The true god is called Logic. There's another god called Random.

Logic and Random are very cold gods. They don't care about a specific pain limit. Logic provides the axiom that reads "life without variety would be no life", and Random sets the maximum possible pain experience at random. The christian semi-god has to follow their rules; he's employed as a hotel manager.

Partly, this is less of a problem for the older theology because modality was dealt with quite differently. Modality was primarily conceived of in terms of act/potency. "Is it possible for a cat to become a frog?" The old answer would be "no." You're talking about substantial change there, replacing one thing with another. It is only possible for a cat to become something that it already possesses the potency to become. It must "be that thing potentially." If something isn't "potentially actual" then it isn't possible. If one contrary is present, "in act," say "light," then its opposite, "darkness" is not a possibility.

I think it would be fair to say that, starting with the nominalists, modality gets much more "expansive" and "linguistic," while also becoming less "metaphysical." Possible worlds modality ends up looking a lot different. I suppose the critique of it would be: "just because you can slam words/concepts together and not recognize an explicit contradiction doesn't mean there isn't one to be found if the things you were speaking of were fully understood."

In one of his homilies (Pentecost I think), St. Thomas claims the collective efforts of the human race have not even come close to fathoming the essence of a single fly. On this view, thinking up possibilities in terms of linguistic composition, and then searching for obvious disqualifications, seems less justifiable. So, they stick to a understanding of necessity grounded in act/potency.

I don't like to think in hard yes/no categories. I prefer gradual, relative thinking. So, a little pain is OK. That's not brutal. That's enough to get warned about caries or fire. It's not neccassary to exaggarate it.

It reminds me a bit of existentialist "overcoming." How absurd must the world be for us to find meaning in our capacity to overcome absurdity? Just a little? A lot?

I would imagine the ideal is likely closer to "as absurd as possible without resulting in a total collapse into despair" for a lot of those thinkers though.

Marriage is also "until death do we part," an oath to stay faithful to an imperfect human being within set bounds of responsibility. I don't think this is really analogous to the will becoming irreversibly and intrinsically"fixed" in anything other than the Good (which would seem to imply an end to appetite, a rest and satisfaction of the will in a finite end).

The more appropriate analogy would be pledging one's eternal soul to a person, or to Satan. I think people can choose to enact such pledges, but they cannot rationally continue in them forever. Holding on to such an oath would be akin to Jephthah burning his daughter.

This is why I initially assumed some sort of external, extrinsic block on repentance or extrinsic punishment despite repentance. I don't think the idea of the will becoming forever at rest in finite goods, or in evil (in the absence of Goodness) makes sense if the will is conceived of in terms of intellectual appetite.

However, mankind throughout the ages got around just fine without governments micromanaging every facet of their lives. The 'nanny state' really is much more modern than people think. Even the Soviet Union didn't achieve the level of micromanagement that modern states do.

This is true, but they had other institutions to do what the state has increasingly become responsible for: collegia, guilds, churches, families, extended-family/clan networks, religious orders, much tighter-knit communities. For instance, if you look at natural disasters in 19th century America, there will be less of a role for insurance (requiring massive state regulation) or FEMA, because of things like neighbors rebuilding each other's homes. Aside from a loss in relevant institutions, market specialization has also made this sort of thing more difficult (e.g. home repair is no longer a default skill set). But even things like friends giving each other rides to the airport, or bringing each other food while sick have been taken over by on-demand services provided by anonymous contractors, supported by Big Tech apps, and eventually state regulation.

That's one of the ironies of the liberal state. In order to empower individuals to increasingly act as individuals, to "free" them from past institutions, the market or state must step in to fulfill the hole left by institutional erosion. The right/left divide is often about which should fulfill these gaps. Often the market moves in first, but then externalities, gross inequalities, systemic risk (e.g. insurance), etc. force a later movement by the state further into public life. Plus, the modern "market" now requires a vast administrative state wherever it expands.

Entertainment is an interesting example because both drama and musical performances long had been primarily religious events, and still retain something of this even in their commercialized forms.

In terms of self-determination (an important sort of liberty), I think it's worth noting that people often positively identify with the prior sorts of institution. They are a member of a parish, a military regiment, a guild, a family, a clan, a religious order (perhaps as a lay tertiary), etc This sort of positive identification of the self in the institution that Hegel sees as foundational for positive freedom is much more difficult with the anonymized market and mammoth welfare state. I think the thread on the NHS is a good example of this. People feel powerless, dependent on forces lying wholly outside the ambit of their personhood, whereas a man might be asked to risk his life for his regiment and feel quite empowered.

Some good posts here. I think they bring out a difficulty for classical theodicy, which is that it must either adapt itself to changes in modern conceptions of man and nature, or else rebut these changes before proceeding.

Classically, the idea of nature as merely "laws + initial conditions," which God must tweak so as to "minimize suffering," wouldn't even have been on the table. Beings possess their own self-determining natures, although in the fallen cosmos they fail to fully correspond to the "divine idea" underlying them. In struggling to maintain their form, each being is doing the best it can to be "like God" in the way they are adapted to by their limiting essence. Each being is self-determining to some extent, and is striving (poorly or well) to become more so. "Evil as privation" suggests then that evil is ultimately a failure of things to "become what they are." Suffering as "negative sensation" plays a role in this, but the sensible world is ultimately "less real" than the intelligible, often "passing away" in many cosmologies. Evil, by contrast, lies wholly in the inappropriate use of things (including sensible suffering).

In this world, man is a "middle being" strung out between the corporeal/sensible world and the intelligible order. He is not "the highest of beings," as he often is in the modern view. The fallen cosmos involves a web of sin or imperfection/confusion involving not only human action, but also superhuman rebellion, the turning away of Satan and the corrupt archons and principalities, which manifests in the decay for nature. Earth itself is accused of rebellion by some of the earliest Jewish commentators because God tells it to "grass grass" (a use of the verb akin to "dance a dance") and it instead "puts forth grass." Whereas in the modern view, it often becomes just man, mechanistic nature working according to inviolable laws, and God in the picture. There is no notion of "vertical levels of reality," and so sensible suffering is not "less than fully real," and its conquest thus largely a matter of proper perspective (as in much Pagan thought, or Boethius' philosophical consolation).

I suppose the difference here is perhaps also one between having to argue that all of creation—creatures taken as a whole—must be free, versus the consideration of the freedom of individual creatures as individuals (often just man) against the backdrop of a "clockwork" nature. The shift in focus to the individuals throws up new difficulties for the classical view.

Maybe a shift in ethics and politics is relevant too. God, far from simply giving over the gift of being and freedom to creation (and of course ultimately redeeming them and bringing them to perfection, or at least offering them this choice), becomes a cosmic executive on the model of the liberal state. He must contend with the problem of one creature encroaching on the freedom of another and strike the ideal balance. The role of the higher beings gets flattened out or vanishes here, or else explodes into a major issue because they are now "encroaching on the freedom of the cosmos". And this also goes along with changes in Reformation theology that moved towards seeing redemption and election as largely about the individual (e.g. Calvinism vs Arminianism, often taken as exclusive of all possible views, versus the prior dominance of corporate conceptualizations of election).

Blame Yaldy-Baddy, the ol' Demiurge. Or, even on the more mainstream view: "Satan is the God of this world" (II Corinthians 4:4; see also John 12:31). And "the entire cosmos is under the control of the Evil One" (I John 5.19).Hence, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him" (I John 2:15). The world is rather in need of saving: "For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17). But "this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil (John 3:19).

Hence, as David Bentley Hart writes in "The Gates of the Sea:"

Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes – and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away and he that sits upon the throne will say, ‘Behold, I make all things new...'

…of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines…Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred…As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is…a faith that…has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead...

For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.

Metaphysical optimism seems generally at odds with the picture of a fallen and rebellious cosmos.



Right, for instance the view from I Peter 4:

12: Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. 14 If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. 15 But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. 16 Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. 17 For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? 18 And

“If the righteous is scarcely saved,
what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?”

19 Therefore let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.

And I Peter 2:

19 For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God. 20 But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. 21 To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.

22 “He committed no sin,
and no deceit was found in his mouth.”[e]

23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 24 “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.” 25 For “you were like sheep going astray,” but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

There is also Surah Al-Baqarah - 214

Do you think you will be admitted into Paradise without being tested like those before you? They were afflicted with suffering and adversity and were so ˹violently˺ shaken that ˹even˺ the Messenger and the believers with him cried out, “When will Allah’s help come?” Indeed, Allah’s help is ˹always˺ near.

2. You are, again, failing to delineate between "that which will result in X" and "that which ought to be done". You are arguing about something I am both (in this thread, anyway) not interested in, and don't really disagree with you about. The words "bad" and "good" have multiple meanings. You are not using an Ethical meaning. You are using a practical, empirical meaning. That you are not noticing this, despite it being pointed out several times is odd. Why not actually figure out what I'm saying here? You clearly don't get it. There's nothing wrong with that - but then coming at me with immature retorts isn't helpful.

The post you are replying to specifically addresses this vis-á-vis the question of ultimate ends/ends that are sought for their own sake. Ends are ordered to other ends. They either go on in an infinite regress, bottom out in irrational desires, or they are ordered to something sought for its own sake (e.g. happiness).

Can you explain what it would mean for something to be "ethically good" on your understanding of the term? Under what conditions can something be good in this sense?

That you are then, insulting and childish, instead of trying to clarify, is also odd.

