Manipulation is just a bad word for influencing; for convincing; for making.

You are making a moral dilemma out of it. You suppose that manipulating someone involves lies or else deception; lies or else deception are bad; the outcome is good. So is it worth lying (deceiving) for a good outcome, or should you not say lies, should you not deceive, and live with a bad outcome.

There are appreoximately 21345 forum threads dealing precisely with that. Making one more when there are tons out there is morally insane Not morally deplorable, or morally commendable, just morally insane.

There are appreoximately 21345 forum threads dealing precisely with that. Making one more when there are tons out there is morally insane Not morally deplorable, or morally commendable, just morally insane. — god must be atheist

Not that I have been very active in these kinds of forums for very long, but I have not yet seen a single active discussion about this precise issue: is manipulation right, when it seems to be for truth even though it stops testing us whether our manipulation is for truth?

Maybe I just haven't gone trough enough threads, but calling this thread morally insane is almost certainly a failure in your judgement.

Almost certainly.

Which is it?

You are promoting a question that is the main thrust behind every moral decision, since Immanuel Kant has walked the Earth. Is the means more important than the outcome, or the other way around?

This is a question that can't be satisfactorily answered in terms of these two polarities.

You are asking the same question, and ask us to help you in deciding it.

Nobody can decide it. For you, you can decide it. From a logical view, nobody can say with authority of reason that manipulating for a good cause is bad or good.

So sorry if you did not know this. I did not mean to insult you. I just figured that everyone on a philosophy forum would have a modicum of knowledge of moral philosophy.

don't misunderstand me, please. This is not a sin or an offence that you did not know. Ignorance is nearly not as bad as stupidity on a philosophy forum. Those who do not know, can be taught and they can learn; the stupid can't

So I wasn't dissing you or your topic, although it certainly looked like it. I just wanted to point out to you that this is an udecidable question, once someone paraphrased it and pared it down to its bare bones.

I started this thread very clearly with very few arguments in one way or another. It is clearly a thread to start a discussion and it clearly is about hearing other peoples perspectives about this issue. If there is no active thread about this, there is no problem starting one whether or not the issue has been talked about for centuries. Such is for most philosophical issues and threads.

You are promoting a question that is the main thrust behind every moral decision, since Immanuel Kant has walked the Earth. Is the means more important than the outcome, or the other way around? — god must be atheist

This thread is not just about whether outcome justifies the means. Maybe you read wrong. In the special case of truth, means also test what is truth, so it is not generally applicable to every "whether outcome justifies the means"-question.

So I wasn't dissing you or your topic, although it certainly looked like it. I just wanted to point out to you that this is an udecidable question, once someone paraphrased it and pared it down to its bare bones. — god must be atheist

Ah, ok... You just claim that the subject is not solvable. Please demonstrate it. Although, my text clearly doesn't try to solve the problem of ethics in this thread - just to start a discussion about influencing people by methods that don't test the veracity of our influence.

You are asking the same question, and ask us to help you in deciding it. — god must be atheist

Yes, I acknowledge that I started this thread to help me in solving this issue... Is there a problem with it?

It is a very interesting question.

Firstly, the actor (the one doing the convincing) should ask himself what his true intention is in convincing the subject (the one being convinced). Many people will try to convince others, not because they believe it is best for the subjects, but because they are trying to mend a personal insecurity. For example, I may try to convince people that the Earth is flat, not because I believe it is in their best interest to believe that, but because the more people I manage to convince of a flat Earth, the more I feel legitimized in my own belief. In this case the actor is merely using the subject as a means to a selfish end.

If the actor does not have the subject's best interests at heart, his actions are unjust.

Secondly, the actor needs to be very certain that he knows what is best for the subject. And this is clearly very tricky. If the actor is successfully convincing a subject, he is exercising power over that subject. With this power comes great responsibility, since changing a subject's view of reality can come with real consequences.

If the actor does not act in accordance with his subject's best interests, his actions are unjust.

Thirdly, the actor has to ask himself whether he is indeed as knowledgeable as he thinks, and the subject indeed as ignorant. For example, lets say an actor tries to convince a subject that aliens exist. The actor may believe aliens exist, but he is ultimately ignorant of whether they really do. Similarly, the subject may believe aliens don't exist, but he is just as ignorant. If the actor successfully convinces the subject that aliens exist, ignorance has merely been exchanged for more ignorance. The actor simply had nothing to teach the subject from the start.

