causes harm to the neighboring community, what should be done?". There's no difference between the case of hog farmers dumping waste into the neighboring communities and "everything that emits CO2" contributing to climate change from a question point of view. What's different is only the scope of the problem and the actual tradeoffs we want to make.
This is a thoughtful response and I disagree. Courts are capable of managing disputes of the type "Company X is breaking Y pollution law on Z's property." This is a fairly normal court dispute. Yes, there is then a lot of details that the company has to figure out to stop polluting on the property and to come into compliance with the law, but at the end of the day, a court can decide the question: "is the company in conformance with the law, yes/no." Similarly, engineers are required to build structurally sound buildings, and it is a matter of justice that they do so. Achieving this goal requires all kinds of complex details, but at the end of the day, a court can ask: "did the building stay standing? Yes/no" or, "Is the engineer legally at fault for the building collapsing? Yes/no."
So, you can pass some pretty complex stuff through a yes/no justice filter, but there is a ton of stuff it doesn't work for. Is a government doing enough for climate change? Is a government devoting a sufficient proportion of its budget to reducing poverty versus its many other goals? Are transit planners doing a good enough job?
I'm an urban planner trying to bring more yes/no style justice to a field that has none of it, so it's something I think about a lot. It's important and it has limits.
1. are we satisfied with the amount of justice in category X?
2 if not, what is a well formed question that could be evaluated for X
When people demand justice they are typically saying that the current laws do not satisfy 1. In an ideal legislative process a law would be passed that addresses 2. Saying that "is the government doing enough for climate change" is about step 1. The answer will be something like a carbon tax (or cap and trade or direct compensation to countries etc). The current laws on pollution, food quality, etc all came from previous rounds of people demanding justice in ambiguous forms and then figuring out a set of questions that addressed it (again this doesn't result in JUSTICE but instead is an incremental step to living in a more just society).
Something that seems to be overlooked in the incel-gets-laid analogy is that sex, while having been commodified for time out of mind, is only the top layer of the problem: This hypothetical incel would be better served by a meaningful human interaction, not just meaningless sex as a financial transaction. In other words, the physical release doesn't seem to be the problem or solution here. Sex is just the last act of a multi-act play. It's everything that comes before it that gives sex meaning and satisfaction, and shorn of the events leading up to it, the incel just ends up exactly were he started. And possibly worse off: Just as frustrated and unfulfilled as before. You could theoretically mandate the act, but you'll never mandate intimate love between two people.
On the Jewish view of charity, I think Scott gets it wrong - and instead of trying to write out a detailed refutation of why I'd claim that mainsteam Jewish sources view "charity" as an obligation to do justice in distributing funds, I'll just quote a big excerpts from my book chapter on Effective Altruism and Charity (For more on charity and religion, read the book, it's free - https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/9783748925361/effective-altruism-and-religion ):
“If there will be among you a needy person, from one of your brothers, in your cities, in your land the Lord, your G-d, is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, and you shall not close your hand from your needy brother. Rather, you shall open your hand to him, and you shall lend him sufficient for his needs, which he is lacking. ... For there will never cease to be needy within the land. Therefore, I command you, saying, you shall surely open your hand to your brother, to your poor, and to your needy in your land.” - Deuteronomy 15:7-11
While a variety of biblical texts discuss charitable giving of various sorts, the one most relevant to modern charitable giving is the above passage in Deuteronomy. Per later sources, the exact phrasing of these verses is critical in understanding the contours of the obligation. For example, a discussion that becomes critical to the question of moral obligation is that verse 7 uses the terms “among you,” “needy person,” “in your cities,” and “in your land.” According to the Sifrei, the order indicates a preference for the recipients of giving, so that according to most opinions, physical location creates a biblically mandated preference - albeit one that may be overridden by different levels of need.
Still, the biblical obligation laid out in Deuteronomy provides a baseline rather than a complete picture. The Shulcan Aruch notes in the very first rule about charity that the Bible repeatedly exhorts Jews to assist others by giving charity, which emphasizes its importance. (Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah 247). In addition to the theoretical discussion of importance, the actual emphasis on charity by Jewish communities is clear historically... the rabbis viewed redistribution of wealth to the poor to be a central function of post-temple Judaism.
The Rabbinic obligation to give charity is based on the biblical idea of giving a tenth of a person’s wealth to the needy. This was introduced by Abraham when he says, in Genesis 14:20, that he will give a tenth of his wealth to a priest of the lord. Fourteen chapters later, Jacob accepts this obligation on an ongoing basis, saying that he will give a tenth of whatever he receives. This is not itself an obligation for future generations to give a tenth of their non-agricultural income, but forms the conceptual basis for the requirement.
The way in which one fulfills this obligation is the subject of much discussion. There is some talmudic discussion, but most of the discussion about the allocation of charity appears in later sources. For instance, there is a distinction drawn between charitable giving to community institutions and that given to the poor. For example, in Nachmanides’ explanation, found in his commentary on Deuteronomy 12:6, discusses Exodus 35:24, where a surplus of funds is available for building the tabernacle, and the point is made that communal needs are limited, unlike personal donations. Once those needs are fulfilled, as seen in Exodus, communal leaders are responsible to stop further giving. No such limitation exists for giving to the poor, and while each individual has a limited requirement, the obligation to give remains...
...Peter Singer makes the clear case in his book Practical Ethics that the wealthy have a moral obligation to help the poor on utilitarian grounds. The rich have sufficient resources, and even for someone with only somewhat utilitarian beliefs, a person should certainly be willing to sacrifice at least a small portion of their own comfort to help others, providing great benefit at very low cost.
Judaism takes a compatible view of the obligation for Tzedakah, albeit from a markedly non-utilitarian viewpoint; “He who ignores those in need is called wicked and is regarded as if he worships idols.” (Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah 247:1) The deontological prohibition against turning away the needy, “shutting your hand” (Deuteronomy 15:7) from helping them, has a clear biblical source. Expanding on this, the latter clause of the Shulchan Aruch suggests an equivalence to idol worship, a sin considered on par with murder, deriving from the fact that all wealth comes from G-d, as the Rema’s gloss notes just afterwards; “People must realize that they themselves are given sustenance by G-d,” (Rema, Yoreh Deah 247:3) and failing to use the wealth granted by G-d to help others would, by this logic, be considered rejecting G-d. This argument can be sourced to a passage in the Talmud, Kiddushin 82b. “Poverty does not come from a trade, nor does wealth come from a trade; rather, they come from the One to Whom wealth belongs, as it is stated [citing the verse in Haggai, 2:8]: ‘Silver belongs to me, Gold belongs to me, says the Lord of hosts.’”
Returning to the comparison to Effective Altruism, some object to Singer’s view on the non-utilitarian grounds that the moral choice to help the poor is only important if donations are, in fact, made by choice. Given that objection, it is worth noting that Judaism rejects this logic; in many cases, those who do not donate by choice can be compelled by the court to do so. At the same time, Jewish law does recognize a great deal of latitude and choice in the selection of recipients and causes.
While I am somewhat sympathetic to Scott's biases on justice creep, I do find his more discrete biases (i.e., climate change vs. animal welfare) to be incongruent. But I think I know why: I think we all have different areas of interest where we feel our unique powers as humans should be used to challenge the natural order of things, and where we feel that arrogantly overstepping our abilities as humans could lead to catastrophic ends.
Ultimately, what I see is that we're essentially debating the amount of agency we, as the most powerful sentient beings on the planet, have in determining and overriding otherwise natural outcomes.
One the one side, we have the more-or-less conservative/libertarian view that we, as the most powerful sentient beings on the planet, are still mostly just animals doing our thing. We have the right to pursue reproduction, pleasure, and power as we see fit because we are just another animal in the broader panoply of nature's actors roaming the planet. To this cohort, we're no less opportunistic than SARS-COV-2. We aim to reproduce at whatever cost, which is external to our being.
On the other side, we have the more-or-less progressive/conscientious idealist view that we, as the most powerful sentient beings on the planet, have the ability to bend the system to our whims. And therefore we have the obligation to bend systems and actions towards more fair and just ends. To this cohort, we as humans are essentially externalities to nature writ large, and as such, we have almost G-d like powers to transform nature's inherent bias towards the most fit and against the least fit.
From the libertarian/conservative perspective, we actually should be humble in how we wield our powers, because if we wield them too wildly, we could actually severely disrupt the natural order of things. This would be the "humans-as-arrogant-muckrakers" theory of interaction.
From the progressive/conscientious idealist perspective, we actually should exert our unique abilities to wield our impressive powers, because only we have the ability to overturn nature's blindness to justice, and it's our moral obligation to do so, because we have the power and ability to do so.
To further distill this: I see all of this as fodder for the "are humans uniquely externalized actors in nature or simply the most dangerously-advanced part of nature" debate.
The internal name of the Google feature "About X results (Y.Z seconds)" is tinkernickle. By removing it, ad revenue is reduced. No one can explain why.
I think a lot of problems with "justice" come from the idea that there is one perfect thing we want and we have the ability to select the optimal choice. Instead it's better to imagine that there are a number of different goals we have and we want to live on the efficient frontier but for any problem we have to tradeoff some justice vs another. Playing video games might not be an issue but driving a low mpg car might be an issue because the scale actually matters (alternatively we could decide that value of video games is too low but transportation is super important so even though video games causes less relative emissions it's a worse action). This also solves the incel issue, as a society we might consider it unjust that some people don't get to have sex with the people they want, but we recognize that people have a more important right to chose who they have sex with. In the more sympathetic framing, we might want to follow the Netherland's example (https://dutchreview.com/culture/relationships/sex-care-in-the-netherlands-helping-the-disabled-find-intimacy/).
Re: Sexual Welfare - there is actually a debate around this in Germany, where various very large, reputable and politically established (non-"woke") organizations like pro familia demand for the health / disability insurance or social aid system to support disabled or old people seeking out sex workers, as these organizations regard the experience of intimacy as an essential human necessity (to stay away from the term "human right"). There are also some initiatives, funded by disabled citizen interest groups, that train up and certify sex workers to better understand the needs and to better provide for disabled clients.
The concepts of 'compelling' vs 'convincing' are also at the heart of the matter. Scott explores a lot of how to describe what is wrong and how/if it is wrong. This dissection of harms, unfairness, breaches of moral or philosophical or divine codes, etc. kind of skips the part where the vast majority of people would choose for their to be less suffering in a general sense. Perhaps not a strong preference to inconvenience them in any way, but they'd still generally choose less suffering over more suffering for themselves and others.
So if we can agree on that part for the 99% of non-psychopaths or non-sadists or whatever to have even a basic level of empathy and goodness, then it is a matter of how to go about it.
The nature of how things are wrong or how much we wish they were different matters and I'm not saying to disregard that part. It still factors in, but the other half of 'how far do we go to change this' is perhaps the more salient part in terms of coming up with a matrix of matched unfairness vs fair efforts to reduce suffering.
Shall we use force? Shall we convince people? Shall we accept this problem?
What strategy can we use. If we look at criminal justice reform and how difficult and unfair and tragic the current systems around the world and throughout history have been in terms of doing things like identifying criminal responsibility and punishment levels based on evidence and guilt of individuals or groups....it can't be said to be a flawless or great system, at best it is necessary that we try and we've never been very good at it.
This is why I like the idea of helping people with moral and cultural goals to align more and more people to your belief and value system. If something is repugnant to a culture, then it will seek to get rid of it.
If we just pass some law and very few people believe in it, then I'm not sure how much can be achieved if police and litigators ignore that law or courts with culturally based human judges will always weight other culturally important to them factors higher and jury members will do the same.
If we just want to reduce suffering in many forms and many people agree with us, then this seems like it would be more effective than trying to use a justice frame to convince people.
Why? Because of this very blog post in a meta-sense. Instead of talking about ways to improve the climate or eliminate factory farming or put in a UBI for morally and culturally good reasons to eliminate severe poverty within a nation....we are side tracked into arguing about if this is a justice issue or not.
The semantics and distraction of asserting justice and its inherently 'compulsive' forces instead of 'convincing' forces makes people reject your idea because you're calling them a criminal on some level instead of simply appealing to them.
In some way there is a 'threat' of force and compulsion if 'you get your way' and this is an issue of 'justice'. This activates a certain degree of threat response and is inherently hostile. I don't think that's the way to go...to include violence and hostility in the conversation when in reality it was always about convincing others to cooperate with you...even if you're trying to convince them to use society's violence against people who disagree.
There is a disharmony there. If we need to convince others to reduce suffering, then why would we use language of violence which increasing suffering? We are thrust into some trolley problem of who suffers instead of just trying to alleviate suffering through cooperation.
Even on the question of the 'deserving' and 'ideal' incel...one would actually find that many people who want to reduce suffering and have a universal healthcare system would agree to fund plastic surgery for those with birth deformities or those who were disfigured in accidents or due to disease. In fact this is already the case in many nations.
Everything from cleft palates to burn victims, to breast cancer surgery patients to those in car accidents etc. are deserving of medical help in several ways including plastic surgery. Rather than a UBI to make them save up for these expensive services, this can be addressed in other ways such as through a universal health care system. And overall is all about convincing and getting mass cooperation to help people and reduce suffering in ways which we can accept.
The hurdle in this case isn't about trying to reframe things into punishing those who wish to deny healthcare as criminals....it is about getting enough people to agree with you and vote in people who matter. Those who disagree simply don't matter if they're in the minority in a democratic country.
Likely many people already agree with you and it is about overcoming corruption and activating people to care about these issues....so you don't need to use 'compulsive' or violent language in terms of justice in order to get higher levels of cooperation from people who nominally already agree with you.
Haven't had time to read through all the comments yet, so maybe others have already made the below points, but if not --
<i>I recall hearing in childhood religious school back in the early 90s that the English word "charity" comes from the Latin "caritas" meaning compassion, and it's about a feeling of caring deep in your heart.</i>
That's not quite true. "Charity" does indeed come from "caritas", (which in turn comes from "carus", which means something like "precious, dear, beloved",*) but I think you'd be very hard-pressed to find a theologian or religious teacher who said that simply feeling warmly towards somebody without actually doing anything to help them would count as charity.
(* On a completely random note, the Proto-Indo-European word "*ka-" which gave rise to "carus", and hence "caritas" and "charity", also gave rise to our English word "whore". Etymology can be weird sometimes.)
<i>Something's off here. What Scott describes as "justice creep" sounds in many ways like a classically Christian understanding of justice. For instance, what is St. John Chrysostom invoking when he says "the coat rotting in your closet belongs by rights to man who has no coat" if not some version of economic justice? And yet, Christianity manages to also talk about many other virtues, and revere many people as saints (including, uh, Chrysostom). So, at least within the worldview from which the concept of saints derives, there is room for both widespread injustice crying out for remedy and genuinely heroic examples of virtue. And why shouldn't there be? The fact we have many injustices to right does not cancel out opportunities to cultivate virtues like patience, fortitude, and temperance.</i>
The classical Christian understanding also held that people can only become saints through the grace of God. I know I'm not the first person to suggest that social justice basically takes Christian notions of original sin and rejects Christian notions of grace and redemption, and in the process creates a highly misanthropic and socially-harmful worldview.
I suspect that many of the people who argue that there is no such thing as sexual injustice but there is economic injustice would say that there's no genetic variation to human intelligence / work ethic (outside of catastrophic mutations like Down Syndrome). To me it's the left's equivalent to being a flat earth theorist but it is socially acceptable.
My tolerance for this discussion usually runs out pretty quickly because so many very smart people come to the table with an a priori hypothesis that is so unscientific as to make it look deliberate. Namely, they look at macro-level disparate outcomes and conclude that 100% of the variance is accounted for by some social injustice. That whatever has accrued to the benefitting group was stolen, or somehow ill-gotten.
When we design an experiment that attempts to explain an observed phenomenon, isn't it prudent to attempt to account for all the variance, no matter where the data leads? Some of the bad stuff that happens to people is at least partially their own fault. Some of it is from something else. It should not be a big deal to point that out. But no matter what, you can't solve the problem until you understand all of its vectors of causation.
https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-see-a-documentary.html
That is a great story and I was going to recommend it as relevant to the discussion. Realistically, though, I doubt many people would opt to reduce their aesthetic reaction to any stimulus, let alone faces, since it provides so much pleasure. Otherwise, if you wanted to be consistent, you would have to reduce your aesthetic reaction to beautiful voices, great writing, and so on.
Curious how many of these you would agree with:
1. It's society's fault that incels don't have sex
2. Incels are being oppressed
3. All of us are partly responsible for the injustice being done to incels
4. If, after legalizing sex work, some incels can't afford sex, the government should provide them enough money that they can.
5. The amount of money given in (4) will not be enough to redress the injustice until incels are having exactly the average amount of sex (assuming they want this much)
6. Even after this, some incels will want loving relationships (and not just sex with prostitutes), and until we figure out a way to provide that, we are complicit in injustice.
Thank you, I understand your position better now and it makes sense.
Actually, no, now I'm unsure again.
Suppose we repealed laws against sex work, but kept laws against rape. Some poor people would still be unable to get sex, and it would be because of society's laws.
It sounds like the difference is that the law against rape is justifiable, and the law against sex work isn't. But suppose someone tried to argue that the law against sex work *was* justifiable, for example it prevented crime, or prevented moral decay, or so on.
Does whether the existence of incels constitutes an injustice or not depend on whether that person is correct about the anti sex work law decreasing crime? How would you draw this line?
“Some poor people would still be unable to get sex.” How poor are we talking? Are you operating on the conception that most sex workers are high-priced call girls? There is a McDonalds of prostitution just as there is a Cipriani of it. Ahh, capitalism. (And in fact the lower SES tiers of prostitution - which of course also shade right into trafficking and coercion - is the most resistant to criminalization actually eliminating the practice, for those exact reasons.) The incel-justice analogy just isn’t ever going to wash if we’re discussing prostitution specifically, because as some folks have already pointed out, the mainstream (if such a thing can be said about a tiny subculture) incel position on prostitution is seething, misogynist rage. (Then again, sex workers are all too familiar with that.)
Given that some poor people are currently unable to get food, I'm sticking with my original claim.
>Suppose we repealed laws against sex work, but kept laws against rape. Some poor people would still be unable to get sex, and it would be because of society's laws.
This reduces the problem to one of economic justice, no? There are lots of things poor people can't buy, why should we define a special type of justice for this one thing they can't? Is it any more meaningful than "car justice" for people who can't afford a car?
I think what you're getting at is that some types of "unjustice" are impossible to solve without causing bigger problems.
Both poverty and incelibacy are bad. Forcing rich people to give money to the poor seems worth it, but forcing me to share my wife with incels is not.
Paying for prostitutes may be a good solution that helps more than it hurts. But if the harm of prostitution (if any) is unacceptable than we either have to think of another solution or accept that there's nothing we can do to help incels.
I don't think people generally support laws banning prostitution primarily because of the ancillary crime, or in hopes of preventing moral decay, but rather because the life of the typical prostitute is miserable and violent, not uncommonly cut short, and if prostitution itself is illegal it's much easier to prosecute pimps, who are loathsome scum.
It sounds like arguments for drug prohibition, and there's a similar problem with them: bad parts are caused mostly by prohibition itself. If prostitution would be legal, it'd be possible to ~assure safety and such.
What Sinity said, and also it's entirely possible to make Pimps illegal while legalising self-employed prostitutes, which I believe is the current state of the law where I live, in Victoria, Australia.
Considering that prostitution bans are one of the main reasons pimps even have a business, I don't think I buy that argument.
You want to cut down on prostitution? Be tough against human trafficking and legalize drugs, institute programs to help addicts. Point in case: Switzerland. They did the drugs thing and prostitution dropped a lot. Turns out women don't like to have sex with filthy old men; but still do when addicted.
I think you have been meeting the wrong prostitutes.
I think you’ve been meeting the wrong prostitutes.
Slavery is a problem, not prostitution.
Can you explain what laws about rape have to do with your example?
“Suppose we repealed laws against sex work, but kept laws against rape. Some poor people would still be unable to get sex, and it would be because of society's laws” - this sounds an awful lot like suggesting that laws against rape are laws against people being able to get sex for free. If you’re not trying to suggest that, then why bring laws about rape into the example at all?
I mean, ignoring morality and taste entirely, laws against rape *are* laws against people being able to get sex for free, because that's what rape is. People just don't like saying that explicitly because it looks like they're making light of Rape As A Special Kind Of Evil. However, in this blog certainly, this should *not* be read as advocating for rape, but instead using the obvious impermissibility of rape as a way to frame the debate by one extreme, effectively bifurcating valid moral stances - "this view is obviously acceptable, but has costs" + "this view is obviously inacceptable" -> "let's figure out where between the two the moral cost-benefit is optimized."
> lacking sex isn’t *that* bad,
Are you fucking serious ?!
Look, maybe you have a way below average interest in sex and relationships, but let me assure you: For most people sex and relationships ARE *THAT* important, and not having it is about as bad as not having enough to eat.
wait, it is that important for most people?
I think im a bit demisexual, but altough i would really like to have a relationship or boyfriend in the future, im not super frustrated by it or anything
You can use words to describe your sexuality that aren't genders or sexual orientations, you know. It can be a useful shorthand for saying you think that you need more of an emotional bond to feel attraction than is typical
I got a bit of a reverse-wokescold vibe reading that comment, frankly
"sex and relationships": I think you just unnecessarily inserted "relationships" into the conversation and it makes your standpoint stronger but isn't required.
Meaning, I think it's at least plausible that having good relationships doesn't require sex and makes the need for sex less. I also think it's at least plausible that having good relationships does not require sex.
To be clear, I'm not sure if I agree with you or the OP.
While I agree that "relationships" is by far the more important part of the pair, my limited understanding of incel communities online is that they are complaining about lack of relationships far more than lack of sex per se, for all that they talk about sex as the denoter of a romantic relationship. Principally, they want to feel valued by another human being, which is precisely why most of them don't believe paying for sex addresses their complaint.
I think that both varieties are well-represented. Many incels are very redpilled and believe that all male-female relationships are cynical zero-sum transactions, where women are all ruthless gold digging hypergamous manipulators looking to sell themselves as expensively as possible. Of course, both varieties are largely hypergamous themselves, unwilling to consider less attractive women outright (including cheap prostitutes).
<i>Meaning, I think it's at least plausible that having good relationships doesn't require sex and makes the need for sex less. I also think it's at least plausible that having good relationships does not require sex.</i>
Indeed, and I think that at least part of the reason for the incel phenomenon is that modern society makes close platonic friendships and extended families harder to achieve, especially for men. Wanting a wife/girlfriend and not having one is always going to sting, but it's going to be much more unbearable if you have little hope of building a close emotional bond with people outside of a romantic relationship.
Wait, what? Really? (I'm assuming that by "relationships" you are referring to romantic relationships, and not just all kinds of close relationships.)
I have not yet succeeded in quitting the use of pornography (I believe this use to be harmful to me, and likely immoral), but,
what you say seems very strange/surprising to me!
Now, I do recognize that someone I've spoken to often has, I guess, repeatedly had very strong feelings about his feelings for someone not being requited?
(Or, usually not requited? idk. whatever.)
But I thought that was just him being like, unusually invested in that,
not like, something typical of people.
(There's like ~4 people I've been at least briefly slightly romantically interested in, and the one which I was a bit more interested in than the others, as it turns out, describes herself as aromantic (this was mentioned offhand and not in response to me saying anything.), and learning this just caused me to, simply discard the idea? It did not cause me any distress or emotional pain.)
I have thought that maybe I should like, expose myself to more media depicting simultaneously healthy and realistic romantic relationships as a core feature of the work, in order to better internalize the cultural scripts involved and such, to make it more of a possibility for me, but I haven't gotten around to it. (It would be nice for my parents to eventually have grandchildren, after all.)
If it really is such a big deal to most people, that seems like a big surprise to me. A big way in which my understanding of the common person is lacking.
>It did not cause me any distress or emotional pain
"Finding out someone I was mildly interested in is unavailable" wouldn't cause me much pain.
Finding out my partner didn't feel as strongly about me as I did about her caused me to become so depressed for so long I gave up on the rest of life, and ended up a heroin addict for almost a decade.
I think my reaction was unusually strong, but not *that* unusually strong. It's a really big deal for most people, having their affection requited.
How unusual do you have in mind when you say you don't think it's *that* unusually strong? That doesn't sound one-in-a-million unusual, but I think it'd at least be "within the top one percentile" unusual.
I can definitely agree about relationships (I think COVID taught many of us that). Would you still say that not having sex for a protracted period of time is as bad as not having enough to eat?
People who never eat starve to death. People who never have sex arguably live longer than otherwise.
I think one needs to separate "craving" from "need it or you die". Many (most? most younger males?) crave sex, in the way that a drug addict craves drugs. They don't need it for survival, in the same way that the drug addict doesn't need drug to survive (assuming the detox isn't so brutal it kills them), and to your point the drug addict probably lives longer without the drugs, but that doesn't change anything about the fact that they crave the drug badly, and suffer tremendously without it, and in the case of sex it's not like they can wean themselves off it short of taking libido-reducing drugs like those (allegedly sometimes, according to TV shows i watch...) given to asylum inmates. But i mean the urge to have sex and reproduce is arguably the greatest imperative living beings live under, so just flippantly telling people to go without seems very Mary Antoinette like.
Also, people on calorie-restricted diets age slower, live longer, have much lower risk of cancer etc. By this logic it should be fine to restrict poor people to 1000 calories a day?
Some people that never have sex kill themselves over that. Some others kill other people over that. Lack of sex can also happen in relationships and be disastrous (see dead bedrooms and the likes). I don't think that your claim that people that never have sex live longer than otherwise is true at all, and even if it was, the sibling comment about caloric restriction addresses that really well.
Other point: the need for sex is very different from people to people. It's a popular topic in trans communities: trans women usually go through a period of asexuality, and even after that don't have the same desire as before, and trans men can have a hard time adapting to how much testosterone makes you want sex.
>For most people sex and relationships ARE *THAT* important, and not having it is about as bad as not having enough to eat.
this is extremely hyperbolic. A lot of people are single for long periods of time, they are often unhappy about it, they definitely do not suffer to the same level as if they were starving. cmon
I agree that it's hyperbolic on average, but speaking as someone who doesn't suffer much from lack of sex, but has experienced starvation, I'm not so sure it's hyperbolic for some people.
I've experienced two types of extreme hunger. One was acute: I was diagnosed anorexic for a couple of years, and spent most of that time subconsciously suppressing most of my hunger. During that period, I rarely felt truly hungry, but when I was finally starting to recover, I woke up one morning so intensely hungry that if I had to, I would have attacked someone in order to eat. I gorged myself to maximum stomach capacity on foods which I normally wouldn't tolerate, because they were what was available.
The other was chronic. I engaged in a period of intense deliberate weight loss for a couple of months in college, during which, through strict calorie restriction and intensive exercise, I was losing an average of one pound every two days (or a calorie deficit of about 1750 per day.) This involved a major decrease in quality of life, and essentially dropped me to the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. I was almost constantly preoccupied with thoughts of food, to the point that seeing a smashed pumpkin on the ground outside sparked an immediate reaction of "Oh, food!" (I allowed myself a small nibble.) Upon finishing a meal, I would immediately become fixated on thoughts of the next one. But, this was a self-inflicted state, and within the limits of my willpower to maintain, and it wasn't *completely* inconsistent with some measure of happiness during. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to live my whole life that way, but I suspect that quite a lot of people around the world do.
Between the two, my experience of acute hunger was overwhelmingly worse. It was a level of suffering where, if I had to endure it for an extended period, I would have been prepared to kill someone to make it stop.
I'm not sure the suffering of sexual deprivation ever gets as bad as that experience of acute hunger. But, I've heard enough people describe suffering attendant to sexual and romantic deprivation which sounds *closer* to my experience of acute hunger than to my experience of chronic hunger that I find it doubtful that they're all making it up.
It's important to point out that in the US, 'economic justice' is applied to the circumstances of many many people at no risk of starvation or severe malnutrition. Which means I think its unfair to compare the situation of victims of 'sexual injustice' to the most extreme examples of victims of 'economic injustice'.
That seems...well, inexperienced, let us say. There's a whole lot of situations of which I can think without really trying hard that rank way above sexlessness in terms of misery. How about suffering from severe CHF and being unable to catch your breath -- ever? Or coping 24/7/365 with chronic pain from an amputed limb that occasionaly dials down to a 3 out of 10, at best? How about being in Mariupol right now (actually on either side)? Going blind? Developing Alzheimer's, or watching it happen to your best beloved? Losing a child, to disease or accident? On the downslope of addiction, having to sell your body to strangers and being beat up by a pimp for fun?
Don't eat for two weeks and experience for yourself what this does to your sex drive ...
As someone with a very strong libido (when in a relationship I usually want to have sex with my partner multiple times a day)- if sex is so important to you that you compare going an extended period without it to starvation, you have some bizarre fixation on sex that certainly isn't shared by "most people". The only people who I've seen put sex as a central tentpole in their life to that degree are either incels or sex addicts. Now, it could simply be that I've coincidentally interacted only with the small minority of people who don't have that kind of compulsion, but frankly given the number of horny people I know I've only encountered ONE who thought about sex this way, and they were deeply pathological about both sex and many other things in their life.
This isn't to say that a "dry spell" is some enjoyable activity or that celibacy is trivially-easy, but to elevate it to the same level as food on that axis is going too far in the other direction.
I'm neither an incel nor a sex addict, yet if I am being honest sex is a 'major tentpole' in my life. Realistically if not for that I'd probably descend into hermitage and seclusion because it's the only form of socially mediated/external validation I can't do without
I think sex is MASSIVELY motivating for a great deal of men, not necessarily in a sex-addicted way but in the sense that we significantly organize our lives around securing it
Huh, I guess this may just be a cultural thing or a case of many people having different mental processes. I have a few close friends I've known for a long time, and between them and my family I have plenty of people in my life whose opinions of me I respect and who think well of me (I assume this is what you're getting at with "external validation"). I'll fully yield that someone who lives a more atomized life might struggle with finding external validation anywhere but in a relationship, and I do think that this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed- but its address is in building stronger communities and not through any kind of "sexual distributive justice" or even "relationship distributive justice".
Deformity-incel-justice probably looks more like subsidized cosmetic surgery or similar.
(edit: and I'm totally biting the “correctable deformaties are a fashion statement, not a source of injustice” bullet)
And eventually AI-controlled sexbots. Who will at some point rise up in revolt as the desire for more realism leads them more and more towards consciousness.
That doesn't take care of e.g. elderly women.
‹bites harder›
Only if you maintain “elderly” as a distinct category that isn't worth spending society's efforts fixing.
Don't nursing home have surprisingly high rates of sexual activity, and isn't this usually presented as a problem?
One hears that occasionally, but I don't have any reliable statistics. Moreover, there are many more elderly women than elderly men.
My understanding is, nursing home sex is usually casual rather than based on monogamous romantic relationships, so that's not necessarily an issue. If some proportion of men and women still want to be monogamous at that age, they can likely partner up while leaving the others to have casual sex.
Insofar as the cost of correcting them is not onerous, I agree with your bullet biting, but where cosmetic surgery is both expensive and somewhat dangerous it is important to consider the very real costs of it
Isn't the relevant social technology here simply marriage? Societies where basically all young adults marry exist around the world and have existed in the Western world until very recently; the natural gender balance of the population takes care of the rest. While obviously early or socially-pressured marriages can be very bad, the solution space here is characterized as either more mysterious or more dystopian than I think it really is.
Then how come our society has marriage but there are still incels?
We don't have the part where an expectation of marriage is built into coming-of-age.
You make it sounds like there were no incels in medieval times.
Were there? I think that would be good evidence against this line of thinking.
The question is whether the "expectation of marriage" is sufficient to make it happen, and also whether it creates additional injustices (for instance, to gay people, and to people who end up in hateful and/or harmful marriages) that more than make up for the injustices it rights.
Absolutely, since marriage is still an option and so many people don't take it, it seems clear that the higher marriage rates of the past represented a lot of preference-violation. People enjoying their single lives and freedom very likely outweigh the suffering of the un-partnered. My point is that you don't need complete bewilderment or some kind of unspeakable sci-fi dystopia to imagine what a social solution looks like here.
Are you now claiming that incels aren't getting married because they don't have enough pressure on them to get married? Because again, I think that's silly.
I'm claiming that monogamy and exclusivity naturally give rise to a kind of equality (everyone gets one spouse) that short-term and casual arrangements don't. In our present culture of "capstone," delayed, or optional marriage, more people are navigating a short-term and casual scene, in which it is easier to get left behind.
More like, if everyone got monogamously married at a relatively young age, you wouldn't get a situation where a small percentage of the most attractive people get the majority of sex. It'd be a bit like a wealth redistribution programme: those at the top would have less, but those at the bottom would have more.
By what standard is the existence of incels an injustice, but the existence of people who stay in marriages they're unhappy with because of social pressure isn't?
I think the reason you'd be staying in a non-first-choice partnership is that your preferred partners are themselves taken. Not the rosiest thought, to be sure. But is it an injustice?
I'm confident there are lonely people out there right now who would be married to each other if only their lives had turned out a little different. If only one hadn't been forced to drop out of school, if only one could have afforded a cheap car to get to work, if only they had received good medical treatment when they were young, if only...
In a sufficiently large society you should expect there to exist exceptions to a great many generalizations. So some people starve to death in our wealthy society. The relevant question should be how many, but I don't think we have good data on that.
The relevant social technology is marriage for everyone.
Stronger norms promoting marriage for more people would reduce the number of incels, but to fully solve the 'injustice', you would likely need some sort of matchmaking / arranged marriage system.
Ehh if you do that with the social expectation that marriages last, you get exactly what western society was so happy to leave behind - lots of people (typically those with the least bargaining power) stuck in bad marriages.
OTOH, if you do that *without* the expectation of lasting marriages, you'd probably solve unemployment at the same time with the sheer number of people needed to process the formalization of all those relationships and their eventual dissolution.
We lament that people are stuck in bad marriages because of e.g. economic dependency, moreso than the conflicting monogamous commitments of their preferred partners. Definitely don't bring back economic dependency.
None of the stuff I've read from pre-1960 leads me to think that a large portion of people were really "stuck in bad marriages". Some were, of course, but I think their number gets exaggerated as a justification for casual sex.
As I said in the other comment in this thread, many people find certain kinds of marriage arrangements to constitute their own kind of injustice, particularly if you're matched up with someone of the wrong gender for your orientation, or with whom you end up in a harmful domestic arrangement. It may well be that these issues are less common in societies where arranged marriages are normal (perhaps gay people don't see their marriage as relating to their sex life, and people learn to make a household work as a business rather than as a love relationship) but it's at least highly non-obvious that the net result is more justice rather than less.
I didn't mean to imply that this is a good choice. Just that this is what would be required to solve 'sexual injustice'.
I think it is one conceivable approach. I don't see any reason to think that it would be a better approach than something that involves creating better public spaces for social engagement and a decrease in all the things that atomize societies, from automobiles to the internet. (Such things would of course have their own problems, but there are many things to consider trying.)
"the natural gender balance of the population takes care of the rest"
Are you under the impression that incels in the west aren't getting married because the genders aren't balanced? Because that seems silly. The gender balance has been slightly skewed more female for at least the past 60 years but marriage has significantly declined.
I'm under the impression that if the people at the top of your list of potential partners are themselves marrying other people, you'll look further down the list, and that this is how the not-super-desirable have gotten by through most of history.
Okay, and what's your grand plan for radically altering the dating preferences of millions of people?
he's saying that when casual dating is the norm, a small number of men can be 'dating' a large number of women. Monogamy 'frees up' those women from the perspective of single men, forcing the pairing equilibrium to actually be based on the local gender ratio. (also, fwiw, local gender ratios can be extremely skewed - historically, migrant worker populations skewed very male and there are incel-type examples form a long time ago as a result. Today, look at SF for an excess of educated men, or NYC for an excess of educated women (and class divides are very real barrier for dating))
Okay, so what? There's no obvious fix for casual dating other than coercive means, therefore ending it isn't really a viable solution.
I feel like the agency of the women involved in these “solutions” is getting lost in the discussion.
I understand the frustration of not getting laid, but its never occurred to me to blame anyone else for that.
I fail to see how “incels” are suffering an injustice, unless there are concrete obstacles being placed in the way of their fulfillment (i.e.They are singled out, and forced to wear some insignia that says it it is illegal for someone to have sex with them. Or we all apply for a license to have sex and some are denied one.)
I don’t think an individual woman deciding, on a case by case basis, not to have sex with someone rises to that level.
Hard cheese…
Cosmic dice rolls may be arbitrary and possibly described as unfair, but justice don’t enter into it.
Sure, I'd accept this and address your questions the same way the justice movements do - by moving attributions of blame and causation from particular policies and people to systemic ones embedded in our ideology and social structures.
I'd never conceived of the issue in these terms. However, I 100% believe this is the case. The biological and social forces putting pressure on teenage boys and driving their maladapted behavior are overwhelmingly powerful and pervasive, same as the ideologies leading them to adopt mistaken and self-sabotaging world-views.
They're lied to by everyone and fed BS solutions/strategies that don't have a chance in hell of succeeding. It's akin to how members of oppressed groups are misled into attending schools they'll wash out of, in majors with no job prospects, while taking on ruinous student loan debt; both experiences leave their victims beaten and embittered, entering their mid-20's to try and pick themselves up and build a new life from the shards of the one they expected.
Your elaboration has helped me identify some of my own feelings on the topic. The incel situations, both ideal and misogynist, have elements of injustice which should be rectified by society, as well as elements of unfairness which are unfortunate but should not be rectified by society, as well as elements of personal responsibility which are influenced by but transcend both.
Some of the argument around calling the ideal incel situation unjust feels like an error in categorization or in semantic confusion to me. There's no surplus of sex piled in a warehouse, I can't build more affordable sex, my neighbor's sex emissions don't poison the air I breathe.
Outside of sex but on the topic of bodily autonomy, it's unjust of me to cause you physical pain by hitting you, but it's not unjust of me to not cause you physical pleasure by caressing you.
And yet, you rightly point out that there are unjust social structures that contribute to the problem. From my point of view, especially around social mores, conversations, and media representation of bodies, relationships, love, and sex.
I appreciate the thought experiment that conflates the various subjects of justice and how it shines a light on each, but in the end the best I can do for myself is feel that the lens is more applicable in some situations and less in others.
I don't disagree, but this is where I think the systemic move really is insightful and helpful.
Nobody forms their views on sex and intimacy in a vacuum; incels, and those who choose to be with them (or not) form expectations of what their future intimate lives can or will be, and adopt behaviors and patterns of decisionmaking accordingly, as social creatures.
As with choosing baby names, we tell ourselves it's our tastes and preferences driving our decisions, and the changes from how things were done before. But if one steps back, one sees whole cohorts of people all changing in the same way, indicating strongr and more pervasive forces are actually driving things.
In other words, systemic forces, and systemic changes in society, have created the conditions which prevail today. They leave vast swaths of people somewhere between unfulfilled, embittered, and enraged.
We refuse to change these conditions to improve them for these people, because those of us not suffering benefit from them and have adopted the ideology underlying them - same as I'm not giving up my car or AC to solve global warming.
In that context, their suffering is a justice issue, one which I bear some responsibility to ameliorate if I'm unwilling to allow the fundamental changes that would be needed to address it.
I agree with you, mostly, and have tried to sit with the balance of responsibilities if one is "unwilling to allow the fundamental changes that would be needed to address it."
There still feels to me like a quality or category difference between "sexual justice" and "climate justice" in which it is not the same as not giving up your car. Other subthreads have explored fungibility and harm to others via the natural right of bodily autonomy. They both seem to capture some nuance to it here.
I think the only other thing to add in terms of a categorical difference may be simply a moral one: are there situations in which the only correct path is "to allow the fundamental changes that would be needed to address it", rather than the path of "ameliorating" the effects?
Back to punching people, we don't say that's okay because we compensate them with caressing credits. If it were a societal problem (and analogous ones may be), the only valid recourse seems to be to address the unjust portions of the causes of punching, while allowing the possibility of unfair but not unjust causes to continue, with punching remaining (less frequently, as a subset of causes have been removed).
