Intentions matter because they say something about the likelihood of the person offending in the future. Someone who commits crimes on purpose is likely to commit crimes again, and so for all the reasons of incapacitation and deterrence they need a harsher sentence. Someone who commits a crime by accident is less likely to offend again. At best you are trying to instruct them and bystanders against the kind of negligence that led to the crime.
Intentions also matter because consequences are contextual, and we don't really understand or have control over the context. Jesus says that if you have lusted in your heart you've already committed adultery. There may not arise a context in which you can or would do the deed, but you want to. Maybe you can convince yourself that the spouse will never find out. It's a victimless crime!
Or maybe the very act of thinking about cheating all the time, even if never consummated, is poison to your marriage.
Utilitarian was a boon in moving from feudal privilege to liberal free markets. The baker and the candlestick maker don't have to be saints. But I'm skeptical of applying that attitude to lots of other things, especially the social the political realms at scale. I think utilitarianism is basically impossible outside the free market context (everyones definition of utility becomes self serving bullshit) and I don't want utilitarianism applied to my family or other things like it (till death do us part, not till util calculations change do we part).
Arnold wrote: "You can take the Western man out of Christianity, but you can’t take the Christianity out of Western man." This is a strikingly concise analysis of how things stand. Of course, the Christianity left in Western man is deeply corrupt and what has been retained is only partial. So what remains is a kind of heretical version of that faith.
Intentions matter because they represent direction of agency. Consequences matter because they are truth signal. E.g. one can BS about intentions but consequences reveal the Truth ( if there is large enough sample size).
Humans have a propensity to lie. Hence there needs to be a way to detect it
Re: "the illusion of morality is the single greatest obstacle to the pursuit of truth." -- Brett Andersen, essay at link in Arnold's post.
There exist various, numerous motivations and psychological mechanisms, which can overpower or undermine "the pursuit of truth." Examples:
• Passion (e.g., "Love is blind")
• Vanity
• Innumeracy (desire to focus on vivid, scandalous, rare events)
• Stubbornness
• Conformity
• Wishful thinking
• Counter-wishful thinking (a surprisingly commonplace, potent motivation)
• Rational ignorance (individual search costs exceed individual power to change outcome)
etc etc etc
And technologies and institutions can promote or limit the pursuit of truth. Examples:
• The internet
• Adversarial justice system
• Tenure
• Psychiatry
(It is an open question whether any of the above have a positive net effect on truth-seeking — and truth-finding.)
etc etc etc
It is an empirical question, what is "the single greatest obstacle" to truth-seeking. Brett Andersen's essay — Nietzsche meets evolutionary psychology — doesn't establish that morality is the main obstacle to truth-seeking.
Parsimony and fullness are joint ideals of science: To explain much with little. Newton's law, f = ma, has astonishing explanatory power and scope. By contrast, scholars who would apply evolutionary psychology to explain the whole of human history and culture get way ahead of the evidence, and shoehorn the sea of facts.
The phrase "consensual hallucination" to characterize social institutions such as morality and money is a poor choice of words, and you and Brett Andersen should avoid using it. A hallucination is something that is not there. The concept of spontaneous order explains how certain patterns of behavior can become self-reinforcing, whether for good or for bad. Some of them are almost as pervasive for us as the facts of the natural world. Try to get groceries without paying money for them, for instance.
Also, to claim as Andersen does that "these moral precepts do not refer to anything that exists outside of the minds, behaviors, and history of human beings" seems to neglect ethology.
Keep telling people that everybody is subject to God's Law and they will eventually start to believe it, and include the King (from Alec Ryrie, an English historian of Protestant Christianity, on how Protestants made the modern world)
Intention largely matters among equals who are able to give grace to one another. That a commoner poached one of the King's deer because his family was starving does not matter to the King. If somebody is telling you that intention doesn't matter, only the fact that you offended them, they are speaking from a place of privilege where your existence is not their concern.
It's true that I want killers stopped no matter whether murder be premeditated or not, or it be drunk driving or simply bad driving. At the same time, I have a hard time seeing these as equivalent and would give more chances down that list before taking the most drastic reactions. I certainly wouldn't treat them the same on first offense.
On what basis do you say it worked? We can imagine worse outcomes, including catastrophic, and even argue some other local outcomes are worse but I don't think we can argue with any certainty that Judeo-Christian isn't near the worst outcome.