Putting aside this incredibly silly and unfounded side-swipe, yes. That's correct. What's your problem with that? I make arguments as anyone else does. They are either effective, or they're not. Has it helped you understand my positions? Then it might be good. If all I've done is make people think less of me, there are two options:
1. They are bad arguments (or my positions are insensible); or
2. You hold positions that don't allow for you to be generous to certain other positions.

Do you not find it ironic that simply explicitly calling out what your own statements imply about your own words seems like an insult or "side-swipe" to you? Those are your conclusions, I don't see how it is untoward to point them out.

In particular, I don't see how it is any more rude than simply responding: "Wrong." to posts.

**Arguments being 'good' is not ethical. They are effective, or they are not. A good (i.e effective) argument for racism doesn't make it ethically good. This is not complicated, I don't think. Can you let me know what's not landing here? I think i've been sufficiently clear and patient.

Wouldn't a good argument be one that leads to truth? This definition of "good argument" reduces philosophy and science to nothing more than a power struggle or popularity contest. A "good argument" in science, or "good evidence" would then be simply "whatever combination of argument and evidence convinces people of a position, regardless of its truth."

Now to be fair, I would agree that we can sometimes speak of arguments being better or worse in terms of their efficacy, but this isn't primarily what makes arguments or evidence good or bad.

If I give my kid a choice between broccoli and a candy bar, and I accept his choice of the candy bar, does it follow that I don't care about his best interest? Respecting freedom is a pretty sound motive. To spin this and claim that I don't care about my son because I allowed him to choose would be a pretty tendentious interpretation.

But this analogy is not comparable because presumably your child is capable of later recognizing that broccoli is better for him (perhaps from the consequences of eating too many candy bars). And presumably, when he is no longer constrained by ignorance about what is truly best or weakness of will, and asks for the broccoli, you will give it to him. Nor do we need to suppose that choosing the candy bar removes any future capacity to choose the broccoli.

Further, if he can choose candy bars for eternity and never regret his choice, this would seem to indicate that candy bars are an equally fulfilling good in which man can find his absolute rest (to stretch the analogy a bit too much perhaps).

Is mercy just a magic wand that God waves which solves every problem? Traditionally mercy is not seen that way. At the very least it requires a kind of repentance, and repentance is a free act.

I have noted in the past that universalists and Calvinists are extremely close, in that both tend to be quasi-determinists who deny human freedom in one way or another. In either case the outcome is predetermined and freedom is not a real variable. I even suspect that we will see more and more Calvinists follow Barth in that universalist direction.

I think it just follows from a non-voluntarist notion of freedom. Here would be my contention: no one chooses the worse over the better but for ignorance about what is truly best, weakness of will, or external constraint.

Exactly what sort of "freedom" is being respected here? It seems to me that it is inchoate, irrational, impulse towards some end. It cannot be that ends other than God are known as being better than or equal to God (they aren't). So such a choice arises from ignorance, weakness of will, constraint, or else some sort of irrational impulse of will that, in being arbitrary, hardly seems to be "free."

And I think this goes as well for the post-Reformation Catholic theology that starts positing that rational natures can find their natural end in anything other than God—that anything other than the Good itself can fully satisfy an infinite appetite for Goodness.

So let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that death has no substantial effect on us or on our ability to repent. What then? Does it suddenly follow that humans are unable to make definitive decisions (in which they persist)? Does it follow that in the Judeo-Christian tradition the will of intellectual beings can never be fixed in anything other than God?

I don't know what you mean by "definitive decision." Is this supposed to be some sort of decision whereby, even if we realize we made a mistake in our decision, we will forever continue to be committed to our mistake? But any such commitment would be wholly irrational, born of some sort of defect of will.

The classical theological answer for why man will not be capable of sin in Paradise is that his intellect and will are perfected such that he knows God as truly best and suffers no weakness of will. Man doesn't sin in Paradise for the same reason that someone who is perfectly empowered to walk never trips and falls, not because his will becomes extrinsically fixed by some "definitive choice."

To say that man's will can become definitively fixed in anything but God is to say that man's appetite for infinite Goodness and the Good itself can be fully satisfied (and thus come to rest) by some other (finite) good. That doesn't make sense to me, nor does it make sense with the idea of Hell as a punishment. The person who has come to rest in an end is satisfied. On this view, the sinner is satisfied in sin, no longer desiring anything else.

Plus, the descriptions in Scripture of Hell are not of some attractive, finite good people settle upon instead of God. The "outer darkness" is a place of great wailing and gnashing of teeth. So, no I don't think people can make definitive choices in favor of their own suffering and perdition if this is to mean that, even if they came to know the truth about what was truly best, or ceased to suffer from weakness of will, they would still somehow choose suffering and the absence of the Good. At any rate, such a choice would be wholly irrational and arbitrary, not a "freedom in need of respect."

You seem to be relying on the assumption that one can be equally "free" in choosing the Good as in choosing the nothingness of evil. I think this only makes sense on some sort of voluntarist conception of freedom as bare choice (which I don't think actually makes much sense, because it makes "freedom" collapse into arbitrariness).

Edit: Now, the idea of people drifting ever further from God and never finding rest is another concept, but this would essentially be a slide towards complete nothingness and seems more to me like annihilation, with the end state being the passage of sin into absolute non-being, rather than the eternal survival of sin in some middle state between nothing and apokatastasis.

Do you think the doctrine of Hell requires that God or Christians must not want what is truly best for everyone? If so, why?

Explain how "unending torment with no possibility of improvement," could ever be in "someone's best interest?"

Look at it this way:

Is God is capable of showing mercy on everyone? If the answer is "yes," then you have to explain how it is that it is better for sinners not to receive mercy. If it would be better to receive mercy than justice, and you receive justice rather than mercy, then this cannot be "what is best for you," on pain of contradiction.

But God does show gratuitous mercy on some, and presumably receiving mercy is "what is truly best for them." So how do we explain the difference?

Second, it also needs to be "better for the sinner" that the "second death" of Revelation really be "eternal life, but one of punishment" or else the same situation exists vis-á-vis annihilation.

You are presupposing injustice here and then finding it in your conclusion. It could be simplified, "Suppose someone does something that does not merit Hell, and God gives him Hell. That's unjust." Yep, but no one thinks that God gives undeserving souls Hell.

Of course I'm supposing injustice here. What I'm describing would be considered gratuitous and cruel if any human being did it. It would be cruel and demeaning to the person meeting out "justice" to keep someone alive just to punish them for 100 years, let alone 10,000.

Man's justice is, of course, not God's justice. But it seems like the two terms are in danger of becoming wholly equivocal here if the response is just "something is not evil when God does it."

...and yet you are focusing on extrinsic punishment objections. Even Dante avoids those. I actually don't know of any theologians whatsoever who think in terms of extrinsic punishment. The passage I gave from Aquinas addresses this directly, with his points about the "disturbing of an order."

I am focusing on extrinsic punishment because human beings, while alive, are capable of repentance. If human beings utterly lose this capacity at death, it would seem to require some sort of extrinsic limitation that is placed upon them at death. A capacity they once had is now limited. If man has this "dual potency," it is apparently being constricted at the moment of death.

Whereas if the damned can repent and turn towards God, then the punishment also seems to be extrinsic.

Right, the human good is a particular instance of the more general principle. Harris allows this too, expanding well-being to "all conscious creatures."

I was speaking to his denial of a strong self. However, it is directly relevant to his view of reason in context. Sense experience is where we discover "good" and "bad," which are known as correlated together by a wholly discursive reason.

He says “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.” (3.3.2.1) Reason might allow us to connect irrational sensations of pain and pleasure with different sense objects, but “it [could not] be by [reason’s] means that… objects are able to affect us.” (3.3.2.3)

What is the claim here, that Hume really does have a use for "rational appetites?" I think it's fairly obvious if you read those sections that he doesn't.

I am skeptical of the "absolute" realization of principles, particularly one that is so specific. From a public policy perspective, it seems to make sense to me that some sort of bigoted free speech act, such as drawing the Prophet Mohammed might be allowable in a Western context, where it is likely to lead to a limited risk of violence, but unacceptable in other contexts (e.g. parts of Southeast Asia), where it might very well be expected to kick off deadly rioting.

But isn’t this more or less how ethics already works in practice?

IDK, current law in the developed world and international law is based on the natural law tradition. The ethics of the academy does not trickle down much into society any more. That elites from these societies increasingly no longer understand this tradition doesn't change where it came from (and this decay in understanding is arguably partly why it appears to be collapsing, although many explanations could be offered of course.)

Morality, as we experience and debate it, seems less like the discovery of timeless metaphysical truths and more like a code of conduct that is shaped by competing preferences, traditions, and values among different groups.

People argue, negotiate, and revise ethical standards using a mix of emotional intuitions, shared values, facts, and reasoning. Ethical reasoning isn’t absent just because there’s no fixed “Good” out there to be discovered. Instead, we appeal to consistency, consequences, fairness, or human flourishing -not because we know the good in some absolute sense, but because that’s how humans justify and improve their moral norms.

Do we need more than this?