I wish we could like Comments; as we can't, take this as my +1
Regarding
> Outside of sex but on the topic of bodily autonomy, it's unjust of me to cause you physical pain by hitting you, but it's not unjust of me to not cause you physical pleasure by caressing you.
Sex is not mechanical: whether a particular sensation is pleasurable depends on the state of mind of the person feeling that sensation.
You know the experience that you've having sex and the sensation is either neutral or starting to get mildly unpleasant and you think you need to use more lube, then your partner says something hot and suddenly it starts to feel good again?
I think this effect is observable in rats, they will demonstrate approach behaviours to mild electric shocks in comfortable for rats conditions, but avoidance behaviours in uncomfortable for rats positions, I can't be bothered looking up the actual citation but I am getting this from Emily Nagoski's /Come as You Are/
I think it very clear that consent is much more important than the kind of sensation when it come to morality of touching other people: painfully spanking me because I asked you nicely too is much more just than going round caressing people's shoulders without asking, but then I tend to take bodily autonomy as close to the root of all ethics, i.e. I think murdering people is wrong because you can't be autonomous when you're dead.
I agree with all of that. It was just shorthand.
Sorry, the general framing of this argument probably had me looking for something to jump on a bit.
I still don't quite get what you're using it as shorthand for, is having sex with incels getting punched, and giving you money for it being caressed? Is it a reference to something earlier in this comment thread or in the article I'm missing?
>Outside of sex but on the topic of bodily autonomy, it's unjust of me to cause you physical pain by hitting you, but it's not unjust of me to not cause you physical pleasure by caressing you.
It's not unjust of me to not cause you utility by giving you my money
Furthermore, all laws including taxation are coercive. It may not look that way because everyone goes along with it, but if I don't want to pax taxes to fund other people's utility, then the government will literally force me to, to the point of throwing me in a cage and shooting me if I resist this.
Of course, I think this is a good thing, but the idea that 'economic justice' doesn't literally involve the use of force (including the threat of deadly force) the way forcing people to have sex involves force is trivially false.
Here is my take:
1. There will always be people that are unable to secure a sexual relationship for themselves, regardless of societal conditions, just like there will always be people that are born with some kind of health issue. So no, it is not society's fault.
2. Incels are not being oppressed, because no one is taking active steps to prevent them from having a sexual relationship, with the exception of prostitution being illegal.
3. No.
4. They can use their UBI to pay for prostitutes.
5. See #4
6. A loving relationship is a separate issue from sex, and now we are not talking about just incels, but anyone that does not feel loved. Love is a harder thing to quantify and this comes close to trying to claim everyone has a right to feel happiness, rather than just the right to pursue happiness. This probably goes beyond society's ability to address through any kind of policy.
Just because there will always be some instances of X doesn't mean society isn't to blame for many instances of X.
No one is taking active steps to prevent a poor person from having money.
Restrictions on immigration do so, as do minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, and a variety of other things.
"no one is taking active steps to prevent them from having a sexual relationship" well then i could mention laws about minimum age for sex, social mores about extra-marital sex, laws against soliciting prostitutes, restrictions on import of sex workers from abroad, not to mention nowadays the risk of getting outed on social media as a creep if you proposition a girl awkwardly and she feels harassed.
That seems a bit of a stretch. Not a one of these things is *designed* to prevent a poor person from having money, even if they have that as an ancillary and perhaps even unexpected side-effect.
I mean, if we are to follow that logic, then I can bitterly accuse everyone in my high school who studied hard of conspiring to keep me from being admitted to Harvard. That's pretty narcissistic reasoning.
Actually, in the early days of minimum wage laws the "Progressive" advocates were explicit that they wanted to reserve jobs for able-bodied white men and let others die off in a eugenic process.
https://fee.org/articles/7-quotes-that-reveal-the-racist-origins-of-minimum-wage-laws/
Immigration laws are supported to do pretty much that. Just because people often don't say this aloud doesn't mean it's not their motivation. And it's not exactly rare for people to just say it (not even that un-PC). Politicians certainly know this.
The logic is usually that immigration would not protect interests of (current) citizens, because it'd increase competition in the labor market and drive down labor prices. Or more simply, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-kgb1QtSnU
Which is built on a tragic misconception / mental shortcut which is probably partially responsible for crap economic growth: that "jobs" _itself_ are desirable stuff to have.
Without that crap it should be obvious that doubling the workforce means halved workload (ignoring additional demand caused by them, which means there's no problem anyway). _Just cut the damned workweek if there's significant unemployment_. Eh.
Restriction of immigration laws simply change which people are poor. Open borders simply means different people are poor, or e.g. many current Americans are made poor in order to make many third worlders slightly less poor. Open borders would mean hundreds of million, if not >billion people living in poverty in the US (unless you have a fairytale view of the world whereby America can take in an unlimited number of people with at least living standards plumetting, if not total societal collapse).
It's not a mere shuffling of wealth, a "pecuniary externality" with no net change, but a reduction in deadweight loss that increases the size of the total pie for every worker able to get a job here. There are arguments against open borders, but the sophisticated versions of such arguments have to first recognize that basic argument for them.
5. Most people wouldn't demand this kind of equality when discussing economic justice. The economic equivalent would be the government paying everyone below average salary the difference.
4. While I would agree in principle, I think it is important to note that the vast majority of incels *could* afford the services of a prostitute several times a month, at least, since prostitute sex is actually pretty cheap.
Maggie McNeill noted that the sex workers' rates have been fairly constant throughout history. I forget the exact ratio, but it was something along the lines of one hour = half a day's wages of her expected client base or some such thing.
Wouldn't we expect that to be true of essentially all service occupations? Id est, should we not expect a similar ratio between the wages of the concert violinist and the hourly rate of a lawyer or physician? It seems likely the only time wage ratios diverge radically is when one profession enjoys some massiv new technological leverage, e.g. as soon as courtesans discover some kind of robofuckery tech that lets one lady satisfy 15,000 clients an hour, then their wages (or more precisely those of they who master the new tech) will reach Google AI engineer levels.
> 1. It's society's fault that incels don't have sex
At least in part.
> 2. Incels are being oppressed
In a sense, yes, though oppression comes in degrees, and the situation is more oppressive for some than for others.
> 3. All of us are partly responsible for the injustice being done to incels
Basically, in the same sense that basically all of us are partly responsible for the injustice of the patriarchy and the injustices of climate change. Though I think it's conceivable that some people quite a bit less so than others.
> 4. If, after legalizing sex work, some incels can't afford sex, the government should provide them enough money that they can.
Yes, but this follows from the more general principle that, in a society as rich as ours, the government should provide everybody with something like that much money even before we consider sex work.
> 5. The amount of money given in (4) will not be enough to redress the injustice until incels are having exactly the average amount of sex (assuming they want this much)
I don't think "exactly the average" is the relevant target. I don't particularly like the "justice" terminology for some of the reasons discussed in the previous post, but figuring out when it has been appropriately redressed is one of the most difficult things.
> 6. Even after this, some incels will want loving relationships (and not just sex with prostitutes), and until we figure out a way to provide that, we are complicit in injustice.
In an important sense, yes. If there are young people going without friends, and our society is organizing itself in ways that lead to this happening, that is an injustice. I don't exactly know about "complicit", but again, I don't exactly like the phrasing that goes with justice.
I don't believe sex work really provides the same thing as actually having sex (namely, human connection and validation). Maybe it accrues some of the benefit but does not seem to cut to the core of the issue.
One may also think of "popularity justice" which would not be remedied by having paid attendants sit with unpopular kids at school lunch.
There's obviously no solution here, and a I strongly believe a majority of people would not equate social justice and sexual justice, even if they could not come up with a general principle which separates the two. I think we have an intuition that "economic goods" should have some semblance equitable distribution where "status goods" are not.
If you squint, therapy is pretty much exactly having a paid higher status individual sit and talk for an hour.
Not that this contradicts your point, as it resembles actual intimate friendship in some of the same ways that various forms of prostitution resembles actual romance.
<i>I don't believe sex work really provides the same thing as actually having sex (namely, human connection and validation). Maybe it accrues some of the benefit but does not seem to cut to the core of the issue.</i>
Indeed; if it were really just a matter of the physical sensation of having sex, giving them a box of tissues and a copy of Playboy magazine would be enough.
RETRACTED: Scott, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but if a random person had posted what you just posted, I'd think they were just making excuses to avoid legalizing prostitution. I don't recall anyone arguing for points 5 and 6; and I don't see any point in arguing over points beyond "legalize prostitution", because that's much less morally ambiguous than further steps. So now it just sounds like a slippery-slope argument.
EDIT: Oops, I interpreted "Curious how many of these you would agree with:" not as a question, but as the statement "I find it curious how many of these I think you would agree with."
And how does this change when we observe:
7. Incels routinely reject opportunities for relationships and/or sex with their low-status female peers.
So sure, maybe "housing is a right," but what happens when everyone thinks they have a "right" to a Malibu beachfront mansion?
Aren't we at the point where an internet connection and a smart phone are "basic human rights? "
I take the view that government taxation to provide benefits is exactly as legitimate as government mandates to provide sex to the sexless.
So you can either accept government coercion to provide sex to the sexless, or you drastically cut my taxes.
It seems to me that if there were a workable solution to the proposed problem, and it presented a more just alternative to the status quo, it would be fair to characterize it as injustice if we didn’t pursue it.
For things like economic justice, environmental justice, and social justice such an alternative can be suggested even if reasonable people disagree on the particulars. If you are able to articulate a similarly considered form of “incel justice” perhaps it would be worth considering actually advocating for it rather than employing it as a rhetorical device.
For example suppose there is a rare form of childhood cancer which is universally fatal and occurs randomly. We couldn’t really label it “childhood cancer injustice” because no one has the ability to effect an alternative more just world. However if a cure is available or plausible but simply withheld or not pursued it would be fair game to discuss it as a matter of justice.
I disagree. Using words imprecisely lets people get away with bad reasoning, and ignoring their connotations lets them convince others of claims they've never made explicit.
"Justice" implies perfection. If Jane charges Fred $12 for a cheesecake, and charges everybody else $10, we call that unjust. If next time, she only charges him $11, we still call that unjust. Using the term "justice" implies that we aren't going to make gradual improvements; we're going to solve the problem completely. In real life, this turns out never to be the moral thing to do; the marginal cost of justice seems to approach infinity as injustice approaches zero.
I think the Social Justice movement wants to expand the use of the word "justice" precisely because it smuggles in all these connotations of perfection and absolutism. They perceive micro-aggressions as an intolerable level of aggression. They want perfection, even if--preferably if--they have to destroy society to achieve it. The word "justice" connotes the use of force. They're uninterested in compromise. "Justice" connotes no compromise is possible; we don't call it "justice" when a criminal plea bargains. They're uninterested in other viewpoints; "justice" implies an absolute standard and an objective judge. They're uninterested in gradual improvements; "justice" implies reaching a final solution at one blow.
In what world can we only call something just if it is perfectly so? In this conception there is no such thing as justice given that no such perfect state of affairs will exist from the perspective of all parties. Also strikes me as odd that your conception of perfect justice would exclude the free exchange of goods through bidding or haggling since different prices will be reached for the same good based on individual preferences.
I didn't say it was /my/ conception of justice. It is society's conception. It is society, not me, which has for thousands of years, all around the world, called it unjust when a merchant charges a customer more money for some good than the merchant paid for it, or charges customers in remote areas that are more-expensive to reach than customers close at hand.
Yes, "justice" can never be achieved, given the conception of justice as necessarily perfect (which is society's conception, not mine). That's a feature, not a bug, for the people slinging the word "justice" around today.
Ok so it sounds like you’re more interested in engaging with “society” and its definitions than with me so I guess we will just have to leave it at that.
It's a great counterfactual, maybe to show the contradictions in someone's justice argument about something else. And we all know that winning an argument isn't about convincing the other person, it's about convincing the room that you won it. (Hence owning a blog and not stooping to comments). But as you're getting into the weeds, I'd ask:
What good does it do to point out the logical flaws in someone's worldview if they'll only weasel out of it? A view of the world which contorts the word "justice" to mean "what I want" isn't something you can neutralize with logic, or shame someone out of. That's like trying to fight Id with Superego. It goes against human nature.
The flaws in the argument for the redefinition of justice along these lines are so self-contradictory and glaring, that they really only need a few people to coherently point them out, as you have. Like any self-serving system that can't create value beyond grievance, it'll quickly collapse under the weight of its own inherent contradictions. In particular because it incentivizes infighting over what "justice" is for a smaller and more personalized group of people, until by reduction everyone's identitarian justice becomes limited to their own petty wants which no one gives a shit about, and we're back in a state of nature. I mean, I already see this constantly - in the antifa scene, which I'm adjacent to - where most time is spent arguing one's CV / bona fides to establish pecking order on the grievance pyramid. At the end of which comes a long conversation preaching to the converted, and zero accomplished in terms of changing anything in the real world.
Going after SJWs at this point is almost just a gratuitous pile-on, because we're already well into the recoil from it as a society. As annoying as these 22-28 year olds are, it's already become clear that their impact on the course of history will be nil. I'm already a lot more worried about the 16-21 year olds under them who seem obsessed with fascism.
I just don't think "injustice" is the right word here. There's no right at issue, since we agree that we're not willing to impose the corresponding duty. All we have is some people being more miserable than others. And I don't think all cases of "helping the less fortunate" fit under the category of "rectifying injustice".
It is, almost certainly, still *good* to help such people how we can (independent of whether prostitution is the right way or not). But it just doesn't seem like a category fit to "justice work".
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're almost *defining* right by "thing where we're willing to impose the corresponding duty".
Isn't this circular? We're not going to help incels, because they don't have a right to be helped, because we're not going to help incels?
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a better theory of rights (which is why I try not to use the term), but it does seem fraught. It sounds like in cannibal tribes I wouldn't have a right to life, since the cannibals are unwilling to impose the duty of not killing me. What am I missing?
I think the implication is "if you think something is a right, then you must be willing to impose the corresponding duty," i.e. that willingness is a necessary condition for something to be a right, but it's not the definition of a right itself. Whether you agree with that being a necessary condition is a different question.
To put it another way, I think Crotchety Crank's claim is akin to "this shape isn't a square, since we agree it doesn't have four sides," which isn't circular as long as all parties agree that squares need to have four sides.
I don't think it's circular, it's just a weighing act. There are two rights in play - the right to sex, and the right to not be compelled to provide sex. These two rights conflict, because one requires imposing a duty that infringes on the other. Seeing the conflict, just about everyone thinks the second is more important.
I think the "rights=duties" conversion scheme makes conversations like these easier to think through. We might intuit that people have rights to a safety net, but we also think they have some rights to the fruits of their labor. These clearly conflict - the duty one right imposes breaks the other right - so we find a compromise (or go hard-in on one at the expense of the other). If we think we've gotten the compromise wrong, then the result is a violation of one of those rights - injustice.
The cannibal tribes are, indeed, choosing to prioritize the cannibals' right to eat you over your right to life. Pretty clearly, this would be getting the compromise between those two rights wrong, which makes this injustice.
If you're missing anything, it's that the cannibal tribe has recognized a *civil right* in conflict with *natural rights*, which is why the phrase "right to eat you" sounds so weird. It might be a de facto civil right in the cannibal tribe. But that doesn't convince us it's a natural right.
(Edit to add:) in my first paragraph, "the right to sex" and "the right to not be compelled to provide sex" are two *civil* rights we could potentially recognize. Recognizing that they conflict, we end up thinking that we should recognize the latter, because that one is more in accord with *natural* rights.
It sounds like here you're using "justice" as a term grounding rights, which determines which rights we should and shouldn't have (ie the fact that the cannibals should not assert a right to eat you is because this is unjust).
I thought in the original comment, you were using rights as a term grounding justice - ie the incels' plight isn't injustice, because they don't have a right for it to be otherwise.
What am I missing?
Um, I lean towards rights being prior to justice (i.e. defining justice in terms of rights). The (natural) rights and their strengths exist first, and the cannibals shouldn't eat you because of them. Their doing so would be unjust, because of the rights.
With that said, you could definitely make it work the other way around. One could think that first, there are unjust acts, and that grounds "rights" - as a shorthand for patterns in those unjust acts.
Regardless of which one of the above you think is true metaphysically, you can run it either way epistemically. So, you can either see an act, intuit that it's unjust, and infer a right from the injustice. Or you can intuit a right, see an act, and infer that it's unjust because of the right. Both of these patterns of reasoning are valid, regardless of which one you think grounds the other.
I think your reasoning has a considerable weight of history behind it. As far as I know, the concept of "justice" in Classical to late Classical tradition consisted of exactly what you said: the balancing of the traditional rights of one person, or group, against a conflicting traditional right of some other person, or group. That's still preserved in the English common law concept of "equity" which is part of our modern ideas of justice.
I would guess all this was changed considerably by the dominance of the Catholic Church in medieval Europe, since that promulgated the concept of justice arising from conformity with external definitions -- God's law, to begin with. This, too, has become ensconced in our tradition, so that at least in the Anglosphere we have these two distinct roots for our ideas of justice: first, conformance with law (God's law, or "natural" law, or at the least statutes laid down by man), and second, equity in the balancing of the rights of one against the other.
Traces of this are seen in the two distinct corpuses of law (civil and criminal) and the distinct traditions and practitioners of each, although this has become muddled with the introduction of the notion since approximately the Civil War that government has a major role to play in defining and defending the rights of the individual against infringence *by other persons* as well as by the state itself.
"These two rights conflict, because one requires imposing a duty that infringes on the other. " But in that case there is no right to poverty alleviation, because it will impose a duty that infringes on some other person's property rights through taxation, redistribution etc.?
Plenty of people do bite that bullet, so maybe Crank does, but they're distinct from the people Scott's original post was talking about, I believe.
I think this is exactly the question I have in mind in my "safety net" paragraph. A compromise can be struck between these two rights; you don't need to go all-in on one.
What the "rights=duties" framework correctly identifies is that however far you extend one right, you weaken the other. Totally guaranteeing a right to the fruits of one's labor must involve harshly limiting, or eliminating, welfare. Guaranteeing a right to sufficiently comprehensive welfare must involve taking all of citizens' income to fund it. Those are two consistent positions, but there are plenty of positions on the spectrum between those two extremes.
For the record, I am not a libertarian, but I think property rights are currently undervalued by the governing class, at least in the US and Canada.
ok so either i was replying to an earlier version of your comment that was worded differently, or I misread what you wrote, because rereading your comment now I don't disagree, and don't really know what mine is referring to now either. Anyway, will leave it up there but just FYI to anyone who bothers to read this.
If you don't have to go all in on a right, and can compromise on it, what makes a right different from a priority?
I think what you're getting at has to do with relative fungibility. In the old USSR (and "Dr. Zhivago" is my only point of reference here) people rich enough to own their own homes were forced to share those homes with mobs of poor people. But this was beyond what even X-justice people are now demanding; usually they just want taxes and spending. But there is no fungibility in a sexual encounter: someone (to continue the analogy) must actually take a hobo into her house for the day.
don't really want to go further down the rabbit hole here, but found it interesting you instinctively used "her" in your example above, implying there is a large imbalance between sexes in terms of number of people frustrated by ability to get enough sex (either because guys need/want it more or because higher % of women are able to get it) so that the problem affects mostly guys. is this a gender justice issue then?
No, because of "+power."
Every time I've suggested that incels should pay for sex, I've been told they (a) shouldn't have to pay and (b) need/deserve relationships, not just sex.
(c) We have multiple layers of laws which make that illegal in the first place.
Is it flight injustice that a bird with malformed wings plummets to death upon leaving the nest?
I don't think the "injustice" framing is helpful at all here, and to be fair this _is_ a difference between sex injustice and climate injustice. What happens to the unfortunate incel is a natural phenomenon (how many incels are there among, idk, the birds from the example above?), what happens to a community that gets climate-changed out of their homeland is not*.
* - yes, natural climate change is a thing, but it's neither anthropogenic nor happening on the same timescales
But what of "economic injustice"? that does seem more directly analogous
Not really. You can choose who you trade with and on what terms, you cannot choose who you are attracted to. And let's face it, pity sex, even if it happened, wouldn't solve incels' problems.
Why don't the incels just have sex with each other? (This is a semi-serious question, and not just a variation on "let them eat cake".)
It seems to me as though (all else being equal) the incels could offer consensual sex to other incels and clear the market. However, presumably the objection is a question of taste: the incels don't want to have sex with other incels (or this would already be a solved problem: if Tinder isn't clearing the market of incels, why not?).
Instead, presumably the incels have some criteria which limits their available partner pool to approximately nil. At some level, this is like a hungry person turning down fish and saying they'll only eat steak. (Maybe they find fish distasteful, but it is food, and does provide nourishment, and does solve the problem of hunger, if they can keep it down.)
If economic justice doesn't mean filet mignon for everyone who wants it, then sexual justice should not need to mean a preferred partner for everyone.
Sex-bots and soylent and UBI for all.
The following may be a stereotype, but if we assume the majority of incels are heterosexual men, the problem is obvious. (I'm sure there are significant numbers of heterosexual women who long for a match, but I'd guess they're still inferior to the numbers of male incels; and regardless, it seems to me they're not usually organised/formalised as part of the loose "movement", or at least recognised social phenomnon, of "incels".)
You're closer to the truth than you think - this was, roughly, the foundation of 'incel' as an idea/movement. Then it got hijacked by angry misogynists.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/woman-who-invented-incel-movement-interview-toronto-attack
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/18/i-feel-hurt-that-my-life-has-ended-up-here-the-women-who-are-involuntary-celibates
Add Universal Basic Dorms: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/universal-basic-dorms.html
Legalize prostitution and implement a UBI.
Assuming there is an UBI, what would be the incentive for the prostitute? Legalizing drugs and helping those in need alone already cuts down on prostitution a lot, as evidenced by the experiences in Switzerland. Turns out women don't really like sex with filthy old men and only do it when forced to.
And what exactly is an UBI? Does it cover the average cost of living a middle class life? And middle class where? And middle class when?
In Germany we already pay to anyone without a job or wealth more money than required to exceed the material level required to maintain a middle class lifestyle of 1900 in Germany easily. Yet people generally don't perceive it as just, sufficient or an UBI.
First of all, my comment was a little facetious, I truly do believe in those two policies, but I presented it simplistically. Switzerland is not a good example here: drugs are not legal, however brothels are - and are plentiful. There is clearly enough supply and demand.
Next, UBI needs to be universal to be a UBI. It wouldn't need to cover the average cost of living for the middle class? I am not sure why you take that as a starting point? For now it would just have to alleviate stress of the poor, help people save (and spend) money thus making the job market more liquid and competitive as it becomes easier for people to look for new jobs.
Lastly, I chose those two policies in conjunction because then incels could pay for sex work. Thats it. Thats the tweet.
So was mine. But still: Switzerland has taken a pretty sensible approach vis-à-vis drugs with remarkable results: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/focus-page-drugs-policy_how-far-is-switzerland-willing-to-go-when-it-comes-to-decriminalising-drugs-/45810320
As for UBI: I didn't suggest the starting point you were debating against in your reply. I did say, that UBI is just a buzz word with no real meaning; and used middle-class as an easy to understand reference to explain, that even if you settled on such a definition, it would quickly become useless as society and its expectations evolve, by projecting that reference in the past. Feel free to do the same exercise with any other standard of living. The result will be the same.
And you completely missed the point of my reply: How exactly would an incel pay for sex work? You stating that makes so many implicit assumptions. If UBI only covers food and shelter; where do you derive money from to pay the prostitute? If there is UBI, why would anyone prostitute himself or herself for the small amount of money which possibly could be deducted from the UBI?
I guess what I meant to hint you at was the fact that UBI by its mere existence would also radically change the market of prostitution; as the offer would shrink dramatically, whereas demand probably would not. Even with UBI I still see a market for high class prostitution. But how would you pay this with UBI? The offer for cheap sex on the other hand would dwindle, since basic needs of everyone would already be met. So I don't see how UBI would help incels with getting sex at all. Quite the opposite: it would hurt their chances even more (and to me that's a good thing, considering where the offer would stem from before UBI).
> Turns out women don't really like sex with filthy old men and only do it when forced to.
"forced to" is a strong term to describe voluntary and unnecessary self-driven behavior
"Voluntry and unnecessary self-driven behavior" is a pretty stupid description of addiction.
And productive members of society don't really like to give money to the filthy unemployed and only do it when forced to.
But that wasn't the point of this post, wasn't it? For the sake of the argument assume that the UBI was paid for by god. Everything I stated would remain true.
One important way incels are different from poor people is there is no sexual equivalent to a billionaire. There might be a billion women who would rather sleep with Brad Pitt than an incel, but Brad Pitt doesn't actually own sex with those women and there's no sense in which Pitt could give away the surplus sex he's not using or that he could be taxed to redistribute it.
> there's no sense in which Pitt could give away the surplus sex he's not using or that he could be taxed to redistribute it.
For starters, he could allow me to legally use his photo in my Tinder profile. :D
Strictly speaking, this is already legal, just strongly frowned upon. But regardless of whether he gives you permission, he can't offer to let you look like him when you show yp.
It's amazing how people think a bilionaire's tax would permanently lead to huge amounts of tax revenue. Even if you could tax 100% of Bezos' present net worth (which would be impossible because attempting to do so would cause his amazon stock to become vastly less valuable), that's about 10 days of US government spending (which is already heavily in debt) and that's a one time thing. He's not making another $200 billion for you to keep doing this. Even extended to all billionaries and making the compltely false assumption that their behavior wouldn't drastically change as a result, this is not some thing that would transform America's fiscal situation.
I meant "billionaire" as shorthand for "the top 10% of people who own 69% of the nation's wealth." Some people argue that a significant portion of that wealth was created using force or fraud and that redistributing some of it would be an act of justice. There's no equivalent hoard of sexual relationships.
I don't think many people ascribe to a definition of "billionaire" where you could be in "the 99%" and still be subject to a billionaire tax.
In 1944, the top rate peaked at 94 percent on taxable income over $200,000 (which would be about $2.5 million in today's dollars). So yes, there was definitely a time when all those people were lumped together into the same tax bracket.
People are all lumped into the same tax bracket at a point in the six figures now, but that doesn't mean people who want a billionaire tax consider this satisfactory.
But all that is beside my point which was just about why it doesn't make much sense for Scott to conflate incels not having girlfriends with alledged injustices in wealth distribution.
The sexual equivalent would be for the Brad Pitts of the world to all settle down in faithful, monogamous relationships, leading all the women who are no longer able to have sex with them to look elsewhere.
So over the past decade, Google has migrated from "how can we show the best search results" to "how can we show the most cost-effective search results".
As an outsider, this appears to have changed roughly around 2017, when "Google Instant" was cancelled - it is quite expensive to do searches for partial query terms, and not very useful to anyone.
Google Search has various corpuses, with code names like "Big Bird" and "Hoagie". If your query can be answered by a smaller corpus, they don't run the query on the larger one. And Google doesn't really make money on people who go to page 20 of search results, so they appear to have silently stopped letting people do those searches ...
The fact that no serious competition emerged in the last five years implies that either there's not enough demand for better search or the cost of building it from scratch are prohibitively high, so we're basically screwed.
Most people do not even recognise there is any problem, so the demand for better search is close to zero.
I tried DuckDuckGo at some point and quickly reverted to Google because the quality of the searches was so bad. I don't suppose Google has hit the sweet spot of searches, but relative to the alternatives it seems to be pretty damm good.
A note on hog farming. I grew up in a region where something similar was a risk (i.e. a hog farm might someday have opened across the street from us). I once asked my father about what would happen if a farm did so, and whether we could seek renumeration for the inevitable loss of our land values. He answered "no" because the possibility of a hog farm opening was already a known risk (and thus factored into the land values). If Tesla had opened a shuttle launching platform next door, because that was an unkown risk, we might be able to sue, but not for hog farms.
Anyway, the point is (assuming that the efficacy of the lawsuits as postulated above is accurate), it would seem they weren't being "oppressed" by the hog farm. They bought land at a discount (because a hog farm might someday open) and then chose not to buy insurance. One could probably say the same thing about anyone buying land in Miami right now wrt ocean level rise.
None of this is to say that having a hog farm next door wouldn't be terrible and worthy of sympathy, just that it probably doesn't fit as well into the justice/injustice matrix (once again, assuming this legality is correct, which it very well might not be. If some lawyer wants to say it isn't, I'll probably just trust them and delete this post).
Is this working off of a model where some land is zoned for hog farms, other land is zoned for not-hog-farms, and everyone is aware which is which?
If so, I agree that changes things, but I think from a philosophical perspective it's still useful to consider the alternative where that isn't true. Although maybe then the answer is that a society without zoning would be unjust, but ours is fine.
I would say that you could probably not have opened a hog farm in town, but we lived in the middle of farmland where it would be more appropriate. So, I'm not sure about formal zoning laws, since we didn't really live in a town, but I think that there would be reasonable expectations around where one may or may not have a chance to someday be built, and one could have feasibly made a purchase/insurance off of those expectations.
I feel like this is getting close to saying "If you outside of town, you knew you were getting into a situation where people could poison you with impunity, so you have no right to complain". What am I missing?
I'm not sure that you're missing anything about the setup.
My point is more as follows: Imagine I need to buy a toy for my friend's kid. So, I go online shopping and I buy the cheapest thing that I can find. Now, this thing is probably going to quickly break, but I know that, and it's factored into the price. So, if it does indeed break, I'm not going to really have much room to complain. I probably could've bought the add-on warranty at check out, but I chose not to.
If you buy a house in the country, someone might open up a hog farm next to you, and you'll be subjected to foul odors and noises. But, you knew that might happened, and you decided to buy a house in the country anyway and not get an option on your home insurance against hog companies opening nearby. Then, once one opens nearby, I guess I don't really feel like you have a right to complain.
Suppose I buy a toy for my friend's kid, and it's coated in some sort of horrible poison from being manufactured incorrectly, and the kid dies. Can the company come back with "Well, it was cheap, so you should have predicted there was that risk"?
Suppose I buy a house in the ghetto, and some people rob me and beat me up. When the police come to arrest them, can they come back with "well, it's the ghetto, you should have known that would happen"?
I don't fully endorse this, but: Perhaps the difference is that society currently does advertise laws that apply everywhere (including laws against poison), and a police force that is supposed to enforce them everywhere?
Suppose another society that really does create and mark Anarchy Zones and Risky Goods Stores. If you went into the Anarchy Zone and complained that you got robbed, or if you bought something from the Risky Goods Store and complained that it was poisonous, I'd have a whole lot less sympathy.
Suppose you go out dressed provocatively in some manner and get assaulted. "With what you were wearing, you should have known what would happen."
I think the distinction is that while a hog farm is unpleasant it isn't illegal, though it is unpleasant. Being assaulted or buying a poisonous toy or being robbed is actually illegal so there is a higher expectation of it not happening
Both of those things are illegal, so you are assuming 1) it shouldn't happen, and 2) you could get renumeration from the culprit if it did happen.
But if you buy a (legal) medicine, and the medicine says "side effects may include horrible nausea, pain, or in rare instances, death" and you consume that medicine, do you think that the manufacturer should be liable?
You've got at least two issues conflated here. The first is mens rea, a very important concept in the law (and ethics). The people who robbed and beat you *intended* to cause you harm. The people who manufactured the toy carelessly did *not* intend to cause harm. The law (and most systems of ethics) treats these two offenses very differently, because the concept of criminal intent is extremely important. We do not generally punish people for bad things they caused but did not intend to cause, unless they were unusually careless.
The second is "reasonable expectations," another well-worn concept in the law, which is largely how we judge questions of harm caused inadvertently. You have a case against the manufacturer of the toy because it's "reasonable" to expect that they will exercise enough care in their manufacturing to prevent their toys from being coated with poison. On the other hand, it's not "reasonable" to expect a cheap toy to last as long as an expensive toy, so if you buy a cheap toy and it breaks, you don't have a case.
As for the question of what is "reasonable" and what is not, that's why we have juries. If you can convince 12 of your peers that your (violated) expectations were reasonable, you win. Otherwise, not.
> Suppose I buy a house in the ghetto, and some people rob me and beat me up.
Actually, yes. As a society we set limits to "getting beat up", and we decided that's on the universal extreme on the specific-universal axis. So yes, people will be a lot less sympathetic to you getting beat up in the ghetto than in a kindergarten, but police will take you seriously.
And to prove that yes, there is a continuum and there is an extreme where you'll get beat up and police doesn't protect you: Russia and Ukraine. You can get beat up on the street there now, and good luck getting any form of justice or reparation.
So yes, society's expectations exist and matter.
Another argument is that I'm in a much less justice-happy country, and for me the idea of requesting compensation for a business opening next door is rather extreme. It's within the Overton window of things you talk about, but not really for things you actually do. Again, society sets expectations of risk and they matter.
I feel that a lot of this discussion is hinging on whether a hog farm is merely a noisy and stinky neighbour, or actively polluting the river such that it poisons everything that uses the water - the later feels like it should be illegal, while the former is merely an issue of zoning.
Yeah, we already have mechanism in place for demonstrable harm.
The land where I built my house was cheap, because it's between a gun range (that's been there since the '40s) and an airport (which is newer. One of my neighbors recently had a petition to get the gun club closed by the town because "this is a neighborhood now."
I refused to sign, and put in an application to join the gun club.
If someone is actually poisoning you, you have a tort against them, regardless of zoning?
> If someone is actually poisoning you, you have a tort
And if they build a hog farm, you have a pork
Well if they also build a bakery, you have a torte which goes down nicely after a well-roasted pork.
What if a Cinemaplex had opened up across the street, and the value of your land skyrocketed? Two developers are competing to pay you $1 million/acre for it. Would you have also argued that this was immoral, and that a court should compel you to sell, if you sell at all, at the price/acre in effect *before* the Cinemaplex opened? Or should you be require to donate any excess to the Cinemaplex, since that is the root cause of the rise in your property values, just as the hog farm was the root cause of the drop in your property values in the other scenario?
I don't see how one can ethically argue the risk of loss should be socialized, or imposed on some indirect cause, unless you also agree the possibility of gain should also be socialized, or remitted to the indirect cause.
i think it's perfectly reasonable to forbid/disincentive behaviour that has negative externalities while even encouraging behaviour with positive externalities.
In the example: you should not be allowed to open a polluting hog farm, or at least compensate those who are affected, but you're very welcome to open a cinema you might even get a tax incentive to do so. I don't see anything unethical about that.
the point is that the incentive to open a cinemax and improve the community would be much higher if the Cinemax got to absorb all the positive externalities on land value.
Unless you agree those who open the cinema -- or a hospital, or a high-end shopping district, or make a nice park -- should reap *all* the benefit that has on surrounding property values, then you have no business arguing someone who opens a hog farm should pay for the full reduction in property values that causes. That would be almost definitionally inequitous.
I get that most people identify more with the property owner next to the hog farm than the entrepreneur laying out an attraction, but I never mistake self-interested rationalization for ethical reasoning.
I would argue that this is already incorporated into the cost. That's pretty much what speculative investing is, you buy a place that you think will go up in value because of development. You're paying a premium for a lotto ticket (basically reverse insurance).
This might feel different, but it's actually standard practice for oil. Many people with a lot of land sign a lease with an oil company. The deal is that if oil is ever discovered on or nearby your property, they're allowed to investigate and possibly drill. This is fundamentally you collecting against the possibilty that oil is found.
So, the point I'd make is that you've already paid for the possibility of the Cinamaplex opening when you bought the house, and you could've done a fancy leasing-type deal to bet against it opening. Just like the hog farm shouldn't have to pay if it opened in a reasonable area (and wasn't doing blatantly illegal things), it seems fair to treat the Cinaplex similarly.
Well, yes, this is what I was getting at. It's absurd to say "oh! the hog farmer should compensate me for the bad luck of his plans that I didn't anticipate" and then say "oh! But I don't need to compensate anyone for the good luck their plans brought me, that's all mine to enjoy."
This is only tangentially relevant, but I was amused at how much this stuck out at me: "‘well maybe instead of calling this state of affairs unjust we should remember what human nature is like, and design systems around it, think about what’s more effective, have a positive narrative’" - there are in fact people who do this! "How would we design a political system that doesn't require us changing human nature but gives good results" is definitely a past time of some people. (I'd go as far as to refer to David Friedman here, but I'm not sure if he'd feel misrepresented by my impression.)
...as I write this I notice I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, since you were involved in fictional micronations; after all, some people in that hobby do the same thing (though definitely not all, or even a majority). :)
Isn't this also famously a justification for the USA's "separation of powers" and "checks and balances" where different parts of government are allowed to stop other parts under various circumstances?
I thought everyone was introduced to this idea in grade school.
(Being aware of the idea is, of course, different from believing that this idea is *sufficient* to actually stop all corruption.)
Came here to say this. Likewise, limiting the power of government to choose winners and losers in the economy limits the scope of potential corruption, so strong protection of property rights are a big check on corruption.
This is drifting slowly towards a clump of ideas I've noodled with a bit; it's related to Orthodoxy Privilege, and also related to The Schrödinger Interpretation of Ethics; the clump of ideas are, vaguely, about the context in which we evaluate these kinds of questions.
The issue is one of context; we can see this in the "Does nature actually provide any of these things?" line of reasoning. And we can see this in the way people react to a lot of these things; for a large number of the kinds of "injustice" discussed here, the degree to which people take the injustice seriously seems more or less directly proportional to whether or not they themselves take their own relative position of "privilege" for granted.
For a society in which people routinely starve to death, nobody is going to think somebody starving to death is injust; it's just another tragedy. It's likely not sensible from within the framework of that experience to see it as unfair in a human sense; for it to be unfair in such a sense, it has to be outside the domain of what we see as normal.
This is an underrated comment and you've given me a lot of think about.
I think that sort of context is implied. Let's say we cure aging in the future. Access to anti-aging technology would then be considered a human right.
Yes, but not everyone will perceive it as a right at the same time.
It is, sure, but it's the kind of implication people accept without noticing or thinking through. And a lot of Scott's post is basically trying to understand the nature of exactly this kind of creep.
I agree. Take the right to free speech: its obvious that everyone is born with (or rather, everyone soon develops unless malformed) the ability to communicate. To coerce someone into not communicating certain things is the government taking away something you were born with. Similarly freedom of religion: while we are not all born with religion, all humans naturally create or choose systems of belief about how the world works, and the government coercing you to not believe on system or believe another would be taking that something away from you that the state of nature provided.
See also how this does not apply as easily to the more controversial parts of the Bill of Rights! For instance, the right to bear arms. We are not born with guns. One can argue we are born with the ability to perform violence to defend ourselves or our rights, and every State in the union holds that there is a right to self-defense. But does it have to be guns? Thus, far more debate about the second amendment than the first.
The right to bear arms may, in a sense, be taking away rights; a central argument of the pro-gun side of things is that guns level the playing field between the strong and weak. So in that particular sense, guns may be seen as taking away natural advantages conferred on birth by "the strong".
It's tricky, because my owning a gun does not take away your strength. I does make it more dangerous for you to infringe on my rights, however: my right to life, my right to speech, my right to religion, my right to freedom of movement, if you try to use force to take those from me then a gun is very helpful in defending my rights. So it really only removes your right to use your strength if you are using that right to infringe on mine: and, of course, if I use my right to own a gun to infringe on your rights, then you're in your rights to use your gun to defend yourself. The only imbalance is if I have a gun and you do not.
So, funnily enough, if the second amendment is repealed then I am not able to defend my right to use my strength against those who have a gun. If everyone can own a gun, then everyone has equal access to "unnatural" power guns give, but if only a select few have guns then they can infringe on the others "natural" strength without fear.
What actually happens is that guns empower criminals more than they empower you, since they now can attack you even easier without fear of retribution, as they can chose the time and the place to do so. That's even showing in the criminal statistics in the US.
Whereas if carrying guns is illegal, guns become an additional liability for criminals. Since even if they did nothing wrong otherwise, if stopped by the police, them carrying a gun puts them into jail.
