Things exist in hierarchies; a cup of coffee rests on a table, which rests on the floor, which is supported by the ground, which is held together by gravity, etc. The cup of coffee cannot hold itself up - it must rest on the table. But the table cannot hold itself up either - it must rest on the ground. Each member of a hierarchical system has derivative causal power conferred on them by other things. It cannot be infinitely long.

The cup has a relationship of 'is held up by' the table, the table 'is held up by' its legs, which 'is held up by' the floor which 'is grounded in gravity', the hierarchy presented has the possibility of different relations between successive entities/relata. A hierarchy is typically constructed of elements under a ordering relation, like a lattice of sets under inclusion. If this is possible, is there a recipe to take an arbitrary set of entities, say 'my laptop', 'my granny's house's front door' and 'Donald Trump's hair' and organize them into a hierarchy such that every step is done through the same binary relation and has the character of 'derivative causal power'?

Is there any detail in the book on how things come to exist in hierarchical relationships with each other? And also what hierarchy means when applied to arbitrary sets of entities?

Also thanks, it's a good article.

That's mostly the reason I scarequoted dialogue, the relationship of people with each-other as political actors in a state such as this is either one of indifference, 'oh dear'ism and paralysis or fetishised placebo politics. The relationship of governments benefiting from the mass destabilisation of perception to their peoples is one of fetishised theater (like Trump's charming sexism), undemocratic opaqueness (like EU politicians having to sign a non-disclosure agreement to view the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership papers) and managerial dehumanisation (missed this appointment? no food for a month).

It is a kind of politics where politicians must be persuaded to act on behalf of their people, be informed on issues important to them,a state in which the problems of corporate power are defined as irrelevant and the social costs are offloaded onto the worst off with a knowing smile from their political representatives.

Academic engagement with the public is declining at the same time as academic engagement with relevant academics. Exterior to the academy it's a problem of outreach, reluctance to adopt a pedagogical style, and academics situated as experts to be believed rather than as guides for intellectual engagement. The latter mode of operation there can be seen on this forum, but such a change in perspective will not manifest in public discourse and politics solely through we 'enlightened ones'' intellectual assent.

@Banno

What do you think of the suggestion that what has changed recently is not the existence of bullshit and lies, but the way they are received? Post-truth resides in the acceptance of bullshit and lies as just a part of the dialogue.

I think 'the dialogue''s severance from truth has a self reinforcing character. Imagine trying to communicate political-managerial decisions to a populace who will buy anything because they think you're full of shit. That makes it so that you get to say loads of shit. If you don't say loads of shit, you appear unsophisticated and curmudgeonly - not part of the political class of disempowered managers -, I think this is part of what contributed to the perception of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US. Their rhetoric consisted in restoring and acknowledging political practice to change things for (what they thought was) the better - and both relied upon objective appraisals of societal systems. EG, Corbyn made so many criticisms of what privatising the railways in Britain did, and acknowledged the horrors that the British afflicted on the Irish prior to their independence. Sanders spent a lot of time criticizing the inefficiencies and unfairness of the American healthcare system. Both got accused of being 'poor candidates for leaders' and 'radical socialists' for insisting on the truth of their claims about failings in society and both generated cult like followings during the election.

But what was different about Trump? He also used the widespread discontent and belief that the political system was bullshit as part of his presidential campaign. In essence, he embodied the paradox of introducing 'speaking truth to power' in his campaign (see his insistence on the 'broken system' of American politics) as a means of attaining the criticized power. The widespread approval of a hypocrisy of this magnitude only makes sense on the background of a massive destabilisation of perception. It is only in those circumstances that he could appear more truthful than his competitors just by giving a name to the destabilised political mileau, and thus appeared transcendent of it. All the while being an embodiment of this destabilisation. I think the use of this by the political-managerial class is best summarised through the following:

Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate. — Sun Tzu

This blurring of truth and fiction in the narrative structures derived from politics has post-truth discourse as a symptom rather than as a cause. The operation of post-truth requires an intellectual isolation of individuals (suggested in phrases like 'everyone is entitled to their opinion' and 'my truth'), and an internalization of truth to belief. I think it's likely that the rising level of average education in most industrialized nations has contributed to this. Why? I think this is best demonstrated through this quote:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it — Aristotle, allegedly

Instead of being interpreted as a capacity for educated people to suspend reality within their judgements, it takes on a strange inversion in modern ideology. We are obliged to suspend judgement of the veracity of ideas as necessary feature of ratiocination. Note that this is circumscribed to complex topics, we definitely act as if many things are true (eg. 'don't abuse children' as a maxim).

