I more or less agree that morality is fake but I think that deep down most people are aware there is a "greater good" and are aware of who the parasites and hosts are in the "global society". Logically morality (probably) cannot be deduced, but that doesn't stop moral realism from potentially being true or people from believing in it.
"Society needs all kinds of people. We observe meaningful variation in moral foundations because it was highly adaptive for paleolithic tribes to contain both mean-minded hotdog chuds and indulgent fibromyalgia aunts. We likewise needed both a healthy base of sheeple to consistently respect Chesterton’s Fence and some segment of degenerate bigbrains to gleefully kick it down and invent fire before developing goiters because they didn’t boil their Manioc Root."
I think this is a broader point about all systems (businesses, military, countries ect)
Every systems needs innovators that want the system to evolve and NPCs to fight to keep the system at is.
This feels a lot like the difference between tantra(praxis) and sutra(rhetoric), or the spirit and letter of the law. Moral frameworks made into law are kinda retarded, we do the same shit with memorization in "education" without skill acquisition/actual change/growth.
Most religions have that exoteric schoolmarm rule following with threat of punishment and lure of reward, but for those of depth and maturity there's always been the core of deep work--which the exoteric can only steal from and formalize, forcing the truly spirited to pack their bags and leave the now rigid and antigrowth formalism
Surprisingly, this is a valuable article for social conservatives to read. Rather then attempting to cast a religious viewpoint as 'civic virtue' while modernizing the surrounding aesthetics, it is far better to preserve ones values in their entirety than to embark on a doomed effort to make them universal.
A practical example of this would be how the position of the Catholic church has changed in America. In the first half of the twentieth century, Catholic culture was largely intact, thriving and self-sufficient, but Catholics were largely separated from public life and government in the United States. However, in the Sixties, the Church largely traded cultural integrity for civic respectability and influence. Today, the religion is largely seen as normal, there have been two Catholic presidents and there are currently six Catholic Supreme Court justices, but Catholic birth rates have collapsed, churches are empty, and the after effects of Vatican II are still causing further damage. Therefore, it is far better to preserve ones values than to pursue national prestige or a "moral victory", and to approach public affairs in a transactional way.
Whilst I think this is a good map for the transactionally minded, epistemologies are as partial as every other story told at the end of the day… and not all people are transactionally minded.
My main critique would be that the aesthetics and so culture the transactional leads to would be… not beautiful.
That alone for me would be enough to not elevate the transactional as lead organising principle.
I’m still not entirely grasping what moralism is… but how is transaction not moralism?
There’s a connection to morals and aesthetics I think. As a Brit the style of moralism I enjoy is ‘there is a time and a place’ (for various things). So I disagree with your titled plan on this principle of ‘there’s a time and a place’, and I think your moral bashing should take place in… pubs, or ofcourse the internet. Where things happen and how they happen then builds the out there world. And transaction alone would build a world that looks like the inside of a bachelors pad… stinky, messy, not beautiful.
I think moralism does contain within it the shallowness of decoration. Of embellishment. Shallowness and depth are aesthetic moves. There is a time to go deep, there is a time to stay at the surface (courtship here is a moralism)
I think no less of shallowness because I don’t worship depth more than it. At its best moralism is the beauty of whim. At its worst it tries to evade its own lightness by feigning depth (i see the latter in wokeism, when it insists on its own deep purity, where depth is a measure of status and quality… ‘how far down does your goodness go?’ Etc.
But then ofcourse this seems like a movement of desire.
I think depth is what men pursue (like the Freudian phallus) as women already have the depth of the womb. So despite woke moralism aligning itself with minorities and women, I see it as an especially masculine moralism as it pursues the phallus of depth. The feminine proper, imo, does not relate to depth (conflated with the ‘real’) in this way. That is instead masculine ‘I have found the treasure of the real in the depths’ etc.
Whilst universalism is annoying, I think it comes hand in hand with complex globalisation… it seems? Universalism is the decorative shallow to globalisations depth, and the two are interacting
Even if absolute truth is unattainable (I personally believe mathematics gets pretty close, though), this is quite a good model about optimal social behavior, and one I am mostly onboard with, although I'd have probably labelled it differently, i.e., as non-realist contractualism.
yeah I was being a provocative asshole to get eyeballs
I have called it Moral Intersubjectivism in the past, but it takes a very high IQ to understand what distinguishes this framework from moral relativism so these days I prefer to somewhat churlishly shove the extent nomenclature down the garbage disposal so I can start fresh
Like "white nationalism", it's debatable as to whether we should even have a label (especially a public one) for our view, lest it connote concession to any legitimate debate over what is a matter of intractable identity. I often think the best answer to
"so man, do you believe morality is objective?"
is
"I don't care".
"So you don't think morality is important?"
"Morality is the most important thing there is for me personally, and because it's so personal I don't diminish it with intellectualizing dialectic."
If Walt ever shoots up a church this could be the Manifesto on the hard drive.
