A good read. We could talk hours on this. And without trying to advertise, it was precisely this sentiment that sent me on a path 12 years ago to develop a new secular religion of sorts. I call it Tribe. And it's the center of the book I just published. I completely agree that the secular world has failed. Cheers!
Tribe? Wow. Congratulations Timo. A fitting title for our first time meeting, because clearly we’re in the same one. How can a cringey gingey (and her readers) get her paws on such a book post haste?
Mine is called The Inner Journey and incorporates all the psychologically beneficial aspects of all religions with none of the woo. It's bolstered by Sects based on Virtues to take the place of denominations for people with different secular priorities.
This is pretty amazing stuff! As an unapologetic Druid/Animist/Shaman and organized religion hater, I have to say yes, feeling the pain of others and needing to respond is the truest measure of, not humanity, because apes and dogs and cats and other "non-sentient" types do it - but life itself, as an expression of ... something. I hurled myself off the cliff of believing that Everything Is A Person And Alive long ago, and my levels of empathy are so off the charts that I frequently wake up in an agony of worry about fucking characters in a book. It's what made me a healer. It is, frankly, not a gift, and makes me somewhat dysfunctional. But empathy for empathy's sake is absolutely the baseline. I love your IWRS framework and can see how it fits perfectly into my mission. Thank you!
I can see how IWRS might look a little clinical or forced. That’s NOT what I’m after here.
Like you, I wake up in tears thinking “we have to fucking help them, now.”
Who? Us? Human family of Earth. Animal and plant family. All sentient electron-based structures in all time and space.
As long as suffering existed in this universe, when the first weave of cells flickered into qualia-based pain there have been things pushing back, the other way. Dreamers and hoping machines.
We are very old, and such a long, long way to go. We all deserve a day off, to work in shifts, forever.
Song helps, especially when sung by angels. The language of the mind that travels, key to the laws of time and all that.
What happens when suffering and wellbeing positively correlate? Apologies if I missed where you address this. But much of what gives life meaning--creation, love--involves suffering. And it's not like the good cancels out the suffering--it may make the suffering worthwhile but it doesn't make it go away.
You also neglect the role love plays in this. If IWRS involves my loved ones suffering so that people I don't care about increase in wellbeing, then I'm not going to think myself bad for defending my loved ones, I'm going to think poorly of those trying to force the cost of their own wellbeing on my loved ones. Your framework fails a basic intuitive litmus test in this regard.
I mean, that's where all y'all secularists fail. You've got nice sounding theories about right and wrong when considering people in the abstract, but don't seem to have much of a handle on the dynamics of actually loving particular individuals, and it's actually loving particular individuals that gives most people meaning and grounds their perception of good.
Vestigial liabilities — I was very clear about what that is. We have evolved in scarcity and this gave us a kind of “infinite wants” calibration that isn’t scalable, and if we don’t take a look at that we’re screwed, just like so many of our loved ones got obese when calories becomes so abundant and collided with corporate greed.
Lots of examples like that. The ignorance, selfishness and fear we DO have is partly there because that particular amount had survival value. We might want to adjust some of those settings as times change. I’m open to that. You’re not. Let’s admit it’s probably because of “God’s plan,” and we’re not even having a real conversation. In the end that’s where you’re going with this.
Increasing wellbeing and reducing suffering isn’t as an alternative to “higher goods.” Those higher goods would be factored in. Just not by the Bible. By reality, by human experience, valence, empathy and coherence. I’m open as to what that higher good might be. Nowhere did I prescribe a shallow or naive set of well-being principles, so you’re just jumping to conclusions.
The only one between the two of us being vague is you, that’s for sure. I didn’t caveat anything. I just don’t start my thought process with a book that tells me the ending and then force whatever comes after to conform to it. And btw I have a lot of religious friends who I can debate this stuff with just fine. I don’t see any of what I’m saying as against religion.
We are SUPPOSED to do this, and we already do. We do it with the damn Constitution. And clearly IWRS hold the exact same shit to be self-evident, that all of us are created equal in that American way, and IWRS is not unAmerican. I see it as hyper-American, because it’s consistent with personal honesty, dedication to human rights, and political effectiveness instead of fucking theocracy.
Ain’t nothing wrong with trying to achieve a moral end without invoking some book a dude wrote, and if you think there is, we have nothing to say. That shit didn’t work for everyone. It’s fine, but excuse me for keepin’ trying. Help or get out the road cowboy.
You're making quite a few assumptions about me. I got no clue what "God's Plan" is (Jesus is notoriously evasive about that) and I'm very ok with you not believing in Jesus (so's Jesus fwiw) and I'm appealing to reality and your full human experience, no more. I'm sticking to what I said in the other sub-thread, my objection is to your characterization of the good, not your religious beliefs, and you're welcome to address the reasoning I'm actually presenting and leave your presumptions about me and Jesus out of it.
