Moral Pragmatism

[Cognisant]

Put simply, being a good person is its own reward.

You can benefit from theft and murder and many other conventionally immoral acts, however although you may get away with a particular instance of theft/murder/etc it behooves society to ensure being a thief/murderer/etc is a non-viable lifestyle.

Piracy being punishable by death seems a bit harsh to us, certainly the pirates who kill should be put to death, but to kill someone for merely committing theft via duress seems disproportionate. However there is no way of knowing how many people a pirate has killed and so to ensure that the murders don't go unpunished it becomes necessary to assume every pirate is a murderer.

Guilt and innocence are not what matters in this, what matters is preventing murders, ensuring that the lifestyle of a murderer is non-viable in order to prevent a competent pirate from spending his entire life murdering people on the high seas. It's not about punishing him through elimination, rather setting the stakes so high, making the risk so disproportionate to the reward, that even the most competent pirate would reconsider their lifestyle.

Because they need to get away with it every time, but they only need to be caught once...

Once this precedent is established and murders on the high seas cease then society can afford to be more lenient, but it shouldn't, by becoming more permissive of immorality society allows that immorality to occur and when it occurs and goes unpunished the new precedent is established, a precedent which ultimately must be corrected with the re-establishment of the precedent of overly harsh punishment.

Ultimately you save more people by being overly harsh than overly permissive.

By "being a good person is its own reward" I mean you don't create a world in which everyone else is incentivized to cause you harm, your bad behaviour may be known, the harm you have caused may not have been discovered yet, but it will be and when it is a debt will be owed to society, a debt that will be extracted from someone somewhere, in order to establish the precedent that is the foundation of moral standards.

Perhaps the inverse is more intuitive, when you do evil you make the world a slightly worse place, both for yourself and everyone else in it. Indeed making the world a better/worse place to live is arguably the quintessential definition of good and evil, if you do something that makes the world a better place to live, even if that action is ostensibly evil, if the net change in the state of the world is positive then you've objectively done good.

From this perspective technology is a moral imperative, if you create a bore water pump that enables people to access drinkable water that was otherwise inaccessible then you have performed an act of objective moral goodness, for if improving the state of the world for your fellow man is not good, then how can anything be good?

 

[EndogenousRebel]

In pragmatism the "correctness" of a belief is determined by the consequences, yes. Like utilitarianism. Unlike utilitarianism, pragmatism values action by how they are accomplished.

Utilitarianism doesn't necessarily care about the how, so long as the end result is that more utility is gained.

So, the outcome of something can be pragmatically desirable, but that doesn't mean that the way that the way it is achieved is one a pragmatist would endorse.

Not to say what you are proposing isn't pragmatic, just that I doubt it's the most pragmatic, and of course it's giving lots of utilitarianism.

Pragmatism is one of those ideals that humans can never really innact in society because the way we do things is so blunt and clumsy especially the more people are involved.

 

[Cognisant]

 

[Black Rose]

In evolutionary terms,

yes, those who are bad get killed off.

What then is disproportional is what happens when we select people to be killed off.

That makes anyone who is politically your enemy "bad".

Which is also an evolutionary mechanism. (Killing the enemy).

Because they have things you want or do things unacceptable to you.

Not simple things like murder, but more gross things like dying hair green.

Green hair is more unacceptable is it not? because it is unchristian conservative or something?

I do not know, my point is that were we to simply state that certain preferences deserve death then most everyone would not be clear on what is right and what is wrong. There is a clear difference between left and right and that is population density. You cannot kill offenders in highly populated areas for their preferences but in low-density areas, you can control people's preferences strictly which includes killing.

So what is revolution? In the cities, it is about work conditions because cities are highly dirty. In the countryside, it is about keeping (gov) and outsiders from stealing your land where you make a living. Suburbs are restricted too. They have far less crime because everyone has laws enforced not enforced in big cities. And in the countryside, you just kill people who bother you like in the big cities. but in the big cities this is harder because of lots of diversity.

Europe then is suburban. Which has neither a conservative nor liberal crime as such but rather a strict order. It is the most monitored and the most controlled. A preference will not get you killed but it will label you. You will be in the computer system as a potential element of deviation. Because law and order must be upheld in the suburbs always. There is so little crime there that any crime is suspect and eradicated. Which makes a revolution, a set of disorders something foreign in the suburbs. Violence at such a level as killing your political enemies is bad, really, really bad and is avoided at all costs.

Revolution = killing your political enemies =
those with different preferences = Not Allowed By Any Means

Which means the density of the pollution must be suburban.

High crime(dirty ever changing work conditions) = High Denisty = Liberal > suburban(the lowest crime) > Conservative = Low Density = High crime also(killing people different from you)

What is missing is where this all fits in with migration.

If you dye your hair blue then you will move out of the countryside where they will likely not tolerate such things because only certain preferences are allowed.

And if you live in the city and do not like blue hair, then that too will make you move as well.

The complications are: that fast life and slow life, preferences, and all these things are not conservative or liberal, those words have become meaningless. It is more about the density of people telling other people what to do.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Pretty big stretch that dude is making.

It's almost like the left isn't made from people in his eyes, that instead it's made from their ideas and that they do not have choice but to apply some centralized doctrine to everything.

Last I heard most people support the death penalty in America.

By his logic, I guess I can say that he believes every criminal is Wilson Fisk.