Comment by karaterobot
3 years ago
Before making moral evaluations, it's really useful to look at these situations, and try to automatically reverse the "polarity" of the actors involved. If you see people doing something and you think they're on your side, imagine a similar scenario in which people are taking the same actions for a cause you are violently opposed to, or on behalf of a group you find deplorable. And vice versa. This helps reduce the chances you'll get confused and take a hypocritical position.
or even simpler, stop being on a side, then you don't have to do mental tricks like "reversing the polarity". you can just see things for the way they are, without personal identity invested in the situation. this is exactly what being independent is.
This isn't just partisan "sides." It's also sides of specific legal questions.
I don't think "just stop picking a side regarding abortion, gun ownership, or gay marriage" is a reasonable solution. These are political wedge issues, but they are also legal questions with answers that can affect your daily life. Of course you want it to go a certain way!
no, stop thinking of sides at all, and especially don't start with a side first. start with reasoned first principles (the constitution is a good start) and continue to reason your way to a position on any given issue that is consistent with those first principles, sides be damned. the only reason you pay attention to sides is identifying with and wanting to defend a side in the first place. don't worry about defending and entrenching. have earnest conversations. if your position is constantly getting barraged with hard-to-argue counterpoints, then consider changing your position. it's not that hard.
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If you've got an opinion on some issue, especially a strong one, then you're on a side, and there is an 'other'. Be careful not to conflate a sense of your own independence with a sense of your own lack of biases or immunity to human irrationality.
no, you don't have to think in sides. you can have a position and discuss your position with others. you don't have to think of them as your enemy, but rather your conversation partner, someone who can help you expand your perspective and perhaps even change your mind.
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> this is exactly what being independent is.
"I think that, a) you have an act, and that, b) not having an act is your act."
-- Linda Powell, Singles [1992]
No it's not. Being independent just means your personal identity isn't "My political party is X." There's still your mental image of yourself and it shapes your opinions ("What would do I think the kind of person I want to be would think about an issue like this?"). This is pretty much inescapable.
we're saying the same thing. you're distinguishing biases formed of life experience that can't be avoided (but can be consciously corrected to some extent), which is implicitly acknowledged. the point was not to pile partisan identification on top to further distort things needlessly, this latter part being a conscious choice we can deliberately avoid.
Not having a side is a nice idea until your opponent forces you into a side. Then they complain when you defend yourself or you must give into their side.
Like when someone is arguing that people with your attributes should be killed or should have less rights than other people you don't have a choice in the matter. If you have a coworker yelling about how gay people are inferior to their openly gay coworker, there's no getting out of choosing a side.
that's a strawman. we're talking about how to have dialogue with people who hold cognitively dissonant viewpoints (to you), and sometimes that means the dialogue is context- and time- dependent. if one person is literally attacking another person verbally or physically, well, then you should possibly step in or call for help. but that's not "taking sides" so much as intervening against violence.
I think of the abortion issue as like a necker cube. You can view the optical illusion as extending inward or outward. But it is difficult to see it both ways. You could easily see it as flat, but then you aren't really seeing it at all.
Partisans may object "but in the abortion case it is objectively extending inward and the other perspective is the optical illusion". But that objectivity is a moral illusion.
remember that the abortion issue, as a matter of law, is about the state's interests in the body. it does not litigate religious or social mores, but most of the "debate" is of this latter type.
i personally agree with the recent supreme court ruling that abortion rights shouldn't rest on privacy protections, but rather on a robust reading of the constitution that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right above and beyond states' interests (nation state or US state). i'd extend this to the issues of euthanasia and suicide as well. the state should have a very narrow and rigorously limited set of concerns (foreign relations and interstate disputes, in the case of the US federal govt).
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Rationalists should strive to cultivate a deep suspicion of any statement that appeals to their emotions, especially self-satisfaction or outrage.
I've never heard of the rationalists, is this a line from their creed or something?
No I just mean someone who strives to be rational.