To that I'd just add, glossing over what the heck you mean by "created equal" if you don't believe in God (because I'm not talking about God), the Constitution is a statement of political principles, not moral ones. We are equal in the eyes of the law. And a big part of American freedom is actually the freedom to be an absolutely terrible human being from a moral or ethical perspective--to leave the government out of that fight. Morally and ethically, I'd say we not only need to give other people the freedom to be absolutely terrible human beings, we should also love them anyway.
You've got a convoluted "system" that gets even more convoluted once you start explaining that by "increase wellbeing and reduce suffering" you just mean some kind of fill-in-the-blank higher good, basically arguing a tautological relationship between goodness and your pet acronym. But while "increase wellbeing and reduce suffering" can mean a lot of things, it can't mean everything, and I'm saying it's a shoddy and misleading way of describing what it actually means to be good. Whereas "love one another" pretty much hits it on the nose.
My argument is to look around the world and dig into your conscience and reflect upon what seems to really bring you and others value and meaning and then see the truth of this for yourself, or not. But I would certainly discourage you and others from viewing goodness through a lens of "increase wellbeing, reduce suffering." That's just a great way to make it way more complicated than it needs to be while simultaneously missing the point completely.
I totally disagree. The vagueness of love thy neighbor, as much as I agree with it, provides cover for a multitude of sins. We already use science to figure out where the hurt it is. I’m just suggesting we use it more explicitly and with a sense of clarity and mission, instead of fiercely arguing in favor of vagueness. That’s fine but it makes utterly no sense to me. I’m actually not arguing for a new dogma. I’m arguing for an explicit framework for measuring things and then doing things people want in a way that improves world happiness scores. I have utterly no idea what your objection is.
Regarding vagueness, that's a feature, not a bug. I'd say it's incumbent upon those trying to systematize our conception of the good to defend the notion that it can be systematized in the first place. Goodness might be computationally irreducible, with no accurate and precise "explicit framework" available for evaluating if something is good or bad without the entire context of the universe at that moment. And/or good and bad may be inextricable, with the isolation of something entirely good or entirely bad being entirely impossible.
I know you scoff at "religion" but simple wisdom across the ages (which has been expressed via religion but is considered wisdom based on human experience of reality--it's in the book cuz it's wise, not wise cuz it's in the book) speaks of the ineffability of goodness all over the place, from "hallowed be thy name" to "the way that can be spoken is not the way."
Whereas people with legalistic mindsets have been notorious for tyranny and self-righteousness. This is even evident in your own writing--the ease with which you judge and dismiss with phrases like "we have nothing to discuss" and "It’s fucking bullshit. If that doesn’t register, stop reading." Systematized ethics have been the recourse for people looking to chastise and banish others since the dawn of humanity. It's how you get away with NOT loving one another. But millions of people in this world worship a God who forgives sinners, not because "the Bible tells me so," but rather because they know deep down in their conscience and through their own human experience that loving sinners is the ultimate expression of the Good. And that is a truth which your system not only fails to capture, it seems built to intentionally avoid.
All of which is to say, I approach any attempt to systematize this stuff with a great amount of skepticism.
But let's set that aside, and acknowledge that what you've described has its own vagueness, with much in your concept of both "wellbeing" and "suffering" left to the reader. Is it a vague but nonetheless reliable guidepost for getting people pointed in the right direction? I say no. I point back to my earlier post: Loving less, learning to live a life without meaning--these are things people can do and actually do to reduce their suffering and increase their wellbeing. But the question of goodness is not how do we increase wellbeing and reduce suffering, but rather, what do we suffer and sacrifice our wellbeing for. Your touchstone is just a shitty touchstone.
Whereas "love one another" is going to actually get you pointed in the right direction. It's vague, it is no promise that you will be without sin, it definitely won't give you an excuse to judge and condemn others, but it'll get you facing what's actually Good. All you're offering is an excuse not to.
Oh jeez. I don’t scoff at religion at all. I write about it frequently. I’m not being clear enough, sorry.
IWRS claims to derive an ought from an is. It even says it’s the “only ought worth wanting.”
It seems like it’s thumbing its nose at an age old truism.
It just hit me how massively grandiose that must sound.
My claim is NOT going to be a problem with some but needs to make sense to the religious or those like you and me who respect an ineffable “love” that stands apart from mere data.
Let this be my first sincere attempt to get this right:
I’m Jewish and not religious, agnostic I guess.
But my tradition teaches blind obedience is very no bueno.
It’s called machloket leshem shamayim, one example is when Abraham argued with God about killing all of Sodom.
Other examples exist. Moses smashed the Ten Commandments. (I’m not the first to do that.)
It becomes clear that God tasks us with figuring out specifically what we OUGHT DO in a million situations.
Being lazy about this is a sin worse than a bacon milkshake. You absolutely gotta save lives and treat people well, period.
There was a time religious folks fought against autopsies.
Some Jews stupidly thought blood transfusions weren’t ok. (Stupidly even in the context of what the Torah taught, that saving a life is more important than kashrut.)
I think fertility treatments were contentious.
When you try to ground morals into science that’s not a slap against God or morals.
The science serves the morals.
My honest opinion is that maybe God ALSO wrote the law in our bones, in our yeitzer tov, our neshama.
