The problem with a statement like . . .you legitimize systemic inequalities, is how can you measure that result. Even if you could, If you want change you need to justify it within a framework that is congruent with reality, in order to create a theory that will resonate with people and change their mind. This means you must deal with the reality that some billionaires seem to legitimately do things for purely philanthropic reasons. However, that truth should be understood against the role of billionaires inside a system that results in deep and unfair inequalities. After all there are perhaps reasons why concentration of wealth in hands of a coordinated group be it a person Corp or government could potentially be beneficial, but the likelihood that they will use it for good is the critical factor. So that some do good proves nothing, unless we think random billionaires are going to use a given sum for a more beneficial purpose than the government (spoilers they won't).

https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateaCommunist/comments/u5nna9/dialectics_the_methodology_of_hegel_and_marx/

It somehow tries to have its hegel blattering cake, and then pretends it's not wishful idealist thinking too.

Charity isn't about "solving" poverty. It is about doing what you can to help lessen the suffering of others.

I find the suggesting that ostensibly left ideologies such as communism put the welfare of the individual over the collective somewhat difficult to take seriously. Similar with the idea that the millions that they imprisoned or killed through commission or deliberate omission were clear enemies. I would say that pretty much all political ideologies claim everyone is better off even if it’s because the hoi poloi are better of in their place.

I would suggest that ideologies by their nature put conceptual factors above realistic pragmatism and when the two clash authoritarianism attempts to reconcile the problem. Ideologies don’t survive the test of being implemented.

So far like democracy could be said in practice to be the worst system apart from all the others , capitalism is the same.

Yes but I'm not talking about Singer, I'm talking about how people in this thread talk about Singer and his charity.

bold statement, please elaborate

Dude, I'm not saying he should be giving more or less or whatever. I'm saying that it's not an argument for one or the other thing. This percentage thing is also weird because if I make 100k per month and I give away 90%, I still live awesome. If I make 1k and give away 90%, I'm fucked. And what's more, the impact I make is 100 times smaller. If that's how we're judging people then rich people are the only ones who even have the luxury of being moral I guess.

Singer's not posing his argument to most people, though. He's posing it to affluent people in developed countries. I think he'd agree with you that, say, a working class single mom, who sometimes has to choose between groceries and prescriptions, should not be expected to give away any wealth.

Nah, this is just your assumption that I was referring to the "Noble Savage Myth". That's your projection, not mine. If you honestly believe modern society is more sustainable/connected to nature than pretty much ANY indigenous group that is by DEFINITION prior to contact with European land exploiters, sustainable you are out of your mind. There's a middle ground between "Nobel savage" and "TheY ArE JuSt LiKe EurOpEAnS". Like if you study those cultures you can gain an appreciation for the fact that sustainability was more of a rule than an exception. Many developed a kinship with the land that views what nature gives us as far more than material resources, but rather a spiritual connection that is quite unlike the typical modern relationship. Speaking about that isn't evoking the Noble Savage Myth, and it is offensive that you would assume any mention of a non-consumption oriented indigenous philosophy as such.

Except it isn't dialectical and it isn't even material.

So capitalism is something we define only by how it's practiced, but socialism and communism are only defined by theory, and any attempted implementations should be called something else if they don't conform to theory?

Am I understanding you correctly?

And Smith is called the father of capitalism. His works are the foundation for the theory of capitalism, every bit as much as Marx is for communism. Just because the term for Smith's new system wasn't used in English until the 1850s doesn't change the historical lineage of that system.

The best alternative to our metaphysical worldview is dialectical materialism, because it is rooted in reality

> Sir, please use proper terminology: zygote.

> As for the question itself: it's a good question! Unfortunately, I have no idea about what the truth of the matter is.

Sorry I'm talking about after it's been born and raised. I think we should definitely assume that a grown adult born from an artificial womb has feelings. Though whether the zygote feels is definitely an interesting question too!

> Oh, I suspect the scenarios where your assumptions (or, metaphysical framework) break down are far less specific than it may seem.

Curious if you have any examples here. I have a pretty wide/open metaphysical view--I'm not even particularly committed to realism or physicalism. But a world with a hard wall against artificial consciousness would be especially weird. You'd need something along the lines of a divine decree to stop it, because you would somehow need to differentiate between brains grown in a human womb and brains grown in a laboratory. The lab can get arbitrarily close to recreating the human womb, up to and including cloning.

> True. But then: is what is "Clear" necessarily what is True? Take that whole January 6 coup attempt as an example - "both sides" are "clear" on what happened there that day (and what lead up to it, from a causality perspective), despite it being objectively unknown, and unknowable. > > I am very wary of predictions (of the future, or otherwise) based on clarity.

This seems like a very nihilistic view of truth. You could use the same argument to deny pretty much any line of reasoning. It's pretty clear the the earth is not flat, but there's plenty of disagreement there too. Should that stop us from discussing geophysics?

Same with Jan 6. There are a lot of facts on the table, and conclusions that can be drawn from them. Some people--even a majority--might loudly disagree with those conclusions, but that doesn't make them false or "unknowable". (Note that I'm not including political narratives, like who deserves punishment or blame, as these are statements based on values, not facts--value statements are indeed unknowable).