I’m reasoning that western civilization, in various versions, has been adopted by many in diverse places.
I’m including the impact of the - renaissance (Petrarch), reformation (Luther, Calvin). science (Galileo, Newton, Boyle, faraday), human rights (Milton), individualism (Locke), elimination of slavery (Wilberforce); all these were Christian.
And even right of members to choose leaders, which began in puritan communities in England and Scotland. Spread to New England.
Even idea of rule of laws and not of man can derive from god given ‘Ten Commandments’..
Isreal not allowed to touch, change or remove. Kings required to write out a copy of the law, not to make law.
I don't see how that changes what I was getting at. Maybe we can reasonably believe J-C morality works better than most known alternatives but I don't think we KNOW that.
It worked at ending material poverty - starvation - as well as deaths from many other natural acts, as well as resulting in fairly low rates of murder and violent criminal acts. It worked at creating a widespread idea of "individual based Human Rights", being more important than a current government's top priorities.
It didn't work to avoid degradation starting ... 2012 smartphones? 2000 dot.com bubble bursting? 1989 Berlin Wall falling? Vietnam & Cambodia (Pol Pot) 1975?
I find myself rereading the opening quotation and substituting "markets" in place of "morality".
Where others look at the "false" nature of money and markets as a bug, I've viewed it as a feature. Perhaps I should reconsider western morality this way.
It isn’t obvious to me that there can’t be objective morality without God. If we accept the common sense proposition that some sets of norms and institutions are better for human happiness and prosperity than others, why can’t there be a hypothetical optimum set of norms and institutions for human happiness and prosperity? That is my reading of what John Locke means by natural law. Locke argues that in practice we need revelation to guide us there, and that in practice philosophy doesn’t have the power that religion does to unite hearts and minds behind a common cause. (I might also add that faith is required to ensure people that defectors are actually NOT better off, despite short term appearances.) But in principle at least Locke seems to suggest that the natural law isn’t explicitly theistic.
Norms work when the vast majority of people accept that the norms should not be violated - meaning they are willing to shame / punish / ostracize those who violate the norms. He's correct that claiming morality is true and objective leads to more folk accepting the norm - and society then working better.
Both intention AND consequences are important - both in the short term and the long term (and perhaps evolutionary time). Reminding me that both mercy/ forgiveness and justice/ punishment* are important yet require some trade-offs.
In contrasting master morality (17:1 reproduction) vs slave, or equality?, morality (close to 1:1 for last 100 years in USA? 3:1 >10kya ), "equal rights to reproduce" are an important implicit part of Christian morality. Accepting the "truth" that "all men are created equal", leads to culture & systems of gov't that encourage more economic wealth creation and liberty and artistic expressions. Clearly superior, in these metrics, to many other culture-gov't combinations.
In complex reality, there can be no "true" value determination of multivariate system value so as to accurately tell which is better-tho in wars there are usually victors who gain territory and more females to reproduce with. The "might makes right" master morality might well succeed at the sub-Dunbar number, but lose in wars of larger forces.
Claims about intentions are particularly suspect because of the ease of lying and difficulty in determining the "real" intention - especially if the actor is being untruthful to himself, and believes his own lies. I claim all smart folk are smart enough to easily lie to themselves, believably.
The norms our society needs are such that low IQ folk have in the least bad behavior - crime and promiscuity should be the metrics we judge our (post-) Christian capitalist culture on. And there's lots of room for improvement. Yet today's reality is far less bad than it has been 100 years ago, and there is an Alarmism idea that anything real which also has problems is Terrible. Because with magic thinking, such silly folk think there are no real trade-offs between competing desires.
*Every Justice System decides on punishment - Social Punishment Warriors, or Social Punishers might be a more accurate way of describing the Woke Activists.
Slave utilitarianism works pretty well in settings were everyone is a "slave" to impersonal forces, one is addressing policy arguments to other slaves.
Intentions matter because they say something about the likelihood of the person offending in the future. Someone who commits crimes on purpose is likely to commit crimes again, and so for all the reasons of incapacitation and deterrence they need a harsher sentence. Someone who commits a crime by accident is less likely to offend again. At best you are trying to instruct them and bystanders against the kind of negligence that led to the crime.
Intentions also matter because consequences are contextual, and we don't really understand or have control over the context. Jesus says that if you have lusted in your heart you've already committed adultery. There may not arise a context in which you can or would do the deed, but you want to. Maybe you can convince yourself that the spouse will never find out. It's a victimless crime!
