From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Apr 29 2001 - 05:48:22 MDT
On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 02:25:25AM -0400, James J. Hughes wrote:
>
> >> But there is no certainty in values or politics,
> >Here's a loathable self-defeating statement.
>
> Well, there are some wonderful French philosophers I could recommend you
> read, such as Camus, Foucault and Lyotard, but I suppose you probably
> already have.
>
> For me, it all comes back to Hume, and the unbridgeable gap between the Is
> and the Ought. One can prove the Is, but the Ought is always, at root, a
> leap of faith. If you have an airtight reason why your idea about the Good
> is better than mine, I'd love to hear it.
There is a great difference between no certainty and no difference (I
think the later was what was regarded as loathable). Just because we
cannot say a value is wrong in some objective sense, we can look at the
(objective) consequences of it and see what they are. Some values are
self-defeating and some result in events that are against the rather
deep seated values we have "built in" due to evolution (such as survival
or striving for happiness) - not to mention compared to whatever value
scales we might set up in the discussion. This may still not prove that
value A is universally better than B, but it enables a discussion based
on whatever values the participans happen to share (like that surviving
and being happy is good).
My own libertarian views are largely based on this problem: if we cannot
be totally certain about the validity of other views, the safest
approach is to allow people to live according to their views as long as
they do not interfere unduly with me. From this a framework can be
constructed game-theoretically to minimize conflicts, and so on.
On a related note, I have always wondered how the postmodern approach
deals with loathable ideologies like nazism. From postmodern point of
view they are all just as valid as say humanism, after all? So what does
a postmodernist do when confronted with a nazi ideologue? Deconstructing
him does not help much beyond the rhetoric of digging up some juicy
influences he might dislike. Showing that the ideology is self-defeating
in some way is usually a rather weak attack on such an irrationalist
view. I have the impression that quite a few of the french postmodern
luminaries instead default to marxism when denouncing LePen and nazis,
which is after all a cop-out (and in itself worth deconstructing).
[ And for the sake of comparision with the originating theme of this
thread, my parents were both quite socialist when I grew up. They even
gave me the _Quotations of Chairman Mao_ to read when I was little. Of
course, in the 70's in Sweden everything was red - childrens' programs
on TV about life in oppressed third world nations, doll theatre and
cartoons with capitalist villains, even music played in kindergarten
with overt socialist themes :-) I think I just uncritically absorbed it
all, regarding myself as apolitical.
I instead became much more interested in the sciences and science
fiction. I actually don't think the science fiction influenced me much
politically, I read everything from Heinlein to very socialist Russian
authors, other than possibly making me a bit of a Clarkian technocrat in
my teens.
It was actually the debate on this list and with some of my
transhumanist friends that made me first abandon technocracy and then
gradually become a libertarian. It was not much the libertarian
arguments themselves that affected me, but rather that I for the first
time encountered a forum where politics was debated, where views were
not just taken for granted. That was tremendously stimulating, and led
me to start investigating my own views. ]
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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