Not Forever wrote: Tue Sep 02, 2025 5:46 pm
I think it’s a matter of imagination: do you find it more fascinating to eat bread bought at the supermarket, or to bake your own bread at home? Beyond the differences, I believe that the idea of having something with your own mark on it, or made with your own hands, somehow makes you grow more attached to it. Or at least, it sparks your imagination more.
Just like, perhaps, the idea of having a child born in the same city where you were born, or in your same country, and so on...
I can understand why someone would feel connected to someone whose existence they are responsible for (that would apply to creating sentient AI who shared none of your DNA though) and it's not even that I don't *understand* on any level why people would feel connected to people on the basis of blood ties, my point was (at least in terms of what you quoted me on; beyond thinking that values are a better basis for connecting with people which I do, and after shared values just the fact that we share our basic experience of happiness and pain even if that leads to a one-sided solidarity) that people who want to have biological children don't connect with all of their biological relatives, yet they still selectively value blood ties based on criteria that has nothing to do with blood ties. Writing that out, that doesn't really sound very impressive to me because while it is an inconsistency, as you noted, people (myself included) are going to be inconsistent.
You reminded me of how female solidarity is seen as something positive, if not necessary, while male solidarity is viewed as the cause of all today’s problems. Haha.
From my point of view, we are social animals, not ideological animals. As much as I agree with the argument itself, I believe this characteristic of ours still leads us to care more about those who are closest to us.
I think that strict egalitarianism (valuing everyone's happiness equally; no one's anymore or less than anyone's else) should be the ideal but my point really isn't about prioritizing people you're emotionally attached to, I can relate to that (there's also an ideologically consistent argument to be made in favor of what looks like favoritism but is rationalized under the egalitarian ideal that I won't get into), but connecting with people on the basis of blood ties and noting what I see as an inconsistency between that and critiquing solidarity on the basis of race or ethnicity. You choose your friends based on similar values, personalities (or at least you probably admire/like their personalities), interests, experiences etc. Even if your DNA plays a role in certain psychological traits you are connecting with people (if you value blood ties) on the basis of something that has nothing to do with who you are as a mind (I don't understand connecting with someone who shares a gene that plays a role in x trait rather than just connecting with people who actually share that trait, even if different genes might play a role in it or were inherited from different people and genes work with environment to produce who we are; not in isolation, a lot of our DNA is inactive). I think it becomes obvious to people on some level how little value blood ties have when they are severely mistreated enough by people who share more of their DNA than is usual, why would you feel a special bond with some brutal abusive older brother or mother and not a friend who actually cares about you, but it seems to me that they compartmentalize between how they feel about person a despite him or her sharing their DNA and the heritage-based bond they think they're going to have with their children/who they think their children are going to be or how they feel about other relatives they are on good terms with for reasons that can't be reduced to their actual personality, values or even history, if blood ties mean something to you that has to include both the disagreeable and appealing 'in-group members' (if you want to be consistent).
I can appreciate your point about being social animals insofar as you might mean that 'ideology' doesn't trump 'human nature' but I think it's largely a false dichotomy here. We're not talking about 'tribe-ing' up in some way or even prioritizing some people over others, people factually connect more easily with other people who share their values. We're always going to have an empathic bias in favor of people we're emotionally attached to, people in our actual lives whom we have concrete relationships with, etc. but I don't think the idea of special bonding on the basis of race, ethnicity or blood ties is inevitable.
The people closest to us are usually our family and closest friends, and I think it’s normal to treat them as exceptions. Then the circle widens to include one’s broader community (social, religious, political), nationality, language, and so on. I’m also convinced that our ideological positions often derive from the context we grew up in, and that they are more a form of adaptation, helping us integrate better into the society we live in.