I am not really sure what you think a "fixed" or "transcendent" good is here. However, an ethics based on facts about human flourishing is not anti-realism. Sam Harris, for instance, is not an anti-realist. He has an ethics based on knowledge about Goodness (which he has a fairly reductionist account of, claiming it to be "certain sets of possible brain states.") By contrast, the Good for the Aristotlian tradition (and much of the pre-modern tradition) is a principle like "fairness" or more specifically "lift" or "entropy," etc. It is an extremely general principle though, hence the large role for intuition and (properly oriented) emotion in ethics. You and @J both have denied goodness as a possible principle for ethics, but then turned to "fairness," "harmonious relationships," and "justice." I am not really sure what the difference here is supposed to be, such that the latter are more acceptable, since these are also very general principles.

An anti-realist says there are absolutely no facts about fairness, consistency, consequences, or human flourishing that have any bearing on which ends ought to be preferred. How exactly do you propose "facts and reasoning" to guide ethics if there are no facts that have a bearing on which ends are choice-worthy? Wouldn't the facts necessarily be nothing but window dressing on a contest of emotions, and ultimately, power? Facts select means, not ends in anti-realism.

On something like the emotivist view, where ethical discussion is just "noises people make to signal emotional states vis-á-vis certain actions," what exactly could constitute "good or bad argument" or "good or bad faith" in argument? It seems to me that ethical debate is nothing but ritualized power struggle at this point. There are no relevant "facts of the matter" to guide one's conclusions. No choices can ever be "more right" or "more wrong."

Your appeal to "fairness" and "human flourishing" to mediate arguments presupposes these are choice-worthy and knowable. I'd agree they are. But then we aren't talking about the situation I was describing. Presumably, "consequences" can guide ethical decision-making because some consequences are more choice-worthy than others. If they aren't, then I'm not sure about that either.

I haven't read the the rest of this, because I want you to not make this same mistake over, and over, leading me to ignore: This is the not the same assessment as what one ought to do. This is a different consideration, based on the essentially arbitrary goal of 'curing liver cancer' or whatever you want to be done, in the abstract. Whether or not one should do X is not hte same as whether X would achieve such and such a goal. This is why it already seemed obvious to me we're not talking about hte same 'good' and I do not take yours as 'ethical'. I may well come back to the rest of that as I can see Leontiskos has replied also, so might feel the need to put somethign in. But it seems your basis is off from the way I see things (and this seems, to me, patent, not subtle). Its very hard to go through making the same criticism at each point.

"I'm not going to read your posts past the first sentence or actually engage with any arguments at all. But my position is very strong. No, I can't positively articulate it either. I will write posts consisting of just the word 'wrong' though."

I address the ordering of ends to other ends, and the question of ultimate ends/ends sought for their own sake in the next paragraph. So the "mistake," was perhaps trying to take the time to work up from the simple to the more difficult.

Then again, why should am I expecting that someone who declares that there is no good or bad, so no good or bad argument, or good or bad faith discussion, to act otherwise? I suppose you're "living your truth" in emotivism, because it does seem to be "true for you." Afterall, what possible arguments or explanation could I offer that could constitute "good" arguments? On the upside, I also cannot possibly have "bad" arguments either.

And thus, when you make your moral pronouncements (which seems to be in most posts) about all the flaws of "Wokeness," I take it that this is just meant to articulate something like "boo-hoo for Wokeness." It cannot mean that it is truly bad to accept such beliefs at least.

Really? I think "hodgepodge stew" might be guilty of not going far enough. A stew is, after all, a whole, and fairly inseparable. For Hume, we're a "bundle." As he says in the Treatise: "I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement."

Or take Nietzsche:

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula—"To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"... It was pretty much on the same lines that the older atomism sought, besides the operating "power," the material particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates—the atom. More rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along without this "earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get along without the little "one" (to which the worthy old "ego" has refined itself).

Beyond Good and Evil - 1.17

IDK, anti-realists and voluntarist have their view. I think it's wrong, but I also don't think they're really just realists and intellectualists in disguise.

If Goodness cannot be known—if there is nothing to know—and if facts, truth, can never dictate action, then one cannot have an ethics where ends are ultimately informed by the intellect. The intellect becomes limited to a subservient role in orienting behavior towards positive sensation and sentiment (positive, but not known as good). I do think Hume is quite right about this. I think Hume is rarely wrong about tracking down where his assumption lead (I just don't know why we'd accept many of his assumptions).

Plato is also in agreement with Hume here. This is precisely what the soul is like when "reason is a slave of the passions," right down to the epistemic concerns. The disagreement lies in Plato's belief that this does not represent the totality of human experience or the limits of the rational soul.

The difference between my defense of postmodernism and your critique of liberalism is that I would never dream of passing judgement on any political system put into practice by a society from a vantage outside of the normative
dynamics at play within that society.

So you cannot critique the Islamic State because you don't live in a Muslim nation? You cannot call out the abhorrent practice of American chattel slavery unless you live in the ante-bellum South? My take would be: "any ethics that requires withholding judgement in that way is a ludicrously deficient ethics."

And in the many posts of yours I have read have never seen you actually try to argue for the claims that seem to lead to this position, e.g. that all intelligibility must be situated in/emerge from a specific language game/metaphysics. Obviously, most philosophy disagrees on this point, which of course doesn't make the majority right, but it does make simply asserting the opposite insufficient. One might suppose that if assumptions like that lead one to an ethics that cannot condemn ISIS or slavery, or forces one to reject "razor sharp hunting knives are not good toys for babies because of what they are," as an overly dogmatic judgement, it's a good indication that something is seriously wrong with it.

Blaming immigration for the dissolution of labor unions is a common meme on the right, and especially by the Trumpists. I’m more persuaded by arguments like this:

What is this supposed to be, some sort of guilt by association argument? "The evil boogiemen said it so it must be false!" You know who else made this argument? Unions, all through the Clinton years. Only later shifts in the Democratic coalition led to them abandoning this messaging. Union leaders met with Clinton at the border as he stated his commitment to do more than Bush re immigration.

Opinions differ on the aggregate effects of migration on unions. It's hard to pull out the effects from everything else, particularly because there are likely strong interaction effects between disparate concurrent forces. But the idea is mainstream in economics. Aside from increasing the labor supply, immigration also tends to make it more difficult to unionize due to intercultural friction and labor/culture barriers.

And employers agree. For instance, leaked documents from Amazon show they explicitly sought to diversify their workforce at the jobsite level to combat unionization risks. That employers pursued this tactic in the first Gilded Age is also well-documented.

That's a neat typology. Sorry you didn't get any interest in this

Ultimately, the analysis suggests that knowledge is not a static possession but a dynamic, perspective-sensitive process — always vulnerable to revision, and never entirely immune to epistemic luck

I tend to see these sort of issues as indictive of the fact that "justified true belief" is simply a bad way to define knowledge. It's a definition that recommends itself by being analytically quite easy to work with; however this is a bit like the guy who lost his keys on the lawn and looks under the street light for them instead because "that's where he can see."

If knowledge involves the adequacy of the intellect to being, then simply affirming true propositions with proper discursive justification is not all there is to knowledge. Truth is primarily a property of the intellect, and only analogically predicated of linguistic utterances (as signs of truth in the intellect). When someone thinks p is true for bad reasons, and p is true, there is an adequacy of the intellect to being insomuch as truth is properly affirmed, but this will not involve the fuller adequacy that comes with understanding (which we would tend to call "knowledge.")

I think the empiricist tendencies in analytic thought tend to lead to a neglect of the role of understanding in knowledge. However, even if one dismisses any faculty of noesis/intellectus (which I wouldn't), I still think the phenomenology of knowledge suggests a big role for understanding (and this a relevant role for problems of vagueness). With vagueness, it seems we can have properly justified true belief and still lack "knowledge" in a strong sense. Knowledge is understanding and if "the truth is the whole," it is also in some sense inexhaustible. A "model" that tries to make truth primarily a binary property of propositions is going to miss this (and has other problems if truth/falsity represent contrary instead of contradictory opposition).

Consider the following illustrative case: A student believes that “2 + 2 = 4” simply because their teacher told them so. While the proposition is necessarily true, the justification rests entirely on trust in authority. Unbeknownst to the student, the teacher is generally incompetent and usually wrong about mathematics — in this case, they just happen to be correct. From the student’s internal perspective, the belief seems justified and true; there is no epistemic tension (coded as 1100). However, from the perspective of an external analyst, who knows the teacher’s reputation, the belief’s justification collapses while the truth remains stable — yielding a classic Gettier case (coded as 0101). Taking a normatively rigorous view — for instance, applying reliabilist or safety-based criteria — the belief may fail entirely as knowledge, since it is both unjustified and lacks epistemic control (0001).

Right, but 2+2=4 is a perfect example of a case where individual understanding becomes a factor.

When we get to the "metaphysics of knowledge" I don't even know if it is appropriate to call knowledge (or at least what is most fully knowledge) a "belief." When we are sure that there are cars in the oncoming traffic lane and that we mustn't drive into them, I think this is not simply a case of sense data + ratio (computational reason) = propositional belief. The reason we find it quite impossible to ignore such knowledge lies, IMHO, more in the co-identity of knower and known in such cases (a union). People find it impossible to believe otherwise because their intellect is "informed" by truth in the senses (sense knowledge), or what we might call the communication of actuality.

Older notions of knowledge also tend to have an ecstatic (ecstasis) and erotic (penetration) element that seems important for moral, aesthetic, and spiritual knowledge that gets bulldozed in the JTB formulation. Likewise for the ethical ideal of "knowing by becoming." But I doubt many analytic philosophers would be swayed to much by those concerns.

