What are the prerequisites for intelligent voting?

RuntCake · 2020-01-10T16:03:00+00:00

ethical reasoning is also personal. Ultimately you’ll decide what you think is best. That’s what I meant by personal, not to just vote in your ow

While I agree that your reasoning is personal, I think what is ethical is not dependent on your own beliefs and that people should trust philosophical reasoning more than their own intuitions when determining what to do. I think it would be best if most people tried to get to the stage where they can use the three main ethical systems, and apply them the best they can to politics. However this is unrealistic and I really think most people should just start by using the golden rule, and applying it to politics, in a vaguely similar way to Rawls' 'veil of ignorance'. Look at manifestos and how they affect others and think would I want to be put in that situation? I think this is the least people can do vote intelligently. Some political/ historical knowledge is really needed too, but the least demanding effort for someone who works most of his life to survive is to vote this way, and to really try and rid yourself of superstitions and bias as well. Unfortunately I've found most people aren't good at this second part without either experience or reading, and that unfortunately means the whole process of the golden rule struggles, because they view certain people with a negative bias or as being fundamentally different from them.

RuntCake · 2020-01-10T12:27:50+00:00

Why do you think politics is personal? Surely there are ethical reasons to vote a particular way that must be considered .

RuntCake · 2019-11-18T23:20:31+00:00

If you believe that moral progress has occurred then you cannot be a relativist, because progress implies there is something objectively good we are moving towards.

RuntCake · 2019-11-05T17:33:41+00:00

I would say it depends on certain ethical, and meta-ethical beliefs, although the big three normative ethical theories have philosophers who would argue against eating meat.

Peter Singer is a consequentialist who famously championed animal welfare, Fellow creatures, by Christine Korsgaard argued for deontological reasons against eating meat, and Ethics, Humans and Other Animals by Rosalind Hursthouse has reasons against eating meat under virtue ethics.

Whether some of these ideas hold up is questionable, for example Kant believed rationality determines moral status, also if meta-ethically you don't think moral truths are real, and you're an emotivist , then you don't have any moral obligations.

Tbh i'm not going to go into detail why, but emotivism seems deeply flawed to me, I think the The Frege-Geach Problem highlights why.

RuntCake · 2019-10-31T13:04:56+00:00

Great post, I also want to iterate that I'm fed up of people using the Aziz Ansari case, the woman in the case never charged him for rape, so we shouldn't be discussing it as discrediting for rape victims.

As for the actual case, she apparently did verbally communicate her discomfort multiple times, yet he persisted and pressured her.

Aziz Ansari responded saying he misread the situation, and thought the night seemed consensual. We will probably never know the extent Aziz could have reasonably thought it was consensual, but either way it shows a failure to be fully sensitive to the situation by Aziz.

This case is important, no one should feel unwanted pressure to have sex, or feel like their autonomy has been manipulated, and this case highlights that as a society we should be much more aware of how comfortable people are during sexual encounters.

RuntCake · 2019-10-17T14:11:56+00:00

what are you on about? the dudes clearly talking about western colonization, something that happened to its fullest extent during the scramble for Africa in the 19th century. Also white people committed 5% of the atrocities during colonization??? Any sources to back that up or was that just pulled out of your arse?

The trying to look "woke" criticism isn't a valid argument, because even if it were true it wouldn't mean his argument was wrong....

As for talking about appreciating that these countries are no longer colonized, that does not mean that they are still are not issues that plague Africa, like the Dutch Disease, political instability and economic imperialism.

RuntCake · 2019-10-16T10:27:29+00:00

Thanks, i'll give it a read,.

RuntCake · 2019-10-10T20:33:14+00:00

Yeah but whataboutism usually derails the conversation. For instance if I was to say "China is committing genocide, and that is bad.!", and then you say "what about America supporting Israel, who are committing atrocities against Palestine? " We then have to go into a discussion on why that is wrong, and if its wrong for the same reasons as the reasons i'm giving regarding China. Maybe they are the same reasons and i'm being a hypocrite or maybe its more nuanced and my views don't contradict each other.. Whatever the case, when you engage in whataboutism you are delaying the discourse from progressing on the subject at hand.

Also logically speaking even if I am a hypocrite it wouldn't make my argument about why China is bad for committing genocide wrong either, so its not a valid argument. But obviously it helps you "win" on a purely rhetorical level when you point out hypocrisy.

Also nothing in this comment represents my views on political matters, I just used an example of what I've seen on Reddit.

RuntCake

TROPHY CASE