What was once identified with the ability to situate yourself within complex problems and use your reason to decide what to do and what to think is now a mechanism of intellectual paralysis. Increasing levels of education has lead us to see the complexity in everything, and ironically lead to widespread intellectual paralysis on the things that need the most thought to justify action - instead we have an interminable process of thought. Perhaps this also goes someway to explain the rise of racist-populist narratives in the US and Europe in recent politics - appearing as simple suggests that our intellectual paralysis mechanism need not be applied. Generating decontextualised victim narratives and oppressive scapegoats.

When people are enslaved, one of the first control measures is to stop them from reading. When we then have an educated populace with a variety of conflicting opinions, is it then much of a surprise that the manner of laying out the facts becomes indexed, and is indeed marketed, to different subgroups in the population?

Post-truth discourse can't have the undermining of incommensurable conceptual schemes by the mere possibility of translation of sentences into equivalence classes of truth conditions as its solution, as even if Davidson's account were true, post-truth discourse would still be an ongoing thing. A better analysis would be to attempt to account for the productive (cultural and political) forces which generate and maintain the condition of post truth.

Adam Curtis terms the mode of engagement between the people and their government which results in 'a radical destabilisation of perception' nonlinear warfare. He gives the example of the way the subprime-mortgage generated, giant speculative clusterfuck 2008 economic crisis had its perception managed in the UK. Quantitative easing was presented as a means of inserting extra money into the economy to make up for what the people lost, what actually happened was one the biggest legalised theft redistribution of wealth in history. The top 5% of earners took almost all of the money. This wasn't reported by the mainstream media, but we still have the term 'banker bailouts' which contains a kernel of the truth.

People know the truth about it, but the truth isn't something which motivates people to political action. People who still believe in truth and recognize nonlinear-warfare for the bullshit pedaling it is rarely engage, instead we 'observe the downfall of civilisation with a cool detachment' (from here, a documentary on related themes).

What to do about it?

Not a clue. Only thought I've had is that people are still aware of the rhetorical power of truth, as apparently it, or the conviction in it, is precisely what separates the (allegedly) incommensurable conceptual schemes which divide us.

@Agustino

Right, so we return to what I was saying from the beginning. Relative poverty is irrelevant, what is relevant is whether most people in the country have enough money, not whether 99% of the wealth is owned by 1% but the 99% still have enough.

That's the opposite conclusion from the one you should draw. What you should draw from the idea is that increasing the lowest of wages decreases inequality. Specifically because being payed a living minimum wage decreases both poverty and inequality. It's a way of decreasing inequality, and oh look, less crime, good education standards, great healthcare, the poorest citizens are exposed to much less risk and you get the highest happiness index in the world, shoutouts to Norway. This is noting and using the previously established correlations of inequality with various standard of living factors.

A lot of this wealth is generated by the state oil fund (Norway owns all its oil produce, in contrast to Britain), and funneled into state endeavors such as the healthcare system and social security. Also Norway has a ridiculously high GDP per capita, so it's easier to achieve less inequality because they have a mixed economy and a lot of money.

What this highlights is the importance of reducing right skewness in income distributions, while at the same time having well funded public services... Skewness itself can be used as a way of measuring income inequality. If you give the lowest 10%tile of earnings a living wage, you dramatically decrease the skew and thus decrease inequality and likely its attendant problems.

:-} That's not what I said. I said envy emerges because certain people, political agitators, tell poor people that they really should be wealthy, but it's because they are exploited that they're not. That breeds envy and hatred. Instead, they should be taught the skills that they need, and encouraged to work, study and learn, since they too can earn more money if that's what they want.

The data on this is pretty complicated. It's often the case that poverty is used as the dependent variable in a study, then it's found that more educated implies less poor. That's a global trend AFAIK. But it's also the case that more poor implies less educated, and there's some evidence that people from poorer backgrounds are empoverished mentally as well as materially; they're worse at learning! It's also often the case that the available schooling is of a much lower quality in poor communities and countries. The effect of education on poverty and inequality is always relative to the average or expected education of a population, or relevant sub-population - like being the only Spanish tutor in an interested community would be quite profitable.

