The Basis of Morality

Noah (@hoodedu) linked me to his thoughts on morality.  Thanks, Noah. Twitter is indeed a very awkward platform for nuance.

This discussion started with reference to the loss of a Neil Gaiman script for Dr. Who.  Thousands of users posted on reddit to pressure the person who found it (or rather, their roommate) to “do the right thing,” and the subsequent trumpeting by some that this somehow “vindicated” the moral authority of the Internet was sickening.  Let me be clear – I do think that in this case returning the item happened to be the right thing to do. But that is a happy coincidence.  I in no way want to get comfortable with the suggestion that listening to what other people claim to think is “the right thing” on an Internet forum necessarily bears the slightest resemblance to the best course of action.  I find equating the right thing to do and the popular thing to do to be morally dangerous. (Cf. slavery, the oppression of minority religions and minority ethnicities, violent homophobia, the cutting of the rose, etc. – all popularly accepted by society for thousands of years, but to me, morally unacceptable.)

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. – Anatole France

Now, with respect to the comments at Noah’s site:

Peter is right in that my statement is not about the generation of moral principles but rather in the idea that one should not ascribe a higher moral authority to the government, to the state, to the corporation, to a board of directors, or indeed to any man-made amalgamation of individual moral actors. Having numbers does not make them automatically more morally correct than an individual making a moral decision. (The critique of modern law as judicial shamanism, for instance, is a structural observation based upon how the ritual of law is constructed around making it appear more impressive, as if that spectacle makes it more morally correct.)

If we say that the state does not properly have the authority to tell you which god to worship, then I take a half-step further and posit that neither does it have the right to dictate your ideals, to tell you good or evil. Of necessity, it makes purely practical judgements like, “People are not permitted to steal things or we will lock them up,” which are to some degree useful for the functioning of society, but we should not confuse them with moral judgements.

Peter also says,

We simply try to muddle through, creating the best world we can — deploying not principles, but what Charles Taylor called “inspired adhoccery.”

I would restate Peter’s “ad hoc” statements thus: there exists a moral axis and a pragmatic axis, and as moral agents we are perpetually brokering an uneasy peace between the two. To be perfectly moral would require infinite resources, or at least the ability to act as if there were infinite resources – a disregard for the pragmatic side of things. To be perfectly pragmatic would require infinite moral flexibility, or effectively an outright lack of morality.  (This level of abstraction, incidentally, derives from the “postmodern” half of my explanation of my stance as “postmodernist-existentialist.”  Peter notes correctly that I differ from Sartre in at least one significant place despite calling my reasoning existentialist.  I believe even Sartre used meta-level principles for moral reasoning in No Exit, but that is a discussion for another time.) I submit that to not perfectly cleave to abstract principles is a different order of things from never attempting to stick to principles in the first place.  That, I believe, is where the real danger of doing what is most comfortable rather than what is moral lies.  Call it a throwback to my days in science: that which is never measured is never properly observed, and that which is not observed, we cannot really make clear statements about. How can you monitor your own moral progress without having some kind of measure?

In the end I suspect my differences with Noah might be theological more than descriptive: is there such a thing as morality, independent of social feedback and pragmatic goals? I say yes, as long as we believe and set it apart; law, for instance, is not morality. Noah, if I read him correctly above, says no. If you don’t allow that morality exists as a separate conceptual thing, then perhaps the distinctions I am drawing become meaningless.

I believe they have meaning, though.

A digression from Vuc

Vuc linked this, and I read it and felt compelled to comment:

It doesn’t matter how you get into things; it matters that you get into things. Let me clarify: you got into anime, which then got you into blogging, which opened the doors to the whole community on the Internet. Any number of things could happen from then on. Business and job opportunities, philosophical revelations, really anything might appear before you. Now you might say “that’s the power of networking,” or some such, but it could equally be said that that’s the power of anime.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.”

If you never take the first step, you don’t take the journey.

Digibro talks about how anime is his whole world.  We don’t need to be quite so grand or dramatic – I’ll be conservative and say that anime is a part of your world.  Because of anime you will be able to meet and relate to people, and because of that you’ll be able to learn new things, which will then open doors into other things, other places, other mindsets.  Anime is the key here, but when we talk of people in general it doesn’t have to be anime.  I’m sure there are people who opened lots of doors by being able to talk about sports, or fashion, or NASCAR racing.  It truly doesn’t matter, except that it does to you, because anime is what was compelling enough for you to take that first step out into the world.

Take the step.  Be excited and passionate about something.  Anime is just fine.

Wield your Klout

Apparently my Klout score is higher than Craig Venter’s.  That’s hilarious.

Fear my arbitrarily high numbers!

On a more serious note, this is always the problem society faces: how do we rank people? We’ve moved past concepts of inherited nobility and so forth, but this just means we’ve adopted new metrics.  GPA, college admissions test scores, GREs, and everything all boil down to the excuse of having a numerical reason people can point to to justify their decisions to accept or reject.

 

“You are not your bank account. You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the contents of your wallet.”  And no, neither are you your test performance or Klout score.

 

But for 90% of your daily interactions, you might as well be.

Possibilities

The possibilities we are concerned with tell us a lot about our priorities.