And it’s super clear that I’m deeply driven to feed the hungry and heal the sick.
If I think this can work to do that, am I even allowed to hold back these ideas?
Maybe they might be abused, maybe I have to be more careful, but who am I to NOT write true things with the level of clarity my “creator” endowed me with?
And if God is real, or love is supreme, do you think either of them give a fuck about getting credit?
IWRS is just humans thinking clearly about being kind. It’s NOT a new religion, G-d forbid.
Is that so bad?
Whether my overthinking led me to God or some other necessity shaped by love isn’t of concern to me.
We just gotta measure clearly and do the right thing.
I just don’t see how that’s anti God.
We do all kinds of things to make us better people.
Prayer and ritual literally changes the brain.
So I just don’t see how any of this is a shitty touchstone or systematized in such a way that it’s sinister.
Maybe oversimplifying things is the true evil. Jesus was right when he said love thy neighbor.
But it’s wrong to just “wing it” and think we know what that means. That’s haughty.
When you truly love someone, you fucking find out. You know that better than anyone probably.
You get the data, you fucking hustle.
And I already said that I’m only after reduction that’s feasible.
Putting others before my own family isn’t feasible. That won’t scale.
But there’s a lot of pretty easy things that will and we’re not doing them.
The excuses we make are not encouraging. We are long past the point of feasibility and we use vagueness to justify inaction.
Indeed, it’s a feature. But a feature serving who, what?
I think appeals to amorphous approximation often serve fear, ignorance and selfishness.
Some selfishness is good. But there’s a line and it’s ok to call that out.
We always have, and if God exists, he wants us to do that the best we can, in the most honest and gentle way.
Without being lazy. IWRS is my humble suggestion.
It comes from love. And it’s an invitation, not a demand. Sorry if I failed to make that clear.
As for my oughts being vague, I respectfully point out that I haven’t suggested ANY oughts really.
Just a method for figuring them out, and that we ought to seriously consider using it.
"When you truly love someone, you fucking find out."
LOL YES!!! Now we're getting somewhere. One of the reasons I make it my lodestar (especially the extended "as you love yourself" formulation) is that there are no words that do it justice the way actually doing it does.
One of the issues I'm trying to address with my criticism lies with the people who try to IWRS in the absence of love. They have the anger at the injustice of the world, they easily see the splinters in others' eyes, but because they look to IWRS rather than Love as their lodestar, they end up taking a very tyrannical approach to IWRS--you've got to break a few eggs, and all that. I can't think of any 20th century tyrants who didn't believe they were IWRS. IWRS without love can be Bad in some serious capital-B ways. Making explicit mention of love is actually really important.
Even when they do IWRS with love, though, if they're placing their own loved ones first, that really is no different than anyone else, even the person who loves only themselves. Yeah, I guess some folks are passing the wounded Samaritan on the street out of sheer cruelty, but most folks are doing so because they have other people they love and prioritize more, and if they don't already find themselves stretched thin by their loved ones, they want to keep something on reserve so they don't _become_ stretched thin by their loved ones. The problem with saying "there’s a line and it’s ok to call that out" is that this always, inevitably, leaves the speaker (and usually their loved ones) on the acceptable side of the line. This is the sense in which I think your caveats are swallowing your thesis. "Love one another" doesn't have this problem--it asks first if the person you're judging is someone you love, and if they're not, then you're already on the unacceptable side of the line with them, so who are you to judge. "Love one another as you love yourself" builds-in the "Golden Rule" in ways that IWRS (especially with your caveats) does not.
But honestly, now that I've got a bit better idea of the mark you're at least aiming for (if not quite hitting, in my estimation), I'd say my biggest objection is really to the attempt to systematize this stuff. It's one of those games where the only winning move is not to play. You don't _need_ to derive an ought from an is. The oughts come from our conscience, and if they don't, they're not really oughts. This really is more about imperfectly describing something qualitatively observable than it is judging according to a rule or law. It's okay to embrace that aspect.
There's lots that's well-said in your latest response, and it's clarified a lot. Thank you for the good faith, too. :-)
Thanks for reading. All I can do is stress IWRS isn’t against suffering with meaning and neither am I.
I believe there is such a thing as unnecessary suffering. If you don’t, we have nothing to discuss. I’m only going after THAT kind, where reduction is feasible.
Love is great. IWRS assumes love or at least is consistent with it. Human well-being entails a bias toward protecting your own. So of course protect your own first. I never suggested otherwise.
Follow the gravity of valence and cross it with coherence and capacity. Fix it if you can. Step 5 can help.
If you can’t, that’s fine. Find a way to make it meaningful.
IWRS is consistent with what you’re saying. Maybe you saw secularist and you’re grasping at straws that ain’t there.
I mean you probably need at least one more letter in that acronym then, probably more. And even with your clarifications, neither meaning nor love nor the suffering that accompanies them are strictly necessary. Loving less, learning to live a life without meaning--these are things people can do and actually do to reduce their suffering and increase their immediate wellbeing. And calling empathy deficits "vestigial liabilities" certainly doesn't suggest you're cool with people having more empathy for their loved ones than for others. So I'm not buying that particularized love is as compatible with what you're saying as you profess.