In Pakistan, being able to read gives you a big advantage. In the UK, being able to read is normal, not having finished highschool or an equivalent course is a big disadvantage. Similar to the US. Not having a degree is becoming a large disadvantage, to the tune of 35% reduction in median income in the UK.

If you give someone access to high quality education (relative to the population and community), and they know the relevance of it to their welfare from their upbringing and previous education (not always the case with poor areas), their standard of living should (is more likely than before) go up. The converse is also true, if a community is poor, they are less likely to be able to increase their skills within that community, so will be 'stuck in a rut'. Put 'being stuck in a rut' together with poverty - lack of food, shelter, basic living conditions, and you start getting some real motivation for crime. No other options, few skills, what you gonna do?

Prostitution, theft, selling drugs. Might sometimes be the only way to make enough to live by. Hell, even use this newfound wealth to catapult you out of your bad circumstances like someone in the article I linked just there.

So, yes, inequality promotes crime, but not in the manner of 'thou shalt be a drug dealer', a necessary divine mandate, but probabilistically - it raises the chances of individuals turning to crime.

It's interesting to compare Norway to the US here, the minimum wage (enforced through union action rather than law) in Norway for a minimal full time Job gives you something like 21 USD per hour for at least 36 hours a week. This is enough to live and save, even considering the mark up in prices from the US. Despite Norway still having an income distribution with a similar shape, violent crime and theft are a lot lower there.

The problem with inequality, like with most things, is determined by what relationships it has with other things, and what those things mean on the level of the community, the county and the country.

Edit: of course, not being able to read in the UK is a massive disadvantage...

It's pretty patronising regardless of whether the addressee is out there somewhere or me. As if the only problem arising from income inequality is envy.

You haven't addressed the question...

I know, I reject the framing of the issue that produces it. As you said:

I don't believe in stats, I believe in people

Which means your method of questioning will never even see aggregate properties and what propensities they endow to individuals. Despite these propensities being both real and measurable, you have cultivated a blindspot to this kind of analysis. It isn't surprising that you don't see the methodological issues in your line of questioning.

So if I am poor, is it not a moral choice whether I steal or not? Am I not responsible for stealing? Or what's the matter here? And what does all this have to do with the ability to become wealthy? :s

The fact that you equate societal properties manifesting as changing propensities for individual actions with the possibility and individual responsibility for doing those actions is exactly a symptom of your blindspot for aggregate properties and constraints.

Note that they are soft constraints, society doesn't make your decisions for you, you make decisions in the contexts and communities it generates and is constituted by.

Yeah so what? Of course if everyone's wealth grows, and you don't do anything to grow yours, you will remain RELATIVELY poor. But relative poverty is not of interest to me. If you have money for food, electricity, and the other basic necessities of life, and assuming you have access to healthcare and other necessities, what's the issue? If you had those before everyone's wealth grew, you still have them now, even though relative to them you're poorer. What's the problem there? The only problem may be that you're envious, because there are political agitators who tell you that you should have more, etc.

Well, despite that your assumptions are often false for people on minimum wage in America... You're completely wrong about having the same standard of living if everyone's wealth grows. If you're poor, you're disproportionately effected by inflation - which is strongly correlated with economic growth. Your means don't stretch as far when real wages lag inflation (which they have for some time).

I'm actually quite well off and do contract work in addition to my job, so stop your daft psychologising. It was much better when you were insulting me for things more relevant to the issue. I can appreciate a good 'you don't even know this, you damn fool', not 'you're wrong and i'm better than you so there nyer i have money u jelly lol?'. Even though both are bad form, your standards of insult are slipping man!

Perhaps this makes the point about your methodological errors better. Would you be able to get a job at the OECD by saying 'I don't believe in stats, I believe in people', not looking at all the measurable effects inequality has on people's lives, and apparently skirting over the problems that come along with inequality and poverty? Probably not, but then you 'don't care about relative poverty'.

I submit that no one at the OECD would think your approach to these problems was particularly good, being mostly composed of select success stories, claims that your opponent is stupid, claims that your opponent doesn't understand things that are largely irrelevant to the debate, and an absolute insistence on moralising category errors in analysing societal properties.

If you want to understand how a societal configuration effects its people, it should be done in the aggregate, it should employ concepts sensitive to changes in individual agency. You've used success stories and the possibility of 'making it', they're the only methodological constructs you've used to understand inequality. By definition they're not sensitive to aggregate properties - the first is a selection of decontextualised anecdotes demonstrating possibilities for action at best, the second is a blunt insistence to not analyse the ways societal configurations can impact people.