That seems like the state putting the rights of one group over another (and also something it does quite broadly and not in any special relation to communitarian life), not a tension between the individual and communities. Slavery involved the state putting the property rights of individuals above the personal rights of individuals; it can happen in that context too.

In general, liberal states have not had too much trouble justifying segregation, colonialism, slavery, or expansion by conquest, which I don't think should be that surprising considering key early liberal theorists argued in favor of them. Israel is not really that different on that front, just behind the curve of change. The move away from these always seemed to me to involve liberalism's sublation of their socialist and nationalist opponents. At least in the US case, federal pressure to end segregation was motivated specifically on those grounds, and nationalism seemed to be a major driver of decolonization.

Edit: And note, liberalism has not fully outgrown this sort of justification of slavery. In some cases, globalization has led to conditions that might justifiably be called "wage slavery" (and it's also played a determinant role in fact that there are more slaves today than at any point in history). Sometimes, apologists do absolutely repudiate these effects, but it's not uncommon to see them minimize them or even to advocate for them as necessary positive steps in economic development in terms that very much recall Locke's admonition that savages be "liberated from indolence."

Yes, that's a very good point. I think that's something like what Robert Wallace would say of his version of Hegel.

It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control.

He has a point to some extent, but this misses the (now much more well-known) fact that dynamic systems can also hit tipping points and totally break down. Also, even if there is "equilibrium in the long run," as Keynes said, "in the long run we're all dead."

Anyhow, to the OP, of course there is great hypocrisy in corporate America (and often vis-á-vis where politicians and corporate interests intersect). Unfortunately, the system is sort of set up almost to ensure that.

I've read a few interviews with Big Tech CEOs on their path from 2008-2012 Obama supporters to 2024 Trump cheerleaders. Their grievance was that the new hires coming out of elite universities (which is where Big Tech hires) after the Great Recession (and Great Awokening) were actively hostile to their companies. The work climate became hostile. At the same time, the political climate became hostile. They are of course, real people and were (I think quite plausibly) really left leaning, but they were also operating in a system of furious competition where "responsibility" means watching short term profits and share prices. At the same time, they were watching their own "tribe" turn them into public enemies even as everything they had learned about corporate ethics in their professional training urged action in another direction.

There was a polemical documentary on how corporations meet the psychiatric definition of "psychopath" many years back, e.g., a tendency towards short term thinking and a total disregard for the welfare of others. It verged on propaganda, but there is a grain of truth there. The system is set up in such a way that it undermines principled leadership and promotes hypocrisy, and the pressure cooker education elites tend to receive, which focuses so heavily on "success" and method just feeds into this.

Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs.

Obviously, the target here is Marxism, but it's interesting here to considered Adorno's differences with Hegel and how they might spring from early understandings of "praxis" in terms of philosophical/contemplative exercises and "philosophy as a way of life." At least, if we take more theological treatments of Hegel, or Magee's "Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition" (to be fair, we should take that one with a grain of salt, but it's interesting) seriously, this could be one of the contributing factors in the dominance of necessity and identity (through the "true infinite").

There is an interesting "sociology of philosophy" question of how praxis across epochs affects an understanding of the "intelligible" and "identity," including Adorno's particular view of philosophical experience pace the German idealists.

I am a big fan of a later of the Frankfurt's thinkers, Axel Honneth, so I will try to follow along. I also share Adorno's dismay for the tendency in Hegel to wash out particularly and for his thought to serve as an apologia for everything in "providential history," although I'm more amenable to "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual" of "properly understood."I am not sure if critiques on this front are always fair to the best parts of Hegel, but they certainly seem to be fair critiques of parts he included in his texts—his worse inclinations perhaps (sort of akin the charge of Spinozist pantheism, which he always vehemently denied, but which there is plenty of evidence for).

Hegel, on of Adorno's big sources, is very much an Aristotlian in key ways, and I think it's worth noting that Adorno's focus on non-identity really does seem to make him a "materialist" in the Aristotlian sense, since it is matter which is the principle of unintelligibility and potency in things (although he cannot embrace the Aristotlian idea of matter as essentially nothing [what sheer being reveals itself to be in the Logic!] at the limit—in some ways then non-identity might retain more of the Kantian noumenal).

I am hoping Adorno might help me with a critique of Hegel. I have begun to suspect that, because he starts without the true (good) infinite already actual it not only fails to actually be a true infinite, but radically destabilizes his whole outlook, opening it up to this sort of critique. This aspect of Hegel is essentially an inversion of the past philosophy he borrows from. There, the "emanations" of the Absolute are "lower" and "after," and I think the inversion might be broken and also leads towards the totalitarian providential aspects Adorno is famous for critiquing.

BTW, is Marjorie Taylor Green right and they force fifth graders to read this!?!?

↪J Secular culture provides a framework within which you can follow any religion or none. But the proselytizing liberalism that Timothy is referring to goes a step further in saying that none is better than any.

I think that's a fair way to frame it. But I would put it that: "you're free to practice any religion you want, so long as you practice it as an individual." Bans on public religious observance or clothing point in this direction for instance. This is very different from earlier forms of liberalism in the US, where religion was a prominent part of public life, and the prohibition on religion was rather than no one be coerced into it, and that the state play no role in supporting any particular faith.

It's a significant political issue. Pew just released a new study for Easter and it found that a full half of Americans are greatly concerned with the decline of religion in public life. Pace common stereotypes, this sentiment is not specific to White, rural Evangelicals (not that large of a population anyhow), but includes a majority of Hispanics as well. It's a difficult and complex issue, but I don't think I would be misrepresenting things to say that the opinion of aggressively secular folks on this issue tends to be: "so much the worse for the majority on this issue." Which is certainly a defensible position. My point would merely be that this is not neutral vis-á-vis conceptions of liberty and "democracy." It tends to put the individual above the community, and I think it's fair to say that there is a general hostility towards religion as a constraint on individual liberty precisely because it is communitarian and, even more so, because pretty much all world religions reject the liberal voluntarist conception of liberty.

Communitarian projects are famously difficult to operate in liberal legal systems as well, since the idea is generally that assets must ultimately lie with some individual (or corporate officers). I think it's interesting to note that a great many intentional communities and communes have been created based on more secular and liberal understandings of liberty and community, and the particular challenges they've faced. In general, they have collapsed quite quickly.

The kibbutz has been a particularly robust example though, and it's worth noting there that (aside from being grounded more in socialist thought), they have had the benefit of a friendly legal system that has enabled them, rather than one that is broadly hostile to their project.

You make this sound like it’s a bad thing. State and market influences are a reflection of and response to where the community decides it wants to make use of the state and the market.

Such a sentiment could be used to justify practically anything though, right? For instance, the people picked Trump, and they picked him despite his obviously extreme authoritarian tendencies and lack of respect for the rule of law. They picked pill mill doctors and opiates. They picked mass incarceration as a solution to opiates (and desegregation). "The market has spoken."


Yet if it was true that state action reflects community preferences, how exactly do you explain simultaneous rioting in most urban centers over the infamies of American police in 2020? Has the "market and people" spoken here? And is it obvious that if "the market (people) want it," it's a good thing? Have the American people also spoken in favor of the private health insurance system?

My mother expected to rely on the community in her decline. Specifically, she assumed she would move in with one of my brothers and their families. But that was no-go. Both of my sisters-in-law refused to allow that. It was a matter of a generational change in attitude toward the responsibility of grown children for aging family members. I don’t know anyone in my age group who expects or wants to be taken care of by a family member when they become unable to care for themselves. Perhaps we’re not as ethically enlightened as you are.

Yes, its less of an expectation. However, people of later generations do still definitely expect that extremely underfunded welfare states will continue to pay their extremely expensive benefits in old age though, which will require dramatic reductions in future investment and young people (young people who in the West will become majority minority even as they will be forced to pay for a much wealthier majority European elderly population who has also become habituated to unsustainable levels of consumption). Aside from the sustainability issues and political stability issues this brings with it, the point is that the liberal individual isn't actually some atomized super human shedding their need for community, they just force the state to force others to provide them what they need to be atomized individuals in a market context.

And if some people in their nation want to choose a more communitarian system? "Too bad, they still must pay for us to have the liberal system first and can use what they have left over," has been the general liberal solution.

This is why the left/right tension within liberalism tends to be about the state doing more or less to help people be atomized individuals by taking some people's property to enable others to be more atomized.

Anyhow, I would think the more obvious failure of liberalism on the topic of elder care lies more in creating a culture where people, particularly women, are derided and attacked, represented as dupes, etc. for supporting their families (generally in market terms of "unpaid labor"), rather than individual choices. The fact is, there is a stigma in directly the opposite direction. You're supposed to "lean in" to career and consumption.

As to the ‘proselytizing’ nature of liberalism, it’s not as though Timothy isnt proselytizing from his pulpit when he attacks liberalism

Whenever you complain about "Platonic" metaphysics and routinely suggest postmodern ones, is this not proselytizing? What makes it different? It seems the only difference here is that we are in disagreement about how great liberalism is. If offering a critique at all "proselytizing?"

Of course I think there is something wrong at the core of liberalism. I said it's vision on human liberty is extremely myopic. Can one not disagree with liberalism's voluntarist vision of freedom?

Globalization lifted many more people out of poverty worldwide that it put into poverty. mEven without offshoring, automation alone would have decimated the industrial heartland. This wasn’t strictly a failure of liberalism

What's the comparison case here? If all economic growth stops in 1980 and neo-liberalism gets to claim responsibility for everything after, perhaps this is true. It seems far from obvious that neo-liberalism was the only, or best way to pursue this growth.