Or maybe the very act of thinking about cheating all the time, even if never consummated, is poison to your marriage.
Utilitarian was a boon in moving from feudal privilege to liberal free markets. The baker and the candlestick maker don't have to be saints. But I'm skeptical of applying that attitude to lots of other things, especially the social the political realms at scale. I think utilitarianism is basically impossible outside the free market context (everyones definition of utility becomes self serving bullshit) and I don't want utilitarianism applied to my family or other things like it (till death do us part, not till util calculations change do we part).
Arnold wrote: "You can take the Western man out of Christianity, but you can’t take the Christianity out of Western man." This is a strikingly concise analysis of how things stand. Of course, the Christianity left in Western man is deeply corrupt and what has been retained is only partial. So what remains is a kind of heretical version of that faith.
Liberals have been trying to create "Christianity without Christ" since (at least) the early 1800s. Its usual result is a pile of skulls.
Intentions matter because they represent direction of agency. Consequences matter because they are truth signal. E.g. one can BS about intentions but consequences reveal the Truth ( if there is large enough sample size).
Humans have a propensity to lie. Hence there needs to be a way to detect it
Re: "the illusion of morality is the single greatest obstacle to the pursuit of truth." -- Brett Andersen, essay at link in Arnold's post.
There exist various, numerous motivations and psychological mechanisms, which can overpower or undermine "the pursuit of truth." Examples:
• Passion (e.g., "Love is blind")
• Vanity
• Innumeracy (desire to focus on vivid, scandalous, rare events)
• Stubbornness
• Conformity
• Wishful thinking
• Counter-wishful thinking (a surprisingly commonplace, potent motivation)
• Rational ignorance (individual search costs exceed individual power to change outcome)
etc etc etc
And technologies and institutions can promote or limit the pursuit of truth. Examples:
• The internet
• Adversarial justice system
• Tenure
• Psychiatry
(It is an open question whether any of the above have a positive net effect on truth-seeking — and truth-finding.)
etc etc etc
It is an empirical question, what is "the single greatest obstacle" to truth-seeking. Brett Andersen's essay — Nietzsche meets evolutionary psychology — doesn't establish that morality is the main obstacle to truth-seeking.
Parsimony and fullness are joint ideals of science: To explain much with little. Newton's law, f = ma, has astonishing explanatory power and scope. By contrast, scholars who would apply evolutionary psychology to explain the whole of human history and culture get way ahead of the evidence, and shoehorn the sea of facts.
The phrase "consensual hallucination" to characterize social institutions such as morality and money is a poor choice of words, and you and Brett Andersen should avoid using it. A hallucination is something that is not there. The concept of spontaneous order explains how certain patterns of behavior can become self-reinforcing, whether for good or for bad. Some of them are almost as pervasive for us as the facts of the natural world. Try to get groceries without paying money for them, for instance.
Also, to claim as Andersen does that "these moral precepts do not refer to anything that exists outside of the minds, behaviors, and history of human beings" seems to neglect ethology.
Two somewhat random thoughts.
Keep telling people that everybody is subject to God's Law and they will eventually start to believe it, and include the King (from Alec Ryrie, an English historian of Protestant Christianity, on how Protestants made the modern world)
Intention largely matters among equals who are able to give grace to one another. That a commoner poached one of the King's deer because his family was starving does not matter to the King. If somebody is telling you that intention doesn't matter, only the fact that you offended them, they are speaking from a place of privilege where your existence is not their concern.
It's true that I want killers stopped no matter whether murder be premeditated or not, or it be drunk driving or simply bad driving. At the same time, I have a hard time seeing these as equivalent and would give more chances down that list before taking the most drastic reactions. I certainly wouldn't treat them the same on first offense.
Well . . .
As William James thought, if something works it’s can be ‘true’.
Judeo/Christian morality has ;worked’ even though not throughly or consistently applied, either by individuals or groups.
Should deserve consideration that it was given by creator as ‘instruction manual’.
Why? Since it has become more and more obvious that deeply frusta find a replacement.
Clay
On what basis do you say it worked? We can imagine worse outcomes, including catastrophic, and even argue some other local outcomes are worse but I don't think we can argue with any certainty that Judeo-Christian isn't near the worst outcome.
Stu
I’m reasoning that western civilization, in various versions, has been adopted by many in diverse places.