No, I'm not down with that idea except in the case of people who are really really poor. I asked you before, how does someone having more money than me prohibit me from becoming wealthy?

Not even wrong. What matters is the pattern of wealth distribution. You don't seem to want to consider aggregate effects at all. Inequality is a property of an income distribution, you can see its effects over communities and how people in those communities live their lives and what they are likely to be able to do with them. Crime obviously has an impact here.

Right, what does this have to do with the individual becoming wealthy which is the topic, granting that we were discussing social mobility?

The individual becoming wealthy is made less likely through inequality, inequality scales with poverty, crime, poor social mobility... I had a lot of details on this in the mega-post I made at the start.

What benefits?

Well the hope is that economic growth increases the average livelihood of people. But what it actually does (see the papers I linked in the first post) is entrench patterns of inequality, people without much before have proportionally less when an economy grows.

Why is it so difficult for you to consider the aggregate properties and changes in circumstance suggested by an income distribution? You're telling stories about people while eliding the things that affect their average livelihood, free time, propensity to commit and be a victim of crime, greater exposure to risks due to an inability to save money...

So you're down with the idea that social mobility is impeded by inequality. Good, that's a start. But you don't care because it's still possible that someone 'makes it', without any thought of how wealth redistribution would make it easier to 'make it'.

And actually, I don't think inequality has anything to do with someone being able to do this, granted they are in the circumstances I've outlined above. Why does it matter someone has more money than me? Again, go back to the wealth equation. The additional money isn't of much help to him or her unless he or she knows what to do with it.

Inequality makes crime more likely, it entrenches poverty by locking people out of the benefits of economic growth, or other things which can generate greater income. Inequality is a structural property of the distribution of wealth, you see its effects in the aggregate in a probabilistic manner. You don't see the effects when focusing on individual success stories and the bare possibility of 'making it'.

Because inequality makes it a lot less likely that someone is able to do those things!

The path isn't unthinkable to me. The fact that it's possible doesn't really say anything about inequality though. Other than it's eventually going to buttress an argument you'll make that inequality is a result of poor people not being motivated enough to change their circumstances.

I do read what you're saying. People create wealth by offering goods and services. It's their own stupid fault in the west if they're stuck working paycheck to paycheck since they had access to education, hot water and electricity.

You seem to be under the impression that just because it's possible that someone can 'make something of themselves' and overcome the conditions of their environment, it's nothing to do with their environment when they don't do it, and is all their own responsibility not to fall into the traps of their environment.

I don't see the difference between what you're saying and 'if everyone was just in the situation I was in, everything would be OK, therefore it's the poor's fault that they are poor'.

Ah yes, if only someone working two full time jobs would have thought of that, how stupid everyone is!

Really? What access to them do the 99% have? Besides their jobs.

I have a pet peeve with the term 'butterfly effect', what it's supposed to convey is the idea that small changes in initial conditions in some dynamical systems can lead to large changes in output. But the means by which it does this is by describing an end point and a starting point which is its cause. This misunderstanding is why you can get the occasional person who justifies their actions because of the butterfly effect.

This wrong way of thinking about it also has a habit of permeating ecological debates. The question 'can and should we intervene in this ecosystem for humanistic reasons?' is always answered 'no, because we don't know what will happen (butterfly effect)'. This is wrongheaded.

I don't think this is relevant to inequality.

@Agustino
Just some clarification - while it's interesting to find things out about how the income distribution looks like that, the main point of the thread is to assess whether an income distribution shaped like it is now is a good thing or a bad thing. Regardless of how companies get their wealth - which, yes, is composed of goods and services - people are not in the same position of power. Even those who try to usually fail. What people have is their skills and what they can do with them.

I think we can both agree that financial markets amplify trends like these. Your business does well, your stock and derived securities go up in value, people buy these things, it goes up in value more. Then you can sell the shares, generate more money, invest it into expanding production of goods and services...

The important thing is that a typical person will not have access to these money amplification effects, so they cannot benefit from them. Another example in this regard is that if wage growth lags inflation it disproportionately effects people with low income. Being low income exposes you to risks that are already hedged against if you have more money.

Overall, the discussion of what factors make wealth is orthogonal to the discussion of what consequences does inequality have.