We actually have examples of extremely poor, (sometimes war torn) nations becoming developed nations since WWII in Korea, Finland, Iceland, etc. They did not follow the standard globalization play book of "become the sweatshop of the West." Nor did China, since the CCP continually intervened to push back on the forces of globalization in ways smaller states could not. There are strong arguments that, at least in many states, globalization, as pursued, has actually retarded economic and political development. And this is of course ignoring the ecological toll about to come due in the second half of the century (liberalism's focus on short term gains and essentially religious faith in "progress" to fix any apparent disasters we are subjecting future generations to).

I think the bolded part is demonstrably false, at least in its hyperbolic terms (i.e., "devastated"), but I wouldn't fault you for thinking this is true because people who certainly know better have tended to put out extremely disingenuous narratives on this front. The common thing to do is to simply look at US capital substitution rates in industry that has stayed in the US and extrapolate from there about what would have happened had other industry stayed. This is wholly inappropriate though, since the type of industry that is worth keeping in-market has been precisely that industry that is most cost-effective to automate (because then you aren't shipping technicians and expensive capital abroad just to ship the product back). There do not exist, contrary to popular opinion, magical machines that can just spit out most products. The factories that moved to abroad were specifically for those products that could most benefit from avoiding labor expenses.

This also ignores that sectoral shift is far less damaging when it happens slowly or that neo-liberal policy also allowed a massive influx of immigration to further drive down wages paired with the shock of off-shoring. New immigration was unpopular and couldn't be passed as a law, so they just stopped enforcing the rule of law on this issue, leading to a substantial share of the population lacking legal status so that they could also serve as a more easily exploitable underclass. The results of globalization and migration absolutely hammered unions, which is why unionization collapsed instead of spreading into the service sector.

None of my preferred philosophical touchstones accept the concept of the solipsistically autonomous individual. On the contrary, they see the self a more radically intertwined with and inseparable from the normative attributes of the larger society than you do. So my objections to your arguments are not about choosing the individual over the community, but rejecting your model of how the self and the social relate to each other, and especially your need for a transcendent ground for community ethics.

I don't really need a "transcendent" ground for these critiques. I just need to reject liberalism's voluntarism, the idea that liberty is "doing what you currently desire."

I do find your opinions interesting though, because you're statements, particularly on a permanent underclass, have often reminded me a lot of Charles Murray, but obviously the underlying philosophical assumptions are quite different. The judgements on the fate of the underclass seem very much in the vein that celebrates to "exceptional individual" one finds in liberal theorist like Mill (On the topic of Mill, he, like Locke, is another liberal who justified enslaving people who were not economically productive enough to liberate them from low consumption).

Anyhow, I don't see how one could possibly separate equality from reflexive freedom, or freedom as self-governance. For instance, you cannot have a equal society with a recalcitrant, morally bankrupt leadership class. They will tend to destroy what they rule over, in part because they are unhappy. Donald Trump, for instance, strikes me as a man ruled over by his passions and appetites, a vice addled man who cannot even follow through on the (very few) good intuitions he has because of a lack of self-discipline.

It's your argument, but that's not how I read it. The argument in a nutshell appears to be that genocidal infanticide would for Singer be morally neutral,

It's easy to dismiss an argument if you refuse to read it and just dishonestly misrepresent it over and over I suppose. I assume your reading comprehension isn't quite this poor and you are just being disingenuous at this point.

It's not that secular reason "has no use" for teleology or eschatology, it's more that to introduce either dimension into a liberal polity is to immediately desecularize the neutral normative constraints in favor of some religious tradition's view.

Do you mean specifically religious teleology or just teleology in general? There is definitely a thread in modern thought that declares all teleology to be essentially just superstition, and sometimes this thread asserts itself pretty aggressively (e.g. the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis "controversy"). However, extended into the political sphere this would seem to me to be a quite totalizing vision of secularism. I don't think teleology is necessarily, or even primarily religious. I don't even think teleology in the ethical sphere is distinctly religious; a great deal of thought would seem to be precluded under "secularism" by that standard.

I think we could acknowledge that losing one's temper, and other semi-involuntary acts, are not covered by the thesis "we always choose what we like," on the grounds that they aren't really choices.

But they cannot be total non-choices, right? Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to punish people for most assault cases where they lost their temper or to blame people for adultery if they were compelled by strong urges, etc. We'd be powerless against our vices and baser impulses if they could deprive us of choice.

Now, when a man acts on impulse and throws a punch in rage, or commits adultery when in the throes of lust, we normally say something like what you said. Such acts are "semi-involuntary." And we say this not because one appetite or passion is pitted against another. If this was the case, then we would also say that a man not cheating on his wife was also "semi-involuntary" if his lust is in conflict with his desire to do the right thing. Likewise, we don't say "my not punching my boss in the face for insulting me was semi-involuntary because my anger conflicted with what I thought was best."

Instead, we tend to speak of a suppression of choice when some passion or appetite overwhelms our self-reflective grasp of what is best. And this is precisely why it doesn't make sense to collapse the rational and lower appetites into one hodgepodge stew, Nietzsche's "congress of souls. And that is precisely how I'd answer your question re rational action.

Of course, our desire for "goodness as such" is always being subverted by competing impulses and desires, lack of cognitive resources, and ignorance, and that's why the development of rational freedom and self-governance is aspirational and something that must be cultivated.

You sound like David Brooks.

Brooks sometimes makes good points, particularly on the way our "meritocracy" has all sorts of negative consequences, while failing to live up to its name.

A do-it-yourself culture of intentional community only works for those who are capable of a more complex and dynamic style of interaction with the world. I believe more and more people have evolved psychologically in that direction, so for them the shedding of the old bonds of social, religious and institutional obligation is a choice rather than an imposition.

Yes, this is the "subtraction narrative" I mentioned above, and perhaps an example of the transparency issue. Liberalism is just "what happens when you remove the old forms of constraint."

Except it isn't. The atomized liberal consumer doesn't cease needing what they previously needed community to provide them, new (often mandatory) voluntarist versions of this same infrastructure need to be created, resulting in the hyperbolic growth of the state and market influence spreading into every area of life.

For instance, without community, there is no one to care for the injured or sick. People are left isolated and without resources after disasters. Older citizens cannot expect to rely on community in their decline. People cannot rely on support or intermediary negotiators in conflicts. Markets must expand to perform all these functions, but markets need regulation. Hence a gigantic (and phenomenally expensive) administrative state must take on all these roles to aid the liberal individual in attaining their individuality. The police and carceral state is the most visceral example, but also massive regulated (and often mandatory) insurance markets, etc. These are not optional (nor are laws banning community expressions or clothing that expressed cultural as opposed to personal identity so as to make the lived environment more conducive to the new individualism).

Indeed, this expansion of the state and markets comes with their own non-voluntary constraints in the form of regulation and taxation. Since liberalism and endless faith in "technology and innovation," growth, and "progress" prevail, there is a focus on the short term. Hence adequate taxes tend not to actually be raised in liberal welfare states, leading to huge accumulations of debt for operating expenses (as well as harrowing ecological debts for future generations to confront).

Aside from this, the reliance on markets to fulfill the former functions of community also has the effect of making the effects of economic inequality more global and all-encompassing. This was made particularly obvious during the pandemic, as the wealthy could comfortably "shelter in place," relying on a legion of anonymous low wage workers to bear the supposed risks for them.

At any rate, we might also ask: "freedom for who?" Industrializing education and care of the elderly certainly freed up prime aged adults from responsibilities, but not in ways that seem to be preferred by those whose care was being outsourced for greater economies of scale. Plus, if liberty requires self-governance, than the liberal education might seem to broadly fail on those grounds as well.

For others who aren’t prepared to thrive in such a world, it has been a damaging change.

You act like this is a minor issue. As far as I can see, it's one that dominates electoral politics and is tearing apart the liberal order in the world's economy and greatest military power. That's not an isolated small scale issue, it's quite possibly the begining of the historical failure of liberalism.

Plus, it presupposes the liberal notion of freedom as: "freedom to do as one currently pleases."

The idea of those being dependent on community not having evolved, or not being "prepared to thrive," does recall a quote though.

Notably, the [marginalized] groups that [liberal reformers] recognize are all defined by biology. In liberal theory, where our “nature” means our bodies, these are “natural” groups opposed to “artificial” bonds like communities of work and culture. This does not mean that liberalism values these “natural” groups. Quite the contrary: since liberal political society reflects the effort to overcome or master nature, liberalism argues that “merely natural” differences ought not to be held against us. We ought not to be held back by qualities we did not choose and that do not reflect our individual efforts and abilities.

[Reformers] recognize women, racial minorities, and the young only in order to free individuals from “suspect classifications.” Class and culture are different. People are part of ethnic communities or the working class because they chose not to pursue individual success and assimilation into the dominant, middle-class culture, or because they were unable to succeed. Liberal theory values individuals who go their own way, and by the same token, it esteems those who succeed in that quest more highly than individuals who do not. Ethnicity, [religion], and class, consequently, are marks of shame in liberal theory, and whatever discrimination people suffer is, in some sense, their “own fault.” We may feel compassion for the failures, but they have no just cause for equal representation.

Wilson Cary McWilliams - Politics

Or as James Stimson put it just a few years ago

"When we observe the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are observing not the effect of decline of the working class, we are observing a highly selected group of people who faced economic adversity and chose to stay at home and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere. . . . Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline.”