I don't think I'm picking at edge interpretations here; I'm saying there are greater goods than increasing wellbeing and reducing suffering, that it's okay to sacrifice wellbeing and suffer to achieve those higher goods, and if you've got to stick a bunch of caveats on about how you're not talking about wellbeing that it's good to sacrifice or suffering that it's good to dive headlong into, then you've just caveated your way out of saying anything of substance about goodness at all.
Or you could just say "love one another"--you don't even have to believe in God! Because, to be clear, I'm not chafing at your secularism, I'm chafing at your description of what is good. I've never considered the core of my religion inaccessible to atheists; there are ways to put it into rather simple secular terms. Y'all just seem to have a difficult time getting there.
I never said there’s “no God.” I also don’t say suffering is bad from an “absolute morals” standpoint. My claim is that unnecessary human suffering is by definition something humans don’t want and they tend away from it. Thus, I feel that we “ought” reduce unnecessary human suffering, starting with agreeing on what constitutes it. My emotional valence compels this, likely due to evolved mirror neurons and other structures consistent with valence, empathy, pro-social instincts and coherence, and capacity. This sort of ought isn’t an absolute, but rather a prescriptive statement limited to human agents, and I’d argue that this is the only kind of ought worth wanting, and has a sufficient level of thoroughness required to support a stable base of morals and ethics if the goal is to increase wellbeing and reduce suffering.
A larger, universal, extrinsic ought is an incoherent concept and we have no need for such an ought.
Hey what’s up Oz. So I wrote a second piece the next day that distills my argument for why suffering is bad, but with less distractions and a really clear, bolted down restatement. It’s the steel man framing, even more so than this piece. It’s shorter and worth a quick scan. Would you be willing to move the comments and our dialectic to that version? If not, that’s okay. My sense is either way you’re going to run me thru the Aquinas diagnostic and see where my argument goes off the rails. If it doesn’t, it may be a bit of a powder-keg moment, and so I want to make sure any ensuing discussion or others chiming in is attached to the canonical piece that best explains my framing. https://open.substack.com/pub/galan/p/im-saying-it-again-differently-in?r=1xoiww&utm_medium=ios
Answer to some pushback from Jack Ditch on how my system was a shitty cornerstone asking for trouble, compared to simpler rules of thumb. Religion, or just love thy neighbor stuff. I don’t see a problem, but I needed to explain why better. I do so here. IWRS isn’t a religion. In fact, if it doesn’t serve existing ones, it’s probably trash.
Assuming you know what question I’m referring to is the problem. Clearly there are some questions that have answers. Maybe start by asking what my question is before presuming my problem? I don’t worship at the alter of helplessness with regard to solving human suffering.
The acronym IWRS is not explained. For that matter, neither is fMRI. All caps is always the register of the triggered. I’ll be backing away from the temple door. But, hey, keep doing that thing you’re into.
This is more like a rigorous discussion using critical thinking, reason, science and seeing where that vector collides with what tends to matter to the majority of human brains.
It explores what we might want to do about it such that we don’t have cognitive dissonance or unnecessary suffering.
It’s not “temple door,” it’s not woo-woo or religious.
It’s intense, though. If it’s threatening to you then sit this one out, by all means.
You can always come back later.
But you don’t have to leave behind a bunch of ego-protecting quips on your way out like a dick.
Not sure who that was for; it fools nobody.
Take care though.
Maybe I am triggered, maybe there’s a good reason.
Oh, it’s far worse than woo-woo, High Priestess. And rigor (at least in sophomore high school English classes) would involve explaining the acronyms one makes use of. Otherwise one’s writing sounds like code-talking to the acolytes. And we wouldn’t want *that.*
Let me know if you have any other critiques aside from that petty detail. Until then I’ll assume you have a low iq and are a disappointment to self and others. Usually that’s what inspires people to lash out in such a craven, low-effort manner. If you have a single point of substance on which to level a critique, let us know. Until then, I guess go back to blowdrying your hair and sucking in your cheeks and wtvr you do that passes for useful these days. 🐶
Religion is the problem
Nearly always.
A good read. We could talk hours on this. And without trying to advertise, it was precisely this sentiment that sent me on a path 12 years ago to develop a new secular religion of sorts. I call it Tribe. And it's the center of the book I just published. I completely agree that the secular world has failed. Cheers!
Tribe? Wow. Congratulations Timo. A fitting title for our first time meeting, because clearly we’re in the same one. How can a cringey gingey (and her readers) get her paws on such a book post haste?
Mine is called The Inner Journey and incorporates all the psychologically beneficial aspects of all religions with none of the woo. It's bolstered by Sects based on Virtues to take the place of denominations for people with different secular priorities.