If the actor is ignorant of his own ignorance, his actions are unjust.

Lastly, on the topic of manipulation I gather what you are suggesting is to lie in order to convince someone. Spreading ignorance can never be just. You may have brought someone to the realm of true opinion, but in a dangerous way that impedes his chances of reaching understanding. To illustrate my point: The subject may believe that the city of New York does not exist. The actor has been to New York, and can tell the subject the way in order to reach New York (knowledge). If the actor convinces the subject that New York exists (true opinion), but has to lie about the way to get there, he is spreading false understanding, and the subject will inevitably get lost trying to find it.

These are my thoughts. I'm curious to hear yours.

Let me manipulate you into having the right attitude to this problem.

It is irrational to suppose that other people are irrational and that I am rational. So let's presume that we are all irrational and all open to manipulation by other irrational people.

I think on this basis we would be well advised to not manipulate each other but to try our best to help each other towards rationality without claiming to be the source thereof.

You can't manipulate irrational people. You can only manipulate rational people.

It is irrational to suppose that other people are irrational and that I am rational. So let's presume that we are all irrational and all open to manipulation by other irrational people.

I think on this basis we would be well advised to not manipulate each other but to try our best to help each other towards rationality without claiming to be the source thereof. — unenlightened

:up:

You can't manipulate irrational people. You can only manipulate rational people. — Harry Hindu

Good point also.

Basically you’re talking about immediate over future benefits. If not why bother? If so how far are you willing to go?

That’s your problem, and possibly mine and everyone else’s too if you have any actual influence in the world.

These are my thoughts. I'm curious to hear yours. — Tzeentch

Well, I don't have a very complex stance on this problem. Personally, I think it's a general problem in the world that we concentrate on what people believe in over how they end up with their beliefs. And I also have found out that the more I try to use manipulation techniques to be more convincing, the more they come into my mind and influence my beliefs even when I'm thinking alone.

Let me manipulate you into having the right attitude to this problem.

It is irrational to suppose that other people are irrational and that I am rational. So let's presume that we are all irrational and all open to manipulation by other irrational people. — unenlightened

My text never assumed anything about me being rational or someone being irrational. It proposed that if someone is irrational, they seem to be hard to convince trough rational means. There is very little information about my attitude or me being a reliable source.

You can't manipulate irrational people. You can only manipulate rational people. — Harry Hindu

Please, demonstrate. Do you mean that that it is sometimes easy to manipulate people who think they are rational?

My text never assumed anything about me being rational or someone being irrational. It proposed that if someone is irrational, they seem to be hard to convince trough rational means. — Qmeri

And that proposal only makes sense if you are the arbiter of rationality.

And that proposal only makes sense if you are the arbiter of rationality. — unenlightened

No. I haven't even given a definition of rationality. I consider that very open to discussion. The biggest proposition I have made about rationality is a singular example of a stereotypical creationist being hard to convince through rational means. None of what I have said are easily interpretable as me needing to be the arbiter of rationality.

a singular example of a creationist being hard to convince through rational means — Qmeri

So you are saying that you do not know what rational means are? Or that you do? Or that you do not know whether you do or not? Perhaps it was irrational of me to presume you at least thought you knew whereof you spoke.

I think we can only manipulate people to the extent that they are gullible. In that sense it is wrong to use someone’s gullibility against them because of the bad faith it involves...unless they deserved it.

There are non-rational factors in communication, but it is not necessarily contra rationality to employ them to make your communication more successful. The analogy I like is a medicinal pill: people are more likely to swallow a pill that tastes good and goes down smooth, regardless of its medicinal content. So flavor and texture can be used to get people to swallow placebos or even poison. But that does not mean that flavor and texture should be disregarded by doctors or pharmacists, and people should be berated for not taking pills based solely on their medicinal value. It means that doctors and pharmacists should ensure that their medicine does not take the form of a bitter jagged pill, but instead one that’s easier to swallow.

So you are saying that you do not know what rational means are? Or that you do? Or that you do not know whether you do or not? Perhaps it was irrational of me to presume you at least thought you knew whereof you spoke. — unenlightened

Saying that someone needs to be the arbiter of rationality for an idea to have merit is a big claim. This is not true about someone starting a discussion about a topic saying he has a problem to solve in the topic and giving a singular example without absolute definitions to give "feel" of the topic in order for people to be able give their ideas without being restrained to criticizing what I said.