@'Agustino'

Just some clarification - while it's interesting to find things out about how the income distribution looks like that, the main point of the thread is to assess whether an income distribution shaped like it is now is a good thing or a bad thing. Regardless of how companies get their wealth - which, yes, is composed of goods and services - people are not in the same position of power. Even those who try to usually fail. What people have is their skills and what they can do with them.

I think we can both agree that financial markets amplify trends like these. Your business does well, your stock and derived securities go up in value, people buy these things, it goes up in value more. Then you can sell the shares, generate more money, invest it into expanding production of goods and services...

Overall, the discussion of what factors make wealth is orthogonal to the discussion of what consequences does inequality have.

@Agustino

Financial markets don't "generate wealth". Comparing the world's GDP with the volume of transactions on financial markets is meaningless. If I, using entity A, sell $300 billion to entity B (which is also owned by me), and then entity B sells $300 billion back to entity A that counts as $600 billion worth of trading in terms of volume. What does that have to do with how much entity A and entity B produce (which does impact GDP)?

That specific trade doesn't happen so much does it. The disjunction between the production of goods and services and the amount of money flowing around shows that production and services have a smaller impact on money flow than the exchange of securities.

Significant sums of money.

The significant sums of money aren't contained in the two markets which dwarf all goods production and services many times over?

What conception of wealth are you using then?

There's also a category error in your individualistic response. Attempting to analyse something which appears only in the aggregate (income inequality) by reducing it to the decisions of individuals - rather than the aggregate properties of individual decisions doesn't work. Discussing the graph is already on the level of statistical summary.

Didn't know that about the Forex market, nice. How does it change things?

>:O No, you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about. If you think most of today's fortunes were created by trading stocks or financial speculation, then you're wrong. Most of the people who get rich do so through starting and running a business, which produces something useful for society that other people need or want.

I don't think I implied much about how people get rich. What I care about is what makes money flow around, apparently this is the Forex Market then the Credit market. This paragraph is dataless assertion anyway. Also due to the failure rates previously mentioned in the thread it's necessary but not sufficient for wealth generation.

Financial speculation and trading stocks, etc. is only a way for rich people to maintain their wealth and avoid having inflation eat it up - once they are already rich. Having said that, I am actually opposed to financial speculation since it doesn't produce anything useful. So I wouldn't mind taxing PROFITS (definitely at least short-term profits) from that at 90%.

First sentence is the important thing. Companies can also sell their shares to generate wealth, the credit market is implicated in business start ups too (most of which fail, as was already pointed out).

Sure, so what? They're not where the real money is.

Where is the real money? What does 'real money' mean?

You seem to confuse the passivity of growing a sum of money through financial investments with the ability to generate wealth. Financial speculation generates no wealth, since it produces nothing. Wealth is generated when products or services are sold. People who are already rich use financial investments not because they're so great at producing wealth, but because they're passive - they take relatively little effort when compared to, say, starting a business.

Financial speculation generates no wealth, but the credit market is the second biggest, and the first biggest contains currency speculation and exchange. What conception of wealth are you working with?

You've provided mostly dataless counterpoints with no arguments. Most of the argumentative force of your post consists in 'fdrake didn't know the proportional size of the forex market to the credit market' then mockery. Bad form.

There are two factors that you can interpret out of that graph, or other income distribution graphs, one is that a lot of people own very little of the money and a few people own quite a lot of the money. This is a qualitative conclusion, and questions addressing it should take the form of questions about inequality.

There's also a quantitative question, what is wrong with this magnitude of inequality specifically, and is there a minimal magnitude of inequality (or a similar quantity) which makes the problems of inequality go away? Alternatively, do injustices and unfairness scale with the magnitude of the inequality; and if so, how?

The first one is a lot easier to address. It's quite well understood that inequality within a community correlates very strongly with all crime rates (except for arson, weirdly). Poverty and inequality have a mediated relationship, but in the US they correlate quite strongly over communities. There's also strong correlations with poverty/inequality and ethnic diversity and proportion of non-whites in a community. I studied the data for this a few years ago.

