Re:A Clarification
by dsacco on Saturday December 16, 2017 @02:37PM
(#15941454)
> Advocating genocide is violence, I think most people would agree.
I disagree. I do not consider peaceful advocation of an extremely controversial or violent activity to be violence in of itself.
Moreover, I think it is important to be able to express why advocation of a thing can be bad without resorting to conflating the advocation with the thing itself. You lose a lot of nuance in discussion (and charitability for opposing views) with this kind of hyperbole in the general case.
> Talking about "ideas" is so abstract and antiseptic; clearly there are things beyond the pale.
I disagree with this as well. In my opinion, things are only beyond the pale if there is nothing new to contribute to the discussion, not because we are born with a heuristic that refutes it automatically.
For example, we should consider advocating genocide bad because every critical, completely informed examination of genocide comes to the conclusion that it is a net loss for society, and there is no novel information to lead us to a different conclusion. We should not consider advocating genocide to be bad because we believe genocide is bad a priori; this is in fact untrue.
Note that I disagree with dialectic methodology, not overall conclusion. It is important to use rational methods for deriving conclusions instead of subjective dismissals. It is bad to beat a dead horse when we know the result is bad for society, but we can’t begin from a position that is unwilling to examine certain subjects because others consider them “beyond the pale”. Rational dialectics generalize to other topics and arguments; subjective heuristics do not.
I disagree. I do not consider peaceful advocation of an extremely controversial or violent activity to be violence in of itself.
Moreover, I think it is important to be able to express why advocation of a thing can be bad without resorting to conflating the advocation with the thing itself. You lose a lot of nuance in discussion (and charitability for opposing views) with this kind of hyperbole in the general case.
> Talking about "ideas" is so abstract and antiseptic; clearly there are things beyond the pale.
I disagree with this as well. In my opinion, things are only beyond the pale if there is nothing new to contribute to the discussion, not because we are born with a heuristic that refutes it automatically.
For example, we should consider advocating genocide bad because every critical, completely informed examination of genocide comes to the conclusion that it is a net loss for society, and there is no novel information to lead us to a different conclusion. We should not consider advocating genocide to be bad because we believe genocide is bad a priori; this is in fact untrue.
Note that I disagree with dialectic methodology, not overall conclusion. It is important to use rational methods for deriving conclusions instead of subjective dismissals. It is bad to beat a dead horse when we know the result is bad for society, but we can’t begin from a position that is unwilling to examine certain subjects because others consider them “beyond the pale”. Rational dialectics generalize to other topics and arguments; subjective heuristics do not.