A Million Save Two Utils-Ten Thousand Lose A Hundred

This one is already built in and it ruins moral insight. A key realization is that you are incapable of accurate moral judgments until you deal with the pain avoidance impulse (which effort minimization is a form).

...Unless you have determined pain avoidance should be prioritized over the good, or you have been made to believe that pain avoidance is the highest good.

Another problem is that people assume others' motivations. In same cases, they may be right, but a lot of the time, they're wrong. Try telling someone that you oppose certain welfare programs, and they'll tell you you don't care about poor people, but the fact is that you have an idea of how to achieve more economic stability through free markets and that sort of thing. You both have the same goal but a different idea on how to get there.

This is a pretty good take. But does it leave some bases uncovered?

Our ultra consumerist society spends billions to shape our minds. As a consequence, many are ashamed of the natural aging process. They spend a lot of money and go through a lot of pain to hide it.

For similar reasons, children are sexualized, from 12 year olds wearing styles that were originally designed for adults to be sexuallly provocative to exposure to porn.

How should we think about these issues?

Do you have anything to say about a Muslim country banning alcohol, and preventing a lot of deaths, birth defects and violence, vs a western society allowing us the personal freedom in which most enjoy alcohol responsibly?

hm no if you set welfare at 0 you do accept some people will live horrible short lives than end far sooner than the rest.

you just think that's better for everyone else if it happens because of a lot of reasons.

people who want 0 welfare don't share the same values of those who want everyone to have access to basic necessities.

goals aren't the same generally. SOME goals, yes.

Many others, absolutely no.

you see the biggest gap currently perhaps with regards to immigration.

true immigrationists simply think every human being alive has the right to access everything the richest societies in the world built identically to people whose ancestors contributed to those successes.

everyone else, to different degrees, accepts that people whose ancestors built the best societies in human history (as defined as those other people want to join instead of fleeing from them) deserve more.

Some think they deserve a tad more, some thinkthey deserve a lot more, some think they deserve it all. Some/many will allow that it is "sad" not everyone can enjoy the same but at the same time they realize not everyone physically can so they go with the above.

If you prefer two different sets of moralities based on who the subject is, then you should understand that it opens the door for absolutely anyone to do whatever they want. I get this type of egoism is appealing to certain people because it would maximize outcomes for them, but then we know that everything you proscribe as a moral bad or good is purely fictive.

It’s funny because you use words like “rape” and “murder” and other moral constructions probably more than anyone on this forum, and now here you are admitting you don’t care about any of that stuff at all, it’s just purely a rhetorical tool. That’s all well and good as an edgy thought experiment but now in the real world I understand your morality means absolutely nothing and what you really mean is “if you do this I think it will benefit me”.

that’s why we have political avenues for change and various tools for convincing others. people don’t need to share the exact same values, we just need to feel like our grievances can be heard and that differences of opinion can be handled peacefully. when things break down is when violent groups refuse to accept the result of democratic/republican processes.

oh jeez I said before I am out of the societal morality game. remember when I said I don't play populus? I don't have a solution for society.

I have my own individual morality that doesn't generalize. I try to pass it to family and friends because I care about them and that's it.

I always transparently said that when I give a moral opinion it's about my own perceived self interest and that of the people I care about.

It’s only appealing until it clashes and is overcome by the desire for a universal justice. Am I wrong?

yes and it worked better for your country than for everyone else in history (for now), and you have already been through a decent amount of testing times.

some people think electing trump poses a danger to your system working, others think allowing unlimited entrance to people with very different moral values than yours does the same.

I think you'll be fine with trump as you were when illegals were allowed in, in great numbers.

I don’t think the way you talk about politicians implicates someone who doesn’t care about morality except for themselves. why would someone with that view call something “rape of the constitution” etc? either it’s disingenuous and you are just manipulating people with language for your benefit or you really do have principles and just want to pretend you don’t.