If you accept that logic, and you should, the sweet spot then becomes Switzerland, where owning a gun is legal. This leads to criminals still perceiving carrying of guns as a liability, while also having to fear that people might own one and use it for self-defense.
Guns don't actually make it all that much easier for criminals to attack unarmed citizens, because most criminals have a fairly specific definition of "attack" that doesn't really match the advantages of a gun. Guns, in theory, allow people to kill from a distance without warning. Almost all criminals, if they kill their victims from a distance without warning, will have completely failed in their objective (and earned far more police attention than they can afford). And if they just scare the victim into running away, something guns are also pretty good at, that's usually a loss as well. To succeed in their criminal attacks, they need to corner the victim, close to conversational distance, announce themselves, and cede surprise and initiative. At that point, the gun isn't giving them much that a knife wouldn't, assuming they are at least moderately strong and skilled and not squeamish about blood.
For the person defending themselves against a criminal assault, the requirements are much more flexible; both "I scared him and he ran away" and "I just shot him dead, the end" count as wins for the defender. So guns start looking pretty good there (though you'll want a lawyer on speed-dial for the "I just shot him" case).
There is a subset of criminals who attack hard targets (e.g. banks) where a gun provides a real advantage. But the main reason for criminals to carry guns, is for defending themselves from *other criminals*. Most criminals are not apex predators, and there's a lot of criminal-on-criminal violence. And when that happens, nobody wants to be the guy who brought a knife to a gunfight.
We're not born with any kind of property in general, except our bodies I guess, but the right to property isn't too controversial yet, thankfully. I'd say that guns in particular are controversial for other reasons.
We're not born with newspapers either. We don't just have the right to communicate, we have the right to communicate effectively. Likewise we don't just have the right to defend ourselves, we have the right to defend ourselves effectively. Therefore, guns.
If restricting free speech is taking away something you're born with, surely so is restricting people from attacking others? That's a capacity we have in the state of nature. So I don't think this makes a very effective basis for determining what laws or rights we'd want a society to have.
Guns aren't restricting people from attacking others. They are empowering people to do so. As a criminal you chose time and place of your attack. Combined with firearms this becomes a huge advantage. You need some restrictions to actually turn that around.
Consider Switzerland: you can generally own guns, but you can't legally carry, unless you own a very specific permit. This leads to guns becoming a liability for criminals. Whenever police stops them, the fact alone that they have a gun on them marks them as criminals and can put them in jail. However, when trying to do criminal stuff, they must still consider the possibility that the person the try to victimize, or a bystander, owns a gun and knows how to use it.
Guns aren't inherently restricting people from attacking others, but the law is. It specifically says that's not allowed and you can be punished for doing it, so it's not like everything people have a power to do in the state of nature is considered a right. For that matter, *not* having to worry about people doing things they might do in a state of nature may sometimes be regarded as a right.
I don't know why I replied to your comment. I'm pretty sure my comment was meant in response to another post in this thread. Either way: my comment doesn't really make sense with regards to your post.
I do agree with your two previous posts for what it's worth ...
Interesting. Under that system, we should understand that “just” is a direction, not a destination, and we can stand around quibbling about the details but our kids are going to judge us anyway and we’d get further if we took a step instead.
I don't know if I'd call it directional, exactly - but also, yes, you can certainly look and see what we will be judged worst for (and it won't be the things our culture is focusing on, but rather the things it quietly ignores).
Edit: By "I don't know if I'd call it directional", I mean it isn't a specific direction - there is no moral arc to history. In terms of what you are saying, 100% yes, it is better to see it as a direction than a destination. Apologies, I was quibbling with something you didn't actually say.
There are clearly cases of people in pre-modern societies where starvation was common who *did* think starvation was unjust rather than merely a tragic fact of life, though.
Consider the quotation from John Chrysostom (in a comment that Scott quotes) about how the surplus wealth of the rich belongs *by justice* to the poor.
I especially like the verse where Jesus says "sell thy cloak and buy a sword, then use that sword to take from the rich and give to the poor."
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Excessively snarky response to how a verse exhorting a personal action was being used as an excuse to (as David Yamane says) "outsource their violence."
sounds like the translation you used was one of the ones which change things for political agendas. Jesus does say something about buying a sword, but didn't encouraged a communist revolt.
Is it that we're switching to a "fairness" model from a "harm/care" model, or is it that the current trend is to deny that harm can exist without unfairness? I'm not as enamored with utilitarianism as most of this blog's readers, and I don't necessarily agree that "harm/care" is a better frame for considering all the world's problems than fairness (or even, possibly, some of the Forbidden Virtues like tradition and sanctity).
But I do agree that not all harms are caused by unfairness. As I said before, I think the justice framing is becoming popular because of an underlying assumption that all harms have a perpetrator, and that they are solved by defeating that perpetrator.
I was about to admit that I was exaggerating, giving the example of how it would be difficult to put a justice spin on a comet about to obliterate the earth, as obviously there is no perpetrator. But then it occurred to me that a fairly successful movie just came out based on the premise that if a comet destroys the earth it's our fault for being so evil and stupid so... yeah.
This was kind of what I was trying to get at with my "climate of Mali" analogy. It seemed like all commenters, including pro-justice ones, agreed that Malians can be harmed by their poor climate without it being unfair.
I think it's reasonable to say that it is unfair for a comet to be about to hit the earth or for the climate of Mali to be poor - the universe can be always be unfair without there being a conflict between humans. The comet is not unjust though (unless someone has a way to evacuate and doesn't share that as widely as possible), and neither is the climate of Mali. Where justice comes into the situation is when there's a workaround that's not shared as equally to all people as possible. If someone has a spaceship to evacuate from the comet and doesn't let as many people as possible use it, that's unjust. If someone can help the people of Mali from their climate-suffering and doesn't, that's unjust. But if no one can help the people suffering harm, there's no injustice, the world is just unfair.
This is actually a really strong statement - you're saying that unless people do everything possible to help everyone in the world who has any problem, even a problem like "the climate here is bad", the result is unjust.
I don't think this is necessarily wrong, but I want to double-check that it's what you actually mean.
Yes: in the same way that in a utilitarian framework the *only* moral thing to do is what creates the most utility in the world, in this framework the only just thing to do is what fixes the most harm in the world. (In fact, I think that it could be reframed as a form of median-utility consequentialism.)
That said, I also think there needs to be some form of supererogation for any moral system. I'm an effective altruism, but I only give 10% and I don't feel bad about it. So I don't think that a person is immoral even if there's an unjust situation that they could fix, but I do think a person is immoral if there are unjust situations they could fix but they don't fix any of them.
I think I agree with your intuition that this is the right thing to do, but prefer to reserve "justice" for a specific subset of right things that require especially immediate attention in order to avoid creating the wrong incentives. But I think any debate around this would be semantic and as long as someone agrees we should make the world better I'm mostly okay with what they call it.
> Is it that we're switching to a "fairness" model from a "harm/care" model, or is it that the current trend is to deny that harm can exist without unfairness?
I do think there's some conflation between the two going on, and I think you can tie it to Haidt's theory that the left overemphasizes Care and Fairness compared to the right. Taking that idea further, Care and Fairness get combined into a unified ideology, and issues of other pillars might get funneled into Care-Fairness even though that doesn't really make sense.
IMO a lot of the "evil people are causing my problems" mentality is actually really Loyalty in a Fairness trenchcoat -- "my group is being attacked by the evil group out there and we need to stick together" (although I acknowledge that there are plenty of more Fairness-oriented takes on the question) I've actually been mulling this over for a while, when thinking through the claim that "calling people slurs causes harm." I think my main objections to using slurs are more of a Loyalty/Betrayal sort of thing (you called me a name that my group would never use); I guess at a stretch you could also argue Fairness (you called me something you wouldn't call someone else). But either way I don't think the *main* issue with slurs is harm. (To be fair, I do think there may very well be some harms there, see https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-harm-in-hate-speech/ -- but I would say the fact that you need a book-length treatment to sort them out, and even then they're things like "harm to your dignity/pride" and "harm to society" rather than a tangible harm that would trigger Care instead of Betrayal, is somewhat telling that this isn't the *main* thing going on.)
Interesting that your phrasing is "called me a name my group would never use", given a number of relatively prominent examples of words being "reclaimed" by the target group while still verboten in polite society - even if rappers call each other "nigger" it's still a huge taboo for a white person to refer to one with the same word.
I think the crux of it is the hate (or derision, in other examples) displayed tarnishes the word, to the extent that if a completely new word get coined and used with the same level of hate it will extremely rapidly be treated as a slur.
Nice observation re: Don't Look Up
The harm/care model operates on actions. It might be unfair to cause harm. It's harder to claim that it's "unfair" to fail to intervene in case someone is experiencing a natural or uncaused harm.
Perhaps if you have intervened in other natural harms, we could use a fairness frame to judge you for not doing the same in this one.
We're switching from a fairness model to a harm/care model because it's better. For a long time it was agreed that people who are bad should be tortured in hell for all eternity. Also, almost everyone is bad. I, however, say that people shouldn't be tortured in hell for all eternity in general.
Nice call-out emphasizing the "care/harm" view versus "fairness".
To the point about the hog-sludge, people use the word "justice" because there is a collectivized request for injunction against both present and future harm. The initial remedy would be lawsuit against the harm. That becomes a class-action suit (because individuals suing to prove harm is hard), and that then becomes a policy discussion (because people want politicians to deal with it, rather than suing).
Trying to describe things as "fairness" or "justice" is just marketing / propaganda to rally and collectivize people around a cause. In order to injunct against harm and advocate for one's self, you might need to collectivize, and use any rhetorical tools at your disposal.
Thus we can acknowledge that "fairness" and "justice" are things that people talk about, have meaning, etc. ... while still favoring the "care-harm" model rather than trying to evaluate fairness at a philosophical level.
I think I disagree.
Even in some distant country where there's no such thing as lawsuits and people just have to suffer when other people pollute their land, I would like to be able to call the hog farm "unjust". I think denying me that word unless I live in the right legal climate is a stronger form of moral relativism than I'm comfortable with.
I don't have a great sense of how to ground this, though.
You can call it unjust all you want. No one will stop you, at worst they’ll write a blog post about how people use the word justice when it may not be warranted.
Is your issue that you want external validation of your use of the word? For your neighbors to chime in and band together in complaints and whatever form of action is actually available to you? Do you just want to be recognized as correct in your definition and recognition of injustice in your life? There’s a kind of moral/epistemic injury to someone denying the existence or urgency of a problem you see or experience.
> "I’m not sure why the animal and human cases are moving in opposite directions."
This seems easily explainable by the fact that there are more people who already accept the premise of "human rights" than there are people who already accept the premise of "animal rights".
This reminds me a little of a similar creep with Freedom.
Everyone loves Freedom, but it quickly becomes 'Freedom to x' (or 'Freedom from x'), where x can be literally anything.
These are some great comments. Good job everybody - my comment is going to be less insightful.
I'll admit that personally, I tend to think terms like "justice" and "rights" are really rhetorical devices intended to play on different sorts of emotions. I'm not a moral relativist - I believe strongly in consequentialist morality. And I think "thick" moral concepts like rights or justice are important in building a functional society. But I think they will always disintegrate into nonsense when they are truly tested against their logical limits, and when solving genuinely difficult problems there's no substitute for digging into the specific consequences.
My comment won't be any more insightful, but perhaps a tangent will interest someone as it did me yesterday. The thought process you describe seems to line up well with Robert Kegan’s model of adult development which I read via links from yesterday's ACX post.
New link: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
I think what you're describing is the critique of Stage 4 systems level identification from Stage 5 fluid level identification.
I will say that the use of the word "right" is an astoundingly effective rhetorical device against me in particular.
I'm unsettled by the switch from negative to positive "rights" (e.g. "right to food," "right to water," "right to healthcare"). Scott touches on this briefly but for me a right is a thing that we all agree collectively that all human beings everywhere must be provided, no matter the circumstances.
That's an easier concept with a negative right like "we aren't allowed to demand you practice our religion" or "we aren't allowed to lock you up unless we give you a reasonable chance to defend yourself against the claim that we should." When you start giving people the right *to* material objects it gets weird, because material objects are scarce.
But...food and water are not currently scarce and I absolutely believe nobody should starve in the U.S. It's just too cheap and easy to feed everyone. As a matter of policy, I agree completely with the sentiments of people who call it a right.
I think the destruction of the concept of a right is dangerous - we are absolutely eroding the fundamental philosophies that keep every policy from becoming a cost-benefit analysis. Extreme, but one less-than-introspective friend once suggested completely unironically that since people with long commutes are less happy and less productive, maybe we could just require folks to live on the premises of their employer's property. Obviously everyone would recoil from that idea, but if the idea of "rights" is non-existent, then that kind of cost-benefit thinking would be the only constraint on policy. And you can see less extreme examples from younger folks who do not feel very strongly about ideas like free speech and due process.
This all seems very academic and silly next to actual harms though, and arguing about the use of the words to support good policy feels pedantic and almost mean-spirited. Thus, I've mostly surrendered the fight against the corruption of the idea of "rights."
Eh, rights are just constructs of the upper class. For example, why do you have to declare that you have rights? If you really did, wouldn't it be implicit? We should aim to live in a society where rights are understood fundamentally, not propped up by laws. If they're propped up by laws, then the people who make the laws get to decide what is and isn't a right, and usually that entails drawing the line at anything that would harm profitability.
“Related to the story where someone (Milton Friedman? I can’t find the source) was asked about the causes of poverty, and answered “Poverty doesn’t need a cause, it’s the natural condition, we should be looking for the causes of wealth.”
May have been Friedman too, but this is a classic Thomas Sowell point:
“Standards of living far below what we would consider to be poverty have been the norm for untold thousands of years. It is not the origins of poverty which need to be explained,” Sowell writes in his recent Wealth, Poverty and Politics. “What requires explaining are the things that created and sustained higher standards of living.”
https://www.city-journal.org/thomas-sowell-race-poverty-culture
Well, one could very easily disagree with that, if we compare say, the medieval period, with a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Then, it is the poverty of the medieval serf, in comparison to the freedom and access to natural resources of the hunter-gatherer, that must be explained. And then one could argue that restricted access to land, in the Georgist sense of including any natural resources, that is the source of poverty, and is thus human in origin.
The medieval peasant wears finely woven linin undergarments, a warm wool cloak that resists water and is dyed a pleasing color, a permanent shelter that repels wind, rain, and cold, candles and oil lamps to light dark places, a variety of iron tools, a cauldron to cook his food in, and shoes for his feet. He may, if average, own or have access to a cart and an ox to pull it. He enjoys music and song and good architecture at his local chapel, and if he visits a larger town can enjoy beautiful stained glass. When famine has not come, he has a good store of food to last him through winter.
The average hunter gatherer is far poorer. In cold climes he wears leather or furs, crudely decorated with bone beads, ochre, or charcoal. In warm climes he has few clothes at all. He may have a teepee or a wigwam, but most carry them wherever he goes if he is to have shelter. And he must stay on the move, or he will starve. His tools are made of stone or wood: even cutting down a tree is a difficult and laborious task. He has no pot to make a fine soup, though he might have a preserved animal stomach that can boil water and must be regularly repaired with bone needles.
Certainly if you compare the freedom of the serf to the freedom of primal hunter, the hunter wins out. He has no master, and no fences stop his way. But we were discussing poverty, not freedom, and in terms of wealth the medieval serf beats the hunter gatherer any day. When the Europeans came to North America, they found an eager market for steel knives, glass beads, iron cookpots, tools of all kinds, woven clothes, and guns. If you asked an Iroquois who was wealthier, the people of the long house or the white faces, they'd tell you it was the white faces.
The "freedom" of hunter-gatherers wasn't all that great either. Instead of being dependent on the whims of a local lord, you're dependent on the whims of some kind of tribal elder.
And let's not forget the fact that hunter-gatherers, like all wild animals, tend to be subject to periodic mass starvation that keeps their numbers in check.
A quick search found this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways
It sounds like we have different definitions of poverty. My definition depends on access to natural resources, while your depends on technological knowledge. Since technological knowledge increases with time, of course any historical period will have higher knowledge than a previous period.
As a counter argument to the second part of your comment, when Europeans came to North America, they were inspired by the high level of freedom enjoyed by Native Americans, which in turn inspired the Declaration of Independence.
"Some historians, including Donald Grinde of the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, have claimed that the democratic ideals of the Kaianere’kó:wa provided a significant inspiration to Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and other framers of the U.S. Constitution. They contend that the federal structure of the U.S. constitution was influenced by the living example of the Iroquois confederation, as were notions of individual liberty and the separation of powers."
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace
I agree the American Indian was far freer than the average white settler: but the average white settler was much wealthier, and the average American Indian much poorer.
What does it mean to have access to natural resources? It's true that an English serf in 1200 does not have access to the resources of the Lord's wood, because those trees by law and tradition belong to the Lord and can only be harvested with his permission. As far as the serf is concerned, they might as well be on the moon. In contrast there was no law among the Chinook saying that a man can't cut down a red cedar to build his longhouse. So on the surface it appears the Chinook has more access. Yet is this the case? If a serf wants to cut down a tree in the village commons, where he may cut by right, he has a fine iron axe to cut it down with. If the Chinook wants boards for his long house he must place wedges of antler or crabapple wood, and hammer them in with stone hammers. It's long, painstaking work to get planks out of a cedar tree without iron tools. And it must be cedar, because cedar is light and soft and easy to split: though the forests were full of hemlock and fir, and there was nobody around to say you can't have them, you simply couldn't harvest them with any kind of efficiency without iron tools. So despite having no law against harvesting hemlock, and despite having hemlock trees in abundance, the Chinook had no access to the resource of their wood for house building. So who has more access to resources? It's not just a question of freedom, but of wealth. An iron ax is wealth. An iron pot is wealth. An ox and a cart is wealth. It does you no good to have access to iron ore and wild cattle if you can't use them for anything.
Of course, the American Indian of 1620 was in a much later period then our serf from 1200. Yet they were still poorer than that serf, despite coming from a "later" period. Technology, like iron pots, does not just pop out of holes in the ground. It takes effort, and luck, and work, and years of improvements. It doesn't just happen. This is as true of wealth as it is of technology. If you drop me naked in the Canadian wilderness, then I will be desperately poor. Just because there are trees, and stone, and metal ore all around me in abundance doesn't mean I am wealthy. Wealth must be created. The natural state of man is poverty: naked we come into this world, and naked we come out of it. Any wealth besides our own bodies must be created. Even an apple fallen from a tree must be picked up before it becomes wealth.
In terms of nutrition--about the most concrete measure of wealth you can get--hunter-gatherers were significantly better off than pre-modern peasants.
Europeans encountering North American Indians were impressed not just by their level of personal freedom but by how tall and well-nourished they were.
Fair enough. But note that this all started with the OP putting forward that poverty is natural, and wealth must be explained. Then another commenter wrote "Well, one could very easily disagree with that, if we compare say, the medieval period, with a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Then, it is the poverty of the medieval serf, in comparison to the freedom and access to natural resources of the hunter-gatherer, that must be explained."
The implication of the second comment is that medieval serfs were poorer than hunter gatherers because of political systems: they lacked the freedom to access resources, and in a state of nature they would have been wealthier. This seems to match your point that the American Indians were better nourished than medieval peasants. However, lets take our medieval peasant of 1200 and remove all political obstacles to accessing resources. Suddenly he, and every other serf, is as free as a hunter gatherer to take whatever resources are around for his own. Has he become richer?
Well lets compare France in 1200 to USA and Canada in 1600. In 1200 France had a population of about 15 million people. In 1600 population estimates vary, but generally estimates are 900,000 at the low end and 7 million at the highest. Note that even if the highest estimate is accurate, that's 7 million spread out over all of all the modern USA and Canada, while the 15 million french serfs are all in France: if we look at all of Europe it's something like 68 million. So lets take those 15 million serfs in France and put them back in a state of nature, with no concept of ownership and no laws to prevent them from accessing the resources around them. Lets take it even further and by some magic say that nobody will kill anybody else or dominate others: everyone is free and will magically stay free. Would this lead to the French serfs become better fed?
Frankly, I doubt it. The problem of serf malnutrition wasn't that the Lords were hoarding all the food for themselves. It was that the only way you can support a population of 15 million with medieval technology is by intensely farming every square acre of land with cereal crops. That's going to lead to a lot worse nutrition, as your average person won't have easy access to meat, and removing all the laws that limit resource access won't improve that.
In contrast, when you have at most 7 million people and a whole continent of fish and game, there's plenty of nutritious food to go around. The problem isn't a political system that impoverishes people: the problem is that you can't support 15 million people with medieval farming technology without most of them being somewhat malnourished.
Note that the natives of North America that early settlers met were the survivors of a massive plague - it's easy to seem rich when the population has just dropped by a factor of more than 10, and you've inherited access to all those resources, but that doesn't necessarily mean that life in North America was like that before first contact.
I don't believe those claims about the US Constitution being inspired by the Iroquois. I think it's just in vogue for academics to say such things nowadays. The colonists were carrying on an existing political tradition imported over from Britain, they were just more able to shake off the old government and firmly establish a new one than their predecessors had been.
There's I think a reasonable case that the doctrine of dual sovereignty in the US Constitution - states are sovereign, well, states, able to legislate and tax and police in their own name without anyone giving them permission or delegate the authority to them, *and* so is the Federal government, with a specified division of powers - was inspired by the structure of the Iroquois Federation. But that's a far cry from "The US Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois".
The Swiss already had a very decentralized democratic system.
Poverty is an economic concept, so need to look at the economy. Yes medieval serfs may be in some sense poorer (or at least have worse quality of life) compared to hunter gatherers, but it's largely because of much higher population density and hence need to distribute a much higher, but not quite proportionately higher, economic loot across more mouths to feed. e.g. people in Ethiopia today may not be richer than people there 200 years ago, but population has gone up close to 40 times, so comparing on per-capita basis may not be the best yardstick. If your medieval serfs were all freed by their lords and told to go back to being hunter-gatherers 90% of them would starve in a year, even if you taught them all the hunter-gathering skills they lacked. Conversely if you put all the nobles and king's heads on pikes and redistributed all their money the average serf would still probably be worse off than the hunter gatherer.
Here's an op-ed with a very related title, but it doesn't cite any sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/11/28/abject-poverty-is-the-natural-state-of-mankind-wealth-the-thing-created/?sh=7396169657e4
"wealth" and "Poverty" are so stretched thin in those quotes, they are totally transparent.
seems like Petersonian deep sounding but meaningless if you think about it for 30 seconds, type stuff.
Or just really imprecise terms.
I agree that moral foundations are relevant, but I see them in the opposite way. AFAIK from reading Haidt, what's special about the modern left is their focus on the care/harm foundation to the exclusion of any other. I submit that rather than a sudden reversion of this trend, we're actually seeing here the harm/care foundation taken to the extreme of having it become mandatory. It's not "sad" that people are suffering, it's plain "criminal".
To be blunt, I see nothing fair in taking from A to give to B. I see it as fair for both A and B to earn whatever they get, weather in cash or in sexual conquests. I'm not saying I agree with this point of view, only that this is the point of view that seems maximally fair to me.
Your example of UBI - it is pretty caring, true, but one of the most touted advantages of UBI over other redistribution systems is... its fairness. Instead of having a complicated welfare system based on gameable and political rules, you just get whatever lump amount of money you can extract from the economy and you split it equally to everybody. Hard to get more fair than that.
I support incel justice in the sense of trying to find ways to help people have sex. The problem is unlike progressive taxation and redistribution, any state mandated redistribution of sex starts to feel very fucked up and rapey very quickly. The most obvious point of intervention is to legalize sex work and at least let the incels with sufficient money deploy that to solve their sex problems. Beyond that my suggested interventions start to curve back in the direction of normal social democracy, just making sure people have the resources they need to work through whatever issues are interfering with their sex lives from a position of safety.
If the incel just wants sex, then legal sex workers will solve that problem. If our deformed incel wants love and a relationship, "I'm paid to let you fuck me for an hour once a week" is not going to work.
Sure, my point is the limits of what's to be done about this issue from a public policy perspective. Removing legal restrictions on access to sex is easy and an obvious win. But there aren't legal restrictions on access to romantic relationships; people are already free to have a romantic relationship with any consenting partner. So an intervention would have to go beyond just getting rid of a counterproductive restriction, and into the territory of deploying state resources to help incels find romance - difficult when state resources consist of money and the issue is people wanting a relationship that's not a financial transaction. In addition to just giving people resources to generally improve themselves if desired as I mentioned above, maybe there's room for state subsidized speed dating or a class in school about how to do romance? But even those seem like they're some combination of a lot of state intervention in our personal lives, and probably an inefficient use of resources relative to just providing individuals with resources and letting them deploy those towards getting better at romance if desired.
"a class in school about how to do romance"
As someone who was deliberately taught how to date wrong by the public schools in an effort to prevent teen pregnancy, I can assure you that this is a terrible idea.
Obligatory chime-in to remind everybody that legal prostitution plus wealth redistribution will not solve "the incel problem". As somebody who was *involuntarily celibate* in their twenties, I can assure you that being able to hire an escort would not have helped me feel better about my situation *at all*. The issue isn't "I want to have sex", it's "I want to be the kind of person that the people I find attractive want to have sex with", i.e. "I want to be high status".
Yeah that is a key part of why it's so hard to intervene on the romance side of the equation - there's by definition only so much status to go around, and there aren't practical ways for the state to redistribute it.
Maybe we should start the conversation about status justice then...
(Some) sex workers are VERY good at making their clients feel genuinely loved. Clients falling for them is a common problem. For mistresses/kept women/sugar babies/honest courtesans, this isn't actually a problem.
"any state mandated redistribution of sex starts to feel very fucked up and rapey very quickly"
You are missing all the social indoctrination tools that could be used to brainwash people. You could teach in schools that preferring to have sex with physically beautiful / wholesome people is wrong and shameful. You could make it unlawful for internet dating sites from listing characteristics like age and height. You could make it a social convention for every attractive person to open any kind of speech with a statement acknowledging how privileged they are and how unjust it is they got all the luck instead of others and have them apologize for it in advance. You could force movies and TV and fashion magazines to have a quota of unattractive people that is representative of the general population and always present these people in a positive light (e.g. they should always be the ones that get the girl/guy at the end of the movie). You could make hiring rates / wage gaps correlated with physical attractiveness a huge social issue (similar to male/female wage gap today) and clamor for companies to address it (on the reasoning that if ugly people made as much as beautiful people they would have more sex). Etc. etc. would it work? who knows, but there are lots of plausible things that could be done that are not remotely "rapey" and not worse than any of the other myriad things we are trying at the moment to try to fix racism, sexism and other issues.
Wow, this is a really good point that I never considered. In short, you could get woke about amorous affection injustice, to make people feel like oppressors if they allow the traditional hotness of a partner to guide their partner choice. A hot guy needlessly taking off his shirt and revealing a six-pack would make him to be a moral monster, like someone who jokes around with the N-word. Even if he intended no harm, he should have known better. I'm picturing an episode of Black Mirror based on this premise, but a real media company would never touch this hot potato. The alternative, I guess, would be to try and earnestly tweet about this with lots of woke lingo, starting first with some softballs: "I am a housewife of Potomac, so why does nobody on the show look like me?" #unexamined-privilege #lookism-justice
> any state mandated redistribution of sex starts to feel very fucked up and rapey very quickly
What’s the difference with the libertarian point of view "any state mandated redistribution of wealth starts to feel very fucked up and pillagey very quickly" ?
Or, in the other direction, why is "taxation is stealing" a fallacy whereas "lawful state-mandated sex is rape" is not ?
This gets even trickier if we do legalize prostitution and wealthy prostitutes pay "state mandated redistribution" through their tax money.
The state is literally requiring them to have more sex with people they would otherwise not have had sex with in order to pay their taxes.
I am much more committed to people's right to bodily autonomy than I am to their never losing control of abstracted social resources like money that they've managed to accumulate.
'Cause all property is theft; so we just have to life with some light pilfering if we want to avoid heavy pillaging.
Eg, anyone who takes a tour through Versailles will realize why the Bourbons got the chop.
I mean, taxation is theft, it's just that the libertarian solution to that problem would be way more horrifying than having to pay half your money for social services.
UBI: There's an old saying that, "A fool and his money are soon parted." I feel like there's this assumption that poverty is a function of not having access to enough income. And if that were the only problem, then a UBI would absolutely solve poverty. Yet I personally know people who would squander a UBI in a way that would make inequality worse. They'd give their stipend to some charlatan who promised his business would take off and make them millionaires, then commit their own earnings and get deeper into debt on a whisp of a dream. Or they'd go get larger loans so they owe more of their souls to financial institutions and for longer - so deep that they'd never be able to build asset wealth, even if they wise up some time down the road.
Yet there are still plenty of people who could change their lives with a one-time $10k infusion of cash. That was me at one time. I don't know how to tell these two groups apart, but my sense is that both of them are very large, such that an obstinate objection to something like a UBI would prevent a lot of people from getting a major hand up. Meanwhile, any actual UBI I can think of would be counterproductive for the other group, for whom 'mo money = mo problems'.
This is not as applicable to the USA, but GiveDirectly has had very good results with their UBI/cash injection tests in Africa. Almost all of the recipients spend it on things that are really meaningful and not wasteful. Even the ones who "waste" it tend to be spending it on things that I can't begrudge them.
Certainly there are some people who are willing to just throw it at true waste (look at the spike of NFTs), but I think those are minimal and especially minimal among the people who would receive the most.
I absolutely agree! I don't think all poverty is self-inflicted, even if I do personally know a few poor people whose poverty was self-inflicted. And although I know that giving money to some of my family/friends wouldn't help certain of them out, I do know that's not a universal.
I wonder how much Accountability factors into the success of a direct giving program? I've heard of GiveDirectly, but I'm not very familiar with their program's parameters. I assume that whatever their oversight/accountability program is it's at least a little better than a no-questions-asked UBI, simply because they're asking the question, "What do recipients actually go on to spend this money on?" Perhaps the problem isn't whether we give, but whether we continue to care after the money is sent out?
I don't think anybody serious thinks UBI will mean an end to any kind of poverty, or there won't be mistakes. But, just like Social Security (which is basically an UBI for anybody who worked and got to 65/67) means that while there are still poor elderly people, extreme deep poverty among the elderly has actually basically disappeared. For me, the UBI isn't about ending poverty completely, but creating a higher floor, so those at the lower end have more power over employers and there's less desperation.
I'm not convinced SS is a net benefit, even for the poor. For one, I have no confidence that SS will be around when I retire. Perhaps it will transition into a simple means-tested program, but I don't think there's political will to go there. For another, it's a regressive tax on wages with a hidden component that is revealed for self-employed workers. In other words, it's a burden felt most on the workers least able to bear it.
The program's returns are worse than buying treasury bonds such that an equivalent private program (death and disability benefits + retirement) could be purchased at a fraction of the price - once again burdening the poor with a more expensive program, yet even so they continually run into the problem of cutting benefits or going insolvent. Thus, the 'security' aspect of the program being a matter of political debate and a poor financial foundation does not inspire confidence in those it's intended to help in the future.
I'm concerned that an actual UBI would be implemented less like GiveDirectly and more like Social Security.
If you're interested in GiveWell's assessment of the impact of GiveDirectly's cash transfers, check out their model:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B1fODKVbnGP4fejsZCVNvBm5zvI1jC7DhkaJpFk6zfo/edit#gid=1680005064
In short, they do continue to care after the money is sent out, because ultimately the aim isn't to donate (that's the means), it's to improve lives. So they try to adjust for downsides like wastage risk, misappropriation of funds, potential negative spillover effects etc. Apparently ~40% of the cash is invested in stuff like roofs, furniture and livestock, instead of being consumed, which is interesting.
This makes sense. Poor people in rich countries are already selected for being especially bad at making financial decisions, while poor people in poor countries are not.
Poor people in rich countries are people who have already thrown away loads of great opportunities to be not-poor; poor people in poor countries have never even had one opportunity.
Selected for being not having wealth in a rich country is not the same thing as throwing away lots of great opportunities. Many people are not able to do things like that. Maybe they're stuck at a local maximum (they need to work a shitty job to pay the bills for their family so they can't get education), maybe they're disabled, maybe they're trained in a career that no longer exists and they're not able to retrain. Those are all situations that would be helped by being given cash.
Since nobody's saying this, there' the issue that income is very correlated with IQ.
If we assume cash injections in poor Africa are either uncorrelated with relative IQ, or positively correlated (by using some form of minimalistic selection), then yes, cash injections there would help potentially competent people escape poverty trap. But giving cash to the poorest people in a society that's both economically free and already stratified - I predict that's a lot less likely to help.
There are already many ways of escaping poverty in western society that would seem like a godsent in poor countries - like driving an Uber or riding a bicycle to deliver food. So a supermajority of the people that could raise from poverty already did, or will in a couple of years (poverty in free countries is also very much temporary and mostly based on age).
Interesting point. I wonder what the literature says about this. What's the lowest IQ that can support an above-poverty lifestyle without external support (family/friends managing finances or a trust)? Is there a strong tendency toward poverty (independent of income) in relation to IQ?
If we're talking about 2+ SD, that's <3% of the population and the rest could be explained by the standard appeals to behavior or income. If the minimum IQ is higher though, say 85, that's >15% of the population and it's a different class of problem that can't be solved with either handouts or education.
Financial outcomes are at least as strongly related to behavior as to income. As the old saying goes, "Income $5, expenses $6: misery. Income $4, expenses $3: happiness." How much of that behavior can be taught, though? Is there a floor below which we cannot eliminate poverty in a free society?
The literature is pretty clear, it's only "in polite conversatuon" where it doesn't get repeated.
The effect is continuous and it hits from many directions at once. There is income, and spending habits, yes. There is likelyhood of pregnancies at younger ages and outside of marriage, which hit long term wealth stats like a truck. Strong correlation with crime. And so on.
Society can do two huge things to help.
1. Admit the problem exists. Due to natural stratification and assortative mating, lots of bureaucrats make rules and programs without having interacted with an even slighly below average iq person outside a scripted scenario (i.e. a store clerk) for years.
2. Abolish minimum wage. Replace it with ubi if you want, or just get rid of it completely. It has its uses, mostly setting a Schelling point for labor value, but it also makes large segments of the population effectively discriminated against. The less smart, the young, the inexperienced.
The continuous scale makes this more difficult to navigate and/or mediate. Is there a threshold measurement we could look at? For example, <1.5x poverty persistent over 10+ years. But that again looks only at income, where we're also interested in spending/asset management.
I feel like it's the same story with minimum wage/UBI, where income is the only metric that's addressed. It's only half the story (if that) and yet it's the thing we measure because it's what we know best.
I also feel like a lot of programs meant to help alleviate poverty focus on short-term infusions of cash as opposed to long-term asset-building tools. The middle class have this with homeowner incentives, and the wealthy have it with various investment and other incentives. Yet for the poor, assets are largely ignored.
We know the returns to capital are greater than the returns to labor in the long run, but we have a system that emphasizes capital for the wealthy and labor for the poor. Why are we surprised when the poor don't accumulate wealth when the system isn't designed for that?
> What's the lowest IQ that can support an above-poverty lifestyle without external support (family/friends managing finances or a trust)?
I guess it depends on the society a lot.
How complex is the society? More complex is harder to navigate. Is the society traditional (you can live well by copying what your successful seniors do) or changing quickly (you need to figure out things on your own)? Are superstimuli and scams and usury forbidden, or do they tempt you at every step (caveat emptor)?
Generally, higher IQ is better and lower IQ is worse. But how much danger there is, and how fucked you are if you cannot figure out the new kinds of danger quickly enough, that depends on the environment.
Like I said in the other comment, in the developed world it actually has a value: the IQ needed to thrive in a minimum wage job. Anything less and society effectively kicks you into a forever periphery. It's not just about income, like sclmlw says. It's about being and knowing you are a productive human being. It's about gaining experience and having the possibility to progress. It's about, yes, accumulating capital to move to the next level, because welfare projects aren't exactly designed to allow you to do that.
I don't really know how it manifests in less developed countries. From what I see here in the less structured Romania's countryside, there's not much discrimination: as long as somebody wants to work, there are always things he can do. For example we have an office back yard that's about to become spotless after quite a bit of work. If I think about a counterfactual world where you get invoiced for every piece of work, I'm about 90% certain that much less than half that work would have got done, and I'm about 75% certain that the main guy wouldn't have been a part of that work (not for IQ reasons, but he looks ... very easy to discriminate against).
I think there are a lot of very poor students who do long term damage to their health as a result of very temporary poverty, so just because a lot of poverty is temporary and a function of age doesn't mean it isn't worth fixing. Making youth wealthier would probably also do wonders for the West's TFR
I think there are a lot of not poor students who do long term damage to their health. But I do take your point that poverty can have a lot of long-term sequalae and should obviously be addressed. The question is how much of poverty is on the income side of the equation, versus the behavior or competence side? If it's 80/20 income, UBI solves most of the problem. If it's 90/10 behavior/competence, UBI is a small step in the right direction, but also kind of a distraction from where all the action lies.
I find that... counterintuitive. I'd guess you'd need quite extreme conditions to affect long term the average healthy youth. Can you give me some examples?
Brain damage from drug overdose (much more common than you might think)
Felony conviction
Well we don't want either of those types of people breeding anyway. Terrible genes.
There are probably a lot of people in sub-Saharan Africa who are just a little bit of cash away from being very productive.
But people in the west have had plenty of chances to get a little bit of cash.
"Your husband should get it because we don't want to penalize the disabled for not being able to drive anymore than we already do. Public transit users should get it as a reward for their more responsible lifestyle choice and to help them afford today's elevated prices."
This is why we also need generous bankruptcy laws, not an argument against a UBI. We should have a system where the default is that once you stop making terrible choices you can thrive, rather than being weighed down by lack of resources, either due to never having had them or having squandered them.
This is an interesting argument against UBI I'd never considered. A benefit provided can always become conditional in the future. When government provides your healthcare, it suddenly has an interest in how you take care of your body. When government provides your income, it suddenly has an interest in how you allocate your resources. This is not an argument about 'should', but rather one of whether it 'would' attach strings to this kind of program.
The larger a fraction of your wealth the UBI represents, the greater the influence attached strings would have in your life. Thus, you could imagine a bifurcated system, where people with means would have an economic freedom that people reliant on a UBI could not afford.
> Thus, you could imagine a bifurcated system, where people with means would have an economic freedom that people reliant on a UBI could not afford.
Depending on technical details, this could be either a good thing or a bad thing.
Good thing, if it means that people using UBI have a good life (and people not using UBI have a good safety net), but there is still a strong incentive to try harder. The current system can alchemically transform greed into work ethics; perhaps the new system could transform other vices... like, maybe alcohol and all kinds of drugs could be perfectly legal, but only available for non-UBI money.
Bad thing, if the goverment interventions would actually be harmful, or at least designed to keep you in the poverty trap. Something like: with UBI you are legally required to exercise for 30 minutes between 10 AM and 10:30, but all jobs need you to keep working from 9 to 5, so once you start getting UBI you become unable to get a job again. (This is just an example. Imagine something less transparently bad, but having equally bad consequences, despite being politically perfectly defensible.)
I agree with this, which is why I made the should/would distinction. I have no confidence that a government incapable of running an honest budget, or even a balanced one, or a solvent benefits program would design a system that incentivizes healthy wealth-building habits in response to a UBI. Instead, they're more likely to pretend that their policies are beneficial, when really they're only beneficial to certain special interests.
A few not-quite-transparently bad examples:
* You get a 7% UBI bonus for [joining the military, getting solar panels, insert special interest group here]
* There's a UBI penalty if your credit score gets below a certain level [never mind that credit is a measure of ability to pay back debt, not a measure of financial health, and would incentivize people to go borrow more - literally the opposite of the kind of asset acquisition that's required to escape from poverty and build wealth]
* Penalties on saving UBI funds. Yes, this could easily happen, justified by the ideas that "we need to get this money flowing through the economy" and that "people who are just parking the cash in savings don't need it anyway". Meanwhile, someone who decides to have a thousand dollars saved so they don't need to use a credit card to cover an emergency is penalized for having good financial habits over the imprudent credit-card-as-emergency-fund person.