> A plausibly even bigger question: to what degree is it optimal that we are even pursuing this [particular goal in the first place, all things considered? Or maybe an even more important question: have we even stopped to consider that question? Just how is it that "humanity" "decides" what it is that we should be doing, and what we should not be doing, anyways? I don't recall that topic being covered.

I sympathize with this. But I tend much more towards descriptivism over prescriptivism. IMO these are things that will happen, no matter what you and I think should happen.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/040/653/goldblum-quote.jpeg

> Considering that, it kinda makes me wonder: how did it come about in the first place that The Science has seemingly ascended to The Throne of Authority (state-sanctioned, no less) on planet Earth? Was a vote of some sort held? Did I miss a news release? Because it sure seems to me that this is now considered A Fundamental Truth.

Very sympathetic to this feeling. We never vote on the Authority, but it does seem to be consensus-driven. Science is at least better than the Catholic Church, in that it doesn't physically torture dissenters. It just publicly ridicules them.

I'm hopeful a new Authority will emerge over the next century or so. One informed by science but not driven by it.

Strange to think of it in percents, as if there isn’t, in the first world, a standard of living floor below which one requires rather than owes charity.

If I’ve lived on 10% of Singers net income, how can my better-or-less-than moral status then depend on how much more I earn that I then can give from? It doesn’t feel right as a calculation.

But there is a whole culture of fetishism around these objects, I'm guilty of it myself. Perhaps the people who celebrate the airplane as an object are on the outside so to speak, not the ones operating or purchasing them though.

Yeah none of them achieved a socialist economy.

Edit: Also, Smith wrote before the word capitalism even appeared.

Wasn't he an unrepentant Nazi?

I find it interesting that people are so quick to correlate capitalism with any form of thinking based on maximizing utility, all economic systems do this to varying degrees of efficiency. A communist system would not build aircraft for any reason other than to move things. I understand that the discussion here is about paradigms of thought and certainly the capitalist mindset does encourage this sort of thinking, but it is present in any large scale human organizational structure to some degree, and more telling of our state of industrial/technological civilization, rather than a direct relationship to economic systems, if the two can be separated.

>

Depending on the ideology, the idea individuals mattered less would tend to be an inherent contradiction, certainly to leftwing movements that are intended ultimately to benefit a people consisting of individuals. If said 'individuals' actually means 'clear enemies who are outright trying to destroy the progress and murder those trying to establish it', then it's only leftist movements that seriously get blamed for this and it has darn all to do with those making such accusations thinking it just went ideologically 'too far', and everything to do with thinking they had no right to try to oppose the status quo to begin with, it's just a bad faith conflation. It's not that individuals matter less than some kind of assumed-abstract ideology in such a case, if the ideology was supposed to benefit the majority and not the minority totally deliberately trying to sabotage its application.

No - genuine believers may be around, but are then up against the opportunists, the people who are just bad/inexperienced at applying an ideology, consistency issues that already existed, legitimate differences in ideology that may be hard to resolve, the weight of the status quo, all the mistakes and pressures of the situation itself, the people behind deliberate internal and external opposition, and likely do not want to be an authoritarian even if they could. So the explanation for what went wrong was still not the typical lame accusation of 'ideological purity': the people who were ideologically at least fairly consistent may not have stood a chance. Which does not make them wrong nor the aim of consistency wrong, it just suggests it's hard, which is more the actual problem imo than anyone ever being overly ideologically consistent on any scale. If more aim for it, it may get easier for others to do, ie. veganism again.

>Though I think it’s possible there may be examples in which the action taken in the name of the ideology actually undermined their power and a more pragmatic approach would have been better for them?

Possible but I've more often seen the reverse argued. Whether a specific action was just a bad idea/misguided/stupid is a somewhat different question.

Sure! I think another criticism that's really good emerges when one looks at how corrupt lots of poverty-stricken countries are; how much money donated is actually being pocketed by dictators and bureaucrats? And one could argue that even the money that reaches it's goal just enables the corrupt machine to keep chugging on...

But ya like you said, it's unfortunate the article went way too far and ended up being a parody of much better criticisms.

So did Communism under Lenin, under Mao, and under Castro, so that's just not a useful definition.

You should actually read some Adam Smith. You might learn something.

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I find arguments like these to be of very little value. Suggesting that the value of a river is more than the hydroelectric energy that can be extracted from it is certainly true, but that's hardly important if you are living in a home without electricity so that people can relate poetically to a river. There seems to be this romanticism about returning to a time where people lived closer to nature; but those types of lifestyles simply aren't sustainable with the population we have now. So we have a choice, we can embrace the fact that it was technology that allows us to support the lifestyle we have now, and that the greatest luxury we have afforded ourselves is each-other; or we can go back to living closer to nature and accept that many billions of people will have to die for us to get there.

No, your understanding of native cultures is ignorant. Heidegger can suck a rusty dick.

Native cultures are and were no better than we are at living in harmony with nature. Plenty of them were horrendously destructing to the environment. The noble savage myth is still a racist stereotype. Natives are people, and people are the same, everywhere and everywhen. We take from the environment as much as we can, and then write poetry about how sad that is. That's just as true for the 1700s Mohawks as for the 1000s Inuit, as for the 1800s British or the first people coming out of Africa.

lol.