The non-hypocricy of tolerance
Dec. 3rd, 2015 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackDid I talk about this before?
Sometimes people you share a society (or a household) with are wrong about really important things. But it's usually best to say, if they're not harming *other* people, to allow your views to be known, but mostly simply let it go. For several reasons:
* Partly practical reasons, that changing someone's mind is often a difficult or impossible, so haranguing them is likely to make you feel better but not actually help, and mutually agreeing to suspend the haranguing unless you have time to talk about it properly is better for both of you.
* Partly humility, you can't be right about EVERYTHING, and how are you going to improve if you don't listen to other people?
* Partly morality: that imposing your opinion on someone else, even if you're right THIS time, erodes people's right to decide for themselves in lots of other cases.
Unfortunately, it's rarely that simple, because often people ARE harming other people, and you SHOULD try to fix it, but sometimes you're forced to compromise for now anyway just because there's only one of you and lots of other people and you can't overpower all of them instantly, and it's hard to find an acceptable compromise, but necessary to try to live in a society with other people at all.
However, whenever I recap the argument for tolerating opposing viewpoints in my mind, I always ask myself, "But what about people who DON'T agree to let it go and allow people to decide for themselves, people who insist their views MUST be imposed on you (whether for good reasons or not)?" As a practical matter, if you don't want to capitulate, you have no choice but to resist. But only recently did I admit, I basically had to accept, tolerating OTHER views as long as they didn't harm anyone else, but that itself was an exception, you had no choice but to impose "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" on people if you can, even if you disagree...
Sometimes people you share a society (or a household) with are wrong about really important things. But it's usually best to say, if they're not harming *other* people, to allow your views to be known, but mostly simply let it go. For several reasons:
* Partly practical reasons, that changing someone's mind is often a difficult or impossible, so haranguing them is likely to make you feel better but not actually help, and mutually agreeing to suspend the haranguing unless you have time to talk about it properly is better for both of you.
* Partly humility, you can't be right about EVERYTHING, and how are you going to improve if you don't listen to other people?
* Partly morality: that imposing your opinion on someone else, even if you're right THIS time, erodes people's right to decide for themselves in lots of other cases.
Unfortunately, it's rarely that simple, because often people ARE harming other people, and you SHOULD try to fix it, but sometimes you're forced to compromise for now anyway just because there's only one of you and lots of other people and you can't overpower all of them instantly, and it's hard to find an acceptable compromise, but necessary to try to live in a society with other people at all.
However, whenever I recap the argument for tolerating opposing viewpoints in my mind, I always ask myself, "But what about people who DON'T agree to let it go and allow people to decide for themselves, people who insist their views MUST be imposed on you (whether for good reasons or not)?" As a practical matter, if you don't want to capitulate, you have no choice but to resist. But only recently did I admit, I basically had to accept, tolerating OTHER views as long as they didn't harm anyone else, but that itself was an exception, you had no choice but to impose "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" on people if you can, even if you disagree...
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 03:52 pm (UTC)If you decided you wanted to try to fix the problem, presumably you'd start with wider-ranging and less-damaging interventions, like putting some restrictions on _publishing_ such opinions. That could shift opinion without killing anyone. I'm not sure if the potential benefit to society outweighs the potential for abuse (if whoever decides which views are restricted abuses their power), which is why I'm considering it but not sure if it would be a good idea or not.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 04:58 pm (UTC)So there must be some benefit large enough and some number of little old ladies small enough that utility can be demonstrated?
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 05:12 pm (UTC)I agree, not infinite, so yes in theory, provided (a) the proposed execution spree actually had some beneficial effect and (b) you were arbitrarily prevented from using a more effective method of changing people's minds, that could be a better choice than not doing it...
But I'm genuinely not sure where you're going with this, do you mean, you're considering if that could be an actual good thing to do? Or you're interested if I ever endorse killing people in hypothetical situations? Or something else?
I think reasons against it:
* Trading off _accidental_ deaths is something you have to do, but choosing to deliberately kill people is generally bad for all sorts of reasons even beyond whatever inherent utility you assign, so you should usually only do it for reasons which are important and urgent.
* Inconsistent and draconian enforcement is generally ineffective AND oppressive. Widespread enforcement is usually better.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 05:35 pm (UTC)Honestly, I'm not completely sure where I was going with that. (-8 I suspect I was just pushing the Goldacre "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that" ethos.
On consideration, however, I'd say my thinking leads to a two-layered conclusion.
Firstly, though by careful choice of utility metrics you can make Utilitarianism a broadly true thing, in practice the limits of measurement and computation power may make it about as reliable as a weather forecast. Worse, the feedback loop from Utilitarian consideration to action to consequence to new situation to be weighed in a Utilitarian fashion is far tighter than the feedback loop from weather forecast to human behaviour to climate change to new weather forecast.
Secondly, God is omniscient in such matters and can offer wisdom better than our own. That's a traditional anthropomorphic way of looking at it; maybe you'd find it more palatable if I say that prayer and related disciplines offer a better path to making moral choices than Utilitarianism in the same way that we can catch a ball more easily than we can measure distances, velocity, gravity and air resistance then solve an equation.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-05 07:44 pm (UTC)I genuinely don't know, there's some aspects of morality I'm fairly sure of, and others where I have intuitions which often work but sometimes conflict and, no overall framework to rely on.
I think that, in a binary choice, the correct choice is the one with greatest utility, but problems with utilitarianism I don't know how to resolve yet include:
* is actively doing a bad thing worse than letting it happen? sometimes I think yes, sometimes no
* how do we cope in a world where there's more things we should do than we know we will ever reasonably do
* I'm fairly sure that there are rules its better to follow almost all of the time even if breaking them seems better in some individual cases, and I'm not sure how to include that in a utilitarian framework -- accept those rules as aims in themselves, or have a framework for "how to act 99% of the time" separately from what's ultimately moral, or what?
* as you say, there are many cases where it's not at all clear what's for the best in the long term, and I think we should still do the best we can, but saying "what's best for most people" doesn't really help us know what that IS.