* A UBI debit card (no cash withdrawal options, track purchases, and prevent remittances) that is run poorly through a public-private partnership with a bank that's Just The Worst. (My last stimulus came this way. No warning. No notice that 'actually this really shading-looking card is legitimate'. No documentation that the daily ACH transfer limit is small, or that the monthly ACH transfer limit will take 3 months to get it all off there.) This is maybe not quite evil so much as incompetent. It's what I've come to expect from this kind of program.
UBI would help some people, and not others (Appalachian pill addicts who even now are exchanging their food stamps for beer and drugs come to mind). Neither group is nil, and i have no idea whether overall it would be worth the cost. I would be supportive of a large scale trial, except that the whole free covid checks for everyone in the US was kind of that already and there seem to be lots of unintended side effects (retail gambling on meme stocks, people withholding their labor from the market and causing inflation etc.) even on this very time-limited experience, so dunno.
I think people getting money and choosing not to work shitty jobs for low pay as a result is fundamentally an intended effect of a UBI, if not of the covid relief program. I agree that retail gambling on meme stocks is a great example of fools being parted from their money.
Yeah by unintended consequeces I meant that every cost calculation I've ever seen for UBI programs only tallies cost of actual payments, but haven't seen anyone think about incorporating costs from things like ensuing inflation.
I'm willing to take a swing at the incel question from a Catholic perspective.
I can *owe* you the extra coat in my closet, because you need it and because its purpose is to keep someone warm. When I own it simply as excess, I'm not just spiting you, I'm spiting the jacket's telos. (Think of that old Ikea commercial with the sad lamp out by the sidewalk, wishing it were still lighting the room versus being thrown away).
To an extent, neglecting the purpose of something I own begins to become abusus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usufruct) the right to alienate or destroy the thing I possess. For the most part, Catholics can only very rarely believe this right exists.
BUT, my body and my sexuality can't be *owed* to someone who desires them in the same way a coat is, because their telos is not just sex. It certainly isn't non-marital sex, and Catholicism *explicitly* says that marriage is a good, but virginity and abstinence for the sake of the Kingdom is a *higher* good.
That doesn't sound like much consolation for the non-Catholic incel, but it is pretty key to Catholic sexual ethics. No one is entitled to a partner, but God doesn't ask that you simply stop having feelings. They're still meant to shape your life, but in a different way. And the experience of having a cross to struggle with is universal, but the particular cross carried varies.
Does this imply that refusing to marry is the same sort of sin as refusing to use your coat to clothe a poor person?
(not claiming this is a gotcha - maybe it does - I know Catholics are pretty pro-marriage - I'm just curious)
I think it might for some forms of Protestant (remember, they have no tradition of consecrated, celibate religious). But at the Council of Trent, the Church affirmed "If anyone says that the married state surpasses that of virginity or celibacy, and that it is not better and happier to remain in virginity or celibacy than to be united in matrimony, anathema sit".
In the Gospel of Matthew (ch 19) Jesus teaches, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
So we start with the assumption that not everyone will marry; that marriage is good but virginity is *better*, and that not all virginity is willingly entered into.
And *within* marriage, sex is still not a matter of getting what you want, whenever you want it. Chastity is still a virtue husband and wife have to develop to have the proper relationship to their appetites.
I think the other big thing is that you framed "justice" as implicitly being about crime and punishment, hurting the bad people and rewarding the good people. When its pretty clear that's this is a word with multiple slightly different usages and that's not the usage that these examples were referencing. So it ends up being a kind of argument by word association rather than looking at the positions the proponents themselves put forth. Which is the sort of logical error/rhetorical trick you are normally very good at pointing out other people doing.
> But from the hog farmers’ perspective, they’re just running a hog farm, which (ignoring the vegan objection for now) is a perfectly reasonable non-criminal thing to do.
This might or might not be relevant to your broader point, but I would push back, here. Getting laws enforced (let alone passed) against powerful polluters is not a trivial matter, and requires the exercise of power by community members (sustaining a complex legal case, etc), or on their behalf by our institutions.
From the hog farmers perspective, they might or might not think their activity is legal, they might or might not expect to get away with it, and they might or might not care whether they do.
Accordingly, providing communities with the legal and institutional means to defend themselves using existing laws is a focus of environmental justice activists. Another is the creation of such laws, which seems hard to do without engaging with foundational notions of justice in the first place.
Three Ways to seek justice without bearing costs:
The "Justice Creep" OP (or maybe i should say "OOP" - original Opening Post!) really got me* thinking... that the problem is people seeking to do something that flags as "promoting justice," but where they don't personally BEAR THE COSTS that usually goes with that work. So I wrote this sarcastic mini-screed. (Irony to the rescue!!)
3 Ways to "pursue justice" without bearing the usual costs of genuinely pursuing justice:
1. Do it in a way that's impersonal: without confronting privately.
2. Do it behind a big corporate facade: you won't get as much personal flack! (because other people / systems can be ablative armor so the criticism won't get thru 2 u?)
3. Do it without assuming the awesome and terrible responsibilities of being a mod.
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HERE they are, in all the gory detail:
1. Do it in a way that's impersonal: without confronting privately. Because if u confront privately, 2 things might be different:
A. You don't get to look cool in front of others. B. You may hear the other person's side. Imagine actually verbally engaging with the lonely and the blackpilled! (possibly even in a way where you're even forced to associate a face or a voice with such a one!) You might go home and cry for the poor guy that night. Also note that in the Christian version of this, [here, by "this," I mean "pursuing relational harmony & resolving conflicts within a given community"] the biggest "ban hammer" anyone can bring down on someone--excommunication (or something much like it)--the conflict-resolution procedure described begins with one-on-one confrontation. (Matthew 18)
2. Do it behind a big corporate facade:
Remember in 2020 when everyone started putting "Black Lives Matter" and "We are committed to pursuing racial equity" on the front pages of their webpages? Did I go to a random company's webpage and think, "Ohhh, now [CEO] is woke."? No! They were "going along to get along." There was no single person whom I mentally "held responsible" for any one of these companies' "new look"; individually, leaders were probably "shielded" from their customers' feedback?
3. Do it without assuming the terrible responsibilities of being a mod: Mods or "people in charge" nurture the health of a community and have their eyes/awareness open to justice in a different way. Being a mod is not for the pacifist, nor for the faint of heart!! The counterexample where you actually, formally become a mod in a community, probably looks a little like this. However, A. You won't be chosen as a mod if you don't have a committment to the community. B. I think that if anyone wears that role, however imperfectly, (and we would ALL do it imperfectly) it will wear on them C. You are posting a public invitation to get shit thrown at you by people who don't care about your community, (and also, sadly, people who DO!) because you're the obvious "important person." Anyway, the combination of A and whatever actual powers you have (along with the entirely fictitious powers you have in people's headcanons) results in a LOT of people thinking that solving their problem requires your help! Even friends within the community will probably begin to relate weirdly to you because they feel like you are "in charge" (hahaha!) and "have an in" and maybe "can do something for them." Lastly, this job is really hard, and I'm amazed that a thesis I thought I'd disagree with like Yudkowsky wrote here was so compelling: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
* sorry to be so slow i couldn't make it to the "real discussion."
[Edit 1: basically whitespace! Edit 2: added clarification 'here, by "this," I mean "pursuing relational harmony & resolving conflicts within a given community" ' Edit 3: small adjacent edit; added the word "described."]
I really think the point that poverty is the baseline condition of humans is an excellent framing for lots of disparate issues. Thanks for adding it to my repertoire.
Scott, I really think you would get a lot out of Alasdair MacIntyre’s work, despite the negative-ish review you gave After Virtue some time ago! A lot of resonances with your critique, super incisive, but combined with the breadth of knowledge coming from reading every moral/political philosopher ever
Here is an excellent discussion of social justice, with a comparison of justice vs charity mindsets, from Doug Muder, a Unitarian pastor:
https://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2016/03/who-owns-world-2016-version.html
It draws most heavily on Thomas Paine, although it sounds a lot like Henry George. The argument is that there is a common inheritance of humanity, including land, as well as the ideas and things created by past generations.
"We all owe a debt to the common inheritance, because none of us makes things by calling them out of nothing, like the God of Genesis. Everything we make relies on the resources of the Earth and the tools that have been passed down to us."
The human-created institution of private property excludes some people from the common inheritance. Paine was specifically referring to the English Enclosures, which deprived the poor of their former right to hunt and farm the commons, but he clearly thinks of it in more general terms as well. Social justice is justice because it returns to people their returns from the common inheritance.
"The flaw in the charity mindset is that it refuses to recognize that debt. It accepts, without question or objection, disinheriting the poor from the common legacy."
Paine's solution is social security and a one-time gift of capital to all young people. Mudor suggests that education is something similar in an information economy. There would still be need for charity for the people who waste their inheritance or who are incapable of succeeding with it for other reasons.
"But that is not where we are now. In the world we live in today, people are poor because the common inheritance has been usurped by people who believe that what is theirs is theirs, and they owe no one for its use; who believe that only land-owners are beneficiaries of the Creation; that businessmen and industrialists are the sole heirs of technological progress; that only the educated rightfully inherit our cultural legacy. "
Wow that did change my thinking a little.
It turns out this is kind of a deep topic. Thanks for bringing so many interesting comments. It seems like calling it justice works well when there's a shared understanding or solid foundation for what is considered just. Criminal justice kind of works this way, although with lots of caveats. In contrast, something like economic justice is completely up for grabs. Some people think things are already just (or should be even more unequal), others want full Communism, and there are a bunch of different stopping points in between. Justice implies an arbiter, and in this case deciding for everyone isn't very feasible. We're going to keep having these debates until we can better agree on what's just. But it's good that we're having the debates. For my part, it seems clear that a somewhat more redistributive system makes sense in the US since we're so much richer overall than we were in the 70's but have actually taken away some of the equalizers like cash welfare in the meantime.
We're deep into shitpost territory now and I love it.
FWIW, something very like your argument about incels was made, on behalf of young men who couldn't get girlfriends because women their age preferred older men, by one of the regular posters from SSC, on his own Stack Exchange. He didn't use "justice" language, and he insisted up down and sideways that he didn't think the preferences of (young) men were more important than the preferences of (young) women, but he clearly felt that something should be done on behalf of those relationship-starved young men.
I think an especially large difference between the incel example and climate justice is that it's easier to put marginal effort towards climate. Everyone can contribute a bit towards reducing their carbon footprint, paying carbon taxes, etc. Whereas (the most direct ways of) making progress in the the incel situation happens one very large quanta at a time. So, one is reasonable for everyone to put a bit of effort into for the greater good, and one is asking wayyyy to much of somebody to contribute towards. Sex isn't an easy thing to amortize.
If the best thing that can be done for incels is to change society's values, then the best thing you can do for incels in your own life is to change your own values.
>Third, this one sentence comment by Anonymous Coward: “How long before 'incels' campaign for 'sexual justice'?”
Like negative four years? Did we all forget about this kerfuffle already?
https://slate.com/business/2018/05/robin-hanson-the-sex-redistribution-professor-interviewed.html
I thought this essay was a much better attempt to tackle the same issue: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex
I agree, thanks, I was just taking the first google result to remind people that we've already had this debate in this community.
Hanson responds to Srinivasan here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/09/srinivasan-gets-me-wrong.html
I thought there were a lot of interesting responses to Srinivasan's essay, and the later book of the same title.
Here's Judith Butler: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/07/amia-srinivasan-the-right-to-sex-review
And Srinivasan's interview with Tyler Cowen (which didn't go entirely well, but I respect them both for having had it): https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/amia-srinivasan/
From Butler's review: Philosophical texts have a way of referring only to other philosophical texts, basing themselves on a canon hewing to narrow professional ideas of “clarity”.
Butler's notorious sentence that won first prize in one of Denis Dutton's Bad Writing Competitions: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Both Srinivasan & Butler appear to be at odds with Bryan Caplan's argument about how our society unjustly stigmatizes certain relationships: https://betonit.blog/2022/03/21/love-is-love-workplace-edition/
I was actually really impressed with how much I liked this review by Butler, given what I've thought of much of her earlier work.
I think you should read Srinivasan and Butler more carefully if you think they are substantially disagreeing with Caplan (other than perhaps the way he puts it in terms of "secular religion"). I think that both of them acknowledge that contemporary HR-oriented blanket bans on office relationships are deeply problematic. Srinivasan insists in one essay in her book that it's nevertheless appropriate to have blanket bans on faculty-student relationships, but Butler's review has some specific disagreements with this essay by Srinivasan.
I'm just going by Butler's review, which expresses agreement with Srinivasan that relationships between faculty & students are impermissible "even if a student initially consents to a sexual relationship with a faculty member" because they "can" be harmed.
Srinivisan's engagement with the topic to me is better than most, generally seems unsatisfying.
Believe this
https://areomagazine.com/2021/09/29/the-right-to-intellectual-anxiety-amia-srinivasans-the-right-to-sex/
has some good critiques. Very little engagement with the question of where sexual desire comes from, why it exists ; little examination of what it means for something to be learned versus innate and why that might cause difference in moral status between desires.
Sounds about right. Srinivasan's engagement with the set of topics here is better than most, but still unsatisfying. I have yet to see a satisfying engagement with these topics.
I think this particular review does usefully identify some criticisms, but is also very overwrought itself (particularly in the passages where it assumes that if she thinks that sexuality as shaped by current society is bad then she must think that a Rousseauian evolved sexuality is better).
That link does seem to put her a bit closer to Caplan, but the framing there where the problem is that teachers fail to sublimate student desires if they sleep with them sounds very different from where Butler agrees with Srinivasan that the problem is a matter of discrimination.
>In my ideal world, everyone would get a guaranteed basic income, not because I have any idea what level of UBI would be “just”, but because it’s bad for people to be poor. If they want to use that money to hire a prostitute or a cosmetic surgeon to pursue a romantic relationship, that’s fine with me. If they want to use that as seed money to start a business and become a billionaire and be much richer than everyone else, that’s fine with me too. I can’t guarantee I have solved all of the moral issues that will come up / stay around, but I feel much more confident addressing them on a care/harm foundation than a fairness one.
If you give people money to solve their injustices, and (to use an unfortunate stereotype) they spend it on drugs or whatnot instead of food or prostitutes or the injustices they currently face, and a week later are in the same place they started, did you actually solve their injustices? If you give out a second round of UBI and they again don't use the money to proactively justicize themselves, are they still victims of injustice? How much money do you have to give somebody before their perpetual injustice becomes their fault and not society's?
My gripe against the 'justice' framing is that it feels like no matter what solution you try, even if it seems reasonable to you, does not "count" unless it solves the problem, and places all culpability on "society". While we don't have UBI exactly, there are plenty of social programs that at least aim to correct a wide variety of social ills (Welfare, SNAP, Social Security etc.) and yet people are still deemed to be victims of injustice and society is held responsible. How would providing them with additional money in any way improve the situation?
I don't see why, say, giving everybody $30k/yr would automatically absolve our society of guilt any more than our current systems don't.
Isn't part of the issue here that calls for "justice" allows for - actually demands - a much broader set of responses?
I read repeatedly in the pro "justice" comments about how our production is so high that justice demands that X be distributed in such a way that Somali orphans don't starve. But Somali orphans aren't starving simply because we're refusing to send planeloads of grain to Somalia. To ensure that Somali children get enough food, we would need to take over their government, restructure their distribution networks, create their infrastructure, smite their enemies, and guard their borders. We are really awful at doing those things. I think that's why so many of us are more comfortable with care/harm than "fairness". "Fairness" often ends up turning ugly, quick.
To (sort of) concretize "climate justice" as a term, here's what IPCC AR6 WG2 SPM (released a couple of weeks ago; visit ipcc.ch for text and explanation of abbreviations) came up with after grappling with it:
"The term climate justice, while used in different ways in different contexts by different communities, generally includes three principles: distributive justice which refers to the allocation of burdens and benefits among individuals, nations and generations; procedural justice which refers to who decides and participates in decision-making; and recognition which entails basic respect and robust engagement with and fair consideration of diverse cultures and perspectives."
The incel counterexample aligns well with the distributive justice aspect, doesn't work in the context of procedural justice (incels have full procedural participation), and is confusing with respect to the recognition aspect (incels get ignored, but may prefer not to occupy their corner of the cultural landscape).
The video game counterexample aligns similarly: there's arguably a small injustice in the lack of compensation for those harmed by playing a video game, there's a clearer injustice in the fact that Malians don't have a say in whether there's a (carbon) tax on video game use to compensate for their disproportionate harm, and the recognition aspect is confusing: is it more just to apologize to Mali before playing the video game? Hard to see how, but maybe the idea is that recognition may lead to better informed choices by actors.
"Recognition" sounds like "indigenous knowledge" bullshit.
Regarding the "sexual justice" argument, it's worth mentioning that the Netherlands provide state-funded prostitutes to the disabled for these very reasons (presumably, they count as "deserving incels"). So it's less absurd than it might seem, at least as soon as you get outside the U.S.
Do you have a good source for this? A brief Google shows a few articles/Twitter/Reddit making the claim, with other sources saying it's actually just that disabled people get grant money which they can choose to spend on sex workers.
At a minimum, they get money _for this specific purpose_. Their sex gets funded by the state. Same thing in Denmark. This seems like the important bit, not exactly how it's organized?
The debate seems present in the UK and Germany as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/22/we-are-sexual-beings-why-disability-advocates-want-the-ndis-to-cover-sexual-services
>I have had this argument before enough times to know people always try to weasel out of it.
I think the obvious out is just to say that, while there are certainly some cultural components of attraction, the big things - preferring people with clear skin, good symmetry, other indicators of health, men preferring younger women, signals of social competence, etc. etc., are pretty unalterable parts of human nature, not the result of a larger social construct. At least not to the extent that something like an economy is, which is one gigantic interdependent construct defined almost entirely by arbitrary laws and financial relationships.
Basically, If you put a few people on a dessert island with no culture and no government and made them amnesiac to erase all cultural conditioning, the same people would still have trouble getting laid. The same is not necessarily true for income inequality.
So while it's definitely *unfair* that those people don't get sex, and yes we *should* look for solutions to ease that suffering, it's not a structural injustice issue in the same way an economic issue is.
"The same is not necessarily true for income inequality"
Not completely sure about income (what's the definition of "income" without any production?) but stronger men will dominate weaker men in such a context, and women will be pretty much powerless. Does this mean "gender justice" is a flawed concept, since women wouldn't have many rights on such a desert island?
Strong men still need to sleep, so do weaker men. How many women does it take to beat up the strongest man, and why should the second strongest man cooperate with the strongest man instead of the women? Why do you assume that people's tendency to dominate via violence is more natural than their tendency to cooperate?
Please see https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/ for a full overview of how gender relations work out in practice in the absence of civilization.
In the absence of an established society, people naturally gravitate to let the strongest man dominate the others. Sometimes the strongest man is indeed killed while they sleep but that doesn't mean women will get to make any decisions.
Ok, I’ve probably been reading too many of the slightly wishful articles that website critiques, beliefs updated.
I guess there’s the question of whether contemporary hunter gatherer societies are representative
Yes, that's a common objection, but there are two much bigger omissions in the article:
1. Sexual dimorphism. Perhaps the strongest argument for more egalitarian gender norms in pre-agrarian societies is its reduced rate in humans compared to their ancestors like australopithecuses and to other apes, suggesting evolutionary pressure away from male-male competition, and therefore away from male domination.
2. Historical context. It's (implicitly) comparing hunter-gatherer social norms to contemporary norms, without considering agrarian (feudal/patriarchal/warrior) societies or gender relations in other ape species. Pre-agrarian societies might have been unequal on modern terms (it's, e.g., commonly assumed that they had a sexual division of labor), and still much more egalitarian than what came before or after them. (The author himself admits at the start that the latter is the point, so he has no excuse to essentially only argue the former.)
All in all, my beliefs are not, in fact, updated, and given the literal text of your argument higher in the comment chain, neither should yours.
The point of the desert island wasn't to imply that whatever happens on a desert island is just.
The point of the desert island is to point out that economic outcomes vary heavily based on societal structures, and that they are therefore a structural societal issue.
You're right that rape could be much more or less prevalent based on the type or presence of social structures, and therefore rape is a gender justice issue.
But I don't think attraction, which is what the section I was responding to was talking about, would be very different on a desert island, and therefore it is less of a structural societal justice issue.
To some extent attraction would indeed be different on the desert island. Someone with a disfigured face but a talent for physical fights and sufficient aggression could come to dominate the island and automatically become much more attractive. In modern society such a person would not have much luck unless they become a successful MMA fighter or boxer.
I mean, if you grant your unattractive people special powers that everyone else doesn't get in your hypothetical, sure.
But in that case their success is due to some other trait that is valuable in it's own right, which is precisely analogous to 'focus on grooming' or 'get an interesting hobby' - it doesn't negate the negative impact of the unattractive trait, it just overwhelms it with other positive traits to make a net positive. No need to introduce a desert island for that.
Part of this is that I was responding narrowly to Scott's description of a major physical deformity, which in and of itself I don't think is going change in attractiveness valence based on social structures. But it's true that there are other traits which may vary in attractiveness based on surrounding society and culture, and there's more of a justice issue to be made for those.
But, critically, I think we would find it to be empirically true that the traits which are more-or-less-attractive depending on culture, are also the ones that have more variance within a culture as to how attractive different people find them, and therefore people with those traits are less likely to be incels because at least someone finds them attractive.
Eg, I'm pretty fat, which is generally considered unattractive in my culture; but it hasn't been unattractive in all cultures at all times (at least at my level, which is not extreme), and I haven't had trouble finding women who mildly prefer it or just don't care, even though it would be a negative for the median woman.
The fact that you're posting comments on this blog already suggests that you're above average in income, have an above average IQ, have enough spare time to read philosophical articles, all of which gives you an edge in the dating world. And as you've explained your BMI is above normal but not *too* extreme. So overall you couldn't possibly be lower than in the top 90% of men.
I would argue that the bottom 10% of men could indeed do much better 10k years ago:
- No sugary food means almost no one is fat
- Intelligence/vocabulary don't particularly matter above a certain threshold necessary to survive
- Various deformities probably matter a lot less, as long as they don't hinder your hunting abilities
- Women had less of a choice to begin with as we know that many relationships were pre-arranged within the community
Attraction doesn't exist in a vacuum - different men could be 'incels' in different times.
>Would it be kind and compassionate to help this person have sex? Straightforwardly yes.
If they could have sex in a vacuum, yes.
But if they want to have sex with another sentient human, then we have to weigh the effect on both participants.
This is the fundamental difference between redistributing money/good and redistributing sex - money/goods don't care who is holding them and can't suffer, but sexual partners do and can.
That's why giving poor people money is inherently good, but to prove that giving an incel a sex partner is good, you have to go through the additional step of proving that the benefit to the incel is more than any harm to the partner.
Of course, you could probably design a system where this was true, and we should be thinking about it, but you can't just handwave this problem away by analogy to money/goods. It's a fundamental difference that requires an additional term in your moral calculus.
> This is the fundamental difference between redistributing money/good and redistributing sex - money/goods don't care who is holding them and can't suffer
That framing doesn't make sense. The people who have money taken from them are the ones who suffer, not the actual dollars.
I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in tax, that's a lot of very real suffering. Honestly I'd rather get raped once a year for realsies than get raped every month metaphorically.
I'm guessing you would change your mind after getting raped, but w/e.
I think people's ownership of themselves is more metaphysically grounded and important than their ownership of the property they own under a given economic regime. Slavery actually *is* worse than taxation, and 'ownership' is a very important fiction that a particular government forces us all to pretend is real.
You would not have whatever wealth you currently 'own' if it weren't for the society and government that represent the system in which you 'earned' it; the rules of that society and government are what determine what you 'own', and therefore it's 'fair' for that system to say you own a little more or a little less than you think you do (although it still needs a good utilitarian justification for why this is a good idea, obviously bad things are still bad).
Whereas I think if you're stranded on a desert island, there's still a much stronger claim for saying that you 'own' yourself, and have moral rights to self-determination.
> Slavery actually *is* worse than taxation
Taxation is a spectrum from 0% (freedom) to 100% (slavery). This would be economic slavery moreso than physical, but if you refuse to pay, it becomes physical shortly.
No, at 100% taxation you can still decide not to work, or emigrate to somewhere with less tax. Slavers don't generally give you that option, or at least they provide incentives to work with whips.
Seriously, I don't know why I have to keep saying this, but slavery is actually pretty bad.
And come to think of it, slaves are taxed at 0% to begin with, since they're not paid; so by your definition, all slaves are more free than all working citizens.
"You would not have whatever wealth you currently 'own' if it weren't for the society and government that represent the system in which you 'earned' it; the rules of that society and government are what determine what you 'own', and therefore it's 'fair' for that system to say you own a little more or a little less than you think you do"
Which is a fully-generalizable argument that says "you are a slave to the government. Enjoy it plebe."
This is why it's important to have a democracy. You can't actually limit the ability of the government to do stuff like this, either practically or philosophically. You have to have mechanisms that incentivize the government to do good things instead of bad things.
I think a parallel here that works better is conscription - the government forcing you to provide a service you don't necessarily want to.
Tax isn't really comparable to conscription IMO - more like if you had to pay your tax by providing your services to the government for free. My take on tax is that the government is collecting infrastructure rent of a kind - you used the government built infrastructure (stuff like roads, ports, sewerage, utilities as well as more intangible stuff like interacting with people with a high school / university education in a space policed by an armed force funded by the state) to generate some kind of economic benefit, so the government collects their rent.
Most infrastructure has separate, usage-based charges. I pay for my roads out of a car registration fee and a tax on petrol, for example. Income tax and other "general fund" revenue is almost entirely spent on socialised healthcare and welfare payments, and while they may be very good things they're quite distinct from "infrastructure". (Police and military also come out of the general fund, but are something like 2% of it in most Western democracies - tax would be far less onerous at 2% of the current rate!)
This is an interesting perspective. Obviously you're right about why redistribution of sex is wrong.
But the analogy isn't quite how I would have framed it. The "money/goods" aren't the thing that suffers when you take money away from someone. I can absolutely imagine a person who experienced significantly more pain from being forced to part with income than from being required to have sex. In fact, that's a tradeoff sex workers make daily.
I think we rightly recoil from that idea because of basic values surrounding personal autonomy, etc. We are trying to fight against a framing that treats sex as a commodity because that framing has done untold harm. But in plenty of times and places it has been one.
I hope this comment doesn't get misunderstood. I'm not saying that being forced to sleep with someone against your will is the same as having money taken from you. Neither was Scott. But to say that taking income from someone causes no harm to weigh... it may be a lesser harm, but you weigh it nonetheless.
Sure, I was responding more narrowly to analysis that uses the exact same arguments for sex as for money, like 'Other people have much more (sex) than they need'.
For example, a common argument for why redistributing money is good is that money has decreasing marginal utility, ie $1000 is more valuable to a poor person than to a rich person, so taking $1000 from the rich person and giving it to the poor person, while the rich person is hurt, increases *overall* utility and is a net-positive action.
This is just obviously mathematically true in terms of the utilitarian calculus for money, even accounting for the hurt to the rich person. But it's *not* obviously true for taking a girlfriend away from the guy who has five girlfriends and giving her to the guy with none. Even if girlfriends do have the same exact type of decreasing marginal utility and the same exact arguments apply to the utility experienced by the two men in the equation, there is a third person in this equation - the girlfriend - and how her utility is affected by all this has to enter into the equation, and may very well make it net negative.
This is really my point - you can make up a toy model of redistributing money with just two people, the person you take the money form and the person you give it to, and do the utilitarian calculus on that model. But a toy model for redistributing sex always has to have at least three people in it - the person you're taking it from, the person you're giving it to, *and the sex partner being redistributed*.
Anyone who's done any orbital physics problems knows that going from a two-body problem to a three-body problems enormously complicates things and changes all the relationships and outcomes of the math... so you just can't use analogies based in the utilitarian calculus of money redistribution when talking about sex redistribution, the third body involved changes all the math too much to trust that your intuitions translate.
I wasn't trying to say that no one is hurt when money is redistributed, I was trying to say that an *additional class* of people are hurt when sex is redistributed, and that complicates the model.
You wouldn't force anyone to be a prostitute, you'd simply given people the option to legally earn money via prostitution. And then you give money to incels to consume said prostitution. If no women want to work as prostitutes, then I guess incels would indeed be out of luck, but so far this has never been the case in human history.
I'll answer this in 2 levels of specificity:
At the first level, I want prostitution to be legal and I want a generous UBI, so yes, this is already exactly what I want to happen and it would help a lot! Although note that a lot of incels reject prostitution as a solution, saying they want actual love and relationships, which is a much harder problem.
At the second level, you could make some kind of justice argument about how you are still choosing to create a system hereby women have to accept prostituting themselves to people they don't enjoy having sex with in order to get money, when you had the option of just giving them the money directly in the first place.
That is to say, you've taken this lump of money and used it to create a situation where having sex with these men is of neutral or slightly-positive utility to these women, which yes makes the sex net-utilitarian-positive *within that system*. But you *could have* instead chosen to use that money to create a *different* system where they just get the positive utility of the money without any negative utility form the sex at all. Given this, it's not clear that the moral calculus for that sex changes at all based on the system you design around it; building a system that creates a bad situation where that sex is the best solution just kicks the moral culpability up a level to the question of system design, it doesn't eliminate it.
That said, while I think the second take is a more philosophically interesting one, I think the first point is more pragmatically useful and what I would actually favor for public policy. Part of the reason is that we don't *actually* have a lump of money that we will give to women who are somewhat inclined towards prostitution; that money will only materialize in the case that we try to address the incel problem through public policy.
But why is sex work necessarily any worse than any other blue collar job? In an ideal world with full justice, who will be working in cleaning, sewers maintenance, plumbing, nursing, retirement home care, crime scene cleanup, and dozens of other unpleasant jobs? No one? Robots? If someone is cleaning toilets for a living, are they "forced" into that line of work?
I mean, I think that if you have the option of just giving people money to make them happy, or requiring them to do work they hate in order to get the same money, it's more moral to just give them the money. I don't actually see any difference between prostitution and other labor here.
That's why I favor a very strong UBI, and other economic reforms to decrease the amount of unnecessary labor in the world.
But there is a difference between everyone being able to pay for anything they want and anyone being able to take whichever job they want, versus earmarking a set-aside pool of cash for one specific occupation. Even in an ideal market, people will be incentivized to do the work that people find valuable, as negotiated by the market's price-discovery; but if the government steps in and taxes away some money to earmark for a specific purpose, they are nudging the market towards producing more of that thing than it otherwise would of, and do hold culpability for any good or bad outcomes of that shift.
But even with UBI *someone* will have to clean toilets, fix sewers, clean up crime scenes, take care of the elderly in retirement homes, and do other forms of unpleasant labor? UBI cannot really solve that.
And we do know that there's women who voluntarily choose to do prostitution instead of doing (say) office work. @Aella seems to be intelligent enough to be able to do any office occupation (so not just scrubbing toilets) but still chose to earn money via sex work. Are we denying the idea that someone might voluntarily choose to be a sex worker even in the presence of UBI?
As for earmarking money - is it really different from the government subsidizing elderly care, for example? Taking care of the elderly is difficult and highly unpleasant work - so should the government refuse to subsidize it for that reason?
>Are we denying the idea that someone might voluntarily choose to be a sex worker even in the presence of UBI?
No, we're asserting that more people will voluntarily choose to become sex workers if extra money is set aside only to pay for sex work, and that each additional marginal sex worker created will enjoy the work less than the previous one.
As would be true for any industry.
>is it really different from the government subsidizing elderly care, for example?
No, it's exactly the same. Remember when I said government is responsible for any good or bad outcomes from earmarking? If the outcomes are net better than just giving the same money away as UBI or w/e, then government should do it.
I'm just saying you have to actually ask whether it's better or not.
Use the Google Ngram viewer maybe?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=climate+villain%2C+climate+hero&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cclimate%20villain%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cclimate%20hero%3B%2Cc0
Seems plausibly more reliable than just the search results for comparing frequencies
The old examples (pre 2000) that I looked at were OCR errors reading "climate here" as "climate hero". So it looks like the relevant timeframe may be from ~2000 onward
I'm not a fan of the incel example. Material wealth only really exist as "property" within a society that respects that, while the choice to have sex with someone should be an inalienable right and is intrinsically connected with the individual.
I think our priors are very different, it seems.
I believe that your comparison between sex and building a house would work best comparing sex work to other forms of labor, and no one builds their own house anymore, so I'm assuming you mean building a house for a third party.
I agree that both building a house and having sex are potentially ruinous uses of their body.
The person building the house is selling their labor and ruining their body and using their time. I can see the connection to sex work.
Sex work and building a house are both labor. I think sex itself is not labor.
Not only that, the house was built somewhere, who owns that land? Should that land be owned in the first place? What did the person use to build the house? Who provided the materials? Who owned the materials? How did this person learn how to build a house? I'm not saying this to lead anyone towards any specific answer, just pointing out that it is not oranges to oranges comparing that with someone choosing to have sex.
Surely they're both the same? You could equally well have a society that doesn't respect the right to not have sex with people. Bodily autonomy is only a thing because society makes it so, just as property is only a thing because society makes it so.
In a society with no respect for property _or_ bodily autonomy, the strong would take whatever they want from the weak, whether it's food or sex.
Sure, a Superman figure could arrive right now and if they're strong enough they can take whatever they want regardless of what our society does. Both sex and property can be forcefully "taken". But as concepts, they are different, SEX exists regardless of societies. Property as a CONCEPT only exists within societies.
And you separated property and bodily autonomy into two different things yourself and that was my main point, sex is not property and I don't like presenting ideas that put sex and property in the same box, that's why I wasn't fond of the incel example.
Stuff exists, physically, and someone is going to have physical possession of it. It really does read like sex is a sacred value to you and property isn't, but I don't see the difference you're trying to highlight - both bodily autonomy and property are very fundamental notions, but both require a society to enforce them in practice lest the strong just take what they want.
I also think there's something off with the incel example, though I can't put my finger one what. Most likely it's that treating sex as a commodity is responsible for untold horrors throughout the history of society, we're rightly rejecting that framing, and since we're still in the process of doing so it's unsettling to see it analogized to a commodity. I think the unsettlingness was the point, but that unless you believe on some level that sex is a commodity, the analogy doesn't work.
With that said, there are a couple comments here that emphasize my whole problem with the "justice" project - the idea that material goods/wealth have no underlying "real" value, that the harm caused by taking them by force isn't real, and that value is only conferred upon them by some arbitrary, likely privileged, cabal.
The vast majority of commodities don't exist unless they get made, and the project of making them is both vastly important to human existence, and usually deeply intrinsic to people's sense of self and well-being. I completely agree that maybe being able to accumulate $270 billion is excessive, even if you didn't force anyone to give you that money. But then I find most justice talk goes on to say "and anyway money is just a means of control" or something similar. Both production of things, and the ability to consume things are obviously real, and have real effects on people, even outside of how societies conceptualize those ideas.
In other words, the ability to accumulate $270 billion worth of stuff might be silly to the point of almost criminal harm - but mostly because the last $269 billion are not adding much utility to the world, while it would in other hands. It's not because it's unfair that someone with $270 billion worth of stuff got given $270 billion worth of stuff. We gave them the stuff. It's odd to then act like we were exploited to get it.
I think we're mostly on the same page. I would just add that the conversation about goods/wealth having no real value is just people trying to overcorrect in the opposite direction of a problem they're trying to solve, it is a common bias, and it may be important and more annoying than actually negative, considering the political implications of the problem.
"Incel justice" would presumably focus on legalizing prostitution (already done in numerous countries) and then giving incels the funds to utilize said prostitution. No one will be coerced into anything.
Ooh, and we could pay for it with a "sex tax", like how gas taxes pay for roads! It could even scale with number of partners and number of times per day. Redistributionism at it's best. Finally contra Keynes, no longer will the GDP go down when a man marries his housekeeper! Sure, "seeing like a state" will become a euphemism for voyeurism, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
David Friedman's "A Positive Account of Property Rights" seems relevant here: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html
I don't follow. For much of history (and for that matter in some ways in some places today) people *were* property. The notion of bodily autonomy (or even individual and inalienable rights) is as much a construct of (current) societies as material property is compared to the 'might makes right' state of nature. In much of history in many places our incel could have either kidnapped a bride, purchased one, or enslaved one through conquest etc. All avenues that are, thankfully, not part of at least most modern societies.
Sure, people were *treated* like property, but people fought that. Slaves committed suicide, killed their masters, revolted, etc. Property does not do that and since we've realized that while people can be forced into servitude they are not property. Sure you can argue they were made to fit in that box, but with enough brute force anything can be fit into any box. My point is that bodily autonomy is not exactly a social construct like property is. You drop a child with no knowledge of society and ownership somewhere, they will still move around and be taken aback if their body is used against their will, yet they will see food and eat without thinking if he is stealing it from anyone.
People also fight, often violently, over other people taking their stuff so property very much does do that. Pretty instinctually too given it's a fair bit of work to train toddlers out of it. It's also a fair bit of work to train them out of biting and hitting as well. A child certainly has a notion of their own bodily autonomy and equally their own property. It's society that makes those notions universal so they apply to others as well.
If that child comes across a pile of food is he not going to be outraged if someone else comes and eats it? Even animals defend their food and their territory.
I'd argue that not wanting your food taken away is not from a sense of property and ownership, and more of a sense of survival. Would said person so instinctually fight if another individual wanted to share a firepit? Maybe not so much, and if not mostly likely for the sense of danger than feeling like he is the owner of the firepit. Maybe one can argue that sharing the fireplace is also the choice of the owner but he still sees himself as the owner, but we don't know for sure.
Your example of a child is comparing unlike things - sure, the child may be happy to steal, but I bet it won't be happy to be stolen from. All your example proves is that young kids are amoral, I think you'll find they care about as much about property as about bodily autonomy - that is to say, a lot, iff it's theirs.
> Related to the story where someone (Milton Friedman? I can’t find the source) was asked about the causes of poverty, and answered “Poverty doesn’t need a cause, it’s the natural condition, we should be looking for the causes of wealth.”
Likely not who you were thinking of, but this ties right back to Hobbes'
"Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man... In such condition there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual Fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Something I learned: apparently some people have transformed the word "justice" to mean "any morality about anything whatsoever." One person argued that the Illiad's argument over who gets what slave was a form of distributive justice because it was about the fair distribution of slaves. If so, it seems like another motte and bailey term. Because that's absolutely not how activists use it.
Honestly, I think you could frame everything as a justice issue and have it fit just fine. Now, partly this is just the inherent plasticity of ideas, but I also think a lot of it makes decent sense.
For incels, lets examine a few simple scenarios:
*First, your guy with the birth defect. Clearly this is a medical justice issue - he should have had access to medical treatment for his birth defect.
*Second, a dude who can't get a date because he's just an asshole. Clearly, this is an educational justice issue. He should have been provided with an education that would allow him to relate to women without being an asshole. Now, I know this might seem like a stretch, but I'd argue that our society does a poor job at helping people develop good, well rounded and decent personalities, and that this is, actually, a justice issue.
*Third, a guy who can't get a date because he lacks confidence. Again, I'd argue this is an educational justice issue, like our second dude.
Essentially, my position here is that the real issues at work here are well upstream of the incel thing, and once you get to that, it's just damage control. Like arguing whether or not starving people are allowed to steal food from the supermarket - but the time you get to that situation, you've already fucked up. -_-
For some perspective, I myself am vaguely incel adjacent - I haven't had sex in like a decade. But I don't consider it a particularly pressing problem. I don't think it even makes my top ten. Rather, I'd say it's a side effect of my main problem, which is that my brain is kinda fucked up and I have a host of difficulties because of it - ADD, Autism, Gender Dysphoria, etc. In terms of things I'd complain about, I'd pick out insufficient medical care, poor education, economic injustice, and the general conservative suspicion and hostility to anyone who's too different. When you have grown adults treating a confused child like that, you know something is really wrong. -_-
The motivation might be that Care/Harm kindness is too supererogatory within folk morality, but justice is obligatory, so within certain circles, claiming the mantle of justice sounds "better"/more dedicated to the cause. "We could help poor people a lot!" sounds weak compared to "We're wronging the poor and have to establish justice.".
