Actual content of ~/drafts, my crazy.txt:

• start of a manifesto “Against Compassion”
• “I didn’t choose to be a wolf”, a meditation on fursonae
• sketches about “could zombies have saved the Nazi war effort?” until I got bored doing calculations (includes mostly worked-out Nazi Zombie campaign setting, incl. sketch of a metaphysics to make it reasonably coherent)
• a love poem to cheesecake
• “why everything sucks and will never ever get better”, a reading of some of Luther’s more obscure writing (on hold until I figure out if everything sucks and will never ever get better or not)
• an incomplete sketch of “Against Imagination”, which keeps on metastasizing as I add more and more anger to it, but it never really goes anywhere constructive and I wonder if I’m not just rewriting the Futurist Manifesto anyway
• “I’m the worst person to talk about politics, but I’m drunk and I have a pile of manifestos, try stoppin’ me”, an interdisciplinary attempt of political exploration
• several sketches and attempts of a new critical method I call Passive-Aggressive Deconstruction

I think it’s obvious why those drafts never go anywhere. ↩

I’m deliberately ignoring e-cigarettes even though they’re cheaper because I don’t want to accidentally establish a “suck on cigarettes” habit that might transfer to real cigarettes so I can always maintain a behavioral separation between “nicotine so my brain works” and “smoking for emotional reasons”, despite them sharing some drug effects. The nicotine in cigarettes is still welcome and I substitute accordingly, but it’s a bit of a pity I have to smoke strong brands just to remind me of her smell.

↩

In particular this post how virtue ethics is not useful in practice, and this (highly excerpted) exchange with Vladimir:

[Vladimir:] If this abstract theory [e.g. utilitarianism] provides answers for the extreme and controversial cases, then it should provide answers for everyday common cases as well. But here we see that these abstract theories are of little use, often providing no useful answer or plainly absurd answers, and requiring tortured rationalizations and special pleading just to get them to clear the bar of ordinary common sense.

[…]

If we actually do start from scratch in our study of ethics and make sure to stick to the reality of what human beings are, not to metaphysical pies in the sky and sophistries useful only for signaling and lawyering, we will end up — or at least have to start with — something resembling virtue ethics.

[Scott:] Aside from the things I addressed in my new post, we seem to disagree a lot on how bad utilitarian and deontological ethics work. As far as I can tell they work about as well as Newtonian physics – they get the right result in the overwhelming majority of cases, but break down in certain weird edge cases where in fact they might still be salvageable.

was the thing that made me throw up my hands and say in a moment of amused desperation, surely you can’t be asserting this! I don’t have an issue with saying that virtue ethics isn’t really a theory of anything but more a label of a kind of discourse, a way of doing morality instead of thinking about morality, and that it is, to use Skinner’s terminology, still mostly prescientific. Fair enough.

But to say that utilitarianism (or even better, deontology! The simplest, most straightforward example of deontological reasoning - don’t deceive - is highly controversial and virtually nobody agrees with it!) works most of the time is.. well, Scott is, to use Moldbug’s amusing phrase, “not a blithering idiot”, so I can’t just say, “clearly he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about”. There must a disagreement not about results (because Scott is neither ignorant nor in denial), but about the problem. With a disparity this huge, we can’t be looking at the same thing.

One might be tempted to say, “this just proves that some people think inherently like virtue ethicists and some like utilitarians”, but that’s just throwing away all possibility of rational discourse forever, and most importantly, this isn’t even the case. (Even if this were the case, “get out of your weird bubble” would likely be a more appropriate response, but I’m not convinced this even applies to Scott, unlike say Kant.)

If I were more the person I want to be, I would now be able to write an eloquent reply, but alas, the only answer I am capable of is a stare of incredulity (which I hate) or an incoherent angry rant (which I love). Wanting not to be abusive, I thus experimented with alternatives and came up with Passive-Aggressive Deconstruction, which is probably still trollish, but maybe not hostile. (Or at least amusingly so.)

Essentially, and this is why I haven’t written more than sketches yet because this is still a lot of work, I just wanted to highlight by mere quotation how Scott himself uses virtue-ethical reasoning frequently on his own blog, and how then, tumblr-style, I could just add his comment pasted on a fitting useless_utilitarian.jpg after each quote and ask, “Why don’t I see a calculation here?” or “Why do you think this is a valid form of argument?”, so that after a sufficiently large number of instances of this, it would at least be more than an assertion of “I can’t believe you’re saying what I think you’re saying, but I don’t see what else you possible could mean to say”.

But eh, now that I’ve outlined the general approach, I can’t be bothered to do it concretely. (<3) ↩

I don’t know of any way to discuss these things without either moving to a very different audience (which I have no interest in) or attempting an act of bridging a moral divide that is akin to making a lion speak. Regardless - and I don’t know if that is intentional or not - I might eventually have to get there if I ever want to go meta and discuss important figures in Higher Criticism directly and not just their ideas how to read the NT. But I’ve failed to tell Lutherans that they don’t understand Luther, so I’m not optimistic about that ever succeeding. ↩

To be a bit more accurate, the problem is how the concept is learned and it basically separates moral subjectivists from moral relativists. In the subjectivist view, “Good” is the extension of whatever collection of preferences I happen to hold, while moral relativists conceive of some distributed concept shared by a community, like a language.

So for example and by analogy, there is a wrong way to speak French (even though there is no Standard Written Into The World Itself that tells us a priori what French “is” and even though boundaries might be fuzzy) and so it makes sense to say someone can learn French (because we can provide positive and negative examples). But under the subjectivist view, that is not the case because only I - or rather, the preferences in my skull - define the concept. As such, I can teach what “Good” means (i.e. others can be wrong about it), but I can’t learn it because I already, by construction, embody it. (This ethical egoism may, as a matter of fact, include the value of “altruism”, of course - values aren’t justifications.) ↩

Look, Internet, I’m sorry but we aren’t that close. ↩

Well yes, Molinists can change the past, but then they have to negotiate with God and that doesn’t sound any easier, if you ask me… ↩

As Baumeister famously argues, “bad is stronger than good”. ↩