You: “Blame is pointless.”

Me: BlaMe iS pOinTLesS

You: “how dare you strawman me!!”

I agree. And any plan to move forward has to confront the fact that humans are obstreperous ignoramuses. So, what do we do? One strategy is to leverage democracy, which has already led to unbelievable moral progress over the last century. Another option is to leverage a populist outreach. Any other ideas?

Yes, let’s fix the problem of men beating women by not blaming anyone for beating women. Brilliant plan.

You took issue with the claim that 90% of people are bad at moral reasoning.

Ask yourself if your reaction would be the same if I had claimed that 90% of people are bad at mathematical reasoning.

I hope not, since that’s uncontroversial, despite the fact that the average person studies math for 12+ years (not counting college).

Now why on earth would we expect moral reasoning to be any different? We don’t. In fact, it’s much much worse. In mathematics, we get to operate within painstakingly established formal systems, such as number theory. By contrast, most people never even learn how to syllogize an ethical argument!

We don’t have ethics coursework in middle school (except for religious pseudo-bigotry) and most students never get to study basics like first-order logic. They get their morals from McDonalds commercials and Disney and parents and whatever random scraps of cultural information they encounter in the gutters of our society.

People are MUCH worse at moral reasoning than at mathematics, and 90% was an absurd understatement on my part.

Moral progress! It takes a long, long time to convince average people to accept moral claims, such as the badness of slavery. There’s a kind of tipping point when normative facts are FINALLY absorbed into the culture and propagated through non-intellectual means (such as media and social pressure).

Democracy is actually the best vehicle for moral progress in that respect, as democratic scholars have been pointing out for the last century or so.

This thread is so bad faith it’s not even funny. And you expect me to what, educate you on basic neuroscience and sociology? No.

Yes. Of course. But I get the sense that you guys are in this weird ideological-purity-testing mode right now. If you actually seriously want to engage with this fascinating research topic in good faith, feel free to message me.

How dare you say something that requires self-reflection in a meme thread made for ideological-purity testing.

How dare you say something that requires self-reflection in a meme thread made by MAGA-style ideological-purity-testing imbeciles.

And this right here folks is why nothing will ever change. Because phantasmagorical ideological abstractions get blamed instead of actual features of reality, such as psychopathy, ignorance, greed, selfishness, and so on.

Reality is always the best starting point.

We live in a religious society that promotes a culture of bigotry. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame bigots?

We live in a patriarchal society that doesn’t take violence against women seriously. Does this mean that wife beaters aren’t to blame?

We live in a capitalist society that promotes selfishness and greed. Does this mean we shouldn’t blame selfish people? (Which is most of them.)

We live in a racist society… etc.

You are responsible for your actions and your beliefs. Step one to improving our society is accepting the reality that most humans have a poor (nearly non-existent) relationship with morality. They’re easily swayed by fallacious arguments because they are irrational and stupid. These are empirical facts about human beings that we ignore (with memes like this) at our own peril.

And every armed conflict in the world would end if everyone put down their guns right this instant.

This is actually true. There’s an important lesson about human nature hidden somewhere in this sarcastic sentence.

The reason we need to get rid of capitalism is that it empowers people’s most horrible greedy impulses. However, that’s precisely because people are horrible and greedy. If people were saints, then capitalism wouldn’t matter because nobody would do dumb shit like buy pickup trucks or eat meat.

Again, long before the advent of any abstract “structures” and economic theories, before Hollywood and global communication networks, when humans were still living on random islands, they behaved like total and utter morons. They were not rational. Because 90% of humans are — and again, this is an empirical fact — incapable of moral deliberation.

That’s why we had slavery for 10,000 years. That’s why people torture billions of sentient animals to death in abattoirs every year to eat their carcasses. That’s why Donald Trump won the last election.

Humans are selfish, and that’s precisely why we need an alternative to capitalism. Because if we don’t force people to act intelligently they’ll act like the animals they are and obliterate their environment until they are living on mountains of shit and corpses. This has happened throughout history over and over and over again, long before the advent of any economic ideologies.

Global warming can be fixed tomorrow if people stopped eating meat and stopped buying giant pickup trucks and stopped worshipping celebrities, and so on.

Redirecting blame attributable to human foibles to an abstract concept like “capitalism” is shortsighted and self-defeating. Analogously, the problem over the last 10,000 years hasn’t been slavery (the concept); the problem has been slavers (their ignorance, psychopathy, and greed).

There’s no period in human history when people weren’t unfathomably stupid, because people are literally just animals (and many would happily end the world in order to get access to cheeseburgers). They make bad choices because the average person is not capable of moral deliberation. All hyperbole aside, this is an actual empirical fact.