I very clearly didn't give very specific ideas in the text and just gave questions since I truly want more ideas for me to consider since I'm personally somewhat stuck on this issue. Pretty much the opposite of having strong attitudes or something like that on the issue, which weirdly is the most talked about part of the text. People seem to read too much between the lines.

I very clearly didn't give very specific ideas — Qmeri

Yes, that's the whole problem in a nutshell. We'll get along much better if you will consent to being a little less clear about your lack of specificity, or a little more specific about your lack of clarity, or something, or nothing.

There are non-rational factors in communication, but it is not necessarily contra rationality to employ them to make your communication more successful. The analogy I like is a medicinal pill: people are more likely to swallow a pill that tastes good and goes down smooth, regardless of its medicinal content. So flavor and texture can be used to get people to swallow placebos or even poison. But that does not mean that flavor and texture should be disregarded by doctors or pharmacists, and people should be berated for not taking pills based solely on their medicinal value. It means that doctors and pharmacists should ensure that their medicine does not take the form of a bitter jagged pill, but instead one that’s easier to swallow. — Pfhorrest

I agree, but the problem I have in the special case of "truth" is that our own reliability (the actual effectiveness of the pill) is not ever certain. The road of assuming yourself as reliable and starting to manipulate others in methods that don't test your veracity (making your pills easy to swallow irregardless of their effectiveness) is a reliable road to falsehood.

Unfortunately you cannot force someone else to consider only the rational content of your arguments. The best you can do is to try your best to make it as sound as possible, and then try your best to bypass anything that might make someone reject it for irrational reasons. Beyond that, you have to leave it up to the other person to consider the rational content of it on its true merits.

Irrational people are not as easy to manipulate as you might think because irrational people (assuming they're functional) are operating on the basis of their own idea of rationality, which generally they tend to hug the harder, the more irrational they are. And this is a larger group than is implied by the term "irrational." It includes the ignorant - all of us, actually - and the willfully ignorant, for which the word "stupid" is the appropriate adjective.

To my way of thinking, the most manipulable are the intelligent and knowledgeable of good will and open-mindedness. Maybe that's a reason why the road to hell is said to be paved with good intentions.

Most of my life I've been a sucker for the right: the right thing, the right idea, the right gesture or understanding, whatever. Only late have I recognized what more sensible people have long known, that some wrongs and evils are of such dimension that it becomes a wrong in itself to treat with them on any basis of right. The rabid weasel, frothing at the mouth and raging to attack, doesn't get a, "nice kitty, poor kitty"; rather instead it's correct and desirable to just shoot it dead.

But we cannot do that to people in a civil society, in our western US society. We trust law. That is, that bad guy may have earned many times over being killed. But we-all agree that the damage of vigilantism is greater, and a greater threat, to our civil polity then anything the bad guy may have done. But some people threaten the civil polity itself, directly. And this isn't mere espionage, but is treason. We trust our institutions to protect us from not just the criminals, and the ones who would - and do - sell our secrets, but also from the ones who work for our destruction. We trust, but ultimately that in which we trust is us. And this leads to a quandary, which can be expressed indirectly and metaphorically in this question: when if ever is it correct to grab your rifle?

Like using things that convince him intuitively or emotionally without proving anything logically. — Qmeri

That's kind of supposing a false dichotomy. Intuition and emotion are not separate from logic. In order to be convinced of a logical proof, you must be moved emotionally and intuitively in several ways first. For example, you have to care about truth and logic. You also have to be able to see logical connections, which I think happens to some degree at an intuitive level. If you have no intuition of why A->B means that if A the conclusion is B, and you also don't care, logic means nothing.

The word "manipulation" implies that you are using the wrong or inappropriate emotions to convince someone of something. It usually implies lying, or at least misusing the truth to false ends.

However, you can clearly use emotion appropriately to persuade someone of something you believe to be true. Like the way sometimes pictures of the Holocaust are more effective in persuading people of the evils thereof than rational argument.

That's kind of supposing a false dichotomy. Intuition and emotion are not separate from logic. In order to be convinced of a logical proof, you must be moved emotionally and intuitively in several ways first. For example, you have to care about truth and logic. You also have to be able to see logical connections, which I think happens to some degree at an intuitive level. If you have no intuition of why A->B means that if A the conclusion is B, and you also don't care, logic means nothing. — Artemis

I do agree that emotions are part of everything that means anything to us, but that is not universally accepted and is not the point of this thread, so I said it in the way that gets my point understood. One can use our irrational emotions to manipulate us. Intuition is not necessary at all for logic (although, it can of course be used to support logic). Every logical step can be made consciously. If you think intuition is necessary, please demonstrate.

