A brief analysis of an algal colony

[BLueRibbon]

Sometimes it feels silly to dive into the world of antis. After all, their arguments tend to be simplistic, predicated on the concept of voodoo or cosmic harm, ultimately boiling down to excuses for hating an 'othered' group purely for the sake of it. Still, their views are shared by many, an unfortunate reflection of the sheer awfulness of the human race. In this post, I'm going to look at some specific comments and general themes, even if doing so is absolutely pointless.

https://www.brianribbon.com/home/a-brie ... gal-colony

[FairBlueLove]

If there is only one sentence that algae can metabolize, please let it be this one:

It's assumed to be impossible that I could do my job without grooming and molesting students, even though straight men can work with women and not commit sex crimes in the process.

[OnionPetal]

Our detractors will claim that harm is done by people knowing their images are being viewed [...]

In that case, it is the police who do the most harm, by informing minors that their images have been shared. Every chance they get, the police do this, as evidenced by countless news reports. Sometimes I think police get a sick kick out of that task. If they believe it causes minors so much 'harm,' then why else would they do it?

And this is not to mention the immeasurable harm done by law enforcement agencies who distribute those very same images as part of their entrapment schemes. Law enforcement agencies are widely acknowledged to maintain some of the largest archives of child c0rn. I would not be surprised if they're the largest distributor, too. But despite this scale, normies are not so concerned about 'harm' when law enforcement does it.

[BLueRibbon]

If there is only one sentence that algae can metabolize, please let it be this one:

It's assumed to be impossible that I could do my job without grooming and molesting students, even though straight men can work with women and not commit sex crimes in the process.

Too far down the page, and I didn't do a silly dance while singing it.

[John_Doe]

Our detractors will claim that harm is done by people knowing their images are being viewed [...]

In that case, it is the police who do the most harm, by informing minors that their images have been shared. Every chance they get, the police do this, as evidenced by countless news reports. Sometimes I think police get a sick kick out of that task. If they believe it causes minors so much 'harm,' then why else would they do it?

And this is not to mention the immeasurable harm done by law enforcement agencies who distribute those very same images as part of their entrapment schemes. Law enforcement agencies are widely acknowledged to maintain some of the largest archives of child c0rn. I would not be surprised if they're the largest distributor, too. But despite this scale, normies are not so concerned about 'harm' when law enforcement does it.

In terms of a psychological need for privacy, I agree that children (and adults) could be harmed by the awareness of people viewing sexualized images of them (that were taken or recorded when they were children). The harm would be in terms of the emotional impact, those images merely being viewed; even contrary to someone's preference, would not be inherently harmful. Aside from the 'incentivization to produce' argument, when I might view using government coercion to discourage the possession or distribution of child pornography as justified I think it should be phrased as a privacy concern, being child porn per se wouldn't be the issue (and I see many laws as something to be enforced with a big picture in mind when there's no categorical moral imperative for all people in all scenarios to follow that law, looking at images depicting people who don't want those images viewed is harmless case by case but being systematic in prohibiting the possession or distribution of those images can be reassuring for 'victims.' I understand the trustworthiness problem with promoting hedonism but in a better society where people's intuitions more closely matched with the pan-hedonistic ideal, this isn't to claim that mine always do, they would not only be more focused on what they or other people actually experience but they would more or less not have to worry about being negatively judged by unsympathetic people or certain information being used as leverage, to capitalize on a power imbalance or as a basis for prejudiced treatment, so there might be less of a need for privacy per se to begin with, although even then they might have a preference for a certain public image and in no practically possible society will people be flawlessly moral, fair-minded, considerate and sympathetic, but I don't think there's an overall better alternative. I think preference utilitarianism covers some of the trustworthiness concern better than hedonism does but it comes with its own problems, people will generally find what preference utilitarianism logically implies deeply repugnant; it requires giving fundamental consideration to anti-social or unjust desires, the hedonist can reject the morally backward values of other people and disassociate that from valuing their happiness, preference utilitarians have to give 'equal' consideration to the desires of the sadist and their would-be victims alike which is obviously incoherent because they're incommensurate and conflicting desires, even though I'm sure that preference utilitarians will try to squirm their way out of this in various ways. So NO ethical worldview practiced consistently or taken to its logical conclusion in every scenario will not have implications that people find deeply repugnant because we are naturally wired to be moral schizophrenics, we're not built for consistency, but we realistically have to strive for consistency in terms of our ideals and trying to live up to them in case you want to counter that we should promote some inconsistent mesh of conflicting values that we selectively apply or ignore circumstantially because that's what works best in practice).

I can see how some privacy violation in a police investigation might be a necessary evil, but it's a lot harder to justify if we're talking about entrapment. The opposition to AI-generated child pornography (with fictional characters that couldn't be mistaken for any real-life person) seems to clarify that the concern isn't with children's welfare, it's with tamping down on 'immorality' and using government coercion to validate conventional attitudes about child sexuality.

