Towards axiomatic morality

http://www.dematerialism.net/Chapter%203.html

by Xcelerate • 11 years ago

9 6 11 years ago

icanhackit2• 11 years ago

I think humor paired with axioms has an important part to play in progressing moral codes. Jokes and limericks are memetic - highly contagious ideas - so they can travel through cultures with little capital and seemingly little effort required.

Going beyond a gag, you can use humor to make an otherwise boring and hard to understand issue like net-neutrality more enticing to listen to, as John Oliver did so masterfully on Last Week Tonight. The way he often does it is by making a point of comparison with pop-culture artifacts (person, movie, consumer goods, historical event) in an analogous and equally absurd situation.

If we could codify this kind of story-telling, we could simplify the passing of moral programs.

unfamiliar• 11 years ago

"this kind of story-telling" is only appealing if you already agreed with the principle. I'm sure someone with a good reason to be against net neutrality could easily pick holes in the Last Week Tonight segment if they wanted.

icanhackit2• 11 years ago

"this kind of story-telling" is only appealing if you already agreed with the principle

You need to understand something before you can agree or disagree with it. That's the point of the kind of humor John Oliver uses - take something boring, use humor to attract ears/eyeballs, use well-known cultural artifacts to make a point of comparison, viewer now grasps principals of the issue while being entertained/having reward center tickled.

He also uses analogies because they reveal the absurdity of something without directly attacking someones existing beliefs, leaving wiggle-room to switch sides.

jzila• 11 years ago

While I like the approach of attempting to derive a moral framework axiomatically, the resulting philosophy experiences one of the main pitfalls that burdens authoritarian Leninism: it fails to motivate independent agents within the system.

You can accept the author's implication that discrimination based on intelligence, charisma, good looks, etc is immoral. You can even accept that business and commerce are inherently unfair because they discriminate on such characteristics. Despite all that, a business-based (capitalist) economy is the best way we know to align the interests of the individual with the interests of the society. The author's philosophy completely fails on that front.

There are other failures to this philosophy, but I think that one is the most egregious.

Lofkin• 11 years ago

can you tldr what immoral means in this context? How did he define this and why should we accept his definition?

DArcMattr• 11 years ago

After a brief skimming on my lunch break: The approach this author takes is similar to the one that Baruch Spinoza uses in formulating a system of ethics, and which David Hume tears apart. His works cited don't reference anything written before the 20th Century, so it looks like the author hasn't done the homework.

The "book" is hard to navigate, this is the whole book's table of contents: http://dematerialism.net/POS.html

Towards axiomatic morality

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