But this of course radically ignores the ways in which massive state intervention and diplomatic efforts were made to secure the vast (and helpfully unregulated and desperate) labor pool of the developing world so as move the economic engines of now "distressed areas" across oceans at great ecological cost to future generations in order to secure greater profit margins and lower prices in the short term (and so higher consumption), with both profits and consumption gains skewing heavily to elites. Globalization isn't an accident though, it's occured with heavy state intervention according to an explicit ideology.

Agreed. Plus, it also tends to generate an inappropriate tautology where "whatever one does" is "what gives one the most positive sentiment/pleasure." This will tend to exclude the very apparent phenomena of "weakness of will," or "losing one's temper," etc. We cannot understand St. Paul in Romans 7 when he says: "I do the very thing that I hate," because it would seem that he must love what he does more than he hates it in virtue of the fact that he has chosen to do it. Part of the problem here stems from the collapse of the sensible and rational appetites, although there are some ways to fix it without invoking this distinction.

BTW, since your familiar with Taylor, I would say part of the difficulty is that liberalism, like secularism, tends to tell "subtraction narratives," about itself. On these accounts, "liberalism is just what you get when the oppressive institutions of the past are dismantled." In turn, this tends to give a sense of inevitably to the negative aspects of liberalism, while foreclosing on alternatives as necessarily entailing a return to an authoritarian past.

Critics recognize the problems, Fukuyama is a huge cheerleader of liberalism (and great analyst), but also identifies key fault lines. But he sees this as the inevitable consequences of economic growth/prosperity and freedom from coercive institutions. I think this misses the way contemporary liberalism/globalization is very much a positive project. As Deneen says, the "inevitably narrative" tends to suggest that the only solution to liberalism is "more liberalism," either more individual economic liberty for the right, or a larger welfare/administrative state for the left. It also obscures how technology, growth, international institutions, and the state are positively shaped with liberalism's assumptions in mind and serve to create the very anthropology it assumes.

Not that clearly. It suggests the unlikely situation where the parents are OK with having their infants killed. We might pass such circumstances over.

It's literally the main substance of the post and the summary you put in to the AI.

Supposing we agree with Singer, does it then follow that war crimes that kill children below a certain age threshold should be considered on par (or in fact less aggregious) vis-á-vis those that kill livestock? To press the point, if a genocidal state decides to enforce a genocide solely by killing newborn infants born to some group, is this naught but a mass violation of "property rights," as it would be if they were to instead kill livestock and pets?

I would think not, right? Parent's attachment to newborns or unborn children is often far greater than it is for pets, let alone livestock. More to the point, destroying people's children is very much "genocide" in a strong sense. It is destroying their future.

The problem is articulating this from the point of view that justifies infanticide on Singer's grounds. For, if we claim that parents care more about their infants than most people care about their pets, a critic can simply say: "only perhaps on average." Afterall, there might be people who willingly practice infanticide with their own children but have beloved pets. Some people allow dangerous pets to maim or kill their infants precisely because of this sort of prioritization (plus wishful thinking). So, it seems all we are appealing to is "average sentiment."

I clarified this as well. You haven't responded to it at all, but instead seem to have invented your own post to respond to that says "Singer cannot say killing infants is bad and if we accept his point of view genocide will follow!" which is, of course, nowhere in the post. Other commentators seemed to grasp this at least. Does Singer have something else to appeal to instead of average sentiment in his work? That's all you have pointed to. I'm not sure, I was just following out the basics.


The post you responded to:

If the only thing that's different about killing infants is the sentiment of those affected, and we weigh sentiment against sentiment as we would in other cases, that seems problematic. To give a stark example, this would mean that it is a worse crime for someone to shoot someone else's beloved dog for barking and annoying them than it would be for them to strangle a newborn to death for annoying them with their crying if the father is uninterested in the child and the mother is ambivalent about being a mother.

This, at the very least, violates moral intuitions and current law across the world. Likewise, it implies that it might be worse for soldiers to accidentally blow up a kennel than a nursery just in case the dog owners really loved their "fur babies," whereas the parents of the infants in the nursery saw them as a burden. It would also imply that war crimes that kill infants in countries where parents are more likely to see new children as a burden are less severe on average. But parental ambivalence and seeing infants as primarily a "burden" is significantly more common in the developing world due to there being fewer resources, less access to family planning, and larger existing families. Yet this would imply that it's worse to accidentally blow up babies in Vermont or Quebec on average than in Afghanistan or Iraq, or worse in poorer neighborhoods than in wealthy ones, because parental ambivalence tracks with wealth.

If these conclusions are wrong (they seem abhorrent) then the ethical value of infants is not reducible to the sentiment of parents and other "interested parties," but must be secured by something greater.

One option open to Singer is to claim that parent's have a personal right to have and raise children. This right might not be absolute, but it would be much stronger than the sentiment we associate with killing beloved pets. But then Singer needs to explain why families (and communities) have a particularly strong rights vis-á-vis their children as opposed to their pets. The obvious reason is "because children become "people" in Singer's terms, while dogs never will, and because they are the living continuation of cultures and communities," yet this response would simply spotlight how Singer's view fails to take account of these factors when declaring the newborn to be of "less value."

The slippery slope is implicit in your post.

lol, I guess if you read what you want to see.

The asymmetry is that Islamic culture, which you reference, is itself not liberal in outlook, with sometimes dire consequences for human rights

Quite so. But I don't think the options are:

A. Accept and endorse liberalism wholeheartedly and ignore its tendency to erode all local cultural norms and sense of community; or

B. Embrace Islam or excuse the excesses of political Islam (i.e., theocracy).

There is a via media between theocratic "anti-blasphemy laws" and making public community prayer illegal because it blocks traffic, but allowing collective individual consumption and "night life" drunkenness to regularly flood the streets and block traffic or commerce at the same time (and it seems to be that the crucial difference is that the latter is individuals engaged in commerce and consumption as opposed to a community). Likewise, you can wear whatever consumable pop culture outfit you want, be it goth or punk, but don't let it be a symbol of cultural rootedness. A and B represent something like the absolutizing of the community and the individual respectively. This is itself a dialectic of liberalism and theocracy, which tend to pit the two against each other rather than recognizing the relationship as organic and constitutive.

The basic problem is that whilst liberalism allows for the diversity of opinions, it is then required to accommodate cultures which prohibit diversity. I don’t know if there’s a way to square that circle

That seems like one particularly acute problem to me, related to a certain sort of group: Neo-Nazis, radical Islam, etc. But I think liberalism's general tendency to dismantle all sources of tradition, norms, and culture goes much further than this. It tends towards leaving only three actors: the individual, the market, and the state.

At least here in the US, a new trend is "going dark" or wholly "cutting off" one's nuclear and extended family, or even one's own children in order to "live one's best life," and "live your truth." Freedom from "baggage." So too, the dramatic rise in children raised by separated parents is often justified (justified because it is fairly obviously bad for children) in terms of parental liberty. In terms of statistics, participation in civic (as well as religious) organization and precipitous declines in the number of social functions people attend, or the number times per month they say they see friends is a problem across the developed liberal states. People report loneliness as a major impact on their happiness at fairly ubiquitous rates, and we do have data to see that this is an increasing trend.

There is also this new phenomena where people polled now feel more in common with foreigners who share their broad political outlook (left or right) than their fellow citizens, people of the same religion and sect, people from the same region, people of the same descent, etc. We might think there is something positive in the dissolution of the power some of these categories (e.g. ethnicity), and still be troubled that an American conservative cares more for an Australian conservative than a liberal in their own town, or vice versa.

I don't see this trend as being positive, nor unrelated to liberalism's relentless drive towards a particular vision of individualism and liberty, or "the inevitable result of progress and technology." First, because technology and infrastructure is literally designed with such a conception of liberty in mind (designed to make us lonely). Loneliness is one of the first things we spend money on, isolated single-generation (often single-parent) homes, removing the need for roommates, close neighbors, etc.

Anyhow, I think the appeal to "theocracy" as the obvious possible alternative to liberalism represents a failure of imagination, perhaps even a sign of liberalism's transparency. The idea seems to be that if one thinks the anthropology underlying liberal individualism is wrong, the only option is a return to the Middle Ages. But why not a return to the Greek polis with a worthy liberal corrective to expand citizenship to all adults, or any other number of possible fusions that tamp down on liberalism's tendency towards pernicious individualism, isolation, monoculture (really anti-culture), voluntarism, consumerism, etc., while also retaining its positive aspects? Liberalism is, after all, itself such a fusion.

Would you describe the spread of a scientific theory or a philosophical worldview in these terms?

Maybe to some extent, but not to the same degree. Science polices itself to some extent. Pseudoscience is called out. People decry cigarette company funded studies on lung disease, or Big Oil smokescreen research on climate change. However, one cannot tell a complete history of the 20th century without copious reference to "right wing death squads." I have never heard of a "scientific death squad," or "science backed coups and assassinations."

Did it ever occur to you that human beings might have decided through processes of reasoning that liberalism actually made sense as way to guide their interactions with others?

Sure. Some aspects of liberalism make sense and are beneficial. That seems obvious enough. And a lot of people have obviously been convinced by liberalism's basic outlook. But you could say the same exact thing about communism and fascism. The Nazis didn't need to coerce or bribe Ford into advocating for fascism in the US for instance.