This is pretty amazing stuff! As an unapologetic Druid/Animist/Shaman and organized religion hater, I have to say yes, feeling the pain of others and needing to respond is the truest measure of, not humanity, because apes and dogs and cats and other "non-sentient" types do it - but life itself, as an expression of ... something. I hurled myself off the cliff of believing that Everything Is A Person And Alive long ago, and my levels of empathy are so off the charts that I frequently wake up in an agony of worry about fucking characters in a book. It's what made me a healer. It is, frankly, not a gift, and makes me somewhat dysfunctional. But empathy for empathy's sake is absolutely the baseline. I love your IWRS framework and can see how it fits perfectly into my mission. Thank you!
Cool, that means a lot to me.
If anyone is suspicious about what I’m doing or why, it’s summed up in two innocent words: feasible reduction.
(IWRS is just one possible tool.)
My principle of feasible reduction is here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/galan/p/the-floor-ethic?r=1xoiww&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I can see how IWRS might look a little clinical or forced. That’s NOT what I’m after here.
Like you, I wake up in tears thinking “we have to fucking help them, now.”
Who? Us? Human family of Earth. Animal and plant family. All sentient electron-based structures in all time and space.
As long as suffering existed in this universe, when the first weave of cells flickered into qualia-based pain there have been things pushing back, the other way. Dreamers and hoping machines.
We are very old, and such a long, long way to go. We all deserve a day off, to work in shifts, forever.
Song helps, especially when sung by angels. The language of the mind that travels, key to the laws of time and all that.
Yes, and yes! And then yes! So hey sibling. I think we're fam.
What happens when suffering and wellbeing positively correlate? Apologies if I missed where you address this. But much of what gives life meaning--creation, love--involves suffering. And it's not like the good cancels out the suffering--it may make the suffering worthwhile but it doesn't make it go away.
You also neglect the role love plays in this. If IWRS involves my loved ones suffering so that people I don't care about increase in wellbeing, then I'm not going to think myself bad for defending my loved ones, I'm going to think poorly of those trying to force the cost of their own wellbeing on my loved ones. Your framework fails a basic intuitive litmus test in this regard.
I mean, that's where all y'all secularists fail. You've got nice sounding theories about right and wrong when considering people in the abstract, but don't seem to have much of a handle on the dynamics of actually loving particular individuals, and it's actually loving particular individuals that gives most people meaning and grounds their perception of good.
Vestigial liabilities — I was very clear about what that is. We have evolved in scarcity and this gave us a kind of “infinite wants” calibration that isn’t scalable, and if we don’t take a look at that we’re screwed, just like so many of our loved ones got obese when calories becomes so abundant and collided with corporate greed.
Lots of examples like that. The ignorance, selfishness and fear we DO have is partly there because that particular amount had survival value. We might want to adjust some of those settings as times change. I’m open to that. You’re not. Let’s admit it’s probably because of “God’s plan,” and we’re not even having a real conversation. In the end that’s where you’re going with this.
Increasing wellbeing and reducing suffering isn’t as an alternative to “higher goods.” Those higher goods would be factored in. Just not by the Bible. By reality, by human experience, valence, empathy and coherence. I’m open as to what that higher good might be. Nowhere did I prescribe a shallow or naive set of well-being principles, so you’re just jumping to conclusions.
The only one between the two of us being vague is you, that’s for sure. I didn’t caveat anything. I just don’t start my thought process with a book that tells me the ending and then force whatever comes after to conform to it. And btw I have a lot of religious friends who I can debate this stuff with just fine. I don’t see any of what I’m saying as against religion.
We are SUPPOSED to do this, and we already do. We do it with the damn Constitution. And clearly IWRS hold the exact same shit to be self-evident, that all of us are created equal in that American way, and IWRS is not unAmerican. I see it as hyper-American, because it’s consistent with personal honesty, dedication to human rights, and political effectiveness instead of fucking theocracy.
Ain’t nothing wrong with trying to achieve a moral end without invoking some book a dude wrote, and if you think there is, we have nothing to say. That shit didn’t work for everyone. It’s fine, but excuse me for keepin’ trying. Help or get out the road cowboy.
You're making quite a few assumptions about me. I got no clue what "God's Plan" is (Jesus is notoriously evasive about that) and I'm very ok with you not believing in Jesus (so's Jesus fwiw) and I'm appealing to reality and your full human experience, no more. I'm sticking to what I said in the other sub-thread, my objection is to your characterization of the good, not your religious beliefs, and you're welcome to address the reasoning I'm actually presenting and leave your presumptions about me and Jesus out of it.
To that I'd just add, glossing over what the heck you mean by "created equal" if you don't believe in God (because I'm not talking about God), the Constitution is a statement of political principles, not moral ones. We are equal in the eyes of the law. And a big part of American freedom is actually the freedom to be an absolutely terrible human being from a moral or ethical perspective--to leave the government out of that fight. Morally and ethically, I'd say we not only need to give other people the freedom to be absolutely terrible human beings, we should also love them anyway.