The circle widens in a way that arguably has nothing to do with concrete relationships, that is actually rooted in 'ideology.' Again, whether or not people share your values has real-world practical implications in terms of your relationship with them (and I think your circle widens in ways that may or may not involve that). If the idea in the OP is just that the sister has this deep emotional bond with her brother and that falls apart and means nothing to her when she finds out he's into lolicon then I can understand if the point is that her love for him was never that strong to begin with (even then, I don't really believe in unconditional emotional attachment. If we like people, something about them is pleasing to us. A big part of that will probably be shared values; a bare minimum for other people, but more than enough for me when it comes to fully rational agents, is that someone value their happiness or their welfare or the welfare of those they identify with, to some degree. I do believe in unconditional compassion because it's a response to suffering, I don't think you can hate someone and care about their suffering, and I don't think you can value someone's happiness without in some sense 'respecting' them, but that doesn't actually have to do with their personality. An egocentric basis can help strengthen it, i.e. if I care about person a's suffering because I see that as an implication of caring about my own suffering, because I understand that it's the same thing so opposing one consistently would imply opposing the other, I have a stronger basis for caring about person a's suffering because denying the inherent value of his/her suffering means denying the inherent value of my suffering. By contrast, 'liking' him/her can't be guaranteed because that's about my emotional response to something; do they cause me pleasure or pain. As a general point, if you want to influence people to care about x I think you need to show them that it's consistently implied by what they actually do care about), even then I think people should be critical of people they love in the interests of justice (that doesn't mean hatred or retribution, it means acknowledging moral errors).
I consider myself a libertarian because I lived in a context where I was able to build an identity as such while still remaining integrated into society. Or something along those lines. I expect hypocrisy in people’s positions—I almost take it for granted. Sometimes I see a philosophical stance merely as a kind of packaging, or a rationalization, of what one wants to bring to the table. For example: if I had been a conservative, my intentions probably would have remained the same—I just would have had a different narrative to arrive at them.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by what one wants to bring to the table or how your intentions as a conservative would have been the same (if libertarianism is pro-freedom then it seems to me that this is compatible with social conservatism and if as a conservative you wouldn't have been a libertarian in what way would your intentions be the same?). I guess it depends a lot on what you think justifies libertarianism or whether or not you're taking a moral nihilist approach when it comes to meta-ethics (or maybe you're talking about reasons why people are drawn to ideologies that have nothing to do with the nature of values, like group identity or heritage. I agree with you that our ideologies are often an adaptation to our social environment which is why antebellum white southerners generally supported slavery. I think my position implies some social detachment, my justification for it being *my personal experience of happiness/pain*). I'm a hedonist because it's the best way for me to make sense of my life experience, it is the simplest truth that requires no analysis, rationalizing, et cetera, at least without 'overthinking' (happiness feels good/suffering feels bad and unlike memory or sensory perception it doesn't simulate some other reality that it might misrepresent, denying that it's good/bad is denying that it's real and my experience is the one thing I can be justifiably certain of because it's self-evident- which is circular but defending a first principle necessarily is), because it's immediately obvious to the least cognitively developed animals even without a capacity for rational reflection. I think that all people, at least if they're cognitively developed enough to recognize ambiguity to begin with, have to find arbitrariness/ambiguity stressful (or are dispositioned to) but some personality types might have a stronger aversion to it than others (so my position might conflict with some of my intuitions but it might also help me more than someone who cares less about minimizing ambiguity. In that sense I don't necessarily claim that I'm just 'objective' to be 'objective,' whatever that might mean). Specific life/identity-defining grievances with other people had a lot to do with my adoption of pan-hedonism (if things had gone differently maybe I would have adopted another position, especially if I were more socially integrated since it's not a popular view. On the other hand, I had those same issues years before I adopted some version of hedonism and I believe I was even aware on some level that a hedonistic approach could work in making sense of them but I think I rejected it) but if I were the only human being in the world or had a very different life there are still so many experiences that I can't see myself processing without hedonism or more specifically hedonism that's justified under epistemic solipsism.
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i hope she fails in everything she wants to achieve.