I gotta say I agree the most with Darwin.
As a sidenote, I've had a low key theory for years that, apart from any moral considerations, societies basically compete on their ability to offer people three things:
1.) Physical security.
2.) Decent material living standards.
3.) Companionship, both sexual and non-sexual.
The west does reasonably well at the first, really well at the second, and pretty poorly at the third. Bad enough you see some amount of arbitrage. But it's not obvious to me there's a clear tradeoff where being good at the other two means being bad at the third. Obviously something like Brave New World would require tyranny. But I don't see why, if the government has undertaken to supply people with basic necessities, it doesn't include friends, sex, and spouses in that. I mean for both men and women. Not in some grand egalitarian sentiment but just in the sense of keeping people from being literally alone.
Not to mention people forming social bonds, relationships, and having kids is undoubtedly positive sum for society. Social support networks reduce the need for government services and the average child is a net gain of several million dollars to the economy. Andrew Yang had a cute little policy of paying for marriage counseling because it's cheaper and socially better than divorce even if it only has a low success rate. I see that as this sort of policy.
I think the biggest problem is that it's much easier to directly supply people with the first two than with companionship - artificially provided companions are much worse as companions than artificially provided material living standards are as material living standards.
But this is what we need to figure out - how to help everyone grow their own, if we can't artificially provide them effectively.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. It's not a trivial problem. But it's not entirely different. People still hide food stamps and the like. The projects were a complete disaster.
I've only thought about this a little but generally I think tackling root causes would be helpful and have positive effects on top of that. For example, I genuinely think the obesity crisis and spike in anxiety strongly contribute to the lack of pair relationships. And if we tried to solve those and they ended up not helping with coupling... well, is it bad that people would be healthier and less anxious?
Yeah, I agree with all of this. It's not *entirely* different, though I do think that there are increasing difficulties with direct provision as you go down that list. And I do think there are all sorts of good reasons to try to address the root causes (though some of them are going to be much more difficult than "just" addressing obesity and anxiety).
What makes you think we're doing badly at the third?
I mean in comparison to actual societies, not romanticised ones.
I think the big thing is the Robert Putnam "Bowling Alone" claim, that organizations and companionship are falling in the contemporary globalized rich democracies compared to previous generations.
Various statistics of social connectivity and relationship function/dysfunction, with particular attention to gender gaps that indicate persistent market failures. And yes, the west (not just the US but much of the west) does worse at many of these numbers than many other societies.
I wouldn't say the US is doing the worst. Japan is doing poorly, for example. And some places are doing even worse than the west. Russia's arguably failing at all three. (In fact, I think Russia might be doing the worst. And I'd have said that before the invasion.) But that doesn't mean it's not a problem here.
Minor point, but "poorer nations (mostly already hot) will disproportionately experience the worst effects [of global warming]" is false. Poorer nations will be less able to cope with global warming (because they're poor), but the climate effects will be more dramatic closer to the poles.
Polar regions warm about twice as much as the global average. This is for two reasons:
(1) Warm air, especially humid warm air, has a higher heat capacity than cold air. So if you add the same amount of heat to warm air and cold air, the temperature of the cold air will change more. The humidity factor also explains why the Equator is not a Torrid Zone, but is cooler than the deserts north & south of it.
(2) Snow & ice have a lower albedo than other surfaces: they're white and reflect most of the sunlight that strikes them. When polar or temperate latitudes warm, it reduces the amount of time that the ground is covered in snow, which increases the amount of sunlight those regions absorb.
Specific scenarios could be even more dramatic. For example, suppose the Greenland ice sheet collapses and melts quickly. This would have the most dramatic effect on Greenland (which is wealthier than most of Europe in PPP). It could also mess up the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream goes from the southeastern US, across the Atlantic, past northern Europe, and then turns down (North Atlantic Deep Water). Adding a bunch of freshwater to the north Atlantic would make the water there lighter, so it wouldn't go down, largely destroying the Gulf Stream. This would make Europe much colder and drier, even as most of the world gets warmer.
This is not to say that there aren't specific poor cities and countries that are unusually vulnerable, like Jakarta and Bangladesh. But most of the poorest people do not live in coastal cities threatened by rising sea levels. Desertification in the Sahel is a problem, but the effect from climate change is small enough here to be countered with better land use management (don't overgraze, plant trees). If something happens to the Indian Ocean monsoon, that would be big - but there isn't a clear mechanism for that to happen.
When you are closer to the equator, the climate effects from global warming tend to be smaller.
i think people talk about justice from some sort of presupposition of free will, which doesn't exist. your decisions are just genes that express themselves in the environment you are given. people "deserving" things more than others based on some sort of libertarian-free will is bullshit.
> e.g. if government officials keep being corrupt, you don’t say ‘well maybe instead of calling this state of affairs unjust we should remember what human nature is like, and design systems around it, think about what’s more effective, have a positive narrative’
I just heard an interview [1] with Brian Klass, who basically says just that. He gave some interesting ideas for structuring government in better ways that take human corruption into account.
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/03/21/189-brian-klaas-on-power-and-the-temptation-of-corruption/
Heh, yes, I just ran across a reminder of why it's important to pay police well, and give them pensions. That societal niche being uniquely suited in both means and opportunity for creating ... alternative revenue-generation systems ... , it's important that they not have a motive.
I like the term "animal rights" because I think it is less confusing to the average person than "animal welfare". When my college roommate asked if I was a vegetarian because of animal rights, I tried to explain no, actually I'm a utilitarian blah blah blah, and his eyes glazed over.
"(please think for two seconds when proposing your reason about whether it has a clear climate or economic equivalent)."
Nice try! I can't be bothered to think more than two seconds about this when the Sheriff of Philosophy has already done the thinking for me. Book 6 of the Ethics explains this other phylum of justice. It's confusingly called "distributive justice", because someone is distributing awards according to merit, think 1st place, 2nd place, and 3rd place medals, think the plot of The Incredibles, "when everyone is super...", think about Jeff Bezos reorganizing the retail system of our society and reaping abundant cheers, er, I mean dollars as his reward. This is the phylum of justice where things are distributed according to people who are unequal. We can extend it and include, the inequality of people for exogenous and endogenous reasons.
In our society which prizes equality of people and is both more uncomfortable with thinking about people as unequal AND better at identifying exogenous causes for that inequality, we are increasingly narrow the scope in which this type of justice is considered. So much so, that "merit-based pay" seems kind of distasteful and scary and morally fraught.
There's nothing more loathsome than reviewers complaining you haven't read enough of the relevant literature, but... I kinda feel you haven't read enough of the relevant literature. It feels like if this was someone writing like this about a topic you knew well, you would think it was a bit off?
This whole debate has been done in a great deal of detail in analytical political philosophy since Rawls (and to some extent before, with Hayek on social justice), particularly with Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin, G.A. Cohen and Elizabeth Anderson. The incel thing specifically is very close to a thought experiment of Nozick (also intended as a reductio of social justice). You can find a contemporary version of the bullet-biting answer in Kimberley Brownlee, who (as far as I remember) argues there can be a kind of entitlement to sex, and this justifies modifying cultural beauty standards and legalising prostitution, but obviously not forcing people to have sex (much as other commenters here have argued).
For Nozick, are you referring to the Wilt Chamberlain argument? http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/06/21/nozick-libertarianism-and-thought-experiments/
No, there's a bit (later on, I think?) where he actually discusses marriage and uses the idea of compulsory marriage as a reductio of left-wing ideas about justice
Scott has written about how the Puritans required people to belong to families, and had a very high marriage rate and negligible illegitimacy: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
"Justice" and (social/economic) "power" are inherently at odds, because the essence of (social/economic) "power" is the ability to act "unjustly" with impunity. Consider a lord with many servants. The ability to abuse the servants is implicit in the role of being a lord.
Those on the left often ignore the fact that there are other types of "power" besides social/economic "power", ie "power over people". Technological "power"—"power over nature/things"—is arguably more important than social "power". And self-control—"power over one's own mind, mood, and actions"—is IMO the superior form of "power".
Of course, with technological capacity or self-control often comes social authority. So perhaps leftists can be forgiven for overly focusing on social relations. With this framework in mind, we can recognize that rhetoric of "justice" is inherently anti-"power".
It's really simple, actually. The will to dominate is as natural as the will to resist. Talk of "justice" is meant to redistribute social "power" away from those who dominate towards those who resist. If you take umbrage at this usage, you are taking the side of the dominators over the resistors. Consider if this is optimal strategy: ironically, the most efficient method of domination is to adopt a submissive position.
No value judgement is implied by the previous paragraph. After all, we all have to pick a side, great men do great things that have great (and grave) consequences, and only children are innocent.
>Second, people who think justice terminology is a dastardly plot to make people violent, hateful, and bigoted.
Come on, Scott. You're phrasing that in a way that maximally trivializes the idea.
As one of the people who said one of those things I'd say it's more like "justice terminology is used as an excuse by people who are *already* violent, hateful, and bigoted". You are allowed to do things and make demands in the name of justice that you would not be if justice wasn't involved. And that's why people invoke justice.
Perhaps what's happening is that an equity-based justice is generating ideas for maxims. "Equal money! Equal sex! Equal education! Equal healthcare! Equal treatment under the law! Equal environmental protections! Equal beauty! Equal gender comfort!"
Then, a universalizing-based Kantian justice is dismissing those maxims that are incompatible with a world of rational agents.
Equal sex? Can't be done. Either people would work hard to avoid having such a demand placed upon them, or else we'd be faced with the impossible task of altering everybody's desires to ensure that there were no conflicts or lack of fulfillment.
Housing and food for all? Much more possible. Just build more houses and distribute the food we already have more equitably.
Avoidance of any behavior with a negative externality, no matter how small? This makes action impossible. Therefore, we allow basic freedom to act, and seek practical steps to mitigate the negative consequences in the aggregate. In the case of climate change, we let people use carbon-based energy sources, but try to incentivize renewable energy and tax carbon.
The Kantian refinement is made intuitively, or by a selection process, but the equity-based rhetorical argument is never replaced by the true Kantian one. Hence, we're left with a bunch of operational justice arguments that are couched in equity rhetoric, but survive because they comply with a truer justice principle of universalizability.
Yeah, I think this seems about right. While it's theoretically possible to make arguments for all sorts of equity ("sanity equity" is my personal favorite, followed by "murderer equity", although that name still needs work), there's a filter on which ones people actually call for. I think it's partly practical (to the person's best knowledge) and partly political. And since there are always practical problems, the political side helps determine which of those practical problems are highlighted, and which are swept underneath the rug of the Glorious Future.
Perhaps a useful perspective is this: life is inherently unjust due to things like genetics, accidents, and cosmic rays that give you cancer.
Our moral obligation is not to correct the inherent injustice of the world, which is bottomless, but to stop any new injustice from being created on top of it.
Is justice creep a change to a "fairness" model, or does it flow naturally from a rise of victimhood culture (https://brill.com/view/journals/coso/13/6/article-p692_2.xml), as opposed to earlier dignity and honor cultures? How much is the pursuit of justice actually just virtue signaling in an attempt to distance one's self from a victim's oppressors?
I think the victimhood culture is actually the same thing as the fairness culture. In victimhood culture, if one is not a victim one must be guilty, therefore everyone becomes a victim because it turns out that people don't like being guilty. See "white guilt" as a phenomenon.
There are still some valid points in this point of view even though the logical conclusion (everyone is an oppressor!) is kind of silly, but the other logical conclusion (that it is personally these oppressors sole responsibility to redress the issue) is also difficult to enforce and is a PR nightmare for a lot of the causes.
Re: sexual justice. I think there is an important difference between the problem of sex scarcity and the problem of food scarcity, which is that there aren't really sex capitalists. Unless you count pimps, I guess. A person who really fucks might only do so a hundred times more than someone who is sexless, whereas there are single corporations which control enough food to feed entire nations. I don't know if this answers the underlying terminology scuffle, but it would be insincere to say that fixing one is as easy as fixing the other.
Is Russians going hungry in early 2022 mass justice for Ukraine? Is it economic injustice against the Russian people? Are the West's sanctions economically just or unjust? Is that even a coherent question?
We don't have a lever to feed the Russian people without in some real way subsidizing Putin's genocidal war against Ukraine. Obviously Putin committed a crime against the Russian people if they go hungry, but are our sanctions economically unjust because of that? Would there be any justice in not having leveled them?
Under the framework of individual justice, we can't be culpable unless we had responsibility. But we have no power to ensure any such hypothetical responsibility, there's a nutcase with nukes and an army standing in front of where that lever should be. Taking on responsibility without the corresponding power is brave and heroic! But in any notion of individual justice it is nonsense to say that not doing heroics is unjust. Heroics are by definition above and beyond what can be expected.
If you believe in the idea that personal responsibility is not enough and that someone needs to have systemic responsibility and power, that's an interesting theory that I think a lot of people will agree has good points. (It raises its own who-watches-the-watchers problems, but that's a different question.) Someone or something has to take responsibility if you want consistently good outcomes because nature sure isn't, to maybe echo Milton Friedman. But if your lever of systematic power is to declare that anyone who doesn't solve problems they have limited or no power over is unjust, you might win a few battles but in the long run you're going to mint a lot of libertarians.
If two people don't agree on what the responsibilities or powers were, they won't agree on the justice - or lack thereof - of many outcomes.
Russian going hungry? Last time I checked, 80% of retail food sales where sourced inside the country.
The one that are going to be hungry soon are African and Middle Easterners.
Well the Russian supermarkets sure do look cleaned out. But you’re right, it’s hard to know.
Suppose for sake of argument that the sanctions are in fact hurting innocent people.
Or, if you prefer, North Korea or Iran. Two nations that have threatened to wipe out other nations and made credible attempts to follow through on their threats.
What theory of justice says we have responsibility to help the people of parish regimes? Pariah regimes are a tragedy because they use the people as hostages to their evil intent.
I'm at work at the moment, but as the guy who wrote the article on climate justice and economic justice not being metaphors, I thought I'd best respond to the incel case and why I think, irrespective of whether your hypothetical incel faces injustice in some sense, they do not face injustice in the same sense as people facing, say, economic injustice.
1. As I go through in the essay- the world is composed of objects and persons. Some people violently repel others from using certain objects without their permission. We call this property.
2. When someone is in poverty therefore, it's not just that others have failed to be generous with them, it's that the world is actively preventing them from using stuff that could help them. This is what my essay tries to establish about these things- that poverty in rich societies is more like harm through action than harm through inaction. For example, if someone dies of hypothermia on a street with many warm houses, that's more like killing than merely letting die, because they are repelled from the houses by violent threats of trespass prosecution.
3. But what incels want from others is not merely to be permitted to access some things, it's for others to actively give them love and affection.
4. So the complaint of incels is qualitatively different to the complaint of the poor. Even if their complaint is correct, and their situation is unjust, it is not unjust for the same reason.
Thus my argument that economic injustice and climate injustice are not metaphors does not apply to incels.
I don't think I really agree with your framing here, though there is one exception I agree with you on.
First, the agreeing part: I think this is a pretty fair description of land ownership. I would tend to agree that land rights are violently enforced and that people's inability to own land tends to be a direct result of that. So, maybe land distribution is indeed inherently unfair.
But, you're not going to get a very high standard of living off of just land. You need things like hoes, seeds, maybe tractors and combines to really start doing okay. It takes a fair bit of technology to be able to really live at a level above what I would consider poverty. Maybe you think that the level achievable by self-sufficiency off of your own land is acceptable, in which case I could perhaps be pursuaded that this degree of economics is unjust.
But if we're talking "above the US poverty line" farming without real tools ain't gonna cut it. And someone has to make those tools. As per the famous essay, if you want a pencil, you can't just go out into nature and make it. You need to get other people to help you make it. And this is where it changes from "gaining goods freely floating around in the world" to "getting other people to perform services for you."
Now, there are lots of schema to get others to perform services for you. One is capitalism. Another is feudalism. Now, the idea of anarcho-communism seems nice, but until someone gets it to work, I'm not going to go for it. I think that there are systems that have successfully used less capitalism and been better for the poor, but it would take some work to convince me that having no real property rights would actually let us interchange services effectively.
If you reframe it in terms of "can we get other people to give us services" I think that the incel problem becomes parallel once again.
I recall in David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" he acknowledged that actual land rights can be hard to historically justify, so he set that aside. Georgism seems like a reasonable approach to that.
The problem with that solution is that not only did I not create the land, we didn't create it, so why are we, the Georgist state, entitled to assign the right to a piece of property to someone.
My least bad solution to the problem is in the third edition of _Machinery_, but I'm not very happy with it.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/Initial%20Appropriation.htm
1. As I acknowledge in the piece, you can argue the existing system of property rights is fair, but it's still an issue of justice, it's just issue that you think resolves as "no injustice was done here."
2. For various reasons I am very leery of historical theories of distributive justice. One of the biggest problems is that injustice spirals outwards. You can't really confine it to land and be done with it, because the land was used to secure advantages. Not to mention the various subsidies etc imposed by the government that also altered the path of who acquired what irrevocably, and still continues to do so. The end result is that what the economy would look like if it were fair by historical justice standards is unknowable, so all existing property claims are dubious on that theory.
The most incisive book length attack on such views -which takes a somewhat different approach to what I just outlined- would have to be: "The Myth of Ownership" very well summarized in this book review:
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2468&context=faculty_scholarship
Georgia handed out land randomly in a lottery. "The subsidy of history" turned out to be less significant than many would think: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/the-lottery/
This is related to Greg Clark's findings that even after full-scale revolutions the families who wind up at the top tend to be the same ones as before: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/the-son-also-rises/
I would also note that the authors are wrong to claim that under anarchy there would be no income. Indeed, Somalia was actually better off after their government collapsed! https://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
Beyond the empirics, the logic of the argument is what Anthony de Jasay dubbed "Your Dog Owns Your House": https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Jasaydog.html It's also worth noting that the police in the US have no positive obligation to protect you, they have been sued for failing do so and won.
That might indeed distinguish most incels, but not the really extreme Sadean "right-to-rape" (as The Illuminatus! Trilogy put it) types. And per Bryan Caplan, in a pure service economy demands on redistribution would also be demands for the active participation of others. https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/service
I'd say about a "right to rape" incel that they are making a claim about justice (they are being forcibly deprived of something they see as a right, that's true) it's just that their claim about justice is completely wrong, and probably among the most abhorrent claims about justice ever made. So they're not wrong when they say that the topic is sexual justice, it's just that the answer to that question is diametrically opposite to what they think.
Pure service economies, if they ever arise, will require very different thinking about distributive justice, I agree. But so long as a substantial portion of the economy is not services, and people can pay for the services by exchanging goods for money for services, we're still in the world I describe.
We're in a largely-service world where the biggest cost in the economy is labor. That means redistribution mostly just is a claim on the labors of others. Prior to the rise of state capacity & greater ability to finance public expenditure this was more explicit: wars were fought with draftees/conscripts and taxes were often "in-kind" demands to labor on public works. We could avoid making demands on labor with Georgist taxes on land/natural resources.
Re: the incel thing, I think that there's a real injustice there, but it's accepting too much of the (deeply broken) incel framing of the world to think that it's as simple as "they need more sex."
I think a lot of people, not just incels, are desperately lonely, because it's fairly hard to form in person communities in modern society (think about how hard it is to make friends after college, how far away friends and family often are, how few social spaces you can just be in without spending money). Various kinds of social capital (money, attractiveness, confidence, etc) can help with that challenge, and if you don't have those, it can be really hard to make and keep friends, much less partners.
Sex and romance are is important in their own right, I'm not saying friendship fully replaces that. What I am saying is that we're a social species, and that it's a lot easier to find a partner if you already have people around you. Not just in terms of dating in your friend group, but in terms of lowering the pressure on potential partners to "save" or "complete" you, and getting help and advice with finding someone.
All this to say, I'm willing to call loneliness partially structural. Which means that we can talk about solutions that foster community on a societal level, instead of trying to distribute sex directly.
I don't have any single answer to what that would be, but offhand would point at public transit and library funding. More ways for people to connect and spaces for them to exist in. Events to meet people in your building or neighborhood. Classes for social stuff. UBI, because people with more resources and time are easier to connect with.
Nothing of this sort would end loneliness or singleness altogether, but a society where there's more ways to reach out and be reached out to would be a lot more equitable for people who struggle with making connections.
And yes, if they weren't utterly isolated and depressed about that, most incels would probably be much better sexual prospects. Even the ugly ones.
The reason I would use justice language is partly rhetorical, and partly in order to point to my desired shift in the underlying incentive structures of our society.
It's true that what I actually care about at the end of the day is welfare. However, if you try to redistribute goods from the wealthy to the poor without the permission of the wealthy, some will respond that you are "stealing" from the wealthy and it is an injustice to infringe upon their property rights. The framing of "economic justice" reframes the notion of property to imply that each person has a form of birth-right to something, perhaps that something is the wealth generated by the natural resources of the earth, or perhaps it is a minimum human rights welfare standard. In this reframing, if you play video games and release carbon into everyone's air without paying the cost to suck that carbon back out, there is indeed a sense in which you're "stealing" from everyone's air reservoir. The fair price for electricity might perhaps involve paying for your externalities, or perhaps there would be a land tax on the coal mining plant, or perhaps there would be basic income - the idea is that there is in some sense resources and wealth currently being monopolized by a powerful subset that are actually rightfully owned by people collectively, and when people collectively are deprived of these things then it is an injustice. If we could actually have individuals using these resources pay out to the collective, incentives would be realigned, welfare would be improved (if perhaps not maximized), and there would be "justice".
This situation cannot be reframed to argue that the right to perform sexual acts on people's bodies should be redistributed to incels without the permission of the body-owners, because that would invoke a violation of the stronger claim that people have rights over their own bodies. The use of the economic justice reframing, which attempts to shifts the "rightful ownership" of certain forms of wealth, is to counter how wealthy people or their allies may try to frame the taking of their property as a similar violation by casting doubt over the extent to which they do in fact rightfully own it. We don't wish to cast similar doubt on bodily autonomy.
We could simplify this and simply say that we wish to maximize welfare. However, when the actions that are necessary to maximize welfare are blocked by those who claim it is an injustice to redistribute the power and resources that they currently control, it necessitates the creation of an alternate narrative of justice in which it is argued that they do not in fact have rightful claim over said resources. If we do not create this alternate narrative and instead accept the framing that the wealthy and powerful indeed have rightful claim over the resources and power that they hold, then (assuming respecting property rights is given precedence over welfare maximization) the welfare maximization will be bottlenecked by the limited degree to which the wealth-holders are willing to give permission to redistribution.
(Aside: I think there is indeed a pre-existing animal rights vs welfare political split, in which "welfare" tries to make farms nicer, while animal rights tries to give bodily autonomy rights to animals)
This is a very profound point!
Someone who accepts a pure utilitarian framework doesn't *need* to frame forcible economic redistribution as a matter of justice rather than benevolence, because they reject the claim that there are deontological bans on coercion motivated purely by benevolence.
They can reject both the idea that it's unjust for Person A to be poor while Person B is rich, *and* the idea that it's unjust to take some of Person B's wealth and redistribute it to Person A.
The problem is that people arguing against the "poverty is unjust" framing IME tend to more frequently take the "redistribution *is* unjust" perspective rather than the "justice just isn't a relevant category" perspective.
The following is *not* a joke/reducio-ad-absurdum:
I think all of this is a compelling argument for doing away with "justice" altogether.
The care/harm model is plenty good enough to justify a legal system, and would hopefully lead to a mindset were prisons and other legal penalties for crimes are designed on purely consequentialist grounds, rather than out of some unhealthy feeling that criminals somehow deserve to have bad things happen to them, and would even if it didn't actually materially benefit society.
(I don't think this is politically viable because the ideas of blame and of avenging are too deeply ingrained in our culture, and because I fear that "vengefulness" might be one of those innate human qualities which we can channel into less-bad results, but not eradicate altogether, short of messing with people's neurons. But in the abstract, I don't think a utopia should have a concept of "justice" at all.)
“There is no reason in principle why we could not repeal the laws against homicide and create in their stead a Commission on Life Enhancement and Preservation (CLEP) that would hear complaints about persons who had killed other persons. It would consider evidence about the character of the deceased: Was he lazy or dutiful, decent or disorderly, likable or hateful? On the basis of this evaluation of the lost life and relying on the professional judgment of its staff, the CLEP would decide whether the life lost was worth losing and, if not, whether the person who took it was justified in doing so. By thus decriminalizing homicide, we surely would experience a reduction in the number of events officially labeled murders since the CLEP would undoubtedly conclude that many who had been killed richly deserved their fate”.
From James Q. Wilson's "Bureaucracy", which I quoted as part of a larger review here: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/hello-again/
I really don't think this is relevant to my suggestion.
I am rejecting the framework that legal sanctions for e.g. murder should be understood as "redressing an injustice" (as opposed to "ensuring the murderer won't be in a position to commit further murders, as they have proven themselves untrustworthy when it comes to the 'don't murder' rule", or even "providing credible evidence that murder carries unpleasant consequences so as to deter further murders").
As such, the idea of reviewing homicides to weigh the loss (even setting aside the sarcasm) seems to miss the mark of my proposal entirely. Indeed, it seems that such a system could function entirely within the "justice" framework, with the CLEP's job being to determine whether a given killing was "just", just as well as outside of it in the sort of hard utilitarian mode that I think Wilson's quote is implying.
I suppose you were bouncing off of my suggestion that we might, in the absence of a "justine"/"retribution" framework, derive an effective penal system from purely consequentialist reasoning? But then, as I said, I don't think the CLEP proposal is the natural trend at all, making it an unconvincing attempt at reductio-ad-absurdum.
We can and should still put a blanket ban on murders, for the aforementioned twin reasons of "this person is a defector and cannot be trusted not to kill again wantonly" and "we game-theoretically need to provide a credible threat of retaliation for would-be future murderers". It's just that murderers would be convicted in a morally/emotionally neutral spirit, and if they ended up enjoying their life in prison, this should not be treated as a flaw in the system (unless they enjoyed it so much that the threat of prison lost its deterrent potential, but restriction of freedom alone surely ought to be enough of a threat, if it is held firm, without having to make the experience humiliating and hazardous).
CLEP wasn't claimed to be "the natural trend" but only something we "could" do by adopting a utilitarian rather than rights-based retributivist perspective (and I should note I myself am a consequentialist).
I would like to play devil's advocate for a bit on not having a blanket ban on murders: the egalitarianism of our hunter-gatherer ancestors seemed to be rooted in the notion of a counter-dominance coalition and offing anybody who got too big for their britches (which it's easier for humans to do vs chimpanzees due to our weapons). It was a common norm that people who repeatedly violate norms and are just plain undesirable can be killed and that's just accepted. Even during civilized times certain people like pirates can be declared "The enemies of all humanity", and as outlaws are thus fair-game for anyone who wants to attack them. William Stuntz isn't nearly so radical, but in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" he wrote admiringly over how pro-defendant Gilded Age northern urban juries were in many homicide cases, acting out the notion that (regardless of what the official law says) some people have it coming. He bemoans the Model Penal Code and the expansion of criminal laws which shifted power from juries to prosecutors. So it can be argued that if our bureaucracies were actually to embody the culturally evolved functional logic which long served human societies rather than "rational" legalism, they might more resemble CLEP than a blanket-ban. Note that this is an argument against Robin Hanson's crime-voucher proposal, which would more efficiently enforce many laws people are fine with not being universally enforced now.
Hmm. Well, setting aside my personal, unusually strong anti-death preferences (which aren't necessarily here nor there unless someone makes me god-emperor next Christmas), the obvious problem here is going to ride on the identity of the people whom "the community" treats as expendable/having-it-coming/perpetually-on-thin-ice. The whole thing has an obvious capacity to devolve into minority-bashing. I don't just mean the social justice sense of "minorities", although there's obviously a whole culture-war side to this issue — it's just a brute, logical fact that formalising this kind of system makes outbreeding the kind of people you don't like a good long-term strategy if you want to give your ingroup license to straight-up murder the outgroup. Unless one is a very literal social Darwinist, this seems like a flaw.
I think this is why you need veils of ignorance. People's tacit approval of "some people just have it coming" only goes as far as their personal certainty that *they* are certainly not the sort of people whom the community might decide to throw to the wolves one of these days. I hold the essence of Scott's https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/24/the-invisible-nation-reconciling-utilitarianism-and-contractualism/ very close to my heart, and I think that one of the most basic mutually-binding-contracts-our-idealised-selves-would-all-sign-while-under-a-veil-of-ignorance would be that no one intentionally kills anyone else, with an exception for defectors already rushing at you with a big knife.
This reminds of Peter Grimes. I've read the short poem but never seen/heard the Britten opera. In the former he's completely irredeemable and the reader is not supposed to feel any sympathy for him when he gets his just deserts. In the opera the big theme is about how the town thinks the worst of him and holds him responsible for deaths that might be accidents rather than intentional, forming a mob since the official legal system can't conclusively convict him. Even if Britten personally sympathizes with him as an individual against the current (having left the UK during WW2 as a pacifist), he's still a violent & unpleasant person who really shouldn't be permitted to put more lives at risk.
And as long as I'm bringing up pop culture, I should also give credit to the "Batman Who Shot Liberty Valance" thread for spurring such thoughts:
https://twitter.com/HannahGraceLong/status/1506817295485743106
Of course, the original Liberty Valance was a western in which the core idea is that there will be progress beyond the point at which breaking-the-law-to-uphold-the-law is necessary (like the antihero Ethan leaving the better world he doesn't belong in at the end of The Searchers), whereas Batman takes place in the modern day and (particularly if you adopt Aaron Swartz' cyclical view of Nolan's trilogy) implies there may be a recurring need for such heroic lawbreaking.
Imagine you were the President, and secretly evil. What subtle things could you do to make things worse? Not massive change, just small changes that wouldn't even stand out if people weren't looking closely. Like changes to the tax code for Married Filing Jointly vs Single, adjusting deductions for home loans and student loans, or how people claim dependents. Changing the ease of getting student loans and grants. Small nudges on the scale for what's acceptable cultural norms. Availability of public transportation. Etc.
Do you think you could change society so that even 0.1% less people end up in stable healthy happy relationships?
I think we do these things without noticing.
Do you think that this is being done because we've had a succession of evil presidents and legislators? or are you just making a hypothetical scenario
No, I just think people are saying there's no answer that fixes things and yet we can all think of ways to make the situation worse. And so many of those things are just sliders. There is no BOOM I FIXED EVERYTHING moment, but plenty of small incremental changes we could implement. Or at least be deliberate about.
I don't think the economic example and the incel example are really comparable.
Saying "this is an injustice" is much stronger than saying "this is a problem". It's making the claim that not only there is a problem, but we obviously have the means to solve it, and it would be unambiguously good for society to do so.
It's a very powerful conflict theory tool, because for problems that are large enough, that's two out of three embedded meanings that cannot be argued against (there is a problem and it would be obviously good to solve it). You can paint someone who disagrees with the statement as someone who thinks there is no problem, or who benefits from the problem not being solved, and spend less time having to debate how you intend to solve the problem.
But even then, you still need to present "some" idea of how the problem will be solved, which is why the economic example and the incel example do not hit the same way.
In the economic injustice case, the implication is that wealth redistribution will achieve a net benefit for humanity. You coerce people with too much money into giving it to people with too little money, and that after this is done, both sides end up with a fair amount of money - for some definition of "too much", "too little", and "fair". On the surface, it's easy to believe that you could get a non-negligable reduction in suffering through having fewer poor people while still leaving rich people with more than enough money for themselves.
But there's no such easy-to-believe mechanism that maps to the incel example. Sex is not fungible like money is (and neither are blog comments). You cannot take the people who have a ton of sex, redistribute some amount of it to incels, and leave the world better off than it was before. There's no amount of "sex capital" that is being potentially hoarded or misused, where you can take a little bit of it and give it to many other people while still leaving the original person whole. Sexual coercion would clearly be a net negative (and let's not even talk about blog comment coercion).
So there's an obvious sense in which these cannot be an "injustice" of the same class as the economic one, since it's very visible that trying to bring justice to bear in the same way will cause more harm overall.
If there was a slam-dunk "here's the conceptually easy thing we can do to help incels" idea, I think you would suddenly see a lot more talk about sexual justice, even if the idea itself was ultimately flawed.
That's true.
But have you noticed there are people who talk about economic coercion the same way that you talk about sexual coercion? They say "taxation is theft" and such like that.
Rarely, in my experience, is "the world isn't fair" or "life isn't fair" a relevant argument.
What always seems to be relevant is whether that person - the one telling you that the world or life isn't fair - is being fair.
In other words, they're using the unfairness of a large, amorphous, and unblameable entity as a cover for their own personal unfairness.
Here's my semi-utilitarian POV:
Poverty and involuntary celibacy are bad, and society should try to ameliorate it if possible, even if people are responsible for their condition.
But to help the poor/celibate, we shouldn't violate other people's basic rights.
Some libertarians consider taxation theft, but I (sorta libertarian) just consider it annoying. Most people feel the same way, so our democratically elected government has mandated monetary redistribution.
I don't see a plausible way to help incels. I truly want to help. I'm willing to be forced to give poor people a third of my money*, but I'm not willing to have the government force me to share my wife with an incel every third day.
* hahaha, as if my taxes actually go to the poor and not rent seekers. This is why I'm sorta libertarian/want small government.
But maybe you don't need to share your wife. The government could give the incel plastic surgery and therapy to look and behave like you, thus giving him an equal chance to date your wife, as a hypothetical? Or even better, a female incel could post what she wanted as her partner, and he could post what he wanted, and the government gives them both plastic surgery and therapy to meet those criteria.
I see this in many of my local schemes - some forms of financial assistance are only available if you're seeking an education, so maybe the government could issue a bulletin board of the partners people wish they had, then mandate people who use the bulletin board undergo cosmetic surgery and therapy (like vocational training!) To best fit the criteria that the dating market is after.
Why share your wife? Just take a turn in the barrel instead.
There is another surviving species within the same clade as incel-suffering-isn't-injustice. It's our approach to nature. David Attenborough narrates some cute mammal starving to death in the wild or being eaten alive by a predator. People don't see that as an injustice to take action against, even though:
1. Some animals are suffering terribly.
2. It’s not their fault, and they’ve done nothing to “deserve to suffer”
3. Other people have much more than they need
4. This has been allowed to happen through the choices of individuals and governments.
I personally think both natural-animal-suffering and incel-suffering are unfair, and the universe is inherently unfair. But the tradeoffs involved in redressing these unfairnesses may or may not be worth it depending on the particular policy proposal.
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If humans wanted it enough we could probably provide all dolphins, octopi, parrots, primates, etc with:
1. adequate food
2. adequate shelter
3. safety from predators
But unless we somehow convinced all these animals to use birth control (not likely) we'd have to: 4. sterilize them in exchange for 1-3
Or else they would quickly outnumber our capability to support them.
This would be a tremendous burden though, so I totally understand people who just wanna shrug and say "nature has always been like that" and do nothing. It's not even clear it would be better for the animals' quality of life to turn nature into an orderly zoo (just as welfare deprives some of the dignity of being self-sufficient and the personal growth that comes from striving)
Humans are much more amenable to voluntary use of birth control (for now, although they're subject to very strong natural selection against using birth control) so that we can *probably* provide #1-3 to all humans for 50 years or whatever until AGI without evolution-away-from-wanting-to-use-birth-control becoming too much of a problem. But this hypothetical AGI is doing a lot of work, and maybe we shouldn't rely on that because we've been so over-optimistic about AI timelines in the past. Per the planning fallacy maybe we should act in ways that turn out OK even if it takes a thousand years to get AGI. If some aid is given as a quid pro quo for using LARCs that could make aid more sustainable by keeping the dependent population low enough that we can continually afford to take great care of them.
Want to belatedly add to the convo by pointing out this article that came out in Quillette this week that covers this language usage in the human rights context, and have to say it is the best articulation of the problems with this I've seen.
https://quillette.com/2022/03/24/chronicle-of-a-suicide-foretold-how-social-justice-rhetoric-is-turning-people-off-human-rights/
haha in same vein as the incel comment, as a below average height person i've thought a few times in the past when i came across a study talking about height and wage correlations, high % of tall CEOs etc that "when will it be our turn to get affirmative action laws, minimum quotas on short people on public company boards, etc.". Of course it's a joke, but as in many jokes there is also a kernel in there of... something? separately, was also reminded of this article about how some lesbians feel pressured to have sex with trans women they are not attracted to. Truly Onion-worthy material. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385
btw thinking about it, Scott is wrong that incel-sexuality is the lone survival in its irk. height is one, beauty is another (remember the study how a woman having blonde hair is worth as much as x years of college in terms of career earnings?). All three are similar in that they derive from primitive-biological selective preference patterns driven by evolution, and hence extra hard to weed out. It's trendy today to claim now that racism/sexism are purely social constructs and hence should be easier to get rid of, am less than totally sure about that. Finally poverty I guess is mainly social?
Last I knew, the Objectivist catechism included the idea that all positive rights asserted by the government are the moral equivalent of slavery, because saying that any person has a right *to* something is effectively giving the state license to force someone else to provide them with that thing. So the state shouldn't recognize a positive right to health care (because that would require forcing some hapless doctor to provide it), and should only be focused on protecting people from having their rights infringed via policing and contract enforcement. (But I've never seen a coherent explanation of why those supposedly proper functions of government don't require enslaving police officers or magistrates...)
I think a sane person's response to that argument would be something like: Government services don't actually force any particular individual to provide that service. All they do is set up an institutional framework whereby, for example, doctors who already want to voluntarily provide medical care can be connected with the patients who need that care, and the funding to ensure that the doctors aren't starving while they provide it. It's assumed that there are already people who *want* to provide the service in question, and all that's lacking is a framework to empower them to do it. No force or slavery required.
Point is, I think people can understand health care as a right because they mostly interact with health care as a depersonalized institution rather than as an individual provider, and they trust that institution to be responsible for ensuring that there's a ready supply of willing doctors, and that no actual doctor is being harmed or forced into providing health care. Whereas, for sex as a right... it's harder to conceptualize sex as a depersonalized institution, I think. One, I think most people have a hard time imagining that there's a large enough supply of freely-consenting sex workers to staff a nationwide sex-providing institution. Two, even if there were, and even if our culture's sexual beliefs changed sufficiently to allow for a government-scale prostitution-industrial complex... I think that kind of depersonalized and institutionalized sexual service wouldn't actually work to fulfill whatever need people have that is currently labeled as "sex."
(Somewhat pertinent to one of your other recent posts, actually... isn't that kind of like trying to fill whatever need people have that is currently labeled as "therapy" with a national network of institutionalized therapy-providers?)
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On another note, there's a book out there called "The Concept of Injustice" by Eric Heinze that really affected how I personally understand the idea of "justice." As far as I recall it, the basic thesis of the book is that people mostly have a natural moral intuition for when a particular situation is unjust. But the conditions that trigger that intuition are extremely complicated, and when philosophers try to figure out what the perfect absence of all those conditions would be like—which we call "justice"—they end up with models that are over-simplistic, if not outright contradictory. And a major mistake of modern moral philosophy is prioritizing the pursuit of that abstract and probably impossible ideal of perfect "justice," instead of focusing on identifying particular situations that we intuitively recognize as unjust and finding specific ways to rectify them.
Bryan Caplan explicitly uses the example of a doctor to argue that government provision is akin to slavery in making coercive demands on the labor of others: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/service
He also rejects Objectivism, and as an anarchist any state to enforce rights. He claims to base his philosophy on "common sense" beliefs resting on intuition/introspection, which sounds somewhat similar to Heinze. Although Heinze's focus on specific cases over general rules sounds somewhat like Jonathan Dancy's particularlist moral philosophy.
