Highly tolerant (accepting, permissive) end of the scale - more vague
Where the X part denotes what the person’s highest priority is.
So the self-ist would say, I matter, and all others can go fuck themselves, a family-ist would say, my family matters, all others can go fuck themselves etc. etc.
Since the modern politics are becoming more and more leftist, the acceptable point where to draw the line is slowly going down, so now according to some, like Peter Singer, it isn’t even acceptable to be a humanist or a mammalist anymore, but one must be an animalist.
Now what I would like Carleas, Turd, and others to do, is show me why necessarily drawing the line at one point of the scale makes one objectively good and virtuous, and drawing a point anywhere else is necessarily objectively bad and evil. Or why being more permissive/tolerant is necessarily, objectively morally superior and good and why being discriminating and differentiating is morally evil, inferior, bad.
So, f.e. why is being a racist unacceptable but being a humanist is a-ok (although, as I pointed out, even humanism is increasingly under scrutiny today)
I find it interesting how those who expect us all to be treated absolutely equally do not generally extend that to other
members of the animal kingdom. For why do the most committed social justice warriors who are not vegetarians think
it perfectly acceptable to stop at humans ? Because this is in principle no different to any other form of discrimination
This question strikes me as poorly posed. First, the spectrum you’ve attempted to define includes very different types of categories. Existence and self are quite well-defined, especially relative to nation or life or animal. Some of your categories are a binary (self) or limited set (gender, under conventional definitions) some are a spectrum (family, race). Many are not mutually exclusive (isn’t my self a part of my family?), and many are actually necessarily mutually valuable (My self is poorly served if I tell my family to go fuck themselves).
The ordering also seems off: The levels of specificity of each category aren’t a single point, but a range. Some nations are larger than some races (compare China or India against Native Americans), while other nations are smaller than races.
It also leaves off what seem like quite relevant categories, though I can see why: religion, political affiliation, age, education level, language group. And there are plenty of other arbitrary (though real) categorizations we could make: handedness, birth month, Myers-Briggs type, initial letter of one’s first/family name. If we’re extending it beyond humans, there’s yet more relevant and irrelevant categories we could include. What’s the rule for what categories we’re including? Are you assuming that all of your categories are somehow relevant, and all other categorizations are not?
Finally, even taking your spectrum at face value, why would we pick a place along it as a basis for our ethical beliefs? Couldn’t I think that both my self and existence are valuable? Couldn’t I think humans are more valuable than animals, but animals are more valuable than non-animals? Couldn’t I think my family and my race are both more valuable than my nation, or even than myself? What does “drawing a line” mean here? Does it say anything more than, “I value this most of all”? Does valuing one’s self tell us anything about how one feels about race and gender? How about a value system where one’s self is very valuable, but the sum of other less-valuable things might outweigh it (e.g., you like myself, but you would die to prevent a billion other deaths), where does that line go?
To answer your example question, race just isn’t a very relevant category (and I am assuming for the purpose of this discussion that race is even a coherent category, a point on which I know we disagree). The difference between a human and a non-human animal is much, much greater than the difference between one race and any other. A human/non-human distinction is pragmatic, and it is useful to base many decisions on it. Not so with race.
Just because two things can broadly be labelled as “categories” doesn’t mean that if one categorization is bad all others must be as well. Categorizing can be done for different reasons, it can have different levels of coherence, relevance, utility – and those differences are not linearly dependent on the level of specificity of the category.
As you probably noticed, my spectrum is mostly based on genetic distance, blood relations.
I am 100% genetically compatible with myself, a little less with my family (or the rest of my family, as you would probably point out), a little less with my nation, then with my race, etc. etc.
It’s not about quantity but quality. There can be plenty of nations of one race, but there can’t be plenty of races of one nation, at least as far as I know.
Most are not mutually exclusive - we all exist, we are all mammals, we are all humans, etc. And so what?
I would agree that my self is poorly served if I tell my family to go fuck itself, but my self is also poorly served if I tell my nation to go fuck itself, and if I tell my race to go fuck itself, etc. etc.
It just depends on how long we want to, or have been indoctrinated to, extend this line.
For example, some people may hold that their family is not a part of their self, they may not identify with their family, so they wouldn’t want to help them or sacrifice themselves for their family.
Most of us would see that kind of behavior as self-ish and disgusting because we don’t extend our identity and empathy to our family.
But why is it any different for race, for example? If it is alright to prefer your family over another, why would it be ‘evil’ and ‘immoral’ to prefer your race over another?