I’m including the impact of the - renaissance (Petrarch), reformation (Luther, Calvin). science (Galileo, Newton, Boyle, faraday), human rights (Milton), individualism (Locke), elimination of slavery (Wilberforce); all these were Christian.
And even right of members to choose leaders, which began in puritan communities in England and Scotland. Spread to New England.
Even idea of rule of laws and not of man can derive from god given ‘Ten Commandments’..
Isreal not allowed to touch, change or remove. Kings required to write out a copy of the law, not to make law.
Thanks for comment.
Clay
I don't see how that changes what I was getting at. Maybe we can reasonably believe J-C morality works better than most known alternatives but I don't think we KNOW that.
Stu
Correct.
Morality is deeply personal.
Certainty found in physics and mathematics is an illusion.
Mathematics starts with Euclid’s unproven premises.
As Aristotle explained, all deduction starts with assumptions. Otherwise we have infinite regress.
Modern world wishes for certainty. There is none.
There is, however, good judgement, keen insight and careful analysis.
Thanks
Clay
It worked at ending material poverty - starvation - as well as deaths from many other natural acts, as well as resulting in fairly low rates of murder and violent criminal acts. It worked at creating a widespread idea of "individual based Human Rights", being more important than a current government's top priorities.
It didn't work to avoid degradation starting ... 2012 smartphones? 2000 dot.com bubble bursting? 1989 Berlin Wall falling? Vietnam & Cambodia (Pol Pot) 1975?
I find myself rereading the opening quotation and substituting "markets" in place of "morality".
Where others look at the "false" nature of money and markets as a bug, I've viewed it as a feature. Perhaps I should reconsider western morality this way.
It's easy to read what you wrote as "autism makes for Christian moral values"
It isn’t obvious to me that there can’t be objective morality without God. If we accept the common sense proposition that some sets of norms and institutions are better for human happiness and prosperity than others, why can’t there be a hypothetical optimum set of norms and institutions for human happiness and prosperity? That is my reading of what John Locke means by natural law. Locke argues that in practice we need revelation to guide us there, and that in practice philosophy doesn’t have the power that religion does to unite hearts and minds behind a common cause. (I might also add that faith is required to ensure people that defectors are actually NOT better off, despite short term appearances.) But in principle at least Locke seems to suggest that the natural law isn’t explicitly theistic.
Compare Robert Sugden's perspective ("Spontaneous Order", JEP 1989), inspired by Hayek, about the social evolution of conventions and norms:
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.3.4.85
Norms work when the vast majority of people accept that the norms should not be violated - meaning they are willing to shame / punish / ostracize those who violate the norms. He's correct that claiming morality is true and objective leads to more folk accepting the norm - and society then working better.
Both intention AND consequences are important - both in the short term and the long term (and perhaps evolutionary time). Reminding me that both mercy/ forgiveness and justice/ punishment* are important yet require some trade-offs.
In contrasting master morality (17:1 reproduction) vs slave, or equality?, morality (close to 1:1 for last 100 years in USA? 3:1 >10kya ), "equal rights to reproduce" are an important implicit part of Christian morality. Accepting the "truth" that "all men are created equal", leads to culture & systems of gov't that encourage more economic wealth creation and liberty and artistic expressions. Clearly superior, in these metrics, to many other culture-gov't combinations.
In complex reality, there can be no "true" value determination of multivariate system value so as to accurately tell which is better-tho in wars there are usually victors who gain territory and more females to reproduce with. The "might makes right" master morality might well succeed at the sub-Dunbar number, but lose in wars of larger forces.
Claims about intentions are particularly suspect because of the ease of lying and difficulty in determining the "real" intention - especially if the actor is being untruthful to himself, and believes his own lies. I claim all smart folk are smart enough to easily lie to themselves, believably.
The norms our society needs are such that low IQ folk have in the least bad behavior - crime and promiscuity should be the metrics we judge our (post-) Christian capitalist culture on. And there's lots of room for improvement. Yet today's reality is far less bad than it has been 100 years ago, and there is an Alarmism idea that anything real which also has problems is Terrible. Because with magic thinking, such silly folk think there are no real trade-offs between competing desires.
*Every Justice System decides on punishment - Social Punishment Warriors, or Social Punishers might be a more accurate way of describing the Woke Activists.
Slave utilitarianism works pretty well in settings were everyone is a "slave" to impersonal forces, one is addressing policy arguments to other slaves.