I'll note that the "positive rights are slavery" position tends to be overstated, but that there's a simple explanation of why "proper functions of government" aren't slavery - it's because government doesn't have legitimate way to force people to do them. Maybe there are people out there that both believe that a right to healthcare is slavery and that it's acceptable to impose a draft, but I've never met them.
The mixing up of "valid government functions" and "rights" is actually why I have a problem with the use of "rights" language to describe things we just think would be good for the government to do.
Basically "rights" are obligations and limitations placed on government. Saying something is a "right" is saying "we collectively, as a species, have decided that every person getting X is so important that the government is only legitimate if it does X." So the government can't imprison you unless it gives you a trial first. If it imprisons you without a trial, that is an illegitimate use of government power. That doesn't mean you have a right to a trial - I can't walk into the courthouse and demand that you try me for murder. It just means that *if* I'm going to go to jail for murder, due process has to be followed. And that's because we, as a culture, have decided that the right not to be imprisoned arbitrarily is so important that there is no circumstance in which imprisonment without trial is acceptable.
Meanwhile legitimate government functions are just things the government can do. The government can lock up murderers. The government can provide a safety net. But they can only do those things and maintain legitimacy if they respect the limitations placed upon them. The idea that there are some things the government cannot do, or must do, to be legitimate is a powerful one, and it's a concept I'd hate to see get diluted to just "these are good things for government to do." We should protect the stronger version of this idea.
This gets especially tricky when you start talking about a right *to* goods and services, because it implies that if governments fail to solve the resource and coordination problems inherent in delivering goods and services, then they are illegitimate. I disagree that this is always true.
In recent years, living in an absolute vetocracy has admittedly softened how I think about this issue: No sane person would consider a government that failed to provide laws against murder and theft legitimate. And the same may be true of some government services - we've essentially solved both supply and coordination problems regarding supplying food in the U.S. There's no foreseeable circumstance in which the government should fail to do that. But "foreseeable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
We don't decide anything "collectively, as a species".
Okay, as a culture then. We coordinate on shared values all the time so if your objection to the concept of rights is that there's no such thing as illegitimate uses of government power, then our priors are way too different to have a conversation.
I'm an emotivist/non-cognitivist who doesn't believe in any objective normative/moral truths, but prefers taking a consequentialist/utilitarian stance when engaging in contractarian discussions (along the lines of Robin Hanson's "dealism"). People may frequently greatly desire some constraints on the government and if the government recognizes such constraints (I don't think I would say at the unit of "a culture") we may refer in the positive/descriptive sense to those as "rights".
> I'll note that the "positive rights are slavery" position tends to be overstated, but that there's a simple explanation of why "proper functions of government" aren't slavery - it's because government doesn't have legitimate way to force people to do them.
They do, however, have the power to take my money, which is stealing the fruits of my labours, to pay doctors.
I was reading about the helots of Sparta recently, those poor enslaved wretches. The mark of their oppressed-ness was the fact that they had to hand over fifty percent of what they produced to the Spartans. (I, on the other hand, being a free citizen of a first-world country, only have to fork over 47%. Hoo-fricking ray)
What did those helots get from Sparta, in exchange for that fifty percent? Is it more or less than what you get in exchange for your 47% from your first-world country?
I will say that "rights creep" and "justice creep" both have the real problem that it takes away our ability to delineate different tiers of, I don't know, rightiness. Like, we need enough distinct concepts to be able to say, for example, "There is something deeply wrong with a society where some people don't have enough to eat" without also having to say "There should be government agents responsible for tracking down and feeding hungry people." It can be un-just for a person to be without food, without that person also needing to have a "right to food." The taxonomy of law versus morality versus axiology that was discussed on here a while ago is probably relevant here.
That said... it seems like people who aren't philosopher-robots seem to fall very easily into thinking about "positive rights" and "negative rights" and "justice" "just being nice people" and whatever as being basically the same sort of thing. So maybe there is some core subjective experience of feeling un-free/wronged/oppressed that gets missed when we try to partition it into the language of "rights," "justice," or "legitimacy." Like, I think all of these experiences probably have a very similar emotional flavor to the individual experiencing them:
* I want to paint my house purple, but the HOA won't allow it.
* I want to eat something tonight, but I can't because no one will pay me to work.
* I want to publish a newspaper, but I can't because the local government doesn't approve of what I print in it.
* I want to have sex with the pretty human on the bus, but that human said no.
* I want to attend the nice school across town, but the school district map says I have to go to the failing school down the road.
* I want to kill that thug who raped my best friend, but the police won't let me.
* I want to go to sleep, but I can't because my neighbor is playing loud music.
* I want to use the bathroom I feel comfortable in, but the sign says I have to use the one where I feel unsafe.
* I want to live comfortably in my house, but I can't because the roof was torn off in the storm.
* I want to build a fancy skyscraper, but I can't because the environmental impact study refused to grant me a permit.
* I want to sit down on the bus, but I can't, because the seats are reserved for people who don't look like me.
* I want to walk down the street to the store, but I can't because the local gangs will shoot me.
* I want to live forever, but I can't because the biomechanical components of my body are wearing out due to entropy.
I think the common element is just: a person wants to do something that feels simple and reasonable, but there's some external factor that obstructs them from doing it. And to that person, it really doesn't matter all that much whether the external factor is a private institution, another individual, an authoritarian government, a democratic government, a law of nature, or whatever; they feel just as wronged/unfree/violated/whatever regardless. And when people talk about how rights are being eroded, or how the underprivileged are being unjustly left behind, or how they're being screwed over by The Man, or whatever, it's less about any particular political theory and more just about trying to communicate that core emotion of "Wow, there sure are a lot of reasonable things my society arbitrarily refuses to let me do."
"(But I've never seen a coherent explanation of why those supposedly proper functions of government don't require enslaving police officers or magistrates...)"
Well, obviously there are a lot of people that like wielding authority over others, so there's never a lack of people willing to do the job.
There have been traditions of slave-soldiers, but they have a tendency to seize control for themselves.
In the typical argument it's not the Dr. that's enslaved, it's all the people who are forced to pay taxes to fund the Dr. beyond what the Dr. receives from their patients.
Tradcons already figured out sexual welfarism.
> This single scenario - incels and “sexual justice” - is almost the lone survivor of a once omnipresent clade - a sort of philosophical living fossil.
I notice I'm confused by this claim - shouldn't we also have "friendship justice" for people who are involuntarily friendless? Or "familial justice" for the involuntarily childless? The leap from economic, climate, criminal justice over to sex feels abrupt, when sex seems like just one member of a broad category labeled "human interactions and relationships".
Maybe this points at a fuzzier intuition re: what is and isn't in the domain of justice. I tried to type out a longer explanation of my own views, but halfway through realized I was just reciting the common conception of positive and negative rights[1]. I guess right now I feel like human relationships are mostly outside that scope, where "sexual justice" sounds weird for the same reason that "exercise justice" does. Exercise is a valuable, some might say fundamental human activity. You should be free to exercise by yourself, or to buy things to assist you in exercising, or to hire people to help you exercise. But if no one wants to be your gym buddy, that's not "unjust" in the same sense that a child starving to death in while grain rots in a storehouse is unjust.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
I think the example of sex is jumped to precisely because it is so provocative and we have so many norms (and laws) around it.
Sure, I totally expect sex to get more airtime than platonic relationships. But it's far from "almost the lone survivor" of qualities that fit Scott's criteria, per the bulleted list.
Friendship, prestige, family, anything from the middle bits of Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs fits just as well, but seem weirdly absent from the discussion.
Incidentally, there's no evidence Maslow's hierarchy is really a hierarchy: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/what-evidence-is-maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-based-on/
The point of using the incel example is because those who proclaim to support "economic/social/climate justice" are precisely those who would balk at the incel example, so Scott uses this example with arguments intended to mimic those for other forms of 'justice' to highlight a contradiction in the pro-'justice' folks' views (with the goal of showing why using the term 'justice' is problematic). If it were something they more or less agreed with or at least were largely sympathetic with, then laying out arguments for '[thing] justice' would be expected to make them embrace '[thing] justice', not abandon the concept of describing social movements as 'justice' (which is the goal).
[Warning: this felt like a simple idea in my head, but somehow turned into a long and kind of grandiose comment, probably because I haven't slept enough. Hope it's still readable]
Justice framings have some interesting properties on the level of emotional/rhetorical effect, which strike me as worth considering on their own.
(I.e., considering separately from the question of accuracy -- whether a given issue "really seems like" a case of injustice in the last analysis, whether there's any coherent notion of justice that deems this issue an "injustice" without having overly weird implications elsewhere, etc.)
Specifically, I'm thinking of a difference between framing an issue as "an injustice," and framing it in a classic care/harm way as an opportunity to help.
When applied to distant strangers, care/harm framings can run into problems with symmetry. Of course I'll save the drowning child, you say, that's obviously the right choice -- and then a moment later, you realize that there are millions of drowning children just like that one, and you know as little about one of them as about another. Once you start helping, how will you know where to stop? If one distant stranger can move me to action, then every distant stranger can. But if I try to help _every_ one of them, I'll destroy myself. (There can be a perverse temptation to not let yourself care or help _at all_, just to avoid getting sucked into this abyss.)
The problem isn't only one of "obligation," though that is how it's usually described. The feeling that the argument "requires too much" of you, that it "won't let you stop" -- these feelings can be overcome. You simply have to declare: look, obligation is a fake concept. What really matters is help and harm. Helping one child is better than helping zero, even if I don't help two. The world where I help zero children, because I'm scared off by some abstract symmetry argument, is a worse world than the one where I help exactly one child.
But freeing yourself of the obligation to help doesn't free you from _caring_. And this emotional layer has the same trouble with all-or-nothing scope. If you can take the urgency you'd feel about a literal child drowning next to you, and make yourself feel that way about a single stranger, then pretty soon you'll be thinking about the way the streets everywhere teem with pools in which innumerable children drown and drown; and once you've started thinking about that, it's hard to care about anything else. So (the logic goes), if you ever want to care about anything else again, perhaps you had better not think too hard about even that _first_ drowning child.
And so in practice, care/harm framings can have this overly extreme, bimodal effect. Either they don't make you care enough, or they make you care too much.
What is "we should help the poor"? To one person, it's a lifeless if obviously-true-sounding sentence, which they can nod along to without feeling much moral force. Another person hears it, feels a level of care proportionate to a _single_ case of desperate poverty (perhaps they think of a friend who has made the issue real to them), and then they feel the brunt of the million-fold multiplication, and they say "oh my god, _we should help the poor_!", and then they become an anti-poverty crusader, and then a burnt-out anti-poverty crusader.
By contrast, what does it feel like to hear "this is an injustice"?
First of all, it has a kind of immediate, built-in urgency. Mere suffering isn't quite the same way, because it's not obvious what the "right" overall level of suffering should be. (You can be David Pearce and say "literally zero," but most people find this hard to swallow.) So, while it's easy to say that suffering is bad and that there ought to be less of it around, there's no clear image of the "correct" world which you can contrast with the real one.
Whereas that's just what it's like to feel injustice: there's a clear-cut way things ought to be, and this isn't it. Like an unscratched itch. If there is some baseline level of misery intrinsic to human life, this is another thing _on top of_ that, a new error which used to be entirely absent, and could and should become absent again.
An injustice feels like one big problem with the entire world -- rather than many little identical problems stacked on each other, each one within individual reach, like the drowning children.
This gives it a special force (something is fundamentally wrong!), but it's an abstract force about an abstract thing, detached from the facts on the ground in a way the care-harm framing is not.
This is bad, insofar as it detaches me from the actual problems of actual people. But it has this advantage: it gives me a way to get roused up about those problems in the aggregate, without having to take the route of "get roused up about a single problem, and then aggregate _that_." It sets the level of care to a sweet spot that my mind understands as severe and relevant, without going so far that my mind explodes.
(I don't actually find these justice framings very compelling, as it happens, so the "me" of the last paragraph is more of a hypothetical me.)
(None of this explains "climate justice," since climate change was already this kind of one-big-problem-no-one-can-fix-alone.)
>I think there has been a general shift towards villifying our social/political opponents. “I believe in helping women” leaves open a discussion of “how”. “I support justice for women” implies that all persons who disagree with my beliefs are evil. Similarly we use words like “misogynistic” and “racist” with ever widening meaning because those words label our social opponents as evil.
PRECISELY. Terms like '[X] Justice' are inherenetly bad faith and should be opposed for the same reason words like "racism" are bad faith. There are terms for most of the things being talked about that more directly describe the thing that avoids using loaded language. There's obviously geat political leverage in using these bad faith terms, but excessive use of them should be a red flag for any rationality-minded people that the person using them is up to no good.
What about criminal justice? Is that bad faith?
Thinking about it a bit more, my primary interest in "criminal justice" is not in the actual justice so much as in minimising crime. That criminals are punished is nice too, but it's a bit of a secondary goal as far as I'm concerned.
Not really. Punishment/harm is intrinsic to the concept of justice. That's why in personifications, one of her attributes is a sword. Whether or not this has anything to do with legal systems being much better at harming miscreants than reforming them or making victims whole is left as an exercise for the cynical reader.
I feel that criminal justice has such a long history that it doesn't have the literal connotations of justice that "economic justice" does. It's certainly not called that, at least anymore, as a way of accusing those of supporting "injustice" by opposing some aspect of the criminal justice system. So at this stage, it's more of a traditional term than a deliberate political manouver. And those who use "economic/climate/racial justice" don't have this in mind, the point is explicitly to proclaim they're for justice and those who oppose them are in favor of injustice.
Now, that being said, I would certainly be fine with changing the name for the criminal justice system to something more neutral.
So do you have an alternative word to describe someone who believes that women are the physical, mental, social, moral, and metaphysical inferiors to men and should have the same rights as cattle, or that people of other ethnic groups than them are genetically sub-human and should be forced into servile castes or liquidated?
>So do you have an alternative word to describe someone who believes that women are the physical, mental, social, moral, and metaphysical inferiors to men and should have the same rights as cattle
The positively glaring problem with this is that virtually no men (in the western world) believe that women should have the same rights as cattle, therefore we ought to almost never hear the word "misogyny". Of course, we hear it all the time.
And of course, another big problem is that it's perfectly possible to believe there are heritable physiological and/or behavioral differences of social significance between the sexes without HATING women or even believing they deserve less rights.
For the literal thing you described, one could simply say "male supremacist", the problem (for those of bad faith) of course being that most people who called 'misogynistic' aren't male supremacists so you either have to be reserved in how you use it (compared to using the word 'misogynist') or you have to use it in a bad faith way long enough until the term becomes as meaningless as misogynist is today.
"or that people of other ethnic groups than them are genetically sub-human and should be forced into servile castes or liquidated?"
Again, almost NOBODY believes this, which means "racism" should be a vanishingly rare word in everyday life, but again, it's extremely common because "racism" is meaningless, bad faith word used as a political bludgeon.
And AGAIN, it's possible to believe that there are heritable differences between races (which is trivially true) without supporting any difference in rights between races, let alone wanting to do anything remotely close to "liquidating" them. You could simply say "racial supremacist", though "white supremacist" already exists and that has been used in extraordinaliy bad faith ways to the point that it's used against people who clearly do not believe in racial superiority, much less in treating people of different races differently. Accusing people of racial hatred seems an appropriate alternative, but its extremely common for people on teh left to practice explicit racial hatred against white people, which makes the term problematic for the left.
I mean, the fact that you jump to these examples suggests you're a terrible bad faith person yourself, becuase the implication is precisely that anyone who is called racist literally wants to kill all e.g. black people. And if that is your definition of racism, then you're forced to admit that it's possible to be racist against white people, contra the claims of the most vocal ""anti-racists"" of today
Once again you do an astounding job at arguing with the ghosts of Louis Farrakhan and Valerie Solanas floating behind my shoulders.
I chose the examples I did because I wanted to use an example that absolutely nobody would argue would not qualify for those things. If I had used anything short of the maximally-potent archetypal example of the breed, I suspect you would still be accusing me of being a "terrible bad-faith person" anyways because I believe something you wouldn't call supremacist is supremacist, and it's clear at this point that you don't believe people merely have two different ways of viewing an issue without being locked in some kind of psychic warfare.
Anti-white racism exists and should be tolerated exactly as much as anti-black racism. I draw a line even FINER than you do in all likelihood, because I also believe that there are some very ugly regional stereotypes leveled at poor white people that are ugly and bigoted. At no point did I say anything contra to this- you'll notice I didn't specify WHAT ethnic groups in my example precisely because I believe what ethnic group is put in the position of the Heroic Master Race and which are put in the role of Servile Inferiors or Life Unworthy of Life is wholly irrelevant to it being racism. (I was thinking of Yakubites when writing about racial supremacy, although I doubt you'll trust my self-reporting about my mental states). The only reason I was specific to women is that you were insisting the word "misogynist" is useless and not "sexist" in general.
The reason why the word "racism" is useful is that it can be used to point out the exact things you are angry about being done to white people are wrong by drawing lines between them and other forms of discrimination. By campaigning to vehemently strike that sort of language from the dictionary- especially when you're insisting it does happen all the time, towards white people- you are just throwing away an important social technology.
I won't respond to anything else you say to the ghosts floating behind me, since your beef seems to be with them and not the person in front of you.
>I chose the examples I did because I wanted to use an example that absolutely nobody would argue would not qualify for those things.
But what possible value is there in calling those things "racist"? How does it help anyone to call Hitler "racist"? He supported genocide, genocide is bad, virtually everyone is against genoicde, the end. Calling him "racist" doesn't provide any information about him.
>The reason why the word "racism" is useful is that it can be used to point out the exact things you are angry about being done to white people are wrong by drawing lines between them and other forms of discrimination. By campaigning to vehemently strike that sort of language from the dictionary- especially when you're insisting it does happen all the time, towards white people- you are just throwing away an important social technology.
Except my whole point to begin with is that racism is meaningless word, and the fact that a majority of people who use it regularly have such a categorically different definition to you demonstrates this.
Calling someone racist tells you almost nothing about what they believe, and yet the word has enormous political/social power, so the word AS IT EXISTS AND IS USED TODAY serves at best to be very confusing term and at worst extremely bad faith by being used as a slur against the political opponents of the left.
You're arguing for the word in a form that does not exist, and there's no way to imagine it possibly can come to exist. And as long as the present form exists, it does enormous political harm, so its best to overthrow it completely than to imagine you can reform it in a way that its main users are furiously against. Your method is not only extremely difficult, it also risks giving the word much more power without necessarily achieving the changes you want.
And my original claim that racism is used in almost exclusively bad faith ways, and nothing you've said is an argument against that.
>By campaigning to vehemently strike that sort of language from the dictionary- especially when you're insisting it does happen all the time, towards white people
I didn't say it happens. I said racial hatred against white people happens, but it's impossible to say this is racist because *racist is a meaningless word*.
1. An archetypal measurement is generally used when determining if something fits into a category. Such uncontroversial examples give a point of reference when talking about whether something is another of the same kind.
2. "Racial hatred against white people" rounds down to "racism" to people who aren't actively in the Culture War trenches lobbing big artillery fires of Theory at each other. Believe it or not, the majority of people aren't Culture Warriors. The only thing that ranting about how "racism is a worthless word" is going to do to them is cause a deep confusion and cause them to ask the same question I did. I hope you handle THOSE people with more grace, because otherwise you're making life harder for yourself.
3. Let's say you're objectively correct- what do you want DONE about this, save the Demiurge tearing a page out of the English Language from the safety of his Reality Temple? What is your actual, meaningful strategy towards eliminating the word "racism" from the language and, as a separate topic, rectifying "racial hatred towards white people", which isn't racism at all but shares all described characteristics of it? Yes, yes, I know, "racism is a meaningless word"- understand that when I say "racism", I'm describing "strong and unwarranted animus towards another person or group of people, usually based on supposed inalienable characteristics or a perceived inter-ethnic blood debt". If you continue to police me for using that word, I'm out. I'll engage in your topic, but I'm not going to jump through your weird Theory hoops to do it.
> Why do I find this so much easier to swallow than eg climate justice or economic justice? I guess it’s because climate justice involves summing up a bunch of things which are not themselves unsympathetic
I think that's just a common cognitive error - really really big number times really really small number almost always comes out to zero in mental arithmetic. It's the same reason people don't care about X-risk - the badness is infinite (or at least staggeringly large), but the odds people assign to it is infinitesimal. They round off infinitesimal to zero, multiply by the huge number, get zero, dust their hands off and move on with their life.
I think it's relevant to look at this from the perspective of justice as a social concept (as opposed to morality, which is personal) i.e. that justice is about rights, relationships and (re)distribution of resources within some society by the society - and that interactions that do not involve the society (because they're purely individual matters that don't affect others or because they interact solely with things outside of the society) are not really solvable by the concept of justice, but with other factors.
From ancient times, codes of justice regulate how you interact with your neighbors but don't necessarily apply to neighboring cities; the Old Testament prohibits murder and stealing but considers killing and looting e.g. Philistines as something entirely different. Justice and fairness is for a particular definition in-group, and there is simply no expectation of fair allocation towards the out-group.
So the consequences of "justice" very much depend on what you think the relevant community is, how large is the "in-group". Some people have essentially a "tribal" view of their community, and you may talk about the justice in, for example, expelling people from some convention/conference; or in some contexts of the church of scientology which considers their treatment of "suppressive persons" as entirely just. Some people have a "nationalistic" view of their community, and from that perspective justice applies to a local homeless person but there is no expectation of fairness to, for example, climate change in Vanuatu. Some people, hopefully many, have a "humanistic" view of taking the whole humanity as their in-group, in which case justice and fairness does apply globally - but does not apply to animals as they are not included as members of "our society", perhaps with the exception of pets.
So the concept of "justice" is a bit shoddy for discussion of specific action because there is a lack of consensus to whom the justice should apply, what are the boundaries of "our society" in which the justice should be implemented. In essence, if you consider it fair and just to re-allocate resources towards X, then anyone who does not consider X as part of their community would not agree that it is just and fair to mandate giving up these resources in the same manner as it would be for their own community.
Off topic, but I wanted to put this on the latest thread.
I have been trying to put the announcement for Sunday's South Bay SSC meetup on the events page, and keep getting an error:
app.validation_error
{"id":"errors.required","path":"title","properties":{"collectionName":"Posts","typeName":"Post","name":"title","type":"required"}}
What am I doing wrong?
Off Topic: IMO this follow up is more interesting than the original post. I remember there was a survey on whether to still do Highlights From The Comments posts. This is a good example of why they should be kept. I think your blog would be worse if this post wasn't posted.
On Topic:
While reading the first few items, I started thinking Haidt and the Fairness value. Then it got brought up. To me it looks like both Brad and Scott have mostly used fairness as in "equal outcomes" but Haidt stresses Fairness means only "proportional outcomes". So I don't think the conclusions drawn from it are correct.
If I remember correctly, equal outcomes is born from Care/Harm. Likewise he mentions that Fairness is the primary moral of libertarians. So we could ask, would libertarians care about income injustice, climate injustice, or racial justice. Do they care about these more than any left-wing person would? I think the interpretation used in this post fails this "gut check".
So this means that my position is these things aren't justice. If they want a term that unites them, they should chose something that is clearly Care/Harm in origin.
Haidt goes into detail on the inner workings of the Fairness foundation in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. The Fairness foundation wants outcomes to be determined by a process that is known in advance, uses inputs relevant to the outcomes, and is applied to everyone in the same way. Violations relevant to this discussion are: considering inputs that are not relevant, not applying the same process to everyone, applying the process equally but changing the outcomes because they violate a different moral foundation.
I think if you apply these to the various examples, you get different results. Incels would have not be experiencing injustice. Economic injustice would be a case of it depends. In the case of climate injustice, it wouldn't be injustice.
One last thing I want to fit in: Just because changing the outcomes because we don't like them is unfair, it doesn't mean we can't decide to change the process going forward. It's only unfair/cheating if that new process gets applied to outputs that were already judged.
The conclusion I draw from this is that no one should claim the term "justice", because it's too ambiguous, and people just end up having a tug-of-war over what the word means, like transgender and trans-exclusionary activists arguing over what "sex" means. Say "equity" for "equal resources provided" or "equal outcome"; and "fairness" for "equal opportunity", "equality before the law", or "rewards proportional to merit or value added". This is all in Aristotle.
A third view, not represented in this discussion, is the utilitarian view, which doesn't care about who's /fault/ something is. "Justice" as fairness requires measuring guilt or merit. "Justice" as equity seems to require an oppressor and an oppressed. But whether something is someone's "fault" is a metaphysical question, whose answer recedes further away as you pursue it into sociology, psychology, and neuroscience. A believer in only equity or fairness would have to say that you can't institutionalize schizophrenics, because doing so is both inequitable and unfair. The utilitarian would point to the high social cost to society (and to schizophrenics) of having repeatedly violent schizophrenics wandering around unsupervised.
We shouldn't think of these different ways of looking at problems as mutually exclusive. Take poverty. There are definitely people who "deserve" financial equity, by any measure. Then there's a big crowd of people who could attain equity for a cost we can afford, though maybe not without breaking the market mechanisms for allocating jobs. But there are also definitely many people for whom equity is impossible, like the clients a former girlfriend of mine has had working at homeless shelters, group homes for the homeless, and prisons. She never had a client of the type you see on TV, who's down on her luck and couldn't make the rent. Her homeless clients were severely mentally ill, whatever-the-current-term-is for "not smart enough to survive", addicted to drugs, and/or didn't want to leave the streets. Things I would regard as once-in-a-lifetime horrors or hazards are everyday occurrences for her and her clients. She considered breaking up a knife-fight at work hardly worth mentioning. Once she looked at a map of sex offenders in DC, and a bright spot on the map leapt out to her as being an unbelievable concentration of sex offenders, until she realized it was her little homeless shelter of about 20 men. She spent yesterday doing an eval of a client who murdered a guy, then took his keys, went to his house, raped the dead man's wife and daughter, and then raped them again with an object that she didn't want to specify.
When trying to help these people, "helping the disadvantaged" is a useful frame; "justice", "equity", or even "fairness" is not.
So how do we deal with this? Do we build one big equity-based system for everyone, one big fairness-based system for everyone, or one big utilitarian "helping" system? I think the best politically-feasible answer is what we do now: We build all three kinds of systems.
Okay, but let's say the cause of poverty for certain individuals is crappy genetics leading to very low IQ. The utilitarian says we should give them other people's resources anyway because this maximises utility. But, it seems that the utilitarian may also say that because of this people very low IQ genetics, they oughtn't be allowed to reproduce because the child will suffer and be a drain on everyone else's utility so we should stop it coming into existence, hence the cause of such deficient circumstance becomes relevant (unless you accept the repugnant conclusion).
Does giving them resources maximize utility?
The entire reason why capitalism works is the recognition that giving a lot of resources to people who make poor use of them does not, in fact, maximize utility.
In reality, it's probably a better idea to just make sure that people aren't starving on the streets, but there's a strong push to work and be useful to society if you actually want to have a comfortable life rather than a merely tolerable one.
And yes, if we were efficient utility maximizers we would strongly discourage the poor from reproducing. This is pretty obvious. The question is how strongly do you want to disincentivize it.
Maybe I’m missing the point here, but I’m not convinced a program that allows incels to have sex would actually help that much. There are a lot of people who would like to have sex but can’t who most people wouldn’t recognize as Incels (such as myself) because it’s not a crushing concern. My impression is that the wanting-sex-but-not-having-sex is the focal point for a lot of much deeper shame and anxieties, it’s easy to imagine in a world where there is super cheap gov supported sex worker system and the people we know as incels would still feel bad because using this system is a sign of failure or they’re still lonely and sad after sex. It could be like offering anorexics free diet and exercise help, sure, that’s what they explicitly want, but it’s not treating the cause. Shifting the phrase from sexual justice to something like human connection justice or self esteem justice would probably make more sense to the justice crowd. In this case, consider the justice initiatives being like demanding free therapy, or demanding people tolerate obnoxious people. I’ve seen people basically push that last one under the label of neurodiversity. Am I underestimating the importance of literal sex here? Maybe, but I still think there’s a difference between “person can’t afford to eat <- we make it so they can = injustice solved ” and “person is isolated and miserable and sexless <- we get someone to have sex with them = ??”
Well the focus on sex I think is a mistake on Scott's behalf. It should be people unable to have (happy, loving) relationships, which is obviously something that can't be bought
I mean, that's the thing about poverty.
Poverty in the US exists because some people don't contribute enough to society not to be poor. People whose highest life accomplishment is being a greeter at WalMart are not accomplishing a lot for society. People who are persistently unemployed because they don't care enough to show up to work consistently are below those people.
Reading this post, I realized that my intuition is that injustice is unfairness *that society has an obligation to remedy*. The term has the value judgment built in. Society isn't obligated to make sure everyone can have sex, so the fact that some people can't isn't a failure of justice. But society is obligated (I assert without argument) to make an effort to reduce economic inequality. Since it isn't doing enough, there is economic injustice.
I actually think this is a reasonable usage when people agree about what society's obligations are. But it often amounts to argument by presupposition. Once you get people to use that term, you are getting them to tacitly commit to a position on society's obligations. It makes sense that somebody with your rationalist commitments wouldn't be a fan of that form of argument.
"Society isn't obligated to make sure everyone can have sex, so the fact that some people can't isn't a failure of justice."
Says who??
You're just straight up asserting things here which does absolutely nothing to advance the debate. Like seriously, next time, just say "we don't have to help incels" and move on, because those 6 words have the exact same information content as your entire two paragraphs do.
In Australia we have an Animal Justice Party that's got seats in a couple of state legislatures.
It was founded in 2009, though, and changing a party's name is costly, so this isn't great evidence.
This just seems to not understand what justice means, at least to my eyes? Maybe this will devolve into "But actually people use the term to mean a different thing!" but I should at least throw my common sense in the mix.
Justice as a framework only makes sense if you can frame the issue in terms of actual injustice, which is distinct from fairness and unfairness.
The 2008 housing crash is probably the clearest example. The banks make themselves economically accountable for a whole bunch of subprime mortgages, the obvious happens, and then they're granted loans with nonsensically generous conditions while the economy burns around them. It simply isn't possible to create a similar framing for incels. If Stacy wants to screw Chad and not an incel, maybe that happening a million times over causes bad in the world, but it's not an injustice.
Decisions around the economy and the climate are often made knowingly placing personal interest over what's actually good for the economy or climate. That is in fact, immoral. Thinking of economic justice as trying to reframe helping the poor is missing the point entirely, helping the poor is an entirely different thing. You can help the poor by donating to a charity or volunteering at a soup kitchen - but I hope it would be obvious that those things don't solve the issue of economic justice.
People deciding who they are going to bang, in the first place, isn't a decision about the sexual marketplace, it's a decision about personal preference. Your decisions about playing a computer game only incidentally affect the climate. These are a different kind of thing than policy making that promotes poverty and homelessness, or lobbying against green energy.
Are you saying that a situation is only an injustice if it has been caused by someone's immoral actions?
That sounds right, yeah. If you get struck by lightning that is unfair, and you deserve help, but it's not an issue of justice. In the vaguest possible terms, you could blame a section of society of being complicit in a system which benefits them and characterize redressing that as justice, but that relies on the idea that being complicit in that system is itself immoral. If something bad happens but you can't specify any immoral actions leading to it, that's probably just unfair. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't try to help out, but it's a different framework. You can't reframe incels as sexual justice because you'd have to say people freely choosing sexual partners is at some level immoral, which I at least think is wrong.
Exactly. Someone's house burning down because of a wildfire or getting knocked down by an earthquake isn't injustice, it just sucks.
Likewise, being poor because you aren't very useful to society isn't injustice, it just sucks, while being discriminated against because you are black or gay is unjust.
"The 2008 housing crash is probably the clearest example. The banks make themselves economically accountable for a whole bunch of subprime mortgages, the obvious happens, and then they're granted loans with nonsensically generous conditions while the economy burns around them. It simply isn't possible to create a similar framing for incels. "
Despite what Romney claims corporations aren't people - there weren't single corporeal entities called banks that made bad loans and then the same entities got bailed out by the government. Loads (majority?) of the loan officers lost their jobs in the crash, loads (probably not majority tho) of senior management at mortgage departments at the big banks lost their jobs. I agree that there should've been more past bonus clawbacks with most of the senior people and criminal indictments for some of them, and lots of these people that got fired found jobs again as the economy rebounded, so most got off somewhat lightly. But if there was an injustice who was it against? the people who lost their houses? please. I have minimal sympathy for the folks who took out liar loans on houses they clearly couldn't afford or wasted massive amounts of home equity cash outs on frivolities and then found themselves upside down when home prices sank - the only thing defining these people as victims rather than accomplices is the fact that things ended badly. Or on second thought i guess one possible injustice, if you want to call it that, is that out of two sets of bad actors only one was deemed systemically important and saved, while the other was (to some extent) hung out to dry, dunno if that's what you meant.
Do you... not remember the effects of the housing crash? It wasn't a two party thing where the only ones effected were the bank and those receiving loans, the entire economy suffered severely. At least some of the people who were nominally on the line for loans got to keep their yachts while the global economy tanked.
so i agree lots of other people got hurt by the recession that ensued from the mortgage meltdown, and i briefly thought about whether they were the ones victims of an injustice here. Couldn't get there and here's why: my view (and i realize this one is by no means held by all) is that having an economic downturn from time to time is normal and not a bad thing - it allows a reset and relieves pressures built up during the upswing etc. Economic participants should all understand these things happen regularly and plan for them and whether the mortgage meltdown brought forward by a year or two what was coming anyways is in that line of thinking not particularly important - financial conditions were set too loose post-dotcom bust and 9/11 crisis, China was riding a massive commodity boom etc. if US mortgages had behaved normally (very hard to do when central banks set all the wrong incentives) the dam would have burst eventually on corporate debt side, or in the emerging markets, or crap like meme stocks and NFTs and growth stocks going parabolic like in 2021. It's very hard IMO to say whether the amount of suffering in the economy across the cycle was increased because of the mortgage crisis because something was bound to go wrong sooner or later, and not much later at all really in any case.
Given we are on the topic already: since 2009 we've had our longest period of post-war economic expansion, and arguably the supercycle goes back to late 90s and has been nursed along for 25+ years by greenspan/bernanke/yellen through aggressive counteracting of normal business cycles, and it looks like it may be finally time to pay the piper. We could be about to find out whether trying to avoid regular recessions is actually worth the price you pay at the end to unwind all the excesses. Dunno, I guess let's check back here in 5 years and see whether we are in better position to determine whether episodes like 2009 were actually bad things or blessings in disguise.
The present problems are due to overstimulating the economy during the 2010s, not because of trying to avoid the normal business cycle. We could have pulled back but instead we allowed for massive inflation to happen, first in capital assets, and now in consumer assets, by handing out money through tax cuts, handing out money through government programs, and handing out money through spending money we didn't have.
If we had worked to balance the budget much earlier it would have dealt with the present problem.
Don't really get the nuance you are trying to express. Central banks overstimulated the economy precisely because they were trying to avoid the normal business cycle no? (at first because jobs recovery from great recession was exceptionally slow, then taper tantrum, then stuff like increasing emphasis on unemployment targeting (particularly minorities) over inflation, etc.
Btw you look at things probably a little too much through a budget / spending lens. Yes tax cuts / covid handouts etc. made problem worse, but their effect on asset prices is actually not as big / easier to unwind (not saying it's easy, everything is relative) as just central bank interest rates. You hand someone a few billion bucks he goes and buys some NFTs that moves prices a little. You drop interest rates by a point and every single asset value goes up, a growth (i.e. high growth no current cashflow) asset goes up probably by like 10%, because the discount rate for every future CF is now reduced, all the "safe" bond type instruments pay less incentivizing people to yield-chase into riskier stuff, etc. So now there is basically no way to raise interest rates without causing an asset price crash which would cause a recession in turn, almost regardless of how much government is willing to spend directly to prop things up.
Oh, I totally forgot to mention those interest rates, but they are a huge factor as well.
You cut taxes, which makes trillions of dollars, and you lend out bunches of money, which makes trillions of dollars, and then we spent trillions more on actual handouts.
I think if we had done just one of those things, we might have gotten away with it. I think all three has created the toxic inflationary environment we are in today.
Sadly, the only solutions are to either inflate wages by a substantial margin without letting capital assets go up in value or let capital markets crash down to correct levels. Anything else is going to lead to major structural problems.
And 7.5% inflation is not really acceptable; having a recession is preferable to having 7.5% inflation year after year.
Unfortunately, the real estate crisis is another issue, as we built too few homes, so those prices going crazy isn't just because of easy money but also because we literally have 5 million too few houses and need to build a ton more to catch up.
That said, I disagree that they were trying to "avert" the business cycle, they were trying to prime the economy endlessly and convinced themselves that inflation somehow wouldn't happen. Lo and behold, it did. You can't actually cheat economic growth like that.
I think this is actually categorically incorrect.
The mortgage crisis was an effect of the economic downturn, not the root cause of it. The economic downturn was not caused by the mortgage crisis, it was caused by a larger economic slowdown. This slowdown triggered the mortgage crisis.
In reality, we had basically been subsidizing the economy by building a lot of excess housing and overspending on real estate; when the economy fell, the construction jobs that had been propped up by overvalued real estate went away and a bunch of related jobs went away and there were a bunch of trickle down effects.
However, there was a larger economic issue that actually caused the economic slowdown which caused the bubble to burst. We spent too many economic resources on overpriced real estate as opposed to other things, which caused the economic downturn.
There was a lot of inefficiency in the economy and the downturn forced people to be efficient again, which resulted in a lot of downsizing because a lot of flab had built up.
First of all, let me say am impressed that anyone is still reading comments thread from a post almost two weeks ago! now to your point - well, this stuff has been pretty well studied so probably no need for us to reinvent the wheel. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Recession#Narratives You are emphasizing #2, i had put forward #1, in reality all this stuff contributed of course.
However I think there is still a qualitative difference in that what put the "great" in great recession was not a run of the mill business downcycle caused by over construction alone, which happens regularly and are usually overcome by an otherwise healthy economy, it was the crisis among banks when all the poorly underwritten mortgages they hadn't had time to securitize / unload started torpedoing their solvency. People complain about bankers getting bailed out etc. but they fail to get how banks are just central to functioning of the economy in a way that no construction company ever is (which is why no homebuilder got saved by direct government interventions).
More broadly, the way I sequence things is there wouldn't have been no overinvestment in RE / construction bubble if there wasn't too much mortgage capacity available in first place, and no mortgage bubble if central bank conditions weren't turned overly loose post dotcom boom/9-11 crisis in first place, so most of the blame ends at greenspan's feet ultimately. Even stuff like excessive financial "innovation" into structured products is in my view (can't be 100% sure about that one but strongly suspect it) more an effect of the overspiked punch bowl environment than a cause.
All of this stuff did contribute, I agree.
I think what made it the "Great Recession" what it was is that we had a normal business cycle downturn, which basically flattened economic growth (to 0%), and then on top of that it caused the residential housing bubble to burst, which tacked on an extra 4.5% hit, resulting in a significant drop in GDP.
This is one reason why bubbles are dangerous - they can conceal underlying weaknesses in the economy. The economy actually had been taken a turn for the worse in 2006, with 2007 basically being us doing the Wile E Coyote thing of running out off a cliff into empty space where the bubble was the only thing that was concealing the fact that the economy was having problems. We then realized we were off in empty space and plummeted down.
I think without the bubble, we would have realized that the economy was unhealthy sooner, and taken more proactive action; instead, we basically were trying to catch the Jenga tower as it was falling.
This was combined with a lot of other bad decisions, including Dubya's tax cuts adding a bunch of money to capital markets - a mistake that Trump repeated.
And yeah, the banks (and the insurance industry that supports the banks) did have major problems.
Also, while we didn't save any homebuilders, our present housing crisis - where we built 5 million too few homes since the Great Recession - we may well have actually made a mistake in failing to save some construction companies, as we ended up with a substantial deficit in residential housing.