I mean, it is accepted that everybody prefers their family REGARDLESS of their family’s actual accomplishments (it’s accepted that to everybody their kid is the most beautiful).
For race this kind of subjectivism is not accepted, moreover, even if you show that OBJECTIVELY speaking some race is superior to another in some relevant aspects, you are still evil and unjustified in preferring your own.
It’s not an absolute hierarchy in the sense that you draw a line at some point and then all below it is equally relevant, while all above it is not relevant at all, but it is a hierarchy of priorities and where we draw the line is meant to emphasize what is the priority of our ideology.
I’m just saying that we should take all of these into account because they are all real categories, and that I don’t see a rational justification for one category being labeled as forbidden to use, evil, morally wrong (such as race or even gender).
So I value myself and my family the most, then my nation, then my race, then other humans etc. etc. What those like humanists propose is that nothing that is more specific than being human matters, and this is what I disagree with.
How is race not a relevant category but others are?
Of course that there is a greater difference between humans and non humans, than within subcategories of humans, but that doesn’t justify humanism no more than the fact that the differences between the great apes and non-great ape animals are greater than those within the subcategories of great apes (humans, gorillas, chimpanzees) justifies great-apism etc. etc.
Human-non-human distinction exists and we should take that into account in practice (pragmatism), I agree, but obviously there are also differences between races so why wouldn’t we take that also into account when making judgments in the real world?
Arbiter of Change:
Human-non-human distinction exists and we should take that into account in practice (pragmatism), I agree, but obviously there are also differences between races so why wouldn’t we take that also into account when making judgments in the real world?
K: As there is less genetic difference between all humans and
one pack of chimps living in Africa, I would say there is no
objective means to account for the differences in races.
In other words, there is no difference between the races as
all races are a mix of each other. There is no such thing as a “pure”
race, thus no means to separate the idea of “race” to allow some
sort of accounting. If everything is mixed up, how to you make some
accounting of it?
No objective means to account for the differences of races?
REALLY?
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What do you mean no such thing as a pure race? Is there a pure anything (in other words, something that can in no way be likened to something else)?
Yes, there are genetic similarities between all races, but there are genetic similarities between all living organisms.
Don’t humans share 50% DNA with bananas? Does it mean that if you have a choice between saving 3 bananas and a human you should choose bananas because they are 150% human, while a human is 100% human?
I’ll give you a practical example: In white race, there are people of varying eye colors and hair colors. In black race all of them have brown eyes and dark hair.
By having genetic offspring that is half-white half-black you are basically erasing the many possibilities of white race (blue eyes, green eyes, red hair, blonde hair, etc.), also the child will mostly adopt the facial characteristics of a negro, this is why mulattos (half-white, half-black) are mostly considered black and not white, because negro genes are dominant and are more expressed in offspring so indeed, the offspring will resemble more closely blacks than whites.
This is also why it is considered genetic suicide for a white person to have children with blacks, along with other cultural and biological factors.
Why prioritize genetics? Most of ones personhood is ideas, not genes. Why not prioritize ideology, or identity, or ways of relating? Maybe I value my family because they basically think like me, but outside of my family my race doesn’t really seem to correlate to a mode of thought, but e.g. politics, religion, and nation do.
I’m also a little confused what you mean by “genetically compatible”: members of the human species are, by definition, genetically compatible with other humans. If anything, you’re less genetically compatible with your family and race, and your offspring will generally be better off if they are the product of two diverse genetic lineages.
EDIT: the notion you put forward of “genetic suicide” does not reflect how genetics works.
I didn’t say it was not ever relevant, just that it’s not very relevant. There are contexts where it’s relevant (e.g. Jews being tested for Tay-Sachs syndrome), but it’s not nearly as relevant as it seems you’re trying to use it for. A non-human animal can’t be reasoned with, can’t be convinced, can’t be given abstract ideas or innovate new complex solutions to problems in the way that the average 10 year old human can. That difference is difficult to exaggerate. Compared to the difference between humans and non-humans, within humans the difference in skin tone, hair color and texture, facial shapes, etc., is in the margin of error.
And really, our neural machinery was selected for to emphasize these differences in order to be able to tell different individual humans apart, which exaggerates these differences (especially where society is segregated along racial lines and people rarely know more than one person outside their own race). And we use salient differences like that to divide society into in-group and out-group because of our tribal evolutionary history, in which it was actually very important to know who was in your tribe and who wasn’t (although proximate tribes were probably more often than not quite closely related genetically).
Race isn’t a good approximation of genetics. And again, ideas and experiences are much more determinant than genetics, there’s no good reason to treat genetics as the best way to rank other humans.
