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totientAt the intersection of some of my interests, here's part of a thread from Facebook in response to some epistemological analysis of the phrase "consent violations are bad".
OK, where even to begin.
First: by most lay concepts of "good" and "bad" rarely is anything 100% good or 100% bad, nor are a lot of things really knowable in the moment even as better or worse. As ethical judgments the concepts are close to useless. But making ethical judgments of everything in the world is exhausting even where it works, so most people have rules of thumb that on balance result in behaviors the ethics of which they're more comfortable with than if they had not used those rules of thumb. I'm going to use the phrase "moral systems" for those to distinguish them from their underlying ethics.
As part of a moral system the words "good" and "bad" are useful stand-ins for the compass points of moral preference. But these are not states that are ever achieved and in most moral systems they're not even states that you'd want to achieve. I can argue for, say, more resources for the arts, and never have to think about how eventually that's going to be so many resources that there are not enough for feeding people any more, because my compass point is not a place, just a direction, and also it is not the underlying ethic, just a generality. That the direction in question is part of my moral system has as much to do with where we're starting from as it does with what I want to work towards.
There's a separate problem that "good" and "bad" are so often conflated with "pleasant" and "unpleasant". Even a utilitarian philosophy [editor's note: you're reading one] benefits by separating those concepts.
All of this leads me to consider arguments that something is "good" or "bad" as intrinsically arguments in favor of or against particular moral systems, and not actually ethical determinations. This allows for the generalities that are almost always part of such systems, such as "consent violations are bad", while implicitly acknowledging that the generality is imperfect. But even in a conversation between people who hold the same underlying ethical values, moral systems are likely to be in dispute. That is, a sentence with the word "good" or "bad" in it is usually an argument.
If one uses harm as an ethical metric, I think this points to "consent violations are bad because avoiding them results in less harm, and the question of how that happens and whether nonconsent is intrinsically harmful or merely tends towards being harmful is unanswerable and irrelevant".
However it *is* necessary in that frame to answer the question of what constitutes a consent violation, which is a very fuzzy question and in most moral systems is going to be deeply bound up with whether the action in question is likely to be harmful. This binding is how it is that things like putting toddlers into carseats are not generally considered relevant to the moral question.
OK, where even to begin.
First: by most lay concepts of "good" and "bad" rarely is anything 100% good or 100% bad, nor are a lot of things really knowable in the moment even as better or worse. As ethical judgments the concepts are close to useless. But making ethical judgments of everything in the world is exhausting even where it works, so most people have rules of thumb that on balance result in behaviors the ethics of which they're more comfortable with than if they had not used those rules of thumb. I'm going to use the phrase "moral systems" for those to distinguish them from their underlying ethics.
As part of a moral system the words "good" and "bad" are useful stand-ins for the compass points of moral preference. But these are not states that are ever achieved and in most moral systems they're not even states that you'd want to achieve. I can argue for, say, more resources for the arts, and never have to think about how eventually that's going to be so many resources that there are not enough for feeding people any more, because my compass point is not a place, just a direction, and also it is not the underlying ethic, just a generality. That the direction in question is part of my moral system has as much to do with where we're starting from as it does with what I want to work towards.
There's a separate problem that "good" and "bad" are so often conflated with "pleasant" and "unpleasant". Even a utilitarian philosophy [editor's note: you're reading one] benefits by separating those concepts.
All of this leads me to consider arguments that something is "good" or "bad" as intrinsically arguments in favor of or against particular moral systems, and not actually ethical determinations. This allows for the generalities that are almost always part of such systems, such as "consent violations are bad", while implicitly acknowledging that the generality is imperfect. But even in a conversation between people who hold the same underlying ethical values, moral systems are likely to be in dispute. That is, a sentence with the word "good" or "bad" in it is usually an argument.
If one uses harm as an ethical metric, I think this points to "consent violations are bad because avoiding them results in less harm, and the question of how that happens and whether nonconsent is intrinsically harmful or merely tends towards being harmful is unanswerable and irrelevant".
However it *is* necessary in that frame to answer the question of what constitutes a consent violation, which is a very fuzzy question and in most moral systems is going to be deeply bound up with whether the action in question is likely to be harmful. This binding is how it is that things like putting toddlers into carseats are not generally considered relevant to the moral question.
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Date: 2023-02-02 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-02 03:04 pm (UTC)