You've got a convoluted "system" that gets even more convoluted once you start explaining that by "increase wellbeing and reduce suffering" you just mean some kind of fill-in-the-blank higher good, basically arguing a tautological relationship between goodness and your pet acronym. But while "increase wellbeing and reduce suffering" can mean a lot of things, it can't mean everything, and I'm saying it's a shoddy and misleading way of describing what it actually means to be good. Whereas "love one another" pretty much hits it on the nose.
My argument is to look around the world and dig into your conscience and reflect upon what seems to really bring you and others value and meaning and then see the truth of this for yourself, or not. But I would certainly discourage you and others from viewing goodness through a lens of "increase wellbeing, reduce suffering." That's just a great way to make it way more complicated than it needs to be while simultaneously missing the point completely.
I totally disagree. The vagueness of love thy neighbor, as much as I agree with it, provides cover for a multitude of sins. We already use science to figure out where the hurt it is. I’m just suggesting we use it more explicitly and with a sense of clarity and mission, instead of fiercely arguing in favor of vagueness. That’s fine but it makes utterly no sense to me. I’m actually not arguing for a new dogma. I’m arguing for an explicit framework for measuring things and then doing things people want in a way that improves world happiness scores. I have utterly no idea what your objection is.
Regarding vagueness, that's a feature, not a bug. I'd say it's incumbent upon those trying to systematize our conception of the good to defend the notion that it can be systematized in the first place. Goodness might be computationally irreducible, with no accurate and precise "explicit framework" available for evaluating if something is good or bad without the entire context of the universe at that moment. And/or good and bad may be inextricable, with the isolation of something entirely good or entirely bad being entirely impossible.
I know you scoff at "religion" but simple wisdom across the ages (which has been expressed via religion but is considered wisdom based on human experience of reality--it's in the book cuz it's wise, not wise cuz it's in the book) speaks of the ineffability of goodness all over the place, from "hallowed be thy name" to "the way that can be spoken is not the way."
Whereas people with legalistic mindsets have been notorious for tyranny and self-righteousness. This is even evident in your own writing--the ease with which you judge and dismiss with phrases like "we have nothing to discuss" and "It’s fucking bullshit. If that doesn’t register, stop reading." Systematized ethics have been the recourse for people looking to chastise and banish others since the dawn of humanity. It's how you get away with NOT loving one another. But millions of people in this world worship a God who forgives sinners, not because "the Bible tells me so," but rather because they know deep down in their conscience and through their own human experience that loving sinners is the ultimate expression of the Good. And that is a truth which your system not only fails to capture, it seems built to intentionally avoid.
All of which is to say, I approach any attempt to systematize this stuff with a great amount of skepticism.
But let's set that aside, and acknowledge that what you've described has its own vagueness, with much in your concept of both "wellbeing" and "suffering" left to the reader. Is it a vague but nonetheless reliable guidepost for getting people pointed in the right direction? I say no. I point back to my earlier post: Loving less, learning to live a life without meaning--these are things people can do and actually do to reduce their suffering and increase their wellbeing. But the question of goodness is not how do we increase wellbeing and reduce suffering, but rather, what do we suffer and sacrifice our wellbeing for. Your touchstone is just a shitty touchstone.
Whereas "love one another" is going to actually get you pointed in the right direction. It's vague, it is no promise that you will be without sin, it definitely won't give you an excuse to judge and condemn others, but it'll get you facing what's actually Good. All you're offering is an excuse not to.
Oh jeez. I don’t scoff at religion at all. I write about it frequently. I’m not being clear enough, sorry.
IWRS claims to derive an ought from an is. It even says it’s the “only ought worth wanting.”
It seems like it’s thumbing its nose at an age old truism.
It just hit me how massively grandiose that must sound.
My claim is NOT going to be a problem with some but needs to make sense to the religious or those like you and me who respect an ineffable “love” that stands apart from mere data.
Let this be my first sincere attempt to get this right:
I’m Jewish and not religious, agnostic I guess.
But my tradition teaches blind obedience is very no bueno.
It’s called machloket leshem shamayim, one example is when Abraham argued with God about killing all of Sodom.
Other examples exist. Moses smashed the Ten Commandments. (I’m not the first to do that.)
It becomes clear that God tasks us with figuring out specifically what we OUGHT DO in a million situations.
Being lazy about this is a sin worse than a bacon milkshake. You absolutely gotta save lives and treat people well, period.
There was a time religious folks fought against autopsies.
Some Jews stupidly thought blood transfusions weren’t ok. (Stupidly even in the context of what the Torah taught, that saving a life is more important than kashrut.)
I think fertility treatments were contentious.
When you try to ground morals into science that’s not a slap against God or morals.
The science serves the morals.
My honest opinion is that maybe God ALSO wrote the law in our bones, in our yeitzer tov, our neshama.
And it’s super clear that I’m deeply driven to feed the hungry and heal the sick.
If I think this can work to do that, am I even allowed to hold back these ideas?
Maybe they might be abused, maybe I have to be more careful, but who am I to NOT write true things with the level of clarity my “creator” endowed me with?
And if God is real, or love is supreme, do you think either of them give a fuck about getting credit?