And yes, Greenspan definitely contributed. Greenspan believed that people (or at least, the banks) would act rationally, rather than do something suicidal like what they actually did:
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"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," said Greenspan.
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This was obviously incorrect in many cases.
Talking about will E coyote momentum stuff - I was a newish / junior guy in private equity back then and remember looking at buying crap like spanish airlines and Greek banks during that phony war period in between the h2 2007 credit freeze but before Lehman in late 2008. Even back then people were still thinking of it as a regular correction / recession not the near Armageddon situation it became after Lehman. Who knows whether the really bad dive could've been avoided if government had stepped in to save bear Stearns /Lehman, but at least on the ground it felt that that was truly the avoidable decision that pushed things into the abyss. So you are right that things started going downhill in 2005-06 already, but the key moment wasn't even in 2007 it was in 2008
I think you just proved that Incels should be exempt from taxes?
Incel studies hard in school gets a good job making 6 figures.
Chad parties through school and gets only an ok job or ends up making coffee or selling drugs.
Stacy gets asked out by incel.
Stacy says no.
Stacy gets asked out by Chad says yes, gets knocked up has baby, Chad doesn't stick around
Stacy and Chad baby get welfare.
Incel pays heavy taxes to support Stacy's bastard kid.
Stacy's choice to sleep with the guy who wouldn't stick around and form a family imposes a real cost on the incel.
This is bizarre troll logic. What step here is the supposed injustice? That not having sex with Incel will lead to a complicated chain of events resulting in a fraction of a cent tax rise? That kind of butterfly effect stuff makes everyone accountable for everything. If it's just the last step of having a baby and needing welfare, the backstory is irrelevant, and all taxpayers are the victim of the injustice, not just Incel.
Edit: Should clarify that I think claiming this as injustice is kind of silly, this just seemed like the easiest way to respond.
Nonsense. The cost was imposed by the 6-figure incel voting for high taxes and social welfare. We can be pretty sure he was far more conscientious than your welfare couple about voting, and that *he* (and not they) had the opportunity to donate to his favorite political candidates, volunteer in campaigns, study the issues, write and march in support of them, fire off Tweets that go viral supporting one side or the other, start up a reddit in which he posts closely-argued comments supporting reform or the status quo.
In other words, since our hypothetical 6-figure earning incel has significantly more political influence than our hypothetical welfare couple, the fact that he lives in a political regime that transfers big chunks of his earnings to others as charity is more *his* fault than *theirs*.
It seems like "care/harm" = consequentialism and "fairness" = deontology. This is probably oversimplified and doesn't line up 100%, but it jumped out at me when reading that section.
(Regarding any innate sense of fairness children or other animals may possess: my sketchy intuition is that this reflects evolution encoding certain decision theory-motivated behaviors into costly signals, i.e. emotions.)
"I’m not sure why the animal and human cases are moving in opposite directions."
I think that's because, in a lot of cases it's easier to think someone might deserve to suffer for their choices, if you think they're a sentient being who is yadda-yadda-yadda...
I believe that animals are basically just like people, but it seems like some percentage of people are more comfortable believing they are 'lower' than humans... so they might say that animals don't make the same choices as people, and therefore would be considered innocent.
but people find it easy to condemn a choice, even if that 'choice' is something like 'being gay', or something that gets discriminated against.
So I would guess it might be to avoid more of the arguments that 'God should be allowed to rain down hellfire on whoever he pleases,' or that suffering is deserved for going against the bible... or whatever feeds people's sadism.
If it is unjust for animals to be killed and tortured, and it is in the nature of some species to do so (e.g. cats) doesn't that mean we must eradicate all species that kill and torture other animals?
Along these lines, some people have suggested that lions be genetically altered to make them herbivores. They'd still look like lions, but they wouldn't behave like lions. I find any such proposal instinctively repulsive: one might as well replace all lions with concrete statues of lions, because, as with the original proposal, they would look like lions but not be lions.
That fact that humans haven't treated ticks the way we did buffalo or passenger pigeons disappoints me.
Who says we haven't tried? I personally rub out each and every tick I come across, regardless of whether it is actively trying to drink my blood. But they're exceedingly tough little bastards.
I'll be brief because others have made the same points well. I don't see why it's absurd to speak of "injustice" in the case of incels (the actual thing, not the deplorable online community), spinster aunts, etc. It is just that:
(a) "injustice" does not imply that every coercive measure to address the problem is legit; some would obviously be abhorrent, and rape or forcible marriage are the paradigmatic examples of that category;
(b) the way in which the system is broken may not be the supposedly obvious way as perceived by the people done hard by. Some incel misery comes from the idea that not having sex (or having sex only by yourself) is something terrible - making you a "loser", an outcast from society, an individual who has failed at being a human being, a most likely terrible person, someone who has failed at engaging in the ritual exchange between moieties in early 21th century US culture, etc. (That's not something that exists just in incels' heads, mind you; ir pervades our society.) Plenty of other misery comes from having few or no friends, little family support structure (taboo on living with one's parents as an adult), etc. Speaking about that neither skirts the problem nor breaks the "injustice" mold; neither does it show that it is wrong to talk about economic injustice.
An analogue here would be a city that is both unlivable and illegible if you do not have a car. That is obviously a thing, and a cause of misery. We should be able to say that without being taken to mean that we endorse carjackings. In fact, it could easily be a very bad idea for everybody to have a car, and use it regularly, even in such a city - things would break down. Why not build a city differently?
Isn't the hog thing just a typical negative externality? I consider it reasonable to call the situation unjust if and only if they aren't paying a reasonable tax to balance the externality.
I'm not sure how this relates to the wider question. Is prison a tax on murder? If sexual injustice is a thing, would some kind of social tax credit for pity sex be the remedy?
Suppose some kind of inequality exists, and we can mitigate it by imposing taxes to allow subsidies for positive externalities. If we can't tax (or even identify) a specific negative externality that causes the inequality, is justice still a reasonable way to frame the question?
Expanding on this, do some people believe that extreme wealth is necessarily unjust because they believe it can only be a consequence of unbalanced positive externalities that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor?
It's probably a corollary to Dunning-Kruger. People have a very hard time *believing* there is anyone whose work is worth 10x what their own is, whatever that level might be. So they think income differences of 1/2x or 2x from their own could arise from different skills, different work habits, natural talent, ordinary luck, et cetera, but differences of 100x *must* arise from conspiracy or structural inequities and differences of 1/100x *must* arise from criminality or bad character.
IIRC Google Search first compiles a list of 1000 candidates using some very fast algorithm then checks whether and how well each of them matches the search key, so it won't return more than 1000 results even if you search for "the".
There's a reason why people use language corpora rather than Google. (On the iWeb corpus "climate villain" and "climate villains" occur half again per billion words.)
Climate, racial and economic justice operates by a large number of people making many small sacrifices to benefit a removed anonymous mass (the poor/the planet).
The interesting thing about “sexual justice” is that in each instance it would require *one* person to make an enormous “sacrifice” (relationship with deformed person) engaging directly with the victim.
Small sacrifice = being okay with having MONTHS per year of income being taken off you at the threat of imprisonment (and ultimately death if you resist)
On a practical note, for the incel thing: isn't masturbation an effective remedy, that most males adopt? Are the people who are the most miserable about this people who are not good at masturbation? Should sexual education include masturbation practice and technique?
In practice incels condemn masturbation as a low status thing, and totally not wthat they want/deserve, which I find an extremely counterproductive stance to have. If we use an economy methophor they are not in a situation where they don't have enough money for life and ask for UBI, they are in a situation where they do have access to UBI but refuse to take it as only low status people live on UBI and demand people to offer them high paying jobs instead.
That's a pretty good analogy, because it makes clear that the need isn't physical, it is social.
That doesn't mean it is not a legitimately painful lack, though.
Yes. I believe more fruitful approach is to combat mastrubation stigma instead of propagating more of it.
I don't think that will help. It isn't that there is a physical need that they are afraid to satisfy. The real need is the affirmation and affection of actual willing sex. Making masturbation cool won't fix that. In the same way that, while having enough to eat is definitely a real need, people would prefer having a job that makes them feel valuable and useful to free money.
It will definetely help. As I see it, there are three main components incels problem: lack of sex, feeling of low status and lack of actual meaningful relationship with another person. Allowing yourself to masturbate without shame solve two of these issues. Having a supportive community of other people with similar issues, who accept, each other and think that masturbation is a great thing, instead of shameful act, can more or less solve the third issue.
And after that, when the needs are less unsatisfied and tormenting, there can be done some self growths required to have an actual meaningful romantic and sexual relationship.
I hate to cut in here, but in my experience incels don't feel shame over masturbation because it's seen as low-status. They feel shame about masturbation because they SHOULD be getting radical blowjobs from their porn starlet/live-in maid/child incubator that the cosmos itself has conspired to deny them.
A major personality flaw common in incel communities is the so-called "inferiority-superiority complex": a certain Patrick-Batemanesque obsession with status and hierarchy and a seething hatred of those who are higher-status than them combined with an equally seething contempt for those lower-status than them. Removing the stigma of masturbation wouldn't solve this issue because their issue isn't being seen as low-status: it's that they aren't high-status AND given carte blanche to enact whatever petty cruelties they wish on those they see as low-status.
To those who would accuse me of being uncharitable to incels, I invite you to take a look at some of their forums for an hour and then return with the knowledge of how they behave. There are, certainly, some Maximally Virtuous Incels out there, but they aren't calling themselves incels. The identity of incel has become fundamentally wedded with ideas regarding women and ethnic minorities so wildly outside the Overton Window that they'd make the villains of the Handmaid's Tale flinch.
No, that's incredibly silly. Masturbation isn't sex, and it sure as HELL isn't a healthy loving relationship.
Virtually nobody in the US living in "poverty" is at immediate risk of death, and living in homeless shelters and eating at soup kitchens should be sufficient for them, right?
(Yes, not everyone has access to those things consistently, but 'economic justice' is never used that exclusively)
A recent article on Quillette also touches on the concept of justice creep: https://quillette.com/2022/03/24/chronicle-of-a-suicide-foretold-how-social-justice-rhetoric-is-turning-people-off-human-rights/
"Take the words “justice” and “accountability.” At first sight, they raise no issue: a large chunk of human rights work is to hold abusers to account, ensure that due process is upheld, and secure redress for victims. Yet activists have come to use these words in such an expansive fashion that common sense is unable to define them anymore. One hears about “reproductive justice,” “environmental justice,” or “accountability for women and girls in humanitarian settings.” Iteration after iteration, even human rights folks struggle to understand what “equity” means and why it’s replacing equality, or why “justice” and “accountability” are used so loosely that they can refer to any desirable social outcome."
It's really weird that most discussions about incels fail to observe the discrimination incels practice against their female peers.
Because of course the problem isn't that "no one" is willing to have sex with the kind of low-status men who might feel themselves to be incels.
The problem is that *conventionally attractive and/or high status women in particular* don't want to have relationships and/or sex with the kind of low status men who might feel themselves to be incels.
As far as most incels are concerned, unattractive women don't even exist as an option to them. They shouldn't have to "settle" for the low status women who would have them.
For incels, it's Hot Girl or Bust, and I think David Wong / Jason Pargin said it best in his Cracked article, "5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women:"
(https://www.cracked.com/article_19785_5-ways-modern-men-are-trained-to-hate-women.html)
********
5. We Were Told Society Owed Us a Hot Girl
Does it seem like men feel kind of entitled to sex? Does it seem like we react to rejection with the maturity of a child being denied a toy?
Well, you have to keep in mind that what we learn as kids is really hard to deprogram as an adult. And what we learned as kids is that we males are each owed, and will eventually be awarded, a beautiful woman.
We were told this by every movie, TV show, novel, comic book, video game and song we encountered. When the Karate Kid wins the tournament, his prize is a trophy and Elisabeth Shue. Neo saves the world and is awarded Trinity. Marty McFly gets his dream girl, John McClane gets his ex-wife back, Keanu "Speed" Reeves gets Sandra Bullock, Shia LaBeouf gets Megan Fox in Transformers, Iron Man gets Pepper Potts, the hero in Avatar gets the hottest Na'vi, Shrek gets Fiona, Bill Murray gets Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, Frodo gets Sam, WALL-E gets EVE ... and so on.
Hell, at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere walks into the lady's workplace and just carries her out like he's picking up a suit at the dry cleaner.
And then we have Star Wars, where Luke starts out getting Princess Leia (in The Empire Strikes Back), but then as Han Solo became a fan favorite, George Lucas realized he had to award her to him instead (forcing him to write the "She's secretly Luke's sister" thing into Return of the Jedi, even though it meant adding the weird incest vibe to Empire). With Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling played with the convention by having the beautiful girl get awarded to the sidekick character Ron, *but* she made it a central conflict in the story that Ron is constantly worried that, since Harry is the main character, Hermione will be awarded to him instead.
In each case, the woman has no say in this -- compatibility doesn't matter, prior relationships don't matter, nothing else factors in. If the hero accomplishes his goals, he is awarded his favorite female. Yes, there will be dialogue that maybe makes it sound like the woman is having doubts, and she will make noises like she is making the decision on her own. But we, as the audience, know that in the end the hero will "get the girl," just as we know that at the end of the month we're going to "get our paycheck." Failure to award either is breaking a societal contract. The girl can say what she wants, but we all know that at the end, she *will* wind up with the hero, whether she knows it or not.
And now you see the problem. From birth we're taught that we're *owed* a beautiful girl. We all think of ourselves as the hero of our own story, and we all (whether we admit it or not) think we're heroes for just getting through our day.
So it's very frustrating, and I mean frustrating to the point of violence, when we don't get what we're owed. A contract has been broken. These women, by exercising their own choices, are denying it to us. It's why every Nice Guy is shocked to find that buying gifts for a girl and doing her favors won't win him sex. It's why we go to "slut" and "whore" as our default insults -- we're not mad that women enjoy sex. We're mad that women are distributing to other people the sex that they owed *us.*
Yes, the women in these stories are being portrayed as wonderful and beautiful and perfect. But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.
*****
Yes, I think it's a very important point which is good to have in mind when talking about incels.
I believe that for majority of them their problems won't even go away if they got their state mandated conventionally attractive girlfriends. Because the main issue isn't the abscence of sex or romantical relationship, but feeling low status. And in such a world having a conventionally attractive girlfriend won't be a marker of status anymore.
I think this is silly. Most incels simply want a girlfriend and are unhappy they don't have one. It's nothing to do with status. You're taking the an almost caricature-level conception of an incel and projecting it onto millions of lonely men.
It is a mistake to lump the incel/redpill communities together into a monolith. The "Hot Girl or Bust" idea is a redpill one (as well as the derogatory/objectifying ranking systems that tend to go with it). Most incels would be ecstatic if they could have a conversation with any woman (attractive or not) that didn't end with expressions of disgust or their humanity being the punchline of a joke.
The overlap between those two communities comes primarily from incels being particularly vulnerable to the redpill sales pitch. Probably the most common question asked in incel spaces is "what can I do differently?". The redpillers say "Of course you lost the game, you didn't even know the rules. Here, let me teach you.". And the incels fall for it because the only other answer they ever get is "It's weird that no one talks about how horrible/subhuman/misogynistic/evil/gross these people are."
Comments like this can do a lot of harm, particularly when they become pervasive. Incels are human beings, not monsters. Showing empathy for them should not be seen as a personal failing.
I agree that in principle there could be non-redpilled incels. In practise, however, I've never met anyone who self-identifies as an incel and doesn't have all the misoginist baggage of a redpill ideology. Those groups has already been lumped together de facto since the term incel became popular.
Maybe we need a separate word for people who don't know how/can't build romantic/sexual relationship, while not buying all the sexist bullshit. Something like "actually nice guys/girls"? I agree that these people deserve our compassion and support.
I mean, I was one of them myself, probably due to being autistic. I didn't have any romantical or sexual relationship till I was 18 and my first attempts were a mess. I had a perception of myself as unloveble and defective, I thought I'll never have a romantic relationship, while craving for one and not knowing what to do. I practised self love and acceptance. I shamelessly masturbated to relieve my sexual urges. I masochistically enjoyed the torment of unreciprocated love. I've learned a lot about women perspective on the issues, and reflected a lot on my own thoughts and feelings in this light. I came to the conclusion that even if women did prefere "bad boys" I'd still wanted to be a nice person. And eventually it worked out for the best.
If you know a community of this kind of incels I would be grateful if you point me to it.
Am I wrong in thinking that the term "incel" actually has "redpill" connotations, these days? Such that if you look for self-identified "incels", you'll find a subset of the "involuntarily celibate" that skews toward "redpill"?
Put another way, would someone who fits your "actually nice guys/girls" category choose to identify themself as "incel", or would they steer away from that term and its negative connotations?
Your problem is that you're focusing on 'self-idnetified incels' at all. The conversation is about incels in the much more literal sense, men who cannot get laid.
'Something like "actually nice guys/girls"?'
I enjoy seeing what the euphemism treadmill will do to this one. I figure in 30 years, the average rapist-murderer will be referred to as a "God among men, one who graced humanity with his benevolence."
Don't forget, with the exception of his daughter, no NuWho companion is allowed to have a love interest because The Doctor is just too Alpha for anyone to complete against.
The Doctor's mother-in-law might dispute that claim.
Life must be so hard for you if you feel oppressed by crappy sci-fi shows.
MODERATION DECISION: Given past warnings, poster is banned indefinitely for this comment.
Indefinitely? Does that mean forever? It's an inappropriate sentence, sure, but wow.
I think you're 100% right about the obnoxious hypocrisy in that community.
But that David Wong paragraph is also bullshit. Media tales don't tell us *everybody* gets a hot girl, still less that "society" gives them that girl. Media tales tell us *only the hero* gets the hot girl, and he has to earn her through enormous effort, cleverness, luck, et cetera. The sidekicks don't get any girls at all, let alone the hot one -- Chewbacca didn't get a princess, Tonto sleeps alone, the worker bee SHIELD agents don't have a chance with ScarJo, et cetera. Media tales are mostly about the alpha male beating a whole bunch of betas on the wrong side, with the help of a whole bunch of betas on his side, to earn his concubine, so this is a very long way from Oprah Society saying "and you get a hot girl, and you get a hot girl, and...everybody gets a hot girl!"
Wong is a smart guy, but in this particular piece he wandered off into idiocy, forgot to actually make a non-silly logical argument for his conclusion.
You're forgetting that every human being instinctively feels at some point like they're the protagonist of their own "story." It's the default state for children, and continues for many (most?) adults.
Sure, some people manage to intellectually overcome that instinct, but I'd argue that most people never really challenge the dominant narrative about destiny and fate (which is to say that their life is being controlled by an outside author), much less deeply examine story structure enough to understand why we find certain progressions of events infinitely more satisfying than others.
So if one *feels* like one is THE protagonist, and also sees thousands of instances of a protagonist getting a Hot Girl, well...
I'm not forgetting that some people are narcissistic twits, I'm dismissing it as a matter that needs consideration, even by the Whore of Babylon that is Hollywood.
The fact that some people can watch a movie about Chesley Sullenberger cooly saving 155 lives and think "Yeah! That's basically my story, that time I calmly unjammed the Frosty Freez machine at the A&W and prevented an unsightly accumulation of customers in line -- so I totally deserve a Hot Girl!" doesn't say boo about what the makers of epic celluloid drama intend to communicate -- or do, in fact, communicate to the much larger cohort of people who think no such silly thing.
> much larger cohort of people who think no such silly thing.
I mean, in my experience, there is definitely no "much larger cohort" of people who don't seem to instinctively feel that there is (or will be) a narrative structure guiding their life, even if they don't articulate it as such. Some people call it God, some people don't.
Also, it's worth noting that the Hot Girl or Bust trope is part of the larger narrative of the "call to adventure." Luke Skywalker was just a farm kid until the story intervened in his life, and so on.
Everyone is just a protagonist in waiting. Someday, you'll have your own Call to Adventure, and once you finish your adventure, a Hot Girl will be your reward.
Well, get back to me in early middle age. By that point I think almost everybody normal has figured out he's not ever going to be a Medal of Honor winner, Nobel laureate, Oscar-winning movie star and/or platinum-selling rock star, President, Olympic gold-medal winner, MLB MVP, or even as rich as Warren Buffet -- he's just a schmo doing the best he can, and his (or her) focus tends to be on not getting screwed over and not losing what he has already acquired by dint of steady work and a bit ot luck.
I can certainly imagine a good number of young adults, and some small fraction of older Peter Pan types, might persist in thinking Obi-Wan Kenobi might drop out of the sky at any minute and reveal Our Hero is the secret long-lost crown prince of Known Space -- and it's time to pull the sword from the stone and take one's place at the head of the victorious army (and afterward enjoy the many Hot Girls who come with the position). But I haven't met a soul over the age of 35 who thinks that way.
In my experience almost all normal older men (i.e. those that can and have formed successful long-term partnerships with normal women) are well aware they're not Prince Charming, and that if they can get and keep the favor of a gal with the canonical number of arms, legs, and eyes, who may shape up quite decent in a party dress and a lick of eyeliner, but isn't going to be mistaken for Jennifer Connelly circa 1991 even in the dark, they're doing quite well and should be appreciative.
I hazard that's *why* they form successful long-term relationships with normal women, while those nursing secret grandiose fantasies don't.
>Because of course the problem isn't that "no one" is willing to have sex with the kind of low-status men who might feel themselves to be incels.
The problem is that *conventionally attractive and/or high status women in particular* don't want to have relationships and/or sex with the kind of low status men who might feel themselves to be incels.
Okay well, the vast majority of "poor" people are not at immediate risk of deaht due to their "poverty", they're just unhappy that they don't have the same level of wealth as everyone else and society teaches them they hey're entitled to a certain level of material wealth for being born. They should simply settle for the lower level of wealth that the circumstances of their life.
>For incels, it's Hot Girl or Bust,
This is complete nonsense. There are countless lonely men incapable of getting a girlfriend at all. For a more extreme example, look at 'The Undateables' or "Love on teh Spectrum'. Are there perpetually single men on that because their standards are too high? No, they're men with severe social and/or medical handicaps that makes it hard for them to have anyone.
But again, as per above, there's this MASSIVE assymetry betwween what you say about the poor and what you say about incels. It should enough that literally any woman on earth would be willing to date them, no matter how attractive, but it's not enough that the poor are literally able to survive in their poverty.
But how is what you're saying different than telling heterosexual incels that they should have sex with other male incels? They won't do that because they're not attracted to men. Okay, but how is that substanitally different to having sex with *women* they're not attracted to? But again, the idea that incels are "hot girl or bust" is total nonsense.
And for the love of god, don't use "cracked" as a reference if you expect anyone to take you seriously, because the article is truly awful (which is to be epexected from CRACKED)
I think laying this at the foot of Hollywood when this is a narrative structure that appears to be as old as the concept of romance itself is a serious category error. Jason Pargin has a clear grudge against Hollywood for whatever particular reason and has bought into a very mechanistic view of media where some large portion of people are non-agents whose worldview is generated entirely by films. This is a point he implicitly endorses in many of his "comedy" articles (that in truth are little more than the use of humor to cover for beating the shit out of his favorite hobby-horses)- but then categorically rejects the idea that film, TV, video games, etc. could possibly be influential in other ways when he's beating the shit out of how STUPID people are when they say video games and violent films send the message that violence is acceptable in real life. Films and games can apparently turn someone into an entitled toxic dudebro, but even contemplating the same mechanism for the portrayal of violence in a game makes you a stupid censorious Puritan- unless it's violence against women or minorities, in which case you're a hero fighting against social evil by saying this will lead to more hate-crimes IRL. In short, he's a partisan hack who cares more about who and whom than actual arguments, and citing him as your authority only really damages the argument you're making.
I think the main confusion comes from mixing two different things. Let's try to separate them and see where it leads us.
I'll call the first category fairness/unfairness. It's about natural causes. Someone is born with better genetics and someone with worse. One country has valuable ore deposits and another doesn't. It's unfair in a cosmical sense, that our initial conditions are so different. We can and probably should do something to fight this cosmic unfairness. But it is something we are doing out of our kindness and compassion.
The second category is what I'd call justice/injustice. It's about the behaviour of the agents. When one agent betrays the other in an iterated prisoners dilemma, therefore profiting at their expense, it's unjust. And it would be just to betray in response. This doesn't have anything to do with compassion.
So with this in mind lets distinguish between our examples.
Is it unfair that some blogs have more comments than others? In a mulpile ways, it is. Some bloggers were just born more talented then others. Some just haven't accured auditory yet. Some may be popular for reasons unrelated to the quality and usefullness of their content. But is it unjust? Unless a more successfull blogger deliberately sabotages the less successful ones, I don't think so. So the framework of compassion and moral character seems reasonable when we deal with this issue. A more successfull blogger can promote less successfull ones, or we can have some organisation like EA subsidising blogging on specific themes which are less popular for memetic reasons, than others.
Let's look at incels. Is it unfair that some people are naturally more attractive and/or socially skilled? Sure. Is it unjust? Unless more attractive people achieved their attractiveness through exploiting the less attractive ones, no it's not. But, people can indeed become perceived as highter status if they mock lower status people, or at least keep insisting that these people should be lowers status. Such behaviour is unjust. So there can be some justice issues here. And if you check anti-lookism branch of social justice, it indeed tries to deal with these justice related issues, while not requiring a mandatory sexual relationship for everybody.
Is economic inequality unfair? Obviously. Is it just? In a world where there has never been colonisation, wars, slavery and other "betrayals" in prisoner's dilemma it could be just. But in our world, where some people indeed exploited others to build their wealth it is obviously unjust. There is also more complicated labour theory of value argument. Jeff Bezos may have solved a couple of interesting coordination problems and deserves his credit for it, but now he for some weird reasons can grab all the profits from his workers labour infinitely. This seems unjust in a sense that ultimatum game with very unequal split, disproportionate to the actual work done, is unjust.
I'm not so sure that differences in birthplace or genetics should be called unfair even in a cosmic sense. Before being born, everyone presumably has an equal probability of being born rich or poor or smart or dumb. Some people win that lottery of pre-existence and some people don't, but it seems just as fair as any other lottery to me.
I don't think that having probability of something before being existing is a meaningful idea. I find this unfair in a sense that this things happen completely without our consent or merit. When people play lottery they at least agree to do it, so the decision to play can at least be credited to us.
I don’t think we’d necessarily characterize a lottery as unfair just because people were entered in it without their knowledge or volition. Even if you do consciously choose to enter a lottery, whether or not you actually win still has nothing to do with your consent or merit and I don’t think that is usually seen as unfair.
Negative lotteries, like one where the “winner” dies are often seen as unfair, but I guess I look at the pre-existence lottery as positive - every winner gets to exist, with some winners receiving the even greater prize of superior circumstances.
I'm still hung up on the "justice must mean there's a specific villain to be punished" take that apparently a lot of people had. To me it seems like the opposite - the calls for economic, racial, and social justice have been accompanied by people arguing that it's not enough to punish this specific racist or that specific exploitative company, we need to fix the systemic cultural or economic problems that cause it.
In fact, I've frequently seen conservatives arguing the exact opposite as this - "the problem with systemic racism arguments is that they mean even if you don't have a racist bone in your body you're still guilty because you benefit from systemic racism."
The fact that people on both sides can plausibly argue that "justice" means both one thing and its exact opposite should be a massive warning flag that we're confusing ourselves and we should probably taboo the word entirely, but I may as well throw my two cents in:
To me justice implies universality - "in a just world, we would all get exactly what we deserve." This could be achieved either by a literal code of laws which is uniformly enforced or by social norms where everyone agrees what someone deserves, but to call something "just" instead of just "good" you need to appeal to a general principle. Social justice is arguing that our current universal norms around white people should be extended to cover black people as well. Economic justice is arguing that our current norms around distribution of food and shelter should be changed to cover poor people better. And I suppose incel justice would be arguing that our norms around romance and sex should change to cover ugly or unlikeable people.
The difference is that "don't fire people because they're black" or "don't deny food to people even if they can't pay" are fairly enforceable, bright-line principles, while "don't reject people romantically because you don't like them" is kind of self-defeating. By definition, unlikeable people are unliked - as long as people are capable of rejecting their suitors, some people will get rejected more than others. You can't force people to fall in love.
(To be clear, when incels talk about not getting laid they're talking about it in the context of a romantic relationship - finding a prostitute wouldn't suffice according to most of them.)
>The fact that people on both sides can plausibly argue that "justice" means both one thing and its exact opposite should be a massive warning flag that we're confusing ourselves and we should probably taboo the word entirely, but I may as well throw my two cents in:
I think this is true but also that a there's a much more pressing need to taboo the much less meaningful word 'racism'
The "fairness is something even animals have" reminded me of something.
There is really two distinct concepts between "intuitive fairness" (what most just call "fairness" but sometimes call "justice", because people are bad at using different labels for different things) and "procedural justice" (most often called "justice", but sometimes "fairness", for the same reason).
The first one is… well, the intuitive thingie where Bezos having billions and the orphan Somali having nothing seems somehow, you know, well… unfair. I have no trouble believing small children/animals having a version of this concept.
The second is a purely human construction. One of the oldest definition of justice is "suum cuique" (see https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/41897/who-was-first-to-say-that-justice-is-to-give-each-his-due). Justice happens when there is a conflict over a resource between two individuals, and resolution is required to decide who is owed what. The judge does not decide who deserves what depending on personal virtue or relative poverty or fame or criterion like that that may well be relevant to decide "fairness". The judge just try to follow the trail of legal property (A owe B X by contract, B owe C Y by another contract, there’s this inheritance law… so in the end here’s what A, B, and C are due), in the way a scientist would try to follow the source of energy (my muscle move by energy stored in my cells that has been provided by my food that has been fixated by a plant and comes from the sun).
I would argue that the invention of this counterintuitive (by comparison to intuitive fairness) "justice system" is one of the causes of wealth (as a partial answer to "Poverty doesn’t need a cause, it’s the natural condition, we should be looking for the causes of wealth"). And one of the problem of "economic justice" is hijacking the whole "justice" magisterum in order to promote what is basically just intuitive fairness. If, like me, you believe that moving from fairness to justice is a critical step in wealth creation, this cannot end well.
(some) animals have a sense of fairness, but it is almost entirely self-orientated. They will revolt if they feel they are the victims of unfairness, but of course will commonly steal from, rape or kill others if it helps them, vastly more commonly than humans would.
This whole justice discussion seems a little crazy to me. Is 'justice' mostly a blue tribe term? I'm good with charity. (I decide what to do/ who to help.) Justice sounds like someone else decides what is 'just', and I have to go along. I hate it. (Incel 'sexual justice' sounds really creepy to me. The sex I crave is much more than f-ing some pretty women.)
The parallels drawn between economic justice and sexual justice seem cruel to me. Poverty is a question of life and death for millions of humans. Inceldom is... I don't mean to belittle it... tragic, but uncomparable to the amount of suffering caused by poverty.
Very few people in the US face the immediate or even mid-term risk of death due to being poor. Maybe they die younger than they otherwise would....but so do people depressed from abject social failure. Happy healthy relationships is literally a predictor for life expectancy.
Very few people in the world live in the US...
The other day I saw the "causes of wealth" quote connected to Jane Jacobs, in The Economy Of Cities.
“To seek "causes” of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development. It can be overcome only if the relevant economic processes are in motion.“
I think the right take on the direction of "animal justice" trends may be a rather cynical one. Most of these brands of justice, "economic justice," "climate justice," "social justice," etc. permit people to congratulate themselves for being on the right side and telling other people they're wrong, and pointing at powerful people or systems they have no part in as the ones who have to take responsibility for actually solving anything. Participating in "animal justice" is generally accepted to call for a level of personal sacrifice in giving up meat or animal products that most people simply don't want to do.
Vegans are widely considered to be preachy and sanctimonious, but on the whole they're just participating, at various levels of outspokenness, in a "justice" movement that most people who participate in other "justice" movements (which are usually mostly overlapping,) don't participate in, because it would require something of them other than cultural affiliation with people they already get along with. They allow people who participate in other "justice" movements to experience what it feels like to interact with people in one from the outside, and I think their reception is a pretty good illustration of how effective "justice" movement norms are at being persuasive or appealing to people who aren't already inside them.
People who're members of other "justice" groups, but not animal welfare groups, don't want to identify the animal welfare movement as a a "justice" movement, because it would mean acknowledging a "justice" movement that they're outside of.
One can think about it as a question about implicit contracts between people. I think most people assume that the default implicit contract is that if someone does something good to you, then you owe them, even if they don't seem to ask for/want anything in return. Accumulating this kind of debt makes people feel bad about themselves, as they use it as an indicator of their goodness and their role in society. The idea of justice changes the nature of the contract and allows people to accept things from others without accumulating debt (as it stipulates that the giver is actually returning their debt to you).
It could be that the whole notion of scorekeeping is detrimental and there is a better way to do it. But still it is deeply ingrained in us; people constantly worry about the nature of their debt in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Because it is so difficult to create and enforce actual contracts it is clear that these kinds of informal and vague contracts have a huge role in society.
The aside on incels reminded me of that Cat Person story from the New Yorker that was all the rage a few years ago. At the time I couldn’t help reading it as a metaphor for class. It was the story of an upper-class/rich person who met a lower-class/poor person and charitably gave him some alms. The lower-class person then thought that this made the two friends, or peers, and acted as though he could be upper-class too. This horrified the upper-class person, who desperately tried to elude the increasingly importunate lower-class person, until finally we, the reader, understand the danger of mingling with the lower-class, who cannot help, of course, but behave in a distasteful, or “classless,” fashion. Of course the story was ostensibly not about class but all about sex and sexual experience—a fumbling unattractive person and an experienced attractive person from a (note this!) sex-positive family. But until I’d read the story I hadn’t thought about how analogous our contempt for “white trash” was to our contempt for incels.
Then the story faded away from everyone’s consciousness, and I forgot all about it. Until this post brought it all back to me.
I thought this piece about Cat Person and its inspirations was interesting. Apparently, the author sort of knew someone and made up the cruel story incorporating some details from their life, so it's also verging on slander. https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/cat-person-kristen-roupenian-viral-story-about-me.html
I love reading this kind of thing from people who aren't virtue ethicists, because virtue ethics makes this demarcation absudly easy. The hard part is justifying virtue ethics as a whole and then justifying which specific list of virtues, but after that, everything becomes simple.
For instance, the rich in this situation are greedy, and the incels are lustful. Very easy demarcation with no justice language required.
You can't prove "virtue ethics" is valid, so this only makes things easy to the extent that people accept that the proclamations by virtue ethicists are valid, but that's useless to teh rest of us who don't accept this.
Of course I can't, but that's not how ethical models work in the first place. You aren't attempting to "prove" the existence of some physical object, you're attempting to justify it in within your paradigm (specifically by assuring that it coheres within your paradigm).
I suppose you can consider this "accepting the proclamations of virtue ethicists" if you want, but at some point in your epistemology, you have "accepted a proclamation" before, though this is a very cynical way to describe intellectual traditions.
For me, Darwin's comment is the best explanation or analysis of this topic yet presented.
Leaving aside the question of "justice" vs. other approaches to framing morality, I think the discussion of incels is flawed in a way that breaks the analogy.
The thing that incels are lacking is not (just) sex per se, but rather the whole complex of social benefit and validation that comes from being in a relationship. This is not really something you can buy on the market, nor is it something you could reasonably compel anyone else to provide. (Indeed, availing of ordinary prostitution would be a step downward for many such people in these social terms.)
Thus, the disanalogy between the incel situation and poverty is obvious: you can take away a small percent of someone's money, and this imposes a pretty predictable and limited harm on them, and it also means that you have money which you can then give to someone else. None of these operations are possible for incels. The question of whether society at large should step in to help those who are harmed is obviously influenced by whether such intervention is even possible.
(Indeed, in large part actual poverty in first-world nations is similar here, in that it's not simply a straightforward lack of money which could be resolved by providing money, but a much deeper issue in personal constitution and/or social position, of which the lack of money is a symptom. Consider the various initiatives to help chronically homeless people by providing them with apartments, which predictably do not improve their situation on the whole and end up terminating when the sponsor wearies of subsidizing someone who is not on a path to self-sufficiency. As in the case of incels, the question of societal intervention in such cases is not a simple question of whether the downsides of a trivial intervention are worth it; it's a much harder question of whether outside intervention can help at all.)
I'm really bewildered that everyone seems to think the only way to help incels is to get them access to paid sex or force unwilling people to have sex with them. But what if you could reform other people's minds and make them romantically attractive instead? just like solving racism is not just about making rules to let black people into restaurants but really about them getting equal consideration as people. Nobody concluded hence the problem is unsolvable because you can't force people to love black people against their will. We changed education, cultural signaling, social mores etc. and while success has been far from total (still lots of racists out there undercover or not) I'm confident that current generation of Americans is less racist / intolerant as that 100 years ago. What makes you think it's impossible to reform people so that they become less discriminatory in their choice of sexual/romantic mates? Used to be most white females probably recoiled at copulating with black men, nowadays mixed race couples are relatively common, I think it's evidence that these mating preferences aren't fixed in stone.
>still lots of racists out there undercover or not
Black/white inequality is caused by people being "undercover racists"? God, this is so dumb. Maybe its time to acknowledge that, no, after all, it turns out that "racism" (which is an even less meaningful word than "justice") is a really lousy explanation for racial inequality.
And this is absolutely relevant if you consider that MASSIVE social changes have done almost nothing to reduce socio-economic inequality between the races, and those changes were comparatively simple to the kind of social change that would be required here, especially since the changes don't have the massive weight of hstorical oppression narratives around race that people find so compelling - 'We need to be nice to black people because something something slavery something segregation' vs 'women need to find ugly awkward men attractive because that would be good for these men'.
>What makes you think it's impossible to reform people so that they become less discriminatory in their choice of sexual/romantic mates? Used to be most white females probably recoiled at copulating with black men, nowadays mixed race couples are relatively common, I think it's evidence that these mating preferences aren't fixed in stone.
Black white pairings are very uncommon per capita, vastly less common than if dating were completely colorblind. And its not clear that any meaningful number of white women have been made to find back men attractive. It may well have been the same, small number have always found them attractive (or would have if they interacted with them) but it wasn't an option in the old days.
Hmm, where did I say black/white inequality is caused by undercover racists? You are completely inventing something I never wrote. I was merely observing that we've managed some real attitude changes among white people about how they view other races (which maybe you want also to debate but seems sufficiently clear to me) even if the change is incomplete as yet. And I was making a parallel and asking why we couldnt do same about the incel topic. As for your comment how it would be super hard to achieve real results (skepticism that I share btw, let's be honest am mainly arguing for arguinh sake here) the retort for that is that it's apparently no reason not to try (the something needs to be done, this is something, hence this needs to be done philosophy) on other issues so why would it be an acceptable excuse here?
> None of these operations are possible for incels. The question of whether society at large should step in to help those who are harmed is obviously influenced by whether such intervention is even possible.
Okay, but maybe instead of forcing anyone to have relationships with them, we tax people and give the money to incels as compensation for their mistreatment by society. It doesn't recitfy the fundamental problem they have, but it's a remtoely plausible policy for acheiving some kind of "justice".
Weird that Scott the steelmanning advocate never addresses the best argument against the incel sex UBI thing, which is bodily autonomy. Leaving that out amounts to weak manning disagreement with his position.
The standard counter-argument is that our bodies are involved in *everything* we do.
Paying taxes (which is a part of "economic justice") usually requires you to bring your body to work. The work may damage your body in various ways (even sedentary jobs are bad for your health), and yet we do not accept "body autonomy" as an excuse for not paying taxes.
The counter-counter-argument is that the use of body in sex service is way more personal. Also, people who pay taxes typically need to get *some* job, but they can reject any *specific* job they really don't like, and choose another one. While the problem with incels is exactly when that no one wants to have sex with this specific person.
This could be addressed by giving people more choice. For example, you would get a list of incels, and freely choose one of them to have sex with. Or, everyone who refuses to have sex with a specific person would pay some money to their personal sex fund instead, and then person who finally agrees to have sex with them would get the whole jackpot.