I mean I agree. I can’t say it doesn’t make sense to not have a drive for universal justice, but those of us that do have that drive have a hard time understanding people like Luciom. Which is fine, society should be able to accommodate both things.

Aside from those who whose fathers got killed in a war and a few others, no one actually "thinks" that second thing. How many people in poor countries think that? People in rich companies try to convince themselves that their stance involves thought.

“If you do what is right, then you will be accepted.”

This is a universal justice idea. It’s what allows you to expose yourself to your deeper conscience. Which then allows for access to deeper levels of meaning.

Most people simply are unfamiliar with this. I’m confident if Luciom explored it for himself, then he would come to agreement.

it's far harder for a person from Mali to enter south Africa and live there than to enter Europe (I am talking when they arrive at the border, not the travel part)

because a deep respect of constitutional order in first world countries is what my grand nephews and their grand nephews need to live good lives.

I am long termist.

I have principles about what will make life better today, tomorrow and in the distant future for over average over achievers from rich countries

And you come to that conclusion by assessing that you and your descendants are helped by other people following the constitution. If you or your descendants were in the position to “rape the constitution”, this would be something you would support as long as it benefited you or your descendants. So in that sense most people who use that language aren’t talking about what would benefit them, they are talking about how they assess this as a bad action for anyone to take. And if you reject you or your descendants raping the constitution, it would only be on the grounds that this constitutional rape would eventually come back to bite you in the butt or something.

So yeah to me that caches out to something disingenuous.

/And if you reject you or your descendants raping the constitution, it would only be on the grounds that this constitutional rape would eventually come back to bite you in the butt or something./

yes!

you are getting it. I end up agreeing with some/ a lot of takes that "normal " people can have because I get convinced they are in my best interest , or in that of my descendants (enlarge to rest of family, friends and their descendants as well).

including stuff you shouldn't do for temporary personal short term benefit if it's bad in the long term.

my principle is that what is good for me, my family and my friends (and descendants of this) is what is moral. and viceversa.

pretty easy moral framework, some stuff gets tricky because of tradeoffs (rare but it exists), some stuff is tricky because estimates for the future are always uncertain (more common), but a lot of stuff is 100% clear and it gives a lot of moral clarity in life.

You're projecting your own views onto everyone else. First of all, I didn't say 0 welfare. Secondly, there's a good case to be made that welfare dependence inhibits growth and keeps poor people down and that there are ways to both lower welfare spending and lift people up at the same time. There are plenty of people who share the goal of having less poverty but have different opinions on how to go about it.

I mean yes I understand your morality, I’m pointing out how your moral language when properly interpreted is a farce. Or at least it would be alien to how many people view the word “good” or “bad”. And pretty much as a general rule for interpreting everything you say it should be interpreted as bad faith because everything you say is purely in pursuit of your own success. I have no reason to see you as being truthful, I can only see you as trying to manipulate me to your will.

What I am saying is that the vast majority of those who feel that their ancestor's actions entitle them to a better life than those with lesser ancestors, are rationalizing because that stance personally benefits them. If the opposite stance benefitted them than that's what they would "believe".

I should also add that unlike math axioms, some starting points that seem at first to be subjective are actually not. One of them is, upon further analysis, objectively right. But it is a lot easier to discover these defective axioms if the discussion initially separates so called subjective differences from differences caused by faulty deductions.

And what I am countering is that the vast majority of people in poor countries instead is actually nationalist and wants to have a claim on their own countries (what their ancestors built) while not asking for any claim on other countries especially far away ones (there are often claims around borders though) even if they could benefit from that.

Indians aren't clamoring en masse that they have a right to access Denmark and it's resources and infrastructure.

Indeed. And then they often make it worse by claiming a very weak argument proves them incontrovertably correct proving the bad intentions of those who have actually have genuine ones.

Then we forget we actually need to make the case for what we believe in. Then we're surprised when we lose.