But I wouldn’t call that mistake evil, I’d just call it incorrect. To the extent it ever becomes morally blameworthy, it’s when a person knows or should know that it’s incorrect, knows that it’s a mistake that hurts others, but continues making the mistake for his own benefit (but this assumes a morality that treats the suffering of other conscious beings as significant).
Altruism indicates slave-minded humans and other creatures.
From a young age, it is possible and even popular to indoctrinate the youth of a generation with lies and counter-intuitive programming. With enough nurturing, instincts can be overturned to different degrees. For example, it becomes possible for a person (their ‘Ego’ and sense-of-self) to sacrifice himself for…family, or nation (soldier in the army), or race (white supremacy), or humanity (christianity-jesus-god), or animal rights (PETA), etc. It is almost possible, a limit of imagination, to imagine a human sacrificing self for…“existence”. That simply doesn’t make sense to even the most intelligent minds. However this is the essence of idealism.
Would it make sense for an evolved human, a white blonde blue eyed female, to sacrifice herself for…a rock? A bee? A tree?
I only know of extreme “Environmentalists” who would consider such a thing. These are extreme forms of idealism, that are good examples of how far humans can go with idealism (extreme sophistication).
It is more common for people to accept, and even demand, self-sacrifice for family, or tribe/ethnicity, than it is to demand or expect self-sacrifice on behalf of the most abstract ideas. This demonstrates the “evolved” nature of humanity that truly separates humans from lower animals. Lower animals would never “sacrifice themselves” for some arcane, abstract ideal, without the corresponding indoctrination.
Would anybody ever expect a wild squirrel, a bee, or a rock to break in half, to save the life of a human? The very fact that this idea is so absurd, proves the premise most correct and true. Since people consider it absurd in reverse, but not forward, and can “accept” a stranger risking his or her life for a family member, but not a different arcane principle, creates the agreement of “common sense”.
People have natures, instincts, which ideals and expectations can overturn and go against nature.
These insights and observations, phenomena, lead to other dichotomies:
I prefer to interact with society based on intelligence and attractiveness - the interaction of the human ethnic strands predominantly began with the spice and silk trades, and seems to have gone horribly wrong since then,
Ideas (memes) are derived from genes and based on genetic (blood) relations. A simple example: White people will be white nationalists, black people will be black nationalists. Difficult to find a black person who is a white nationalist or the other way around, eh?
Our genetic predisposition determines what kind of ideas, thoughts, subjects etc. we will be inclined to.
We’ve already had this discussion before - you argued that nurture > nature, and me nature > nurture.
Ah yes, what I meant is genetically identical. I am 100% identical to myself (obviously), less so with my family, than my race, etc. etc.
What do you mean by ‘diverse’? If you mean non-incestuous, then yes, if you mean interracial, then NO, at least for me. For a negro though, having children with a white or asian person may be beneficial.
That’s a pretty poor example. That’s attributable to the fact that people are generally selfish and that black people believe they are black while white people believe they are white (and while it’s difficult to find counterexamples, it is not impossible…).
It’s a poor example because it’s really the same meme (i.e. “people like me should be in control”), it’s not correlated particularly well with any one race, and there are many, many, many other memes that show zero correlation with race, but are fundamental to personhood.
Our genetic predispositions do not “determine” anything, to the extent they exist for a given set of ideas, they are just that: a “predisposition”, they are forces that can be (and frequently are) often overcome. Even ideas as abstract as personality traits are significantly influenced by non-genetic factors (this paper puts the heritability at about 50%; this paper argues that the statistical analysis used was flawed, i.e. even twins separated at birth were likely to have significant environmental similarities that would lead them towards greater similarity of personality that is not entirely attributable to genetics).
And personality is abstract, it’s fundamental. It, in turn, bears an attenuated relationship to more complex ideas that one adopts later in life (political party, religious/spiritual inclinations, moral tradition, etc.), which bears an attenuated relationship to e.g. the kind of work one does, which bears an attenuated relationship to e.g. social class, which bears an attenuated relationship to e.g. where one lives, which bears an atten… These relationships aren’t genetic, and the role of genetics in shaping who one ultimately is is not likely to be dominant.
I feel it’s important to clarify that we have not had this discussion before. Not all questions of nature vs. nurture are equal. Some traits, even some mental traits, are quite clearly genetically determined. Others are quite clearly not. In the past, we discussed a particular trait that you alleged was correlated with race. Here, you seem to be alleging that genetics will always be the more important factor. I disagreed with your earlier claim because the evidence does not support it, but it’s vitally important to this discussion to point out that your claim here is much, much weaker: Even if some trait is genetically determined, it does not follow that we should base our ranking of the moral worth of others on their genetic similarity to us.