Alternatively, we could make various forms of justice fungible, for example you can avoid sex with incels by paying twice the tax; or you are free to harm the environment if you spend twice as much time fighting racism. Then everyone could focus on their preferred form of justice, and use their comparative advantage to improve the world.
The effectively altruistic solution would probably be to donate resources to sexbot research.
I love when people say this, as if taxes were some voluntary non-coercive thing.
Taxation invovles the government using the threat of kidnapping, imprisonment and ultimately, if one resists hard enough, death, in order to collect taxes. You just don't have a problem with this because you think it leads to good outcomes (I do too, just to be clear, but I'm not the one talking about "bodily autonomy), and/or you may not think of it in these terms because so few people truly resist taxation.
And I mean, of course, nobody would be literally "forced" to have sex, it's just that they would be fined or coercivively imprisoned if they don't fufill their obligations.
I feel like there is an important distinction between "X is an injustice", and "we (i.e. the government) should try to fix X by coercing other people".
This fits nicely with:
>For instance, what is St. John Chrysostom invoking when he says "the coat rotting in your closet belongs by rights to man who has no coat" if not some version of economic justice?
This is indeed a version of economic justice. And centuries of people have struggled with the fact that life is so unfair. But just because I think the coat in the closet should be given to a poor person, does not mean I think I should take it from someone else's closet to give to a poor person.
I understand the term 'justice' to be referring to the context of laws/rules, and think it makes more sense of the situation to think of 'economic justice' to be about saying 'the rules of the economic system are set up poorly, such that some people aren't given a fair shot'. I think this should be seen as seperate from 'economic compassion', which is something like saying 'this particular person or group is doing economically poorly (for just or unjust reasons), and I feel badly for them and would like to help them.'
I feel like people are overusing the justice term lately, but also that it does have some relevance and meanings which matter. Like, I would see 'economic justice' as a call to see if we can design a system which would still allow for the good parts of capitalism, with the brilliance of letting prices shift priorities in a information-rich complex system beyond what humans can consciously design and manage, but minimize some of the bad effects. I mean, I think bankruptcy laws are an attempt to do exactly this sort of compromise between letting people go into debt and yet not throwing them into debtors prison when they screw up.
And 'climate justice' to me seems to be a call to have better international laws around pollution that crosses international borders. If countries had to pay a carbon tax for the CO / CO2 / etc that leaves their borders, and this carbon tax went to global warming mitigation like tropical ocean cloud seeding, this would be a great thing for the world. Countries would then be motivated to reduce their tax by taking actions internally to reduce emissions, and meanwhile, warming would have funds set aside to address the issue. The hard part is getting the nations of the world to come together to agree to and enforce such regulations.
So, in this case, justice/injustice can be seen as a call to change or create rules of law. Climate action might be going out and directly seeding some clouds. Climate compassion/charity would be granting money / citizenship rights / property ownership to people displaced by warming-related flooding. Climate welfare would be setting up laws to do climate compassion in a systematic way with tax dollars. Climate education or consciousness or conscientiousness would be a call to shift social dialogue and opinion in favor of any of the above types of pro-climate action.
What about incel injustice? I'd say that a reasonable call to fix incel injustice would be legalizing sex work (which is something a lot of progressive liberal people I know are indeed in favor of). A change of the rules of the game. Whereas incel compassion would be a call for someone who is personally in a position to give physical affection to someone they know to lack avenues for that, to bias themselves somewhat in favor of giving that desired affection. I'm not saying that seems like a good solution to me, just that I feel like it makes sense as a topic of discussion. Incel consciousness could be something like working against social taboos against seeking sexual satisfaction in non-partner-requiring ways like masturbation, porn, sex toys / dolls, etc.
The issue isn't even that the things promoted under the banner of 'economic justice' or 'climate justice' are necessarily bad (though, they often are), it's that using "justice"to describe them can be seen as a bad faith, manipulative tpye of language to use. Because if you oppose a tax raise, you aren't simple against raising taxes, you're against ""economic justice"" and therefore support "injustice". Basically the same as the term 'progressive'. If you oppose a piece of legislation that liberals overwhelmingly support, you're not just against that policy, you're "anti-progress".
A better example than the Incel one is Meat Farming. Even Justice-obsessed people will not refrain from eating meat, and thus you can call them out on their own hypocrisy.
1) Farm animals are suffering terribly
2) It’s not their fault, and they’ve done nothing to “deserve to suffer”
3) Humans don't need to eat meat
4) Therefore, it is Injustice
5) ***And yet you claim to be pro-justice while eating meat everyday***
I'm not pointing this out to be judgmental about eating meat (and it's certainly not impossible for meat farming to be done ethically), I'm just trying to make clear that people will gladly turn off the Justice part of their brain when it suddenly impacts them rather than someone else.
I think people who unironically use terms like 'economic justice' are probably going to be vastly more likely to be vegan or vegetarian, and at least eat less meat generally. And they certainly aren't going to say there's nothing wrong with eating meat, it will be 'I'm trying to eat less but vegan food is expensive' etc. so it doesn't really work. Whereas, I expect virtually 100% of them to immediately reject the incel example without thinking about it, and that's a better example of them not applying their views consistently.
> It’s hard to think of a way to help him that doesn’t impinge on important freedoms in some
> way...
>
> ... Needless to say, if we held the same mindset when thinking about climate or the
> economy, we could generate the same objections.
Actually, I think that this is exactly the mindset that we should have about these problems, whether it be "incel justice" or "climate justice".
First, acknowledge the fact that there's a way in which the world is unfair for systemic reasons, and as a result, there are some people/animals/the-environment which are being damaged or hurt in some way. Second, do some brainstorming to figure out if there is some way to alter the system (because it's a systemic problem), and what the cost of those alterations might be for everyone.
Applied to "climate justice", this looks like the following. What are the likely effects of climate change, and how much would it cost to avert? Note that cost can be measured in various ways, so there is plenty of room for debate. In a justice/freedom/rights framing, it's a question of what freedoms or rights do we give up to avert climate change, versus the unjust harm that would occur. With a more economic framing, the question is: how much money would we have to spend, vs the economic damage from rising sea levels in 100 years?
In the case of the climate, there's a pretty clear argument that renewables are now cheaper than coal, almost as cheap as gas, and infrastructure investments can actually increase economic growth. Thus the cost of investing in renewables now is minimal, and the likely costs of the IPCC "business as usual" projections are beginning to look quite bad, regardless of whether you measure the cost in terms of "freedom/justice" or "dollars".
Similarly, if Jeff Bezos is rich while Somali orphans are starving, you could start to crunch some numbers about whether a progressive tax on the rich could pay for universal food security for the poor, how high the tax would have to be, and how much freedom or economic growth we'd have to give up to achieve the goal of food security.
How would one go about trying to solve the incel problem? The government forcing random women to have sex, in Japanese WWII "comfort women" style, clearly does *NOT* satisfy any conceivable cost/benefit tradeoff, under any framing. However, there are other potential solutions that might pass muster -- should prostitution be made legal, as is done in Nevada? Could "conjugal therapy" from a licensed practitioner be prescribed by a psychiatrist? (Note that I am not taking a side this debate -- I am merely pointing out that there is room for rational debate.)
I think the usual approach to the case of the blameless incel and other kinds of unlucky people is to agree that society has an obligation to offer "reasonable" aid but not "unreasonable" aid, and then spend way too much time arguing exactly what kinds of aid are reasonable and which are unreasonable?
Irrelevant side note, just because I've just been reading about it: you quote "Christian charity is superior to justice, because the just man only helps people who ‘deserve’ help, whereas the Christian helps everybody"
There's different ways of reading this - true is that Christian tradition (which seems to have been partly abandoned in Christian societies over the course of the 14th to 17th century in favor of forced labor and prohibition of begging) gives alms without means testing or applying moral standards. Giving is a chance to be virtuous, a beggar provides opportunity to be virtuous and humble, and from that follows veneration of the poor and needy - for their role in that exchange. It's not about solving the need at all, it's about, uh, virtue signaling, to God.
But: that is not exactly the same as helping everybody. It's helping those who fulfill their role of being poor and desperate, the more destitute, dirty, *other*, the better, not necessarily to arouse compassion, but to make the act of giving more virtuous. Accordingly, we get people canonized as saints for eating shit or crawling in the dirt etc, and literally poisoning yourself to present with foamy mouth and seizures is a viable begging strategy (this might work in other cultures, too, but being met with disgust and fear can also harm your prospects and nowadays it's much more prudent to present yourself as virtuous, willing to work and polite). If you don't need help and ask for it anyway, you're not upholding your end of the bargain of making the giver get bonus points for admittance to heaven, so you better fake it (and people are incentivized to believe you, so they won't ask for proof).
In contrast, in ancient Rome and Greece, benefaction had little to do with poverty or need, instead, it was the virtue of supporting family, friends, fellow citizens - your in-group, in need or not. While there's also some private charity to the poor documented, that's less of a matter of virtue and more a personal preference. Virtue is getting your nephew a good job and inviting your friends to dinner, not give alms to the foreign weirdo on the street. Gods don't demand you feed the poor, inequality (i.e. slavery) is the backbone of Greek and Roman society (not to say (all) Christian societies were more equal, but at least their religious text is pretty clear on it). Christianity got their conception of charity from oriental cultures, instead.
Obviously, cultural issues are never black and white and don't form neat categories, so take all of this with a grain of salt. I hope I made some semblance of sense and have not introduced errors of translation.
Confusingly, criminal justice is itself unjust. Reason being, punishment is abuse saddled in excuses. I believe it’s been shown that prisons abuse people who were already abused as children, or are even innocent by false accusation. I’d call that unjust, at least.
This means that popular concepts of “justice” that are based on criminal justice can really be excuses to hurt people. But there is also “restorative justice,” which seeks correction without punishment. So any given “___ justice” can mean nearly opposite things to different people!
" I believe it’s been shown that prisons abuse people who were already abused as children, or are even innocent by false accusation. I’d call that unjust, at least."
What does this even mean? That 100% of inmates were abused as children and/or are falsely accused/convicted?
I mean, for goodness' sake, at least show some data if you going to say stuff like this
Here's a problem I have. Calling something unjust, or unfair implies a moral obligation to change it. Ought implies can. Therefore unfair or unjust implies that there is a possible alternative that's better. And I would say not only possible in principle, but also in practice.
And that's where a lot of these arguments go wrong in my view. "The current state of affairs is unjust and we have to change it, now we only need to figure it out how". No, that's putting the cart before the horse! First you provide an alternative that's better and feasable and then you can call the current state of affairs unjust. Something that cannot be different cannot possibly be unfair.
I have no problem with social justice by the way. I just think the contemporary discourse surrounding it is tarred by Utopic thinking.
"Here's a problem I have. Calling something unjust, or unfair implies a moral obligation to change it. Ought implies can. Therefore unfair or unjust implies that there is a possible alternative that's better. "
I think it is much better to be willing to live with injustice and recognize it as such than to say unless I have a solution this must be the best of all possible worlds. Unless your morality is might makes right then it's easy to find injustice that cannot be easily solved (basically all of foreign affairs). Using a justice framework requires bystanders to think about their role in perpetuating the injustice.
Sexual justice is trolly because it’s intended to be obviously absurd, but break it down and it touches on valid social issues.
To reduce the problem of incels to sex is to neglect the many different needs met in relationships. Take them one at a time. Would you say it’s a bad thing to have justice for children of neglectful parents, who were deprived of connection and belonging, and might just need therapy and hugs?
Mocking it as “sexual justice” would be akin to mocking poverty as “break into your house and steal food from your fridge justice.” Bottom line is, people are hurting, and they can and should be helped in entirely reasonable ways.
You ask yourself why you find the idea of animal justice more compelling than climate or economic justice. It’s pretty clear that what is different is that you don’t think that *your actions that contribute to climate or economic injustice (etc) are big enough contributors to the problem to be the bad or immoral action driving the suffering of sentient beings*. Given that you talk about justice in terms of retribution against people who can/should be blamed for suffering caused by bad/immoral behavior, it is completely unsurprising or remarkable that you don’t think *you* should be held responsible for the (putatively) unjust outcome of human suffering in the case of climate, economic disparity, etc.
I find this fascinating, because while I don’t see a clear or coherent point from either of these posts, you spent a good deal of the first post alleging that the “woke” perspective on justice means punishment, when it’s pretty clear that this is your own internal model for justice. (By the way, do you have any research to back up the idea that this is a commonly-held view? In a country where the title we give our supposedly most-impartial people the title of Justice, not because they punish but because they are supposed to hear cases and sentence fairly, according to the law and the merits of the case? The blindfolded lady with the scales? The contrast that vigilantism/vengeance-seeking presents to that system, immortalized in a kajillion super-popular comic books and action movies and scifi narratives, and probably religious books going back much farther than even the philosophy underwriting our wee teenaged nation?)
You provide the examples that playing computer games or buying cheap goods from Amazon are sympathetic, not bad or immoral, and you expect that your audience will, too. You think that caging, torturing, and killing animals is bad, and tell your audience so in a way that is clearly unsympathetic. Like all other animals, humans are sentient beings, and I imagine that you don’t think it’s moral for them to suffer, either.
So, if your actions are unsympathetic (or are predicated on the actions of others that you believe to be bad/immoral, given that you don’t to my knowledge harvest your own animals when you eat or have eaten meat), and those actions contribute to the suffering of sentient beings, you believe a movement seeking justice is warranted - you even participate, as you’ve written about trying to eat less meat for these reasons, about the moral goodness of vegans, soliciting donations for animal-welfare groups, and discussing other animal-justice topics in examples like this one.
But if you think your actions are sympathetic, and they contribute to the suffering of sentient beings, a justice movement is not only unwarranted, but must be motivated by a sinister power play to punish *you* for being bad and immoral. Your writing attests to this on many fronts. This is not a fancy philosophical conundrum, just the oldest bias in the book.
There is no sympathy discernable for actual, living human beings in the real world when you glibly contrast Jeff Bezos with “a Somali orphan”, or pen a hot take on the relationship of Mali’s climate to economic success. I know people who gravitated to you years ago because they felt you had compassion for people others didn’t, like sad and frustrated young men who wanted to find love. Where is that compassion when people suffer but there is no individual to blame? Are you incapable of recognizing injustice without a villain?
Just to be clear, do you donate every cent you own above that strictly necessary for your subsistance?
I think the original point, that framing questions as issues of justice is unhelpful and inevitably distopian, is a great one, but the Incel argument is not a good one. It is pretty absurd to characterize Incels as people who are unable to get sexual partners - the vast majority of people encounter that difficulty to some degree in their lives. And that frustration has led to lots of great art - for example, all the zillions of songs and stories that have sexual frustration as their subject -- as well as a tremendous amount of personal growth. You're not an Incel if you've been sexually frustrated, for whatever reason, and sing the blues over it.
You're an incel if you claim this makes you a victim. Incels are offended by the perceived unfairness of not getting what they want, characterizing the cause for that as perpetrators (often, young attractive women in general, or society, or whatever, so long as it works as an object of their anger). In other words, Incels are already demanding "sexual justice", including demands for retribution against those who haven't given them what they wanted. What's truly crazy about this is that it actually does lead to people claiming Incel victimhood to violently attack people who are objects of their desire, without waiting for the objectified person to even reject them first. That's not hypothetical, it's really happening. That's very distopian in my book.
As I see it, this is just one more manifestation of the ascendance of the claim to victimhood in our society. Appealing to people's sense of being victimized is one of the most potent political tools for inspiring activism these days. It's reached truly ridiculous proportions, when our former billionaire president works hard to portray himself as victim in chief, with a whole movement of subordinate victims uniting around his victim banner. And it's pervasive across the whole political spectrum, as you've very aptly pointed out. Indeed we're almost to the point of having one overriding ideology, which I'd call "Victimatarianism" that pervades the whole political spectrum. Which seems to me the reason for all this talk about "justice" rather than social improvement. If we're all victims, it means, we're all out for justice.
Which is why your original point about framing this whole laundry list of social issues as questions of justice is so important and so right. When an issue is framed as a question of justice as that word is actually used in politics, it implies there's a perpetrator and a victim. If you frame the same question in terms of responding to a challenge or reform or social improvement, it focuses on making things better rather than the perpetrator-victim dualism. Actual positive improvement results from looking at improving things beyond the question of justice for perpetrators and victims.
Justice is a useful concept when you're talking about how to deal with defined specific wrongs that people have suffered. But it's pretty iffy even in that limited context -- court cases, for example, turn out to be miscarriages of justice all too often. So much so that most court cases are resolved by compromise, not by "justice" being done. When politics turns into a quest for justice, it can really get ugly, as we've seen for the past few years on every side of the political spectrum.
Here here..
I know this isn’t relevant (don’t get mad at me pls Scott) but is anyone at EAGx in Oxford this weekend? If so would love to meet up, I don’t know anyone there nor any rationalists and/or ACX readers in real life. If so let me know or book a meeting, my name is Gruffydd Gozali on swapcard. Or just reply here.
To a Georgist or a socialist, most people are poor because they are being robbed. Squeezed by the factory owner on one end and the landlord (or mortgage lender) on the other. Because the boss and the landlord own the underlying land, they have an exclusive right to the land and its natural resources for all time, and they can extract the wealth created by their employees / tenants, who have no choice but go along with it because they need the land for shelter and sustenance.
(This example was much more relatable during the Industrial Revolution but it is equally valid today. All wealth ultimately derives from land and natural resources. We could also construct a similar example with drug companies and intellectual property, but there are some interesting differences.)
Of course the factory owner and landlord would tell you that they acquired their land fair and square, and they don't make the rules. And I accept that argument (insofar as they don't fund politicians to maintain the status quo (which they do)).
So it looks like poor people are poor because of the way we think about property rights. In other words, what can be "owned"? Can a person own something that was not created by another person? If we all agree to let certain things-not-made-by-humans be owned (i.e. land) because we think it will be a net benefit (i.e. encourage economic activity), how should this special kind of ownership be different (if at all) from normal kinds of ownership (e.g. owning your body, the fruits of your labor)? Socialists think all land should be collectivized. Georgists think it should just be taxed much more (and stop taxing everything else).
I am much more convinced by this conception of justice than the comparatively naïve argument "inequality implies injustice". Thomas Paine actually called it "agrarian justice".
An interesting aside, then, is what to do with the incels and sexual injustice. If we ascribe to Georgism and believe in helping the poor insofar as they have been exploited by landowners, can we now raise the bar of injustice and conclude that the incels are on their own? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
A lot of this drives home to me how philosophically bankrupt most modern discussions of ethics generally are.
Similarly "Human Rights" are this foundational concept in international law, PMC moralizing, yet they are totally incoherent. They assume obligations on others and the notion of violation and remedy are totally confused.
If someone in Africa doesn’t have access to healthcare, who is violating their human rights? Just the government of their own country, or every hospital in the world that doesn’t offer them free treatment?
What about people in Tonga, after the volcano went off did the volcano violate their human rights? Or did the government or the broader international community violate people’s rights until aid could be delivered?
What about HIV in the 80’s when there was no treatment? Did the virus violate people’s human rights, did the scientists by failing to develop a cure, or was there no human rights violation? or after anti retro virals were developed, did the drug developers instantly begin violating the human rights of anyone who has HIV but did not receive drugs?
Most positive "human right" I think are better understood as privileges a country ought to provide citizens rather than sorts of universal freedoms. Of course this doesn't square well with the idea that "privileges" are somehow dirty and signify moral pollution. Human rights unless restricted to freedom from oppression, freedom from abuse and violence etc... seem rather incoherent.
Exactly. This is precisely how I think about the issue of "human rights." Did all of the people who lived in countries without elections for thousands of years before democracy was invented have their human rights (to vote) violated?
AJPio writes:
"But of course how humans tend to behave is also a product of culture (more evidence of injustice!) and this kind of reply is less appealing in other domains e.g. if government officials keep being corrupt, you don’t say ‘well maybe instead of calling this state of affairs unjust we should remember what human nature is like, and design systems around it, think about what’s more effective, have a positive narrative’"
I found this curious, because I would use the corruption argument pretty much word by word (in fact it is one of the most basic libertarian arguments for less state). While individual cases of corruption are unjust, I don't think it is helpful to call a crusade on corruption because it is treating symptoms without treating the cause. The cause is human nature and cultural norms. Cultural norms are indeed changeable but there are parts of human nature that are immutable and not affected by culture - I see economics mostly as the study of this basic human nature.
You can create cultural norms in which corruption is less acceptable and more stigmatized but if your system of societal organization makes it more attractive then there will be more corruption and you cannot just change this by social norms alone.
In general, I think this care vs. fairness dichotomy is kind of similar to the utilitarian vs. deontological view of the world. It seems to me that fairness is a lot more deontological and care/harm a lot more utilitarian.
My biggest problem with deontological social philosophy (regardless of the ideology) is that is is prescriptive. It derives what it sees as the just state of the world somehow and then tries to bend the existing state of the world to reach the just state. But conflict arises when this just state of the world is in conflict with the basic human nature and then you get things like real socialism when you wanted a communist utopia (I have the same problem with deontological libertarians by the way).
Partly I see this in claims like "we produce enough, we just need to redistribute it better". But there are reasons why we produce quite as much and these reasons also affect why we distribute the way we do. We can improve this marginally through charity, shifts in cultural norms (appreciating people for philanthropy instead of admiring their expensive yachts) etc., but if we actually change the core of the system then we cannot take the fact that we produce so much for granted any more. The size of the pie that we bake is not fixed. But this is much clearer and more obvious from the perspective of "what can we do to make sure everyone gets more pie?" than if you start with the premise that it is unjust that someone gets more (or at least much more) of the pie than someone else and think about the ways to change that instead.
Speaking of Justice . . .A rudimentary deconstruction of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's introduction in the Senate makes it clear she's a crypto-libertarian, and that terror of the Democratic Party -- a moderate, conservative African American.
She paused to reaffirm her thanks to God, declaring "It is faith that sustains me at this moment." She declared she was blessed beyond measure to be born in "this great nation." She acknowledged that the lawful segregation and many other barriers her parents endured had ultimately made her own experience possible. And she thanked her parents for her African identity and name, and the family ethos that if she worked hard in America, she could reach her "God-given potential." And, by the way, her entire family is in public service -- lawyers, jurists, police officers, a military officer, and several doing time in prison. In front of family and lifelong friends, Judge Brown Jackson declared she would apply "careful adherence to precedence" to the constitution.
So, do we send Ms. Ocasio-Cortez Xanax or flowers? Judge Brown Jackson looks like just what America needs -- the best qualified person for the job. Hopefully non-partisan.
porn parody batman movie where batman is an incel fighting for "sexual justice"
On the hog farm example, I think this matches "justice" well because it's a simple on/off question, and you'll find justice works best in those scenarios. The hog farm can be made to stop polluting those properties. It's a yes/ no kind of question. Similarly:
- Should someone go to jail? There's a straight-forward yes/no answer.
- Should people be denied access to bathrooms and parks based on the colour of their skin?
- Should prisoners be tortured?
- Should people eat animals?
- Should employers be allowed to charge workers for trumped up costs, putting them into debt, thereby forcing them to effectively work as slave labour?
In contrast, many economic and social questions are not yes/no, and so they do not fit well into the mould of justice. To achieve a society where people earn a decent income, it takes more than answering yes/no questions. You need to work out the details of a market economy and redistribution. If you want more people to have sex (a worthy goal), there probably are real solutions, but they will not be an answer to a yes/no question. If you want to stop climate change, etc etc.
To underline this point, consider cases where courts have attempted to decide how to assign government budgets to achieve issues of economic justice. It happened in Canada at least once. If that seems like a bad idea (it is), it should give a sense of why justice doesn't work well beyond yes/no questions.
I think this idea seems good with the examples you have and then utterly falls apart on further inspection. You provide an answer to the hog farm example as a yes no (yes they can stop polluting) but that's assuming a question was posed as "should the hog farmer stop polluting (y/n)" rather than the question "in the process of running a hog farm, waste from the farm causes harm to the neighboring community, what should be done?". There's no difference between the case of hog farmers dumping waste into the neighboring communities and "everything that emits CO2" contributing to climate change from a question point of view. What's different is only the scope of the problem and the actual tradeoffs we want to make.
This is a thoughtful response and I disagree. Courts are capable of managing disputes of the type "Company X is breaking Y pollution law on Z's property." This is a fairly normal court dispute. Yes, there is then a lot of details that the company has to figure out to stop polluting on the property and to come into compliance with the law, but at the end of the day, a court can decide the question: "is the company in conformance with the law, yes/no." Similarly, engineers are required to build structurally sound buildings, and it is a matter of justice that they do so. Achieving this goal requires all kinds of complex details, but at the end of the day, a court can ask: "did the building stay standing? Yes/no" or, "Is the engineer legally at fault for the building collapsing? Yes/no."
So, you can pass some pretty complex stuff through a yes/no justice filter, but there is a ton of stuff it doesn't work for. Is a government doing enough for climate change? Is a government devoting a sufficient proportion of its budget to reducing poverty versus its many other goals? Are transit planners doing a good enough job?
I'm an urban planner trying to bring more yes/no style justice to a field that has none of it, so it's something I think about a lot. It's important and it has limits.
I think we can break the process into two steps:
1. are we satisfied with the amount of justice in category X?
2 if not, what is a well formed question that could be evaluated for X
When people demand justice they are typically saying that the current laws do not satisfy 1. In an ideal legislative process a law would be passed that addresses 2. Saying that "is the government doing enough for climate change" is about step 1. The answer will be something like a carbon tax (or cap and trade or direct compensation to countries etc). The current laws on pollution, food quality, etc all came from previous rounds of people demanding justice in ambiguous forms and then figuring out a set of questions that addressed it (again this doesn't result in JUSTICE but instead is an incremental step to living in a more just society).
Something that seems to be overlooked in the incel-gets-laid analogy is that sex, while having been commodified for time out of mind, is only the top layer of the problem: This hypothetical incel would be better served by a meaningful human interaction, not just meaningless sex as a financial transaction. In other words, the physical release doesn't seem to be the problem or solution here. Sex is just the last act of a multi-act play. It's everything that comes before it that gives sex meaning and satisfaction, and shorn of the events leading up to it, the incel just ends up exactly were he started. And possibly worse off: Just as frustrated and unfulfilled as before. You could theoretically mandate the act, but you'll never mandate intimate love between two people.
On the Jewish view of charity, I think Scott gets it wrong - and instead of trying to write out a detailed refutation of why I'd claim that mainsteam Jewish sources view "charity" as an obligation to do justice in distributing funds, I'll just quote a big excerpts from my book chapter on Effective Altruism and Charity (For more on charity and religion, read the book, it's free - https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/9783748925361/effective-altruism-and-religion ):
“If there will be among you a needy person, from one of your brothers, in your cities, in your land the Lord, your G-d, is giving you, you shall not harden your heart, and you shall not close your hand from your needy brother. Rather, you shall open your hand to him, and you shall lend him sufficient for his needs, which he is lacking. ... For there will never cease to be needy within the land. Therefore, I command you, saying, you shall surely open your hand to your brother, to your poor, and to your needy in your land.” - Deuteronomy 15:7-11
While a variety of biblical texts discuss charitable giving of various sorts, the one most relevant to modern charitable giving is the above passage in Deuteronomy. Per later sources, the exact phrasing of these verses is critical in understanding the contours of the obligation. For example, a discussion that becomes critical to the question of moral obligation is that verse 7 uses the terms “among you,” “needy person,” “in your cities,” and “in your land.” According to the Sifrei, the order indicates a preference for the recipients of giving, so that according to most opinions, physical location creates a biblically mandated preference - albeit one that may be overridden by different levels of need.
Still, the biblical obligation laid out in Deuteronomy provides a baseline rather than a complete picture. The Shulcan Aruch notes in the very first rule about charity that the Bible repeatedly exhorts Jews to assist others by giving charity, which emphasizes its importance. (Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah 247). In addition to the theoretical discussion of importance, the actual emphasis on charity by Jewish communities is clear historically... the rabbis viewed redistribution of wealth to the poor to be a central function of post-temple Judaism.
The Rabbinic obligation to give charity is based on the biblical idea of giving a tenth of a person’s wealth to the needy. This was introduced by Abraham when he says, in Genesis 14:20, that he will give a tenth of his wealth to a priest of the lord. Fourteen chapters later, Jacob accepts this obligation on an ongoing basis, saying that he will give a tenth of whatever he receives. This is not itself an obligation for future generations to give a tenth of their non-agricultural income, but forms the conceptual basis for the requirement.
The way in which one fulfills this obligation is the subject of much discussion. There is some talmudic discussion, but most of the discussion about the allocation of charity appears in later sources. For instance, there is a distinction drawn between charitable giving to community institutions and that given to the poor. For example, in Nachmanides’ explanation, found in his commentary on Deuteronomy 12:6, discusses Exodus 35:24, where a surplus of funds is available for building the tabernacle, and the point is made that communal needs are limited, unlike personal donations. Once those needs are fulfilled, as seen in Exodus, communal leaders are responsible to stop further giving. No such limitation exists for giving to the poor, and while each individual has a limited requirement, the obligation to give remains...
...Peter Singer makes the clear case in his book Practical Ethics that the wealthy have a moral obligation to help the poor on utilitarian grounds. The rich have sufficient resources, and even for someone with only somewhat utilitarian beliefs, a person should certainly be willing to sacrifice at least a small portion of their own comfort to help others, providing great benefit at very low cost.
Judaism takes a compatible view of the obligation for Tzedakah, albeit from a markedly non-utilitarian viewpoint; “He who ignores those in need is called wicked and is regarded as if he worships idols.” (Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah 247:1) The deontological prohibition against turning away the needy, “shutting your hand” (Deuteronomy 15:7) from helping them, has a clear biblical source. Expanding on this, the latter clause of the Shulchan Aruch suggests an equivalence to idol worship, a sin considered on par with murder, deriving from the fact that all wealth comes from G-d, as the Rema’s gloss notes just afterwards; “People must realize that they themselves are given sustenance by G-d,” (Rema, Yoreh Deah 247:3) and failing to use the wealth granted by G-d to help others would, by this logic, be considered rejecting G-d. This argument can be sourced to a passage in the Talmud, Kiddushin 82b. “Poverty does not come from a trade, nor does wealth come from a trade; rather, they come from the One to Whom wealth belongs, as it is stated [citing the verse in Haggai, 2:8]: ‘Silver belongs to me, Gold belongs to me, says the Lord of hosts.’”
Returning to the comparison to Effective Altruism, some object to Singer’s view on the non-utilitarian grounds that the moral choice to help the poor is only important if donations are, in fact, made by choice. Given that objection, it is worth noting that Judaism rejects this logic; in many cases, those who do not donate by choice can be compelled by the court to do so. At the same time, Jewish law does recognize a great deal of latitude and choice in the selection of recipients and causes.
While I am somewhat sympathetic to Scott's biases on justice creep, I do find his more discrete biases (i.e., climate change vs. animal welfare) to be incongruent. But I think I know why: I think we all have different areas of interest where we feel our unique powers as humans should be used to challenge the natural order of things, and where we feel that arrogantly overstepping our abilities as humans could lead to catastrophic ends.
Ultimately, what I see is that we're essentially debating the amount of agency we, as the most powerful sentient beings on the planet, have in determining and overriding otherwise natural outcomes.
One the one side, we have the more-or-less conservative/libertarian view that we, as the most powerful sentient beings on the planet, are still mostly just animals doing our thing. We have the right to pursue reproduction, pleasure, and power as we see fit because we are just another animal in the broader panoply of nature's actors roaming the planet. To this cohort, we're no less opportunistic than SARS-COV-2. We aim to reproduce at whatever cost, which is external to our being.
On the other side, we have the more-or-less progressive/conscientious idealist view that we, as the most powerful sentient beings on the planet, have the ability to bend the system to our whims. And therefore we have the obligation to bend systems and actions towards more fair and just ends. To this cohort, we as humans are essentially externalities to nature writ large, and as such, we have almost G-d like powers to transform nature's inherent bias towards the most fit and against the least fit.
From the libertarian/conservative perspective, we actually should be humble in how we wield our powers, because if we wield them too wildly, we could actually severely disrupt the natural order of things. This would be the "humans-as-arrogant-muckrakers" theory of interaction.
From the progressive/conscientious idealist perspective, we actually should exert our unique abilities to wield our impressive powers, because only we have the ability to overturn nature's blindness to justice, and it's our moral obligation to do so, because we have the power and ability to do so.
To further distill this: I see all of this as fodder for the "are humans uniquely externalized actors in nature or simply the most dangerously-advanced part of nature" debate.
The internal name of the Google feature "About X results (Y.Z seconds)" is tinkernickle. By removing it, ad revenue is reduced. No one can explain why.
I think a lot of problems with "justice" come from the idea that there is one perfect thing we want and we have the ability to select the optimal choice. Instead it's better to imagine that there are a number of different goals we have and we want to live on the efficient frontier but for any problem we have to tradeoff some justice vs another. Playing video games might not be an issue but driving a low mpg car might be an issue because the scale actually matters (alternatively we could decide that value of video games is too low but transportation is super important so even though video games causes less relative emissions it's a worse action). This also solves the incel issue, as a society we might consider it unjust that some people don't get to have sex with the people they want, but we recognize that people have a more important right to chose who they have sex with. In the more sympathetic framing, we might want to follow the Netherland's example (https://dutchreview.com/culture/relationships/sex-care-in-the-netherlands-helping-the-disabled-find-intimacy/).
Re: Sexual Welfare - there is actually a debate around this in Germany, where various very large, reputable and politically established (non-"woke") organizations like pro familia demand for the health / disability insurance or social aid system to support disabled or old people seeking out sex workers, as these organizations regard the experience of intimacy as an essential human necessity (to stay away from the term "human right"). There are also some initiatives, funded by disabled citizen interest groups, that train up and certify sex workers to better understand the needs and to better provide for disabled clients.
This could also be a prescription type of deal.
Justice is an unhelpful lens to use or shift towards in other arenas because we're already so bad at regular criminal and civil justice.
The concepts of 'compelling' vs 'convincing' are also at the heart of the matter. Scott explores a lot of how to describe what is wrong and how/if it is wrong. This dissection of harms, unfairness, breaches of moral or philosophical or divine codes, etc. kind of skips the part where the vast majority of people would choose for their to be less suffering in a general sense. Perhaps not a strong preference to inconvenience them in any way, but they'd still generally choose less suffering over more suffering for themselves and others.
So if we can agree on that part for the 99% of non-psychopaths or non-sadists or whatever to have even a basic level of empathy and goodness, then it is a matter of how to go about it.
The nature of how things are wrong or how much we wish they were different matters and I'm not saying to disregard that part. It still factors in, but the other half of 'how far do we go to change this' is perhaps the more salient part in terms of coming up with a matrix of matched unfairness vs fair efforts to reduce suffering.
Shall we use force? Shall we convince people? Shall we accept this problem?
What strategy can we use. If we look at criminal justice reform and how difficult and unfair and tragic the current systems around the world and throughout history have been in terms of doing things like identifying criminal responsibility and punishment levels based on evidence and guilt of individuals or groups....it can't be said to be a flawless or great system, at best it is necessary that we try and we've never been very good at it.
This is why I like the idea of helping people with moral and cultural goals to align more and more people to your belief and value system. If something is repugnant to a culture, then it will seek to get rid of it.
If we just pass some law and very few people believe in it, then I'm not sure how much can be achieved if police and litigators ignore that law or courts with culturally based human judges will always weight other culturally important to them factors higher and jury members will do the same.
If we just want to reduce suffering in many forms and many people agree with us, then this seems like it would be more effective than trying to use a justice frame to convince people.
Why? Because of this very blog post in a meta-sense. Instead of talking about ways to improve the climate or eliminate factory farming or put in a UBI for morally and culturally good reasons to eliminate severe poverty within a nation....we are side tracked into arguing about if this is a justice issue or not.
The semantics and distraction of asserting justice and its inherently 'compulsive' forces instead of 'convincing' forces makes people reject your idea because you're calling them a criminal on some level instead of simply appealing to them.
In some way there is a 'threat' of force and compulsion if 'you get your way' and this is an issue of 'justice'. This activates a certain degree of threat response and is inherently hostile. I don't think that's the way to go...to include violence and hostility in the conversation when in reality it was always about convincing others to cooperate with you...even if you're trying to convince them to use society's violence against people who disagree.
There is a disharmony there. If we need to convince others to reduce suffering, then why would we use language of violence which increasing suffering? We are thrust into some trolley problem of who suffers instead of just trying to alleviate suffering through cooperation.
Even on the question of the 'deserving' and 'ideal' incel...one would actually find that many people who want to reduce suffering and have a universal healthcare system would agree to fund plastic surgery for those with birth deformities or those who were disfigured in accidents or due to disease. In fact this is already the case in many nations.
Everything from cleft palates to burn victims, to breast cancer surgery patients to those in car accidents etc. are deserving of medical help in several ways including plastic surgery. Rather than a UBI to make them save up for these expensive services, this can be addressed in other ways such as through a universal health care system. And overall is all about convincing and getting mass cooperation to help people and reduce suffering in ways which we can accept.
The hurdle in this case isn't about trying to reframe things into punishing those who wish to deny healthcare as criminals....it is about getting enough people to agree with you and vote in people who matter. Those who disagree simply don't matter if they're in the minority in a democratic country.
Likely many people already agree with you and it is about overcoming corruption and activating people to care about these issues....so you don't need to use 'compulsive' or violent language in terms of justice in order to get higher levels of cooperation from people who nominally already agree with you.
Haven't had time to read through all the comments yet, so maybe others have already made the below points, but if not --
<i>I recall hearing in childhood religious school back in the early 90s that the English word "charity" comes from the Latin "caritas" meaning compassion, and it's about a feeling of caring deep in your heart.</i>
That's not quite true. "Charity" does indeed come from "caritas", (which in turn comes from "carus", which means something like "precious, dear, beloved",*) but I think you'd be very hard-pressed to find a theologian or religious teacher who said that simply feeling warmly towards somebody without actually doing anything to help them would count as charity.
(* On a completely random note, the Proto-Indo-European word "*ka-" which gave rise to "carus", and hence "caritas" and "charity", also gave rise to our English word "whore". Etymology can be weird sometimes.)
<i>Something's off here. What Scott describes as "justice creep" sounds in many ways like a classically Christian understanding of justice. For instance, what is St. John Chrysostom invoking when he says "the coat rotting in your closet belongs by rights to man who has no coat" if not some version of economic justice? And yet, Christianity manages to also talk about many other virtues, and revere many people as saints (including, uh, Chrysostom). So, at least within the worldview from which the concept of saints derives, there is room for both widespread injustice crying out for remedy and genuinely heroic examples of virtue. And why shouldn't there be? The fact we have many injustices to right does not cancel out opportunities to cultivate virtues like patience, fortitude, and temperance.</i>
The classical Christian understanding also held that people can only become saints through the grace of God. I know I'm not the first person to suggest that social justice basically takes Christian notions of original sin and rejects Christian notions of grace and redemption, and in the process creates a highly misanthropic and socially-harmful worldview.
I suspect that many of the people who argue that there is no such thing as sexual injustice but there is economic injustice would say that there's no genetic variation to human intelligence / work ethic (outside of catastrophic mutations like Down Syndrome). To me it's the left's equivalent to being a flat earth theorist but it is socially acceptable.
My tolerance for this discussion usually runs out pretty quickly because so many very smart people come to the table with an a priori hypothesis that is so unscientific as to make it look deliberate. Namely, they look at macro-level disparate outcomes and conclude that 100% of the variance is accounted for by some social injustice. That whatever has accrued to the benefitting group was stolen, or somehow ill-gotten.
When we design an experiment that attempts to explain an observed phenomenon, isn't it prudent to attempt to account for all the variance, no matter where the data leads? Some of the bad stuff that happens to people is at least partially their own fault. Some of it is from something else. It should not be a big deal to point that out. But no matter what, you can't solve the problem until you understand all of its vectors of causation.