President Donald Trump

if very very morally bad people all come out against the death penalty or purportedly in favor of strict pacifism, it's actually a significant reason to understand their probable hidden evil motivations and to presume both the death penalty and rightful wars can have their roles.

now if some consolidated uncontroversial moral intuition is confirmed even by them ye that doesn't change anything.

but every time the moral claim is about something 90%+ of people don't automatically and obviously agree with, it's like I described above.

How would you rate yourself in relation to Trump? Are you also sharp as a tack? Would you say Trump is dumber, the same, or smarter than you are?

You apparently have never listened to him talk.

If some bad people came out against the death penalty we can presume that the death penalty is good-luciom

That logic only makes sense in your head because your prior beliefs based on targeting.

Hardly relevant, but all the absolute most evil men in history were pro death penalty and they usually applied it liberally.

He is certainly no Biden that's for sure. He's out there getting things done. Have you heard how difficult it was for Bidens handlers behind the scenes? They wanted to put him in a wheelchair.

I watched Trump's meeting with the Chancellor of Germany today. He doesn't mumble or slur like Biden. He doesn't have the awkward moments where Biden can't think of the word he is trying to say. He is able to answer all questions unlike Biden who needed everything scripted.

You are a sore loser. Nothing more.

it really does nothing to update my priors on this issue when you appeal to issues you already agree with to support your point. what issue do you not agree with that if you heard a moral monster also not agree with that it would cause you to update your priors?

for me, there are no issues such that if someone horrible agreed with me that I would update my priors. there’s also no issue that if someone horrible disagreed with me I would update the confidence in my priors to strengthen my belief in the thing we disagree on.

maybe if there was some very small update like a .001% probability update I could see it, but anything less modest than that wouldn’t really make any logical sense to me based off the argument on the table.

The most evil men in history were dictators. Dictatorship allowed this evil to come out. It was embellished even further due to the fragile hold on power these people had. They did a lot of killing because they had to. There were always people trying over throw them. There were folks who tried to sabotage their agenda. Others simply refused to cooperate. Many folks did not fit in with the plan.

If somebody says that Trumps policies are crazy you might be right. He is still articulate and can think his way to answer any question. I do have concerns about him a couple years down the road but right now he still very sharp. Any comparison of Trump to Biden is nothing more than pouty poor sportsmanship.

“They did a lot of killing because they had to.” - mongidig

I don't feel the need to compare myself to others.

Staying within the context of this thread I was just pointing out how ludicrous it was to compare Biden to Trump. Everybody knows and knew that Biden was Demented. Many of you pretended to not believe it.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first to say that.

Ya that’s a really good question. Most people have no problem admitting Clinton or Obama are smarter than them because they obviously are. Don’t think even Trump supporters can come up with good reasons for why he’s smarter than them.

I think you forgot he rambles and talks total bollocks in those meetings and press conferences.

Most of the people dictators have killed they didn’t have to.

The idea that dictators have to kill a lot of people to keep their power should be a red flag in terms of the validity of the death penalty itself.

When he's not deflecting or lying, he speaks in word salad that only complete idiots like you would take as "answering the question".

when most of them were, almost everyone was.

which is why we used it in Nuremberg.

the death penalty was very much not controversial for most of human history.

it was absolutely a commonly held moral intuition that killing evil people was morally good.

which makes the topic a good candidate for moral discussion. things changed and a decent number of people now dislike the DP. many others don't.

That's exactly something where you are then expected to actually look around you, check who shares others values with you that you hold "more obviously true", and what their take on the DP is.

so not historically, rather in the present, depending on who you think morally horrific people are, you can move your opinion on the DP a lot.

If you were to discover that you actually had a higher IQ than Trump, would that change your view of Trump?

The death penalty was controversial historically, but almost always present historically. Slavery was also controversial historically, but almost always present historically. It turns out the sample size of our entire history is a relatively modest 7000ish years and slavery had been wrong all along. You know what else has been wrong all along? the death penalty. Over the last 100 years more and more thinking people have moved against it for the same reasons more people are against slavery than ever before.

Of course his politics are malleable. He isn't tethered to anything other than his own ego and self interest. But that's also why he is a worthless political ally and a malignant force in the world.

I don’t think that this works either, because we are talking about cases of moral ambivalence. and I would say if I had moral ambivalence about something, I would not want to update my priors to go against something a bad person thinks we should do. I would much rather just learn more about the issue and see if my stance changes based on what I learn. if I exhaust my resources in that respect, I’m not seeing how adding the info that bad people see things a certain way is going to help me, nor would something being traditionally uncontroversial help me either.

This is true, the reciprocal argument of moral progress would actually suggest updates in moral opinions should be given more weight than the original opinions. I’m not sure I agree with that position either though, but it does put an epistemic counterpoint to the point luciom is trying to make.

Also, as an aside, it’s ironic that attraction to minors is being used as an example of a morally disqualifying position when that would be a position widely held throughout human history that has been updated via “moral progress”

Obvious indeed. I posted the following in January.