The people needed to be liberated from the constraints of the past and illiberal institutions, the Church being a prime target, but also local custom. There was a similar move in the Spanish Civil War, or in other places.

If church and liberal state can coexist so well today it's because the former has atrophied so much that it no longer shapes public life and culture. For instance, only a very few religious holidays/festivals are recognized anymore, and they have been pretty well secularized and made appropriate for a monoculture. That's a far cry from there being holidays every other week or so, and regular corporate events that bound up most of the population in collective action.

We have a "multiculturalism" that is acceptable to the liberal order because it is really "monoculturalism." You can still get a McRib during Ramadan in "Muslim towns," and you won't have to worry about your shopping getting interrupted by a call to prayer, or being confused by radically different forms of life. Everywhere becomes everywhere else. There are obvious benefits to this, and obvious downsides. In terms of downsides, it's pretty difficult to build any depth of culture around shared common events in common spaces when it is only acceptable to "disrupt the right to commerce" a few times a year, and the expectation is that stores will always be open (and thus people always working).

Liberalism's aversion to this can be seen in Europe where a critical mass of Muslims exists in urban areas, and they do sometimes attempt to engage in such communal rhythms, e.g. urban roads might be blocked for prayer, impeding the steady flow of commerce, which seemed to drive the French in particular up the wall, leading them to make it a crime, the state stepping in to make sure the individuals' economic activity is not disrupted by the community. You can wear any consumable pop-culture items you want to showcase individual identity, but it becomes illegal to wear clothing showcasing cultural identity.

Particularly in America, the residential geography itself is a sort of "buffering." It'd be hard to have communal events in many American municipalities because they've been designed so that it's impossible to walk anywhere.

Put simply, the parents of those infants would be a bit upset at the genocide, and their discomposure is morally relevant.

Yes, the OP mentions that. The problem is that the sentiment of parents, etc. is the only thing that is being violated here; killing infants becomes a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind.

Yet the state often weighs the sentiment of the few against the many, and will do things that absolutely devastated the few to benefit the many, so long as certain lines are not crossed (e.g. a violation of personal rights, something Singer denies for infants). For instance, the state might put a bunch of beloved animals down if they are enough of a nuance to neighbors. After a hurricane, if a bunch of needy animals are inconvenient, they might also be put down. Etc.

If the only thing that's different about killing infants is the sentiment of those affected, and we weigh sentiment against sentiment as we would in other cases, that seems problematic. To give a stark example, this would mean that it is a worse crime for someone to shoot someone else's beloved dog for barking and annoying them than it would be for them to strangle a newborn to death for annoying them with their crying if the father is uninterested in the child and the mother is ambivalent about being a mother.


The AI is like most AI, just slapping words together. It hallucinates an appeal to a slippery slope where there is none. It takes up the issue of personhood, which is tangential, etc.

Excellent summary, you did it better than I.

I think such an argument has force if one accepts Moorean arguments. Many hold (B) with such certainty that one could argue it outweighs the plausibility of Singer's theoretical case. I'm not sure if this is exactly how you meant for your argument to be taken. Please correct me if it is incorrect.

Nope, perfect. Before I start, I'm curious since you seem knowledgeable about this:

Singer further justifies this by noting that we can have desires without them being at the front of our mind (Ibid.). I might want to buy a house, but I will only have this desire at the front of my mind when reminded of it in some way. Yet, according to Singer, I still possess that desire while unaware of it. It does not apply to a being if that being has never had a concept of having a continued existence, as Singer argues is the case for, for instance, a fetus.

What does Singer have to say about the infant who is deprived of the capacity to ever develop such desires through neglect and deprivation? No doubt, he still could claim it is wrong, but it would seem initially that he cannot call it any worse than animal abuse (indeed, based on his phrasing, it would be less worthy of opprobrium than mistreating a dog or pig, just so long as the infant's development is so retarded that such desires cannot emerge). Yet again, this violates our intuition. It seems fairly obvious that horribly abusing a child so as to massively retard their development is a particularly heinous crime, going well beyond the infamies of modern farming techniques (even if we happen to have a fairly strong inclination towards animal rights).

Bias. Singer would likely give debunking explanations and counter-examples for the intuitions that support (B). (B) is, in this view, without rational support. Rather, it is due to cultural and evolutionary influences that should not be trusted.

Yes, although I think this will be difficult because of the scale of what killing all of a people's infants entails. The result is extinction, the total erasure of that people. It's what the Nazi's attempted with the "Final Solution," just using slightly modified means. Hence, since "Nazi" is pretty much the closest thing we have in the modern era to "Satanic" in the old, we are probably justified in claiming that this extraordinary debunking claim requires extraordinary evidence. Since wholesale extermination through these means eradicates a people, Singer would need to show that these cultural and evolutionary sources of value are essentially wholly unworthy of consideration, not just suspect.

I will admit, I was thinking of bias and emotional appeal a bit here. Given the climate on campuses, I think an argument that plausibly leads to the conclusion: "Israel can exterminate the Palestinians without an almost maximal transgression of moral norms so long as they do it by only killing newborns" is going to be a total non-starter (and I mean, as well it should).

Extrinsic potential. As a utilitarian, Singer does value potential states of affairs. Preventing persons from coming into existence on a large scale as with genocide would not maximize utility. The reason why infanticide and abortion are sometimes justified fits this view. A parent may choose to delay bringing a person about via abortion or infanticide, but they are not lowering the amount of persons that would exist. In cases of genocide, this is different, and this is a relevant difference from livestock most of the time.

That's a fair point, and perhaps why the example of "loose rules of engagement that lead to unnecessary infant deaths" is a better one, although not as emotionally salient. I still think there is still plenty of reason to think accidentally and recklessly mortaring someone's horse is a lot different from mortaring their daughter.

Emphasis. The comparison with livestock seems worse when one does not consider Singer's wider view that the treatment of non-human animals should be significantly improved. Even if Singer argues for the lower moral status of infants, which is highly counter-intuitive, it should not be taken as being meant to be a comparison to our current treatment of non-human animals which Singer vehemently opposes.

Fair point, although in the context of war crimes this might matter less. Either civilian assets are intentionally being targeted (a war crime, but certainly one with degrees), or they are "collateral damage" or the result of loose rules of engagement. So, regardless of how animals are treated, it still seems that firing a rocket at a farm might be quite different from firing one at a nursery.

But, yes, human society can survive and has survived large scale infanticide.

A society cannot survive an all encompassing campaign of infanticide as genocide though.

But the scale of genocide probably obfuscates things. Just consider something like this: US forces, thinking they are striking a terrorist meeting fire a missile at a wedding party. This has happened in the past. The missile doesn't injure any adults significantly, but kills four infants. On Singer's logic, nothing more untoward has happened here than if they mistakenly targeted a farm and killed four pigs, except that people might be more attached to their infants than their pigs. But that people might be extremely attached to their animals generally doesn't make failure to try to avoid animal casualties a war crime, hence the same might be thought to apply here.

That is, an artillery strike against a target is not justified if its near a grade school, but would be more justifiable if it was near a nursery.

I do not suppose for even a second that Singer was advocating child murder.

That's probably the thing he is most famous for, justifying "non-voluntary euthanasia" in a number of contexts, including killing infants and the disabled on the similar grounds to those offered for early term elective abortion."And I continue to think there’s no real ethical difference between bringing about a child’s death by turning off life support than by giving the child a lethal injection.” .

Or another course is to find small truth and blow it up out of proportion - same exercise, same results. An example is ready to hand:

I don't think this is at all unfair to Singer's premise, nor unfair to adopt the premise to see where it leads. Based on his rationale for denying that infanticide is wrong (see OP), a child that is abused such that they do not develop self-awareness at least surpassing a pig can be killed without issue. Nor can halting their development be wrong, since there is no personhood to violate.

If, as you say, " all rights to life are absolutely grounded in being," and not "becoming," and we pair this with Singer's premise, how does it not follow that, so long as you deprive a child of development, you cannot be doing something wrong? Or is the complaint about following things to their logical conclusion in general? Accepting "all rights to life are absolutely grounded in being" as a premise is not stretching a small truth into a large one, absolutely means "absolutely."

It is problematic for Singer's initial premise to deny potentiality. That's the point. It leads to seemingly abhorrent conclusions. You can find absurdity in the other direction of course. Every time people fail to reproduce they could be accused of depriving "potential people" of life. But I think this just demonstrates the need for a middle ground grounded in a more robust metaphysics.

Why don't you explain what you think makes a choice "rational?" Apparently it's something like "informed consent and discursive reasoning + some level of 'good judgement.'" What is the criteria for the last part? "You know it when you see it?"

Barring early death, smoking will almost invariably cause lung disease to some degree and dental disease. I have never seen a lifetime smoker with good teeth (barring veneers). Maybe extreme outliers exist, but to "rationally choose to smoke," is pretty much to choose lung and dental disease on account of some good impulse. Why is destroying your hand in pursuit of irrational pleasure "irrational" and obvious "bad judgement," but destroying your lungs in pursuit of irrational pleasure fully "rational?"

Here is the thing, I think someone could rationally justify tobacco use. Soldiers often use smokeless tobacco to stay awake. Keeping awake on watch, or keeping focus as you pour over signals intelligence might very well be justifiable as "truly good," but then it isn't justified as: "I have this irrational sensible appetite and have thought long and hard about the costs of indulging it and decided to indulge it as irrational, to simply order some sensible appetites against others" Likewise, someone with alien limb syndrome might very well see amputation as truly better, because the irrational sensation of foreigness distracts them from truly choiceworthy ends. But this isn't the same as lopping off a limb in a judgement that ultimately bottoms out in impulse.