IWRS is just humans thinking clearly about being kind. It’s NOT a new religion, G-d forbid.
Is that so bad?
Whether my overthinking led me to God or some other necessity shaped by love isn’t of concern to me.
We just gotta measure clearly and do the right thing.
I just don’t see how that’s anti God.
We do all kinds of things to make us better people.
Prayer and ritual literally changes the brain.
So I just don’t see how any of this is a shitty touchstone or systematized in such a way that it’s sinister.
Maybe oversimplifying things is the true evil. Jesus was right when he said love thy neighbor.
But it’s wrong to just “wing it” and think we know what that means. That’s haughty.
When you truly love someone, you fucking find out. You know that better than anyone probably.
You get the data, you fucking hustle.
And I already said that I’m only after reduction that’s feasible.
Putting others before my own family isn’t feasible. That won’t scale.
But there’s a lot of pretty easy things that will and we’re not doing them.
The excuses we make are not encouraging. We are long past the point of feasibility and we use vagueness to justify inaction.
Indeed, it’s a feature. But a feature serving who, what?
I think appeals to amorphous approximation often serve fear, ignorance and selfishness.
Some selfishness is good. But there’s a line and it’s ok to call that out.
We always have, and if God exists, he wants us to do that the best we can, in the most honest and gentle way.
Without being lazy. IWRS is my humble suggestion.
It comes from love. And it’s an invitation, not a demand. Sorry if I failed to make that clear.
As for my oughts being vague, I respectfully point out that I haven’t suggested ANY oughts really.
Just a method for figuring them out, and that we ought to seriously consider using it.
"When you truly love someone, you fucking find out."
LOL YES!!! Now we're getting somewhere. One of the reasons I make it my lodestar (especially the extended "as you love yourself" formulation) is that there are no words that do it justice the way actually doing it does.
One of the issues I'm trying to address with my criticism lies with the people who try to IWRS in the absence of love. They have the anger at the injustice of the world, they easily see the splinters in others' eyes, but because they look to IWRS rather than Love as their lodestar, they end up taking a very tyrannical approach to IWRS--you've got to break a few eggs, and all that. I can't think of any 20th century tyrants who didn't believe they were IWRS. IWRS without love can be Bad in some serious capital-B ways. Making explicit mention of love is actually really important.
Even when they do IWRS with love, though, if they're placing their own loved ones first, that really is no different than anyone else, even the person who loves only themselves. Yeah, I guess some folks are passing the wounded Samaritan on the street out of sheer cruelty, but most folks are doing so because they have other people they love and prioritize more, and if they don't already find themselves stretched thin by their loved ones, they want to keep something on reserve so they don't _become_ stretched thin by their loved ones. The problem with saying "there’s a line and it’s ok to call that out" is that this always, inevitably, leaves the speaker (and usually their loved ones) on the acceptable side of the line. This is the sense in which I think your caveats are swallowing your thesis. "Love one another" doesn't have this problem--it asks first if the person you're judging is someone you love, and if they're not, then you're already on the unacceptable side of the line with them, so who are you to judge. "Love one another as you love yourself" builds-in the "Golden Rule" in ways that IWRS (especially with your caveats) does not.
But honestly, now that I've got a bit better idea of the mark you're at least aiming for (if not quite hitting, in my estimation), I'd say my biggest objection is really to the attempt to systematize this stuff. It's one of those games where the only winning move is not to play. You don't _need_ to derive an ought from an is. The oughts come from our conscience, and if they don't, they're not really oughts. This really is more about imperfectly describing something qualitatively observable than it is judging according to a rule or law. It's okay to embrace that aspect.
There's lots that's well-said in your latest response, and it's clarified a lot. Thank you for the good faith, too. :-)
Thanks for reading. All I can do is stress IWRS isn’t against suffering with meaning and neither am I.
I believe there is such a thing as unnecessary suffering. If you don’t, we have nothing to discuss. I’m only going after THAT kind, where reduction is feasible.
Love is great. IWRS assumes love or at least is consistent with it. Human well-being entails a bias toward protecting your own. So of course protect your own first. I never suggested otherwise.
Follow the gravity of valence and cross it with coherence and capacity. Fix it if you can. Step 5 can help.
If you can’t, that’s fine. Find a way to make it meaningful.
IWRS is consistent with what you’re saying. Maybe you saw secularist and you’re grasping at straws that ain’t there.
I mean you probably need at least one more letter in that acronym then, probably more. And even with your clarifications, neither meaning nor love nor the suffering that accompanies them are strictly necessary. Loving less, learning to live a life without meaning--these are things people can do and actually do to reduce their suffering and increase their immediate wellbeing. And calling empathy deficits "vestigial liabilities" certainly doesn't suggest you're cool with people having more empathy for their loved ones than for others. So I'm not buying that particularized love is as compatible with what you're saying as you profess.
I don't think I'm picking at edge interpretations here; I'm saying there are greater goods than increasing wellbeing and reducing suffering, that it's okay to sacrifice wellbeing and suffer to achieve those higher goods, and if you've got to stick a bunch of caveats on about how you're not talking about wellbeing that it's good to sacrifice or suffering that it's good to dive headlong into, then you've just caveated your way out of saying anything of substance about goodness at all.
