People in the comments of the latest SSC are already pointing out that he seems to be understating the possible dangers of coordinated “meanness”*, but more worrisome to me is the flip side: if coordination is the minimum bar, then you should never be assertive or contrary unless you can convince a big enough** group that you’re in the right. Sure, argue all you want*** for your beliefs, but until you’ve won don’t you dare act on it, that would be unsafe and unstable!
A slave who escapes to freedom, a gay couple holding hands in an intensely homophobic community, a doctor in, say, Massachusetts refusing to perform an abortion, a vegetarian declining meat served to them, etc. can all be in violation of this coordination rule. How do we decide which are OK to do? At some point, you have to get below the meta level and actually evaluate the moral object level situation at hand. It’s true that people have made horrible choices based on their object level moral beliefs****, but hiding behind abstraction and symmetry isn’t actually a viable option much of the time.
* Accepting the mean/nice dichotomy as somehow important in morality is another issue here
** And who decides what “big enough” is here?
*** If you’re lucky enough to live in a society with free speech norms… otherwise, I guess you’re limited to private agitation among people who you’re confident won’t be hurt by your arguments?
**** It’s also true that people have made horrible choices based on their meta level moral beliefs, so.
If only we had a very easy heuristic for deciding when something is an actual violation of important rules and when something is just people wanting to be assholes to unpopular people… something like “auto-determination” or “bodily self-nomy” or something like that…
2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 19 notes · source: shlevy · .permalink
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