People who walk in darkness
Is the impulse (or habit or need) to set people straight about things a necessarily religious one? I don’t think so, I think it’s a lot broader than that, although religion is certainly one area of life where people are encouraged to do it even unto the end of days.
I get what he means, and accept the mockery, but still – I think it’s a broader impulse than he’s implying, and also a more useful one. If you know how to get a fire going better than the people in the next hut over, you’re doing them a favor if you show them your skills.
But, of course, evangelism doesn’t come with a false positives detection kit. The impulse can be to bring people out of darkness into the light of your personal or shared delusion, and that’s not necessarily a benefit.
Or maybe I’m just constructing a rationalization for why I like to argue about nearly everything.
A bit off-topic here, but … not being a facebook user, I am constantly confused by this endless stream of facebook snippets. Does this one show Tom Holland replying to Prof Alice Roberts, or is it the other way round?
Uh, Twitter, not facebook. Same thing.
My father-in-law owned two tools: a hammer and a screwdriver. So if the screw won’t turn, you hammer it in.
He got by, and I never felt compelled to tell him any different.
Step 1: Identify a normal human behavior.
Step 2: Claim that behavior as distinctive of a group.
Step 3: Note whenever someone engages in the behavior.
Step 4: Infer that they are members of that group.
Step 5: ???
Step 6: Profit!
I feel like the “you try to convince people that your views are correct, you’re just like Christians!” jibe was already played out by around 2004, but I appreciate the retro aspect of it.
It feels a little bit like what Daniel Dennett calls a “deepity.” It’s true in its shallow, literal sense: humanists and Christians, being humans, engage in some similar behavior. But the deeper meaning that it presumably implies (that humanists ARE Christians deep down, or that this behavior is uniquely Christian in origin) is false. There are some pretty opinionated people in non-Christian cultures, too.
People share their opinions about all sorts of things: religion, politics, economics, art, sports, morality, relationships, which way to hang the toilet paper roll. It’s not “wrong” to do this, and it’s not particularly a Christian thing, it’s part of being a social animal.
There are, of course, obnoxious ways of going about it — that’s part of being a social animal, too — but Twitter is practically synonymous with “a place to spout off your opinions in the hopes that other people care.” Roberts tweeted a perhaps trite piece of advice, she didn’t show up in someone’s home and slap the bible out of their hands.
Yes, it is quite retro, but I guess it’s so retro that it felt novel for a second – long enough to think about the broader subject of leading people out of darkness (& assuming that’s what you’re doing).
Laughing at the screw-hammering.
Harald, sorry. I know it’s annoying. I don’t really have an excuse. (In this case Tom Holland is commenting on what Alice Roberts said. Commenting on, not replying, because he used a screenshot of her tweet, which is why the timing looks as if she spoke hours after he did. Different time zones.)
What has become known as the Golden Rule is a good one to live by IMHO; except that the earliest statement of it I have been able to find is that of Confucius (551-479 BC), who put it into a (superior) negative form: Do not do to others what you would not have others do to you.
From China, it possibly made its way down the Great Silk Road to Judea, as a series of ‘Chinese whispers’; garbled in transmission. Then written into gospel.
It’s not all that good though, because people want different things. It seems good at first glance, but it fails.
OB:
Could you elaborate on that?
It was shorthand for philosophers have gone into it and explained better than I can.
I’m not sure that’s riight. All the philosophers I know (and I know the odd big-name personally) would have to getup pretty early in the morning to put one over you, OB.
In my humble opinion.
But the Confucius version is what most people I encounter actually follow, consciously or unconsciously. And in politics, JS MIll is hard to beat: the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Bourne out by a study of history.
IANAP (I Am Not A Philosopher), but consider two gay men. One man loves his balls touched. The other man hates his balls touched. As I read the Golden Rule in the negative form in #7 above:
• The man who hates his balls touched should not touch the balls of the man who loves his balls touched.
• The man who loves his balls touched is free to touch the balls of the man who hates his balls touched.
This reminds me, I saw the philosopher Jean Kazez give a talk where she mentioned that part of her job as a philosopher is to problematize things, i.e. to make you realize you have a problem. I call this particular problem The Testicles Paradox.
I’m often confused by the lack of context or background knowledge of who a tweeter is and what they might be on about… what prompts a person to remind dead people do not come back to life? Is it a joke? A dig at someone else? A genuine concern? A secret message? It just baffles me.
Dave Ricks# Alas, you have proven the Golden Rule phallacious…
For what it’s worth I still think the Golden Rule, as rule of thumb, is about as good as it gets. If I had to come up with the most applicable rule possible in as few words as possible, I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything obviously better, and I think counter-examples like “What if you’re a suicidal masochist?” are just being difficult for the sake of being difficult: If any counter-example no matter how far-fetched or non-representative (e.g. the vast majority of people are not suicidal masochists) means the general rule is crap, I suspect that every rule will turn out to be crap on close scrutiny.