Moreover, even if there is a correlation between genetics and some trait, why does that entail that we should favor genetics over e.g. the trait? Your argument seems in part to be that race is a rule-of-thumb for genetics, and genetics is a rule-of-thumb for traits. Setting aside that both are really not very predictive rules of thumb, aren’t you really saying that some trait is the moral best (or set of traits, likely those you have, if I might hazard a guess)?
Rather then dealing with genetic determination, would it not be simpler to point to instinctive correlations to primary processes? Apart from such correlations, genetic determination, especially mental ones, would reduce to patent assumptions. Nature and nurture would remain only a statistical possibility.
The probability of which, May depend on the language used.
Gender doesn’t make sense in this list, as it doesn’t just divide the human but also the mammal, most of the animal, and much of the “zoal”. Anyway, yes, I think that, with the exception of genderist and existencist, this is a pretty comprehensive list with regard to genetic kinship. I also think it’s natural or normal to be more oriented toward the selfist end of the scale. Interestingly, though, the more primitive the community, the more implicit this selfism is: thus the emergence of “sovereign individualities” in ancient Greece was accompanied by increasing cosmopolitanism: the Physicists, the Sophists, the Platonics. In fact you could say that the more oriented toward the existencist end of the scale one is, the more philosophical… But this does not mean that a philosopher considers himself an equal of microbes; instead, he conceives an order of rank that transcends genetic kinship, ranging instead from self to type to metatype to meta-metatype, etc. etc. His type is the philosopher type, and of the essence of this is what Nietzsche called “the great health”, which is basically a sufficiently strong orientation toward the selfism end of the scale that one can allow oneself the most comprehensive orientation toward the existencist end of the scale. For there is a risk involved in this, a great risk, the risk of losing one’s “rootedness in the soil”. But beyond this rootlessness, the philosopher finds a new rootedness: a memetic kinship with all other philosophers, and to a lesser extent with all other artist-tyrants, all other “human” beings, and all other beings. Which is not to say that philosophers will not rather be, say, mammals than other animals.
Yes, but I am not concerned with ethnic components… being of triumvirate heritage, I guess I have always seen the world through my triumvirate-gilded eyes.
Most people around here are: Human-ist. Therefore they will insult those above, pejoratively using “Sex-ist” and “Race-ist” to mean: negative, disgraceful, shameful. The reason and cause for this defensiveness is their own, personal disgrace and shame they feel, when those identities apply to them. They are ashamed of their identity, whether it be as a male or female, as white or black, as an american or not, to have a family or not, and finally, to have any personal pride and ego-ism or not. The greatest insult to them, is to be “ego-ist”. Because they hate themselves. They, literally, hate their “Self”.
Probably, early in their lives and youths, their sense of self was crippled, stunted in development, limited, enslaved, etc. Therefore, now when they are matured, older, and have a little bit of strength, they resent others who have a “bigger or better” sense of self. Since their own “Self” was destroyed, as children, they want to then destroy everybody else’s “Self”.
Again, I conclude, this is the reason and cause they use “Ego-ism” as an insult, negative, and pejorative. Because it is their own, negative value at work. Their Modus Operandi.
K: another silly they must hate themselves post. I am a humanist because I believe in
humans and their possibilities. I have a good sense of myself as a human because I
am old and as we age, we become comfortable with who we are. You are wrong in a
most basic and profound way. We humanist are actually more secure in who we are than
you so called realist and conservatives and nihilists. I want equality because it is the
fairest way we have to conduct our lives. We all exist in the middle, in age, in height,
in intelligence and in wisdom. One might say, I am the wisest man in the kingdom
and another might say, I am the dumbest man in the kingdom and surprise, they
both are right. I cannot fix some way to decide who is the smartest man in the
room and we should allow that man to rule our lives and I cannot decide who
is wisest enough to rule and I cannot know who has the wisdom to make the
right decisions, so I take the course that we are all smart enough to decide
as a group to make that decision and thus exist democracy. A political theory
that says being in the middle is ok. My ego is quite in check because I
have lived a long time and I have had lessons, many, many lessons that
have taught me that I am just a man, a human being who lives in the middle.
I am average in every way and I am ok with that. My ego doesn’t demand
that I proclaim myself the smartest man in the room and my ego doesn’t demand
validation from anyone. I am a humanist because I believe in human beings.
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