Second, I'd disagree that statements like:

"There is no fact of the matter as to whether or not it is good (or good for children) to torture and rape them. All we an say is "boo-hoo" and "hoorah: to such acts," are not contrary to "good judgement."

To deny that anything is truly better or worse than anything else is to deny that truth is truly preferable to falsify, good argument to bad argument, good faith to bad faith. It is to say that these are always only "good" as conditioned to some end, such that, depending on our impulses, they might not always be good. Sometimes falsity is better than truth, it just depends on what suits us at the moment.

This isn't "rationality" except by some extremely deflated definition. It's quite literally misology, the ruin of reason.

In some of the strictest 'free-will' conceptions of hell, the unending suffering isn't due to the fact that the will becomes irremediably fixed. The claim is that sinners in hell will continue forever to confirm their choices, even if they are invited in Paradise.

Yes, that's true. That's C.S. Lewis' view in The Great Divorce. The damned are damned just in that they spread out into ever greater isolation and multiplicity according to their own free choices. They can start the painful pilgrimage to Paradise whenever they want, it's just that they see no reason to. They are "at home in Hell." They have made themselves thus.

I am not sure how this is supposed to correspond to "every knee bowing," "all praising God," and "God being all in all," though. It rather suggests the eternal survival of sin, and that some knees will never bow and that some lips will never praise. Whereas visions that involve more extrinsic punishment have knees bowing and lips praising, but only through coercion not sincerity. I suppose God might be "all in all" here, but God is beatitude in some and torment in others (sort of what Pope Benedict says). The difficulty here is that this direct contact with God, experienced as torment, seems incapable of improving the sinner. Hence there is this weird thing where contact with a mortal evangelist might reform man right up to the moment of death, but eternal (painful) union with God Himself is insufficient to ever bring about such change.

And yet, if St. Augustine was right when he said that our heart is restless until it rests in God, the movements of heart will continue forever. The damned would experience at least perpetual disappointment and forever will seek to rest their heart. So, if unending hell isn't a punishment of God but the result of a perpetual confirmation of one's own choice of being self-excluded from God, one has to leave at least open the possibility that the damned will at a certain point come to sincerely repent (and God in this doctrine of 'eternal hell' would still accept the repentance due to the fact that damnation is purely the result of the choice of the damned). This would not be strictly 'universalistic' as a scenario but certainly if this is the case there would be reason to hope that nobody is forever beyond hope.

Maybe, although Lewis' vision doesn't seem inconsistent. His damned spread out in space more and more over time, moving further and further from others as they become folded more inwards and become more spiteful towards all others. Hell is in some ways an education in vice (although some do leave it, and all are free to leave it). People sit around moping all day in a world much like ours.

But, even if these people are "eternally moving" the image is of them diffusing into an ever expanding space. If space is always expanding at a rate at least equal to movement, there is no need for eternal movement to necessitate a return to the "center" of the space. To use a mathematical example, I am pretty sure Poincaré's recurrence theorem only holds if the system is closed and not expanding. Of course, the question would be if man's eternal life is actually infinitely expansive in this way. I suppose the counterargument from people like Talbot would be that man cannot drift arbitrarily away from the Good and still retain a rational nature (and thus still be man). They would have to be replaced by some other substance.

So, maybe, disappointment in frustrated desires can't a part of the torment of the damned in this scenario. In any case, if the will is irrevocably fixed, the punishment must be thought as a extrinsical 'deserved' punishment in my opinion.

That seems fair to me, since I have never seen a good argument for why the will must necessarily be fixed in this way.

I mentioned Dante avoiding the problem of repetent sinners earlier because he does have souls in Hell (Limbo) who do seem to have repented and live in "hopelessness" despite this. His ultimate vision is somewhat unclear though, because he ultimately makes appeals to divine justice being unknowable, even to the beatified (a voluntarist problem perhaps), but provocatively includes some Pagans in Purgatory and Paradise.

Is slamming your own hand in a car door over and over until every bone in it is broken "rational?" What if you have a very strong desire to do it, and you explain: "why yes, I know it will hurt, and I know having a mangled hand will be inconvenient, and that physical therapy will be expensive. I have thought of all that through. I have balanced the variables. I am being rational. I still think the joy I would derive from slamming my hand in the door is such that it makes all this worth it."

Per your thoughts on smoking, this is "rationally" slamming your hand in a door until you cripple it. The only difference is that the desired action seems even less intuitively desirable. So long as the person seems to be making "informed consent" then it is "rational," by this standard, to pursue completely irrational desire, even up to the level of maiming oneself. On this view, the person with alien limb syndrome who has their own arm amputated isn't sick, they are just making a rational judgement based on strong desire. But they're desire to have a limb removed cannot be particularly irrational, since all desire is irrational.


I suppose the anti-realist can claim rationality in this extremely deflated sense. That doesn't make randomly crushing your hand rational in the classical sense, and it certainly doesn't make slavishly following "whatever desires I feel really strongly, but in a thoughtful way" self-determining freedom.

At any rate, you haven't responded to the argument at all. You've just said: "no 'rational' means this other, much more deflated thing." Ok, saying we accept that, the anti-realist is still quite incapable of the freedom the realist is pointing towards because they have no coherent way to order or transcend current desire. Nietzsche saw this, and it's why he makes everything simply a battle, the warring "congress of souls" vying for power in each soul.

This highlights a really important point about the divide between realists and anti-realists. Neither side can simply legislate that the other is wrong about ontology. That would take us way outside of ethics. And I'd further claim that, this being so, each can maintain that their stance is reasonable/rational. The rationality -- or lack of it -- is not the problem.

This just seems like: "you must default to the deflated "rationality" of "informed consent" or else you will be guilty of 'metaphysics' and not being polite." But any ethics worth its salt does tie to metaphysics. Chopping philosophy up into sui generis spaces and denying metaphysics its space as first philosophy is often just a way for nominalists, etc. to simply engage in question begging on metaphysics.

"Oh look, we'll start without presupposing anything about metaphysics, and that just so happens to mean doing all of ethics, philosophy of language, etc. as rigid nominalists to avoid presuppositions!" Neat how that works.

So, assuming Singer is right about individual infants, if a genocidal regime only kills infants it isn't genocide because they aren't yet people? E.g., the far right in Israel would be as in the clear declaring: "from now on we should cut the throat of every Gazan infant and eventually the problem will sort itself out," as "we're going to round up and euthanize all the pets in Gaza?"

Note, both could be "justified" on the grounds that Gaza currently lacks the capacity to care for new infants or pets, but are these the same thing? Obviously we could reject Singer's initial claim. My point was that he seems committed to the idea that the hypothetical genocidal state would be doing no more than butchering someone else's pigs here.

Anyhow, ignoring potential cannot be absolute, right? Otherwise locking a child in a room and neglecting them, denying them education or play, etc. would considered acceptable on the grounds that they hadn't yet become what they were being prevented from being.

Children kept from all stimuli end up profoundly disabled. They might even meet Singer's criteria for non-persons in extreme cases (provided they can survive this level of neglect). Would there be "no crime" here in such neglect because the child never actualized their potential to be a person?

It would be easier to accept that all these crimes happened because nobody was teaching virtues in schools, except the only thing new about any of it was the scale. And that scale was a result of technological advancements directly stemming from liberalism's hot economies.

I didn't suggest that changes in education could resolve all of liberalism's ills. I suggested it would be beneficial and that liberalism's anthropology has generally precluded that sort of education (putting it at variance with most of history). It's just one example where ideology affects policy.

Anyhow, cnquest, plunder, slavery, etc. have happened since the dawn of civilization. However, the idea that one would force the conquered people to accept your ideology, philosophy, political structure, and economic structure is (somewhat) unique to evangelical modern ideologies (communism too). The Mongols and Seljuks didn't much care about turning the Arabs into Mongols and Seljuks for instance. Alexander's Greeks didn't attempt to make Persia Greek. Actually, quite often it was the conquers who were assimilated to the culture of the conquered (e.g. in China, in Asia Minor, etc.). The ancient model of empire tended to leave local culture and custom in place, and simply to extract wealth and military service (e.g. Cyrus sending the Jews back to rebuild the Temple). In particular, the concern that one would be "bringing liberty" to those conquered seems uniquely modern, and I think it requires a modern notion of freedom not grounded in the community and reflexive freedom (i.e. the one found in liberalism and communism).

Now, you can find examples of the conquerers forcing their culture, economic, and political system on the conquered in some earlier cases, although it seems to be more the exception than the rule. The most notable example is Rome. But this happens in a model fairly distinct from liberalism, and at any rate it mostly occured in less developed areas of the empire, while the wealthier East got to keep its culture. Christianity, from which liberalism springs, captures something of the modern mode later in the middle ages when it starts to spread by conquest in the Baltics.

In the middle ages for instance, that different states had different constitutions, that you had powerful republics in Italy, elective monarchy in the Commonwealth and Empire, fairly different forms of monarchy in neighboring states, etc. would have seemed like a bizarre source of conflict, let alone warfare I think. I don't recall ever hearing about Italian republics or the Swiss ever trying to force republicanism on their neighbors at least as far as I am aware of. Same with Greek city-states.