I aggregated census data in the US with crime data and income data, extracted communities which are measured in each data set, then dida principal component analysis of crime, make a coordinate system with the first 3 principal components (of which the first and the second are the most interesting). Plotting demographic variables and measures of inequality/poverty over the sphere gives you a colinear relationship between poverty, inequality, ethnic diversity and non-white population proportion. Which is to say that in terms of variation in crime rates, (inequality)-(poverty)-(ethnic diversity)-(non-white proportion) are a single construct. Or more prosaically 'race and class are two sides of the same coin'.*

This isn't to say that such an analysis lets you draw causal conclusions from the demographics, in fact it impedes treating inequality, poverty, ethnic diversity and non-white proportion as separate quantities for causal analysis. Which isn't to say it's not possible, it's to say that their alignment gives strong evidence of pairwise mediation, or in another word, confounding, when trying to draw causal conclusions.

Some analysts also throw economic growth into the mix as an inflation factor of inequality. Prosaically, money makes more money. It's interesting to ask where the money's made - what kind of human activity generates the biggest changes in ownership of monetary value?

This is hands down the stock exchange or financial sector. Worldwide, in total about 60 trillion Euros are traded in stock exchanges per year. This is more than the combined monetary value of all goods and services bought in a year worldwide. See here for World Bank data on the subject. Wealthy countries have a bad habit of trading more monetary value in stocks and financial assets than their entire yearly GDP.

It's interesting at this point to note that the idea 'those who demonstrate consistent skill and utility to their communities are reward financially', that @Agustino said, is pretty much bunk considered under this light. The majority of US stock traders are worse than chance at their job, but are disproportionately rewarded to the tune of a wage equal to about twice the median income in the US.

Who actually has the money to invest in stocks, to play the game that generates most wealth? You need about 3000 dollars to purchase an index fund. This breakdown of the 'average cost of living per year', they have enough to minimally purchase index funds or speculate on the stock market. But what about people receiving the minimum wage of 7.25 dollars per hour? They can't even afford the average yearly expenditure on food+housing in that breakdown (approx 16k dollars per year before tax). So they're locked out of the mechanisms by which the economy grows, so will receive less and less of a share. Conversely, those who get to play the game will get more and more of the share. The poor also can't pay for lobbying, so their political impact is diminished as well.

So what's so bad about income inequality in general? It correlates strongly with racial inequality, inequality of opportunity, it locks out the poorest from growth, it promotes crime.

What about the quantitative question at the start of the post? How do greater magnitudes of inequality impact a nation? Well. inequality has a strong link with crime rates, more inequality more crime. Also, growth magnifies unequal distributions of monetary value to the extent that the the monetary value is unequally distributed. So if we have a monotonic relationship between X and a set P(X), increasing X increases P(X) - so growth is likely to increase the inequality in income, which through its correlates is likely to increase poverty, racial inequality, crime and decrease social mobility and political agency of the poor. Since these relationships are linear (see collinearity earlier, linear is a subspecies of monotonic), the more unequal things get, the worse the expected impact on poverty, inequality, crime, social mobility and political agency.

*the angle between the first principal component and all those vectors was between 5 and 15 degrees, perfect correlation is 0 degrees, no correlation is 90. The vectors were pointing along the first principal component, this means that they all contribute/explain the major components of variation in crime over the US.

Probably at some point to do philosophy became to engage with the canon. I think this is largely an institutional feature (or bug). I think it's doubtful that there was any conscious decision made at some point not to engage with anything but the canon, but to do philosophy as a professional became to engage with the problems in that canon. Perhaps this is why feminist or black ethnographic critiques often fall on deaf ears (see this for a hilarious example and counterpoint), since they're treated as external to the canon - institutionally though maybe not philosophically. Thus they are a threat. The same thing happened with Derrida and Foucault in America and the UK (despite there still being more radical 'ordinary language analysis' than the form Derrida was anathema to, also Foucault's focus on discourse sharing some minimal things in common). That backlash is still ongoing (see any of Jordan Peterson's comments on Post Modernism).

I can understand you rolling your eyes at the first post. The second one makes the case with less patronising and inflammatory language. Your call.

I hope you read more of the post than that. Getting personal about hatespeech and sexism is the best way to change people's minds, I've found. If the person you're talking to has a little respect for you, or at least thinks you're not a waste of space, then it feels pretty bad to be chewed out by them. Rhetorical strategy.

Still, I don't want to be remembered as a sexist grandpa.

Interesting, yes. It is as if all the privileged white males get all the respect and honor and attention when there was a ton of work being done by unprivileged, non-white, and non-male people in the background. It is "whitewashed". And it does seem to be racist to continue to act as though it's not this way. — darthbarracuda

Less Hussein, more Avicenna. Less conflict in Iraq, Iran and Afghan, more Islamic Golden Age. Less Ota Benga, more M'Banza-Kongo. Less William Wilberforce, more Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Less 50 Cent, more Marcus Garvey...