I can see how validating an existing grievance would be beneficial for someone (although not necessarily overall) but 'we' are harming at least some children in introducing the idea that they were wronged as a result of intimacy that they desired at the time, that there's a reason for them to suffer even if it hadn't caused them emotional distress prior to our telling them that it was bad and the wrongdoer was considering whether or not they would suffer because they valued their happiness.

[OnionPetal]

Aside from the 'incentivization to produce' argument, when I might view using government coercion to discourage the possession or distribution [...]

So it's OK for the government to cause harm, if their goal is to reduce the very harm that they're causing?

Law enforcement does not discourage distribution, if they themselves are the biggest distributor.

So NO ethical worldview practiced consistently or taken to its logical conclusion in every scenario will not have implications that people find deeply repugnant because we are naturally wired to be moral schizophrenics, we're not built for consistency, but we realistically have to strive for consistency in terms of our ideals and trying to live up to them in case you want to counter that we should promote some inconsistent mesh of conflicting values that we selectively apply or ignore circumstantially because that's what works best in practice).

My, that's a long sentence...
Look, you can 'justify' hypocrisy however you like. But at that point, it seems to be a concession that the given worldview indeed requires mental gymnastics for people to cope with the cognitive dissonance.

[John_Doe]

-I don't know. Maybe if it prevented greater distribution or in some way greater harm, I was just considering possibilities and conceding that it seems unnecessary and counter-productive if you're going out of your way to entrap people. Is that legal? To just entrap random possible perpetrators? They wouldn't use the images of real-life children for that, would they?

-I wasn't justifying hypocrisy, although all people without exception are almost certainly deeply inconsistent if not 'hypocritical.' My point was that every ethical theory taken to its logical conclusion (unless maybe your worldview is just 'do whatever feels intuitively right in the moment' which you can't coherently defend and is internally inconsistent, like preference utilitarianism) has implications that people find repugnant so I can't think of an overall better alternative to promoting hedonism even while acknowledging some of the real problems in promoting it (I won't get into my general argument for why it should be promoted). If promoting the inconsistent adherence to certain values is what worked best then it could be justified but we have to try to and maintain some consistency in our ideals and behavior in large part to avoid the cognitive dissonance you speak of (I don't that think any other worldview can help us to make sense of ethical issues or reality as pan-hedonism as a moral realist position justified by epistemic solipsism can, which is a big part of why I think it should be promoted).

This was written very quickly, for me.

We seem to have a cursed nature, we have to fight against some of our natural intuitions and impulses to accomplish some of our own goals.

[OnionPetal]

@John_Doe, thanks for clarifying your points. I don't want to drag this too far off topic from BLueR's article, but I'm not sure how hedonism is related? I personally would not use hedonism as a basis for reform. If you need a philosophical framework, humanism might be more relevant.

[John_Doe]

@John_Doe, thanks for clarifying your points. I don't want to drag this too far off topic from BLueR's article, but I'm not sure how hedonism is related? I personally would not use hedonism as a basis for reform. If you need a philosophical framework, humanism might be more relevant.

I more or less think that child pornography laws, if they are justified, would be better framed as as a matter of privacy and preference utilitarianism seems to be the only specific ideological perspective that can justify a concern with privacy for the sake of privacy itself but I understand harm in hedonistic terms and promoting preference utilitarianism still has certain problems despite avoiding some of the issues that come with promoting hedonism. Hedonism is a statement about what is good and bad and it is my framework for analyzing all ethical issues, even if I'm not explicitly referencing it out loud to other people in any given conversation, so it can't not be relevant in a conversation that has to do with morality, justice or even just issues related to harm/benefit or value. If we were talking about the moon or quantum mechanics then it would be totally out of place (unless we were talking about the ethical implications of quantum mechanics or whether or not we should blow up the moon or something like that, I mean talking about these things from a value-neutral scientific standpoint or just noting something about the moon as a matter of interest etc.) because these wouldn't be conversations about morality.

If I wasn't off-topic before, I'm probably going in that direction now (because I'm not just applying hedonistic reasoning to specific issues that BlueRibbon has brought up) but I've always gotten this impression that people think interjecting hedonism (or other worldviews) in certain moral discussions is tacky or off-putting and I've never thought that it made sense because the idea isn't that you shouldn't ascribe to hedonism but that you shouldn't center every ethical discussion (that has to do with morality or something that matters, something that we 'care' about in contrast with just being curious about or in some sense interested in) around it, but it's fine to actually hold that position. If someone dies or is killed, for example, I should give my condolences and acknowledge the injustice of their murder but if I were to expand on why I think their death is bad (because of the harm it causes survivors or that it presumably deprives the deceased of all possible future happiness, in addition to the fact that the process of dying is normally painful) or why I think it's unjust, circumstantially, to kill people then that becomes a totally different thing, and in the right settings I would keep my hedonism to myself and give vague generalized sentiments that may be implied by different pro-social worldviews in consideration of how people would react, but how can you expect me to not analyze the situation in hedonistic terms if that's the worldview I ascribe to- again, the critique isn't that one is a hedonist, but that they shouldn't consistently apply hedonistic reason to ethical issues which is what a consistent hedonist would do. I'm supposed to think that it's bad or wrong but in this vague, non-analytical way that doesn't involve reflecting on why exactly (there is no answering why suffering is bad, that is a statement about its nature that you can't expand on because we're not talking about causation or instrumental value, but I can give an answer as to why I believe that emotional distress is inherently bad or what justifies that view; although, ultimately, all first principles inevitably rely on a circular defense). Sorry if this is vague, I'm also not articulating myself well today (I'm rushing, for one thing).