I also think there’s a “spirit of the law” vs. “letter of the law” kind of distinction at play. If you take “the way you want to be treated” to mean “literally the same” (“I want my eggs fried on both sides, therefore I should fry everybody else’s eggs on both sides whether they want me to or not”), then, yeah, you’re quickly going to run into some obvious problems. I do think a more general, more abstract interpretation is fully in line with the spirit/intention of the law though, e.g. “I want my own interests to be taken into account, therefore I should take other people’s interests into account”. Of course people often have conflicting interests, in which case we might interpret the Golden Rule as “I wouldn’t want other people’s interest in X to trump my interest in Y, so I should not let my interest in X trump other people’s interest in Y” etc.
I’m generally skeptical of any attempt to reduce ethics to formulas or algorithms, but if you dig deeply enough it’s not that easy to find an obvious example of (what I would consider) “immoral” or “evil” behavior that didn’t ultimately rest on the premise that “other people should have to put up with crap that I/we would never put up with myself/ourselves”.
I think y’all might be missing the point of the golden rule. It’s not about literally treating someone as if they are you, it’s about having compassion for others *as if you were them*. @12 Dave, this is why the testicle example doesn’t work. If you put yourself in the person’s shoes who hates ball touching, and employ the golden rule, then you will treat them appropriately, because you would expect them to allow you to hold your own ball touching perspective. The golden rule doesn’t work in a vacuum, it is part of other general rules of behavior such as live and let live, and other idioms. So I think Ophelia is correct, it fails, particularly when translated literally and without context or practical application, and I think Bjarte is also correct, that in proper use it is hard to find a more widely accepted *rule* if you’re looking for a foundation for a generally acceptable folk theory of ethics. It’s not a bad starting point, but as the counterexamples above show, it doesn’t hold up to rigorous scrutiny. However, if you align it with compassion, fellow feeling, or empathy, it makes more sense, and has better application than simply viewing it as transactional, or as an arbiter of competing interests.
Omar @ 11 – but “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” isn’t the same thing as the golden rule at all.
(And thank you for the extravagant compliment but ohhhhhhhh yes they could. [Put one over on me without having to get up early.])
Catwhisperer, I imagine the tweet was because of Easter. Some people have their fill of resurrection long before Easter arrives; I used to, but I manage to stay clear of most of the crap now.
Actually, the reductio ad absurdum argument is a valid form of argument. Looking at that sort of case can lead you to see what the problems are in an argument, and I agree with most on this site that the Golden Rule is full of problematic things, with or without the reductio ad absurdum. I don’t think it can be seen as the best rule for ethics, though it is a place to start. If you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it goes a long way to compassion. But it is very important to realize that many people would take it in the very literal way, and be aware.
As for good rules, Bentham had his: greatest good for the greatest number. That is also easily broken by a reductio ad absurdum and in fact, you don’t have to go absurd, because there are times when it is necessary to put the needs of the one against the desires of the many. And interpreting good is highly…interpretive, as the testicles paradox or the sadomasochist problem demonstrate.
Catwhisperer @ 13 – Sorry about the randomness, again (after Harald @ 1). The tweet is a stand-alone, I think, as opposed to a response to anything. Alice Roberts is one of those trans-allies who performs her allyship by verbally abusing feminist women. Maria MacLachlan gives some background here:
https://www.peaktrans.org/blog-on-alice-roberts-humanists-uk-and-compassion/
Dave Ricks @#12:
In its positive (Christian) form, yes. The Golden Rule encourages that. In its negative (Confucian) form, no.
iknklast:@#18:
Neither Jeremy Bentham nor JS Mill to my knowledge denied that, nor developed a mathematical calculus of happiness. Depending on how it was loaded, such a scheme could be concocted to justify the death of just one innocent person (say) if the outcome included a day, month, lifetime of enhanced happiness and wellbeing for a larger number (by whatever factor) of people. After all, that is a common argument for going to war; even for aggressive war, and for revolutionary movements which promise a more even distribution of wealth across the society (Gini coefficient approaching 0.)
Omar, that is true. But unfortunately Bentham and Mill were not the ones who would be deploying it in the future long after they were dead, and I have seen it used well, but also seen awful uses of it to justify awful behavior by awful people.
Aw, well, aphorisms, slogans, and moral codes all have their bad players. But a moral code that will fit on a bumper sticker is probably going to be inadequate for the job, no matter how much we might like to simply things.
Iknklast #18
Hence the caveat “as a rule of thumb”. As I said, I don’t think there is a law universal law of morality. Even Kant’s categorical imperative is just a more carefully (and awkwardly) worded version of the same general idea as the Golden Rule.
Empathy IMHO is at the heart of all morality, but at the same time can be rather terrifying if practiced selectively, as by for example, tyrants and authoritarians. Animals arguably have it to some extent, but the people most lacking it tend to finish up in jail.
It looks to me as though Alice Roberts is reminding dead people not to come back to life. I don’t care whether that was the intent or not, I’m going to assume it was.
I tend to keep coming back to the idea that all supposed moral rules should be treated as heuristics, or as Bjarte already said, rules of thumb. The best possibly universal axioms are simply empathy and reciprocity, but that could just be primate (or any social species) instinct.
That hasn’t added anything to the conversation so I’m just going to mention The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.