There's a racist element to the Enlightenment myth as it's usually formulated. As it stands, history looks like: ancient Greeks -> Enlightenment thinkers -> contemporary Western Civilization. Sometimes the Ancient Egyptians are included. But everyone is white (even though the Ancient Egyptians weren't, they had very dark skin colour).

The role the Moors played in introducing mathematics, engineering and philosophy to Europe is usually entirely omitted. Just like the idea that slavery was ended by William Wilberforce, the contributions of people with non-white skin colour to the history of white civilization is usually minimised, so the ideological background of our Enlightenment heritage is constructed on the destruction of black history. More precisely, it creates, through elision,a distinction between white history and black history.

Edit: making the link between this post and the OP more explicit. Looking at history gives a continual process from 'non-white' values to 'white values', the idea that the distinction exists is ahistorical. This isn't to say that there aren't variations in morals and ethics with respect to countries, just that the amalgamate of Western values aren't at root, Western, and the West as an ideological construct is part of a whitewashing of history.

On the other hand, ethical judgments are subordinated to a prescriptive system, in the sense that the system dictates the judgments. And this is precisely the case where you have a theoretical guarantee that your actions are right: if you follow a prescriptive system, then actions that are in keeping with the system cannot fail to be the right actions (the only remaining uncertainty is whether the actions really do conform to the system).

Bit of imprecision there. Person believes system is right. Person believes any action entailed by the system is right. Person believes system entails particular action, then person believes action is right.

Is it though? This is what I've been questioning. You are, again, implying that the only admissible ethical inquiry is one that can result in practical guidance. I disagree on general principles, and would like to again put this in a broader context of human endeavors. Not everything we do or think about is aimed at immediate practical ends.

I don't think I've made an argument that the systems we're talking about have to be aimed at immediate practical ends, only that they should entail or constrain things that we do - by providing heuristics and methods of thought. The purpose of the ethical system might be to understand whether moral statements have propositional content, and whether that propositional content is true or false, but then there should be some relationship - minimally in the form of heuristics - between what a person's ethically justified in doing and how they understand ethics.

Beliefs about ethics aren't 'free floating' somewhere in a purely abstract domain, they concern concrete ethical decisions - if the systems aren't sensitive to variations in ethical decisions then they lose their core content.

More generally, the idea that there are 'purely philosophical problems' is something I don't believe, nor do I believe that 'the love of wisdom', originally founded in ethics, is done justice by the want to entertain abstractions devoid of real problems.

Come now, you know better than that! This is not the converse: what I said was not an either/or proposition.

Ok, how would you formulate my central claim in the thread, and how would you formulate its converse? Should help us get something nice out of the discussion.

Two things that should definitely be removed are the absurd paywalls in front of lots of academic articles and a general resistance to writing research pedagogically in the sciences. One thing being at university does give you is access to material presented pedagogically by an expert (ideally) in the field, and a removal of the paywalls to reading papers. Also the absurd price of textbooks.

I don't think education gives students the tools they need to be a good citizen, at least in my experience, you have to read around and beyond the curriculum - into other fields, things you're not familiar with from previous studies - to even attempt to grapple with the complexity surrounding us. The continued study of the humanities is being made a problem due to lack of funding, probably because it doesn't have many engineering or technology applications and must 'run at a loss' financially. This has a horrible feedback because it makes people less likely to broaden their study into the humanities, and there simply aren't as many people who specialize and know their way about fields of the humanities. Running at a loss financially is an excellent price to pay for a more informed public.

There's thus a strong imperative to educate yourself, not just in technical fields to stand a chance of getting some amount of job security and non-precarity, but so that you learn how to find out wtf is going on. Online resources here are great, as they stand a chance of democratizing education a bit and making it a level playing field.

Yes, and?... You imply (and say explicitly in elsewhere) that there is something wrong with that. I am trying to understand why you think so. Why is it wrong to pursue an inquiry into ethics for reasons other than helping yourself make the right choices? For example, out of the love of wisdom (you know, philosophy)? — @SophistiCat

Let me try and formulate the converse then. 'I don't care about how to live ethically, I only care about what it means to live ethically'.

Somewhat imprecise but I think it suggests the right idea.