A kind-of example of what I have in mind, or at least something related to it, is that it's ok if you're pro-gun control but when someone is killed don't go using the tragedy to promote your political views. The whole 'POINT' of abstract ethical theories or positions is to apply them to concrete specific real-life scenarios. You're not just pro-gun control as some kind of vague philosophical/political identification that is a quirk of your personality but not something that you apply to how you process real-world events, the point of gun control as a policy is to prevent specific real-world murders so how could you be fine with the pro-gun control stance itself in the abstract but take issue to people connecting it to real-world events? Again, it would be something else to just critique the pro-gun control stance itself, of course people are going to analyze x event in terms of their abstract ethical principles and the policies they support (that they hold largely in anticipation of such events) because the whole point of abstract principles is to make sense of concrete real-world events. When would be the better time to start promoting your gun control views if not when someone dies from, in your belief, a lack of gun control?

I can vaguely remember I think it was Penn Jillette (if I'm completely misrepresenting him, it applies to other people) saying that he had no interest in converting others to libertarianism (because that's seen as super-tacky, manipulative, controlling etc.) but if some guy assaults and robs him his grievance, something that he expects the wrong-doer to respect and the rest of society to validate, will be rooted in libertarian principles. If you actually hold a value, if you truly view something as good or bad or, by extension, moral or immoral, then you are critical of those who reject those values, you have to assert their legitimacy. No one has this silly relativistic 'to each their own/all values are valid' stance when it comes to viciously torturing their child (no one who truly values their child's welfare, anyway). If you don't 'force' your values on to others, they inevitably 'force' theirs on you. It's always self-refuting because the people who are certain about the categorical illegitimacy of certainty are just as closed off to the possibility that they could be wrong, the people who think that forcing their views on others is the ultimate evil force that view on others, the people who are humble enough to realize the limits of their own knowledge are claiming to know that much, etc.

It's a similar thing when people complain about propaganda in fiction (e.g. woke-ism in a lot of movies, tv shows and books, and apparently this is a big critique of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, where he apparently emphasizes libertarianism a lot, more so in the later books I think). I can understand if we're talking about simplistic, stereotyped characters or situations (e.g. cartoonishly evil and one-dimensional right-wingers, this doesn't really apply to using fiction to explore ethical first principles without demonizing dissenters which is what I really want to get at) and I can appreciate the complaint about sacrificing plot and depth of character to promote a 'message' but, for the most part, it seems that a story is only really seen as overly didactic or as propaganda if it explores an idea that isn't totally uncontroversial in polite society. Some generic theme about anti-racism or being 'kind' in this really broad way that ignores differing attitudes that 'kind' people have about the nature of welfare, what people's entitlements are, should morality center around welfare or consider other goods, etc. will generally be seen as perfectly fine because everyone is on the same page with those ideas, they take them for granted so it's not seen as some slimy, self-interested attempt to push one's personal beliefs on to others. You can't even write a character with a certain perspective without it being taken as the narrator's establishing a moral truth as opposed to just acknowledging that people of that mindset exist.

Humanism is a really broad meaningless term that isn't going to help people settle a lot of their disputes. 'Humanists' want to protect children from 'sexual exploitation' (and they define any kind of theoretically possible child-adult sexual or romantic intimacy as 'abusive' or 'grooming' which drives me nuts, just defining amsc as abuse in lieu of a substantive argument, as if it necessarily implies either harm to minors or the willingness/intent to harm minors. I won't get into 'grooming,' or expand on the common amsc as abusive by definition fallacy). Even if you say that you'd rather base reform under 'humanism' and not hedonism, I don't see how it's more relevant. The irony is that while libertarianism might better cover 'MAP liberation' in terms of legal rights, only hedonism really covers the injustice of stigmatization or the potential value of adult-minor relationships (I have a similar gripe with vegans who are unaware that, outside of the view that sentience itself is inherently good and emotional states per se are irrelevant to that value, hedonism is one of the only two positions that you can actually build an idea of animal equality around, yet they're as prejudiced against it as the general population not realizing that a lot of their arguments are built on anthropomorphism or projecting human values on to cognitively less developed beings for whom they cannot apply. I'm not going to elaborate on or clarify this).

I really rushed this because I wasn't in the mood and I still managed to waste my day away, so a lot of it was especially clumsy and awkward and I could maybe better word/expand on some things.