Or you could just say "love one another"--you don't even have to believe in God! Because, to be clear, I'm not chafing at your secularism, I'm chafing at your description of what is good. I've never considered the core of my religion inaccessible to atheists; there are ways to put it into rather simple secular terms. Y'all just seem to have a difficult time getting there.
That's bc people stupidly insist on valuing credentials rather than truth. Here's most of the answers: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell
If there’s no God, why is suffering bad?
I never said there’s “no God.” I also don’t say suffering is bad from an “absolute morals” standpoint. My claim is that unnecessary human suffering is by definition something humans don’t want and they tend away from it. Thus, I feel that we “ought” reduce unnecessary human suffering, starting with agreeing on what constitutes it. My emotional valence compels this, likely due to evolved mirror neurons and other structures consistent with valence, empathy, pro-social instincts and coherence, and capacity. This sort of ought isn’t an absolute, but rather a prescriptive statement limited to human agents, and I’d argue that this is the only kind of ought worth wanting, and has a sufficient level of thoroughness required to support a stable base of morals and ethics if the goal is to increase wellbeing and reduce suffering.
A larger, universal, extrinsic ought is an incoherent concept and we have no need for such an ought.
Hey what’s up Oz. So I wrote a second piece the next day that distills my argument for why suffering is bad, but with less distractions and a really clear, bolted down restatement. It’s the steel man framing, even more so than this piece. It’s shorter and worth a quick scan. Would you be willing to move the comments and our dialectic to that version? If not, that’s okay. My sense is either way you’re going to run me thru the Aquinas diagnostic and see where my argument goes off the rails. If it doesn’t, it may be a bit of a powder-keg moment, and so I want to make sure any ensuing discussion or others chiming in is attached to the canonical piece that best explains my framing. https://open.substack.com/pub/galan/p/im-saying-it-again-differently-in?r=1xoiww&utm_medium=ios
Answer to some pushback from Jack Ditch on how my system was a shitty cornerstone asking for trouble, compared to simpler rules of thumb. Religion, or just love thy neighbor stuff. I don’t see a problem, but I needed to explain why better. I do so here. IWRS isn’t a religion. In fact, if it doesn’t serve existing ones, it’s probably trash.
https://galan.substack.com/p/its-time-to-go-there/comment/189716547?r=1xoiww&utm_medium=ios
The assumption that there is an ‘answer’ is the problem.
Assuming you know what question I’m referring to is the problem. Clearly there are some questions that have answers. Maybe start by asking what my question is before presuming my problem? I don’t worship at the alter of helplessness with regard to solving human suffering.
The acronym IWRS is not explained. For that matter, neither is fMRI. All caps is always the register of the triggered. I’ll be backing away from the temple door. But, hey, keep doing that thing you’re into.
Temple door? Uh, no.
“But, hey,” fuck off.
This is more like a rigorous discussion using critical thinking, reason, science and seeing where that vector collides with what tends to matter to the majority of human brains.
It explores what we might want to do about it such that we don’t have cognitive dissonance or unnecessary suffering.
It’s not “temple door,” it’s not woo-woo or religious.
It’s intense, though. If it’s threatening to you then sit this one out, by all means.
You can always come back later.
But you don’t have to leave behind a bunch of ego-protecting quips on your way out like a dick.
Not sure who that was for; it fools nobody.
Take care though.
Maybe I am triggered, maybe there’s a good reason.
Oh, it’s far worse than woo-woo, High Priestess. And rigor (at least in sophomore high school English classes) would involve explaining the acronyms one makes use of. Otherwise one’s writing sounds like code-talking to the acolytes. And we wouldn’t want *that.*
Let me know if you have any other critiques aside from that petty detail. Until then I’ll assume you have a low iq and are a disappointment to self and others. Usually that’s what inspires people to lash out in such a craven, low-effort manner. If you have a single point of substance on which to level a critique, let us know. Until then, I guess go back to blowdrying your hair and sucking in your cheeks and wtvr you do that passes for useful these days. 🐶
Yes, thanks for the invitation, SS. I note your reputation precedes you.
https://ibb.co/pvNNDZ9k
Thanks for the constructive criticism. I’m sure you learn all your favorite things from a guy named commander rimmer.
https://gybemperor.substack.com/p/cosmology-a-new-religion-the-mission?r=3lnqop
https://gybemperor.substack.com/p/the-thinker-stanislav-saburov?r=3lnqop
https://gybemperor.substack.com/p/all-or-nothing?r=3lnqop
https://gybemperor.substack.com/p/how-to-reorganize-the-rabkrin-2?r=3lnqop
https://gybemperor.substack.com/p/what-is-good-and-what-is-bad?r=3lnqop
https://gybemperor.substack.com/p/cosmology-a-new-religion-the-mission?r=3lnqop
https://gybemperor.substack.com/p/the-unified-state-of-planet-earth?r=3lnqop