I can imagine examples of how thinking in terms of consequences is different from thinking in terms of duties, but do you ever get any wisdom in how to act from your rough adherence to emotivism? If so, how?

I think you're interpreting my ire towards ethical systems as a kind of quietism towards them - that theory is irrelevant for motivating ethical decisions, considering what we should and shouldn't do. Rather I'm trying to advocate a subordination of ethical systems to ethical decisions. The subordination I'm advocating is that ethical systems should allow a user to think in concrete circumstances about what to do - they should have some heuristic import to applied ethics. If they don't have the ability to give heuristics; using 'heuristic' as 'a method of informing about choices'; then they can no longer have an impact on ethical decisions.

This is related to my claim in the OP, admonishing the idea that people 'pretend that they live their lives by an ethical system they just invented'. This gets the direction of influence wrong; subordinating ethical decisions to theoretical constructs, rather than using theoretical constructs to make ethical decisions. I'm sure that you've also met people who have in their mind a theoretical guarantee that their actions are always right - and these people are assholes. Or, rather, they always get to decide whether what they did was right or wrong, failures in character and lack of relevant experience to a specific context of decision be damned.

Hence raising questions like 'how would a cognitivist and a non-cognitivist behave differently in scenarios?' Or more precisely, what variations do their meta-ethical stances allow in their behaviour. Similarly 'how would a utilitarian and a deontologist behave differently in scenarios' - or more precisely what variations do their normative-ethical stances allow in their behaviour. If there are no differences - no applicable heuristics that can be 'derived' from the system - then they cannot inform the procedure of ethical decision. Which is supposed to be the core action of these theories.

If you'll permit me to use 'empirical evidence' in philosophical debate, look at the way people use the trolley problem to distinguish between different normative ethical frameworks. It is a model ethical decision, an ambiguous scenario with internal conflicts in intuition. The normative systems give different ways of resolving the problem - usually with respect to which horn of the ethical dilemma they admit. What is primary in the consideration of the trolley problem isn't that, say, act utilitarians and rule utilitarians may differ on its solution, rather that the ethical decision contained in the trolley problem generates ambiguities which are then codified and analysed in accordance with different normative-ethical structures.

If one is skeptical of such enterprise, as I am, then one is left with looking into the is of ethics. I suppose that too can influence one's ethical behavior in some cases, but the influence wouldn't be so direct and obvious.

The 'is' of ethics has a very natural link to how we decide to approach ethical decisions... it describes how we make them. When we make an ethical decision, we should consider what we ought to do - and this is where ethical systems are useful. Is it too much of a stretch to say they have to be useful in this regard to be ethical systems? Another way of putting this is - if they do not suggest or provide heuristics which may allow differences in ethical behaviour, normative-ethical and meta-ethical structures consist in differences that makes no difference for how we live our lives. Surely a sorry state for any ethical inquiry to be in.

It would be strange to love wisdom without trying to let that wisdom influence your actions, no?

That makes sense. Do you think being ethical is possible without this sense of doubt? I've met a few people who were convinced that they had good will and were ethically right regardless of what they did - they weren't sociopaths, just people who strongly identified with their own sense of right and wrong... The arbiter of right and wrong being their decisions.

Also reminded of Sam Vimes from Discworld. He was a good man because he fought the darkness he wanted to enact. In opposition to Carrot, who was good by virtue of narrative force.

I don't think your 'system' is one of the ones I'm trying to tar in this thread. It seems like a bunch of generalizations from difficult scenarios you've been in, so isn't a top-down imposition, it's a bottom-up exploration.

I think something like this. All ethical inquiry consists in reasoning about what to do. This includes what it means to do something right (is this thing I do ok? is it good?), what justifications are adequate ethical motivation (consequences, duties...), or abstract properties of ethical behaviour (is it rational, emotive...). If the way someone thinks about the abstract properties or adequate justifications has no influence on how they live their lives - what might be called practical applications - then the system of abstract properties and demarcation between adequate and inadequate justifications is entirely abstracted from attempts to live a good life.

What I've been trying to do in the thread is coax out people who have advocated architectonic thought about the abstract properties of ethical behaviour or adequate justifications and attempt to get them to derive specific 'oughts' or ways of conducting themselves from the systems. So far I've received little to no effort in 'derivations' from what people think ethics should consist in to what they should do.

A scientific idea does have practical consequences, insofar is it must be realised through research and provide a vantage for viewing other scientific ideas and generating other scientific problems.