And I did not make a false dichotomy about logic, intuition and emotions since that was just an example, not a claim of an absolute rule.

What do you mean by 'irrational'? Do you have anything more than a subjective judgement to label someone as 'irrational'?

People are actually perfectly rational.. so far as their view and experience of the world is concerned.
However when asked why a person did something they well not know the underlying rationality or they may choose to lie about their underlying reasons, which could be considered to be a perfectly rational response to the situation. So what a person says about their beliefs or their actions may not seem rational and perhaps it is not, but this does not mean that either their beliefs, their actions or what they say about their beliefs or actions are in fact irrational.

In fact one could go so far as to say that your claim that other people are irrational is itself irrational as it cannot be logically or rationally justified. However this is not to say that you yourself are irrational as it may well be that your claim is commensurate with your views and experience of the world.

irrational emotions to manipulate us. — Qmeri

@A Seagull Is right about that. You have to be clearer what you mean by "irrational." Even a schizophrenics paranoid illusions are rational once you understand the mechanisms that lead to these delusions.

Every logical step can be made consciously. If you think intuition is necessary, please demonstrate. — Qmeri

Well, first off, another false dichotomy here between "conscious" and "intuitive."

But that aside, very simply the recognition that a=a and a=/=~a involves an intuitive understanding of the world and the way it works. We can also consciously recognize that, but the two go hand in hand really. And the more complex your logic gets, the more intuition comes into play.

In any case, you haven't addressed the second or third paragraphs of my post which more directly pertain to your query.

You can't manipulate irrational people. You can only manipulate rational people.
— Harry Hindu

Please, demonstrate. Do you mean that that it is sometimes easy to manipulate people who think they are rational? — Qmeri

Irrational means that someone behaves in ways that are "random" - meaning you don't have a causal explanation as to why they are behaving a certain way. It may seem like they are irrational from your perspective, but that is your model of their behavior based on your ignorance as to the cause, or reasoning, behind the behavior. It is a possibility that they are irrational, meaning that they have no reasons for their own behavior either.

In order to manipulate something means that you must possess some knowledge of what you are manipulating, not ignorant of what you are manipulating. Manipulation requires forethought and reasoning behind the action of manipulation. It means that you must know what's in another person's mind and their reasons for behaving certain ways in order to manipulate them. If you don't then they are effectively behaving irrationally from your perspective and you are unable to manipulate them because you lack the information necessary to manipulate in any meaningful way.

In other words, you need to know the reasons they behave a certain way (their behavior is rational) so that you trigger or inhibit those behaviors to then say you can manipulate them.

At the very least it would seem like it depends. Will they later figure out they were manipulated? How important is it that they believe X right now or even in the long run? How irrational? (since there is a spectrum of being irrational, not a neat binary split between us and them ((us always thinking they are the rational team))) What is this specific person whose mind we want to change like, likely to do, and so on?

It seems to me that there would likely be a lot of factors, unless one rules out manipulation in all instances or thinks one has a free hand to manipulate.

It's also one of those issues where the consquences, for consequentialists, are very hard to evaluate: What are the indirect effects of having as a guideline that manipulating those one considers irrational is ok? The effects on them? the effects on me? the effects on trust in general? How do we track these results, if we are consequentialists?

Every logical step can be made consciously. If you think intuition is necessary, please demonstrate. — Qmeri

you've read an argument or made one. Have you checked it enough? such that you can now assume it is sound? (intuition will be involved) Is your sense of the scope of meaning of each of the words used in the argument correct, or really, correct enough? (more intuition) Is your memory correct? about the context, about the earlier stages of the argument now that you are reading that later parts? (more intuition) There would be all sorts of qualia in this. Such as the 'I have now checked this enough' quale. There will be intuition, in some form, in the premises. (about the sources, that is that the epistemology is sound (enough) in its specific application here. Is my sense of the probabilities of any portion of the argument being true fairly good or might I be overestimating my own ability to estimate? Might I not be realizing how affected my own analysis of an argument is affected by what I want to believe? IOW intuition about how good one's own introspection is.

We cannot avoid using intuition.