Choose Your Hero

What makes a hero?

While it’s a simple question to ask, it turns out that people have vastly different ways of coming to grips with our literary traditions and heroism.

moritheil @edsizemore You know those stories where the mecha pilot is in space and smashes the monster to “save the people of earth”?

edsizemore @moritheil I see it as simplistic and not worthy of discussing. But remember my father is a retired Marine and I’m ex-Navy so discussions

edsizemore @moritheil of heroism tend to be a lot grounded than anything in mecha anime.

edsizemore @moritheil Fictional people dying for a fictional abstraction isn’t the way I define heroism.

I take it Ed (who actually writes a lot about fiction and manga) means to assert that real life examples are privileged, and cannot be compared to fiction. But I think there is an error in this thinking – fiction derives from real life. Moreover, fiction shapes society even as real world examples shape society – sometimes more so. Social identities, corporations, and nations are ultimately all examples of “fictional abstractions” that control the behavior of real people on a daily basis. To have any meaningful sort of discussion about our concepts of heroism in general, we must be able to talk about both real and fictional examples. We don’t equate the two, certainly, but refusing to talk about both reality and fiction for an ideal is tantamount to refusing to talk about the subject.

Silly Alexandra Wallace

Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words will never hurt me.

- Traditional

Silly bitch, your weapons cannot harm me!

- The Juggernaut

Everyone keeps dithering over precisely how much we should condemn a girl for babbling something racist on YouTube. But what she did is, in a strange way, actually good for her as a person: this is a great opportunity for her to examine her views and decide whether or not she wants to change them, while she’s still young.

On the whole, it’s hardly a meritorious act, but how many skinheads wind up with a criminal record, or have to see friends die, before they ever reconsider their hatred? She’s getting this chance rather cheaply.  That she can do so is itself one of the merits of a tolerant society.

Absent moral reasoning

CNNGo recently looked for writers.  I happened to look at the call for applicants, and I recall that it was formidable.  ”Professionals only,” they insisted, “with years of prior work experience and a strong grounding in the nuances of the local language.”  Lists of specific proficiencies followed.  Perhaps CNN staff were so enamored of their lists that they forgot to check for basic writing ability.

If true, that would go a long way toward explaining this Richard Smart article on a proposed manga censorship policy. Using such wonderfully precise phrases as “needs to be fixed right way up” and “Seem obvious? It should do,” it is a study in how not to write an editorial.

The essence of Smart’s article can be found in a quote he takes from Simon Scott, and his reaction to it:

“Japan’s new law, insofar as it strives to regulate more than just the surface images to look at the overall theme of the story, suggests that the country is moving in a Western direction.”

This is a good thing, particularly with regard to child pornography.

A reader would normally expect further explanation by Smart here, or a justification for the general statement that Japan becoming more like the West is a good thing. But such trifles are beyond Richard Smart – he moves directly on to quoting other sources and describing other things happening, without even a hint of justification for the sweeping statement he has just dropped.

This is not a woman

In his rant of November 2010, Poster of Oduza Okasa argues in no uncertain terms that NyaaTorrents is pushing pornography. The reason?

The figurines of women with exposed breasts is porn; the figurines of characters touching themselves in obviously sexual manners is porn. This isn’t artistic stuff and there’s no way to take it any other way. So Nyaa is purposefully pushing porn.

Thus, he writes, NyaaTorrents exploits women.

TMR: Dating Edition

We’ve all seen jokes about the “2D brotherhood.” The absurdity (or, if you like, the temptation) lies in the idea that the 2D is so ideal that men would forsake real ties with flesh-and-blood women to bask in it. But we equally acknowledge stereotypes that otaku, by virtue of inferior social status, should be desperate to capitalize on the opportunities for relationships.

Do otaku jump into relationships readily? Perhaps even too readily?

Without breasts, there is no paradise

What sounds like a line of propaganda from the Oppai Taisen is actually the title of a multimillion-dollar production at an international media conglomerate.

Despite the hilarity of the title, Without Breasts There Is No Paradise tells some very sad stories.

Gustavo Bolívar Moreno says the story is based on real-life conditions facing child prostitutes in the town of Pereira. There he met two girls who were desperate for silicone breasts. One told him that she got her operation for free in exchange for sex. Unfortunately, the doctor used a pair of used implants, which led to allergic reactions and infection.

It makes me wonder: why is it that a crass, throwaway Penny Arcade joke causes all kinds of furor and outrage from new-wave feminists, but not something like this? For crying out loud, this depicts a place where it is culturally normative for women to seek breast implants so that they can have a shot at being the sex slaves of the local warlord. It describes a world where a girl’s highest aspiration, growing up, is to one day sell her body to have a shot at the big time.

This causes less outcry amongst new-wave femnists than a patently absurd joke about fictional “dickwolves,” which don’t exist, and which don’t target women anyway?

First they came for the dickwolves . . . – ANNZac

You know, maybe this is yet another example of the unreal being more important than the real. We have reached a point in society where the plight of actual people means less to us than nourishing our instinctive moral panic, and affirming our own reactions as dictated by society, because we are so preoccupied with our own minds.