Even the asides hit the bullseye, like:
“consider that each new paradigm in physics requires an increasingly high IQ to substantively understand”. People still grappling with Relativity, much less Quantum
being both a philosophy and stem student which this essay managed to attack both i feel i have to comment , as i understand your essay you believe in scientific instrumentalism and skepticism about human reason being able to grasp the world as it really is , philosophy and specially moral and political philosophy goal is to manipulate people , the existense of different human temparments that lead people to have different values and different optimal life stratigies and this beliefs lead you to believe that the best way to manage a complex pluralist society is through adopting a honorable transactional mindset .
now i agree with walt that morality and moral language is oftenly used to manipulate what i donot understand is why walt idea of honor and duty is any less likely to be used to manipulate others which what bothers walt about morality in the first place , if honor is adopted as moral ideal the way tolerance or dignity are today wonot the same thing happen based on walt theory of power dinamics and different tempermants wonot honor be redefined as you are not honorable if you donot believe and practice sexsual chasity or donate to racial justice .
the second problem i have with this essay is that walt says that there is no way for us to study human nature in rigrous way without using some extreme methods i almost said unethical methods but i stopped myself yet walt uses the 5 peronality traits a psychological theory and john haidth moral foundation theory as evidence for his beliefs my question why are you not also skeptical of those theories too .
the third problem is walt power dynamics to be more formal and overt rather than subtextual but by logic of people having different temparmant and abilities making power dynamics more formal will advantage some people and disadvantage others , and why will the people who are advantged by power dynamics being subtextual will accept the change what do we have offer them for their loss power ?
there a lot more that i can say but this comment is getting too long , this essay is like a lot of walt other essay his really good at noticing hidden thing and unmasking them but not really good at offering a way forward
- Honor culture can absolutely be used to manipulate people. JD Vance talks about this at length in Hillbilly Elegy and I observed a lot of the same thing both in my own family and in the Alt Right. But compared to morality it offers the advantage of the manipulation coming primarily from within your ingroup and ensuring there are far fewer vectors of attack.
- Re: moral foundations and Big 5, I'd argue those are different because (like IQ) they're decently replicable metrics that assess a lower order characteristic and (at least compared to other shit in the social sciences) hold a ton of explanatory / predictive power. It's much easier to lie or fail to know oneself on surveys about more complex or higher order characteristics. Whereas at the very least scoring 100 in trait openness demonstrates you *strongly value openness* even if you might not display it as consistently as you purport.
- You're absolutely correct that people who benefit from status/power being subtextual (primarily upper middle class neurotypical women, who currently control elite culture) would resist this change quite aggressively. But I'd posit that ultimately they'd take back their share of power and then some under a more formalist structure by returning to their old tactic of acting through men (which a huge number of them continue to do into modern times despite it no longer being even remotely necessary simply because abrogating agency is a vastly more effective strategy for seizing power than competing with men on male terms). So in practice women and feminine men would adapt to the new ruleset immediately and the power balance between the sexes would remain basically the same (as I'd contend it always has).
thanks for the reply but i disagree with you that the big 5 offer explanatory power and john haidth moral foundations is not a really good construct and that can easily be shown for example liberals value authority as much as conservatives (remember covid) the only different is which authority the same with sanctity ,the reason john haidth get the results he got is because of the questions he asked , i personally prefer the language of courage vanity and patience, virtues and vices to describe human beings .
your way of " honor and transactional " is more honest than " universal morality " but i am not sure its more effective at achieving your goals , if i am playing by the rules of honor and the other side is playing by the rules of morality who will win ? and how ?
I'm not attached to the specifics of Haidt's theory so much as to the general principle that moral foundations A) are downstream of temperamental factors determined mostly by genetics / early environment; and B) break down in a fairly consistent way across political lines. Big 5 meanwhile seems to be the most "scientific" way to categorize human behavior. But I'll own that the whole enterprise might be kind of silly to begin with.
>if i am playing by the rules of honor and the other side is playing by the rules of morality who will win ? and how ?
Good question. If I'm being totally honest the answer seems largely contextual.
Historically it certainly seems that nations governed by a morality culture usually dominated nations governed by a more transactional honor culture. But it likewise seems that honor cultures totally mog morality cultures in imperial politics and kulturkampf--consider how the Irish drove the Brahmins out of Boston or how the Italians and Jews seized control of New York.
What I'm basically arguing is that the old cishajnal way of understanding public morality (which maps to pre-Trump GOP sensibilities) is completely outmoded and that the transactional and coalitional sensibilities of the old Democrat coalition ought to predominate going forward even on the Right (ironically it seems the Dems are starting to adopt universalist WASP sensibilities).
Chatgpt: "In the limited instances where it [cishajnal] has been used, such as in the writings of Walt Bismarck, 'cishajnal' seems to refer to a subset of white individuals, possibly with connotations related to traditional or conservative mindsets..."
> (ironically it seems the Dems are starting to adopt universalist WASP sensibilities).
They always have it in them, it's just now being stretched out. Liberals are ultimately moral universalists - which is why they want "human rights" to be universal and enact UDHR and bully other countries to accept those standards.
(Interest: Like seeks like, and as someone from the third world I can say with absolute certainty that left-liberal UMC everywhere are practically alike. They want more people to be ideologically like them as a terraforming process so to say)
Meanwhile, more chuddish conservatives are ultimately are "LEAVE ME ALONE" Gribbline voters, but that also means they can be more pro pluralism as long as they're left alone & things are approached transactionally.
The thing is that foreign policy "cultural" and "moral" export-wise neoliberals and their predecessors (basically internationalist, pro UN, pro "human rights" moralizing (basically all the Democrat social issues talking points and moralizing exported really) — which today is a Democrat thing) have been utterly dominating ever since Jimmy Carter & the fall of Soviet Union.
Also, BTW. If you're ever going to talk to DeepLeftAnalysis you should discuss this since he's taking the opposite side (More moralism to provide new "religion" after Christianity, he wants to wipeout the chuds with McGenics while you want to use them as the mass troops for bum rush ("The chud is your Indian"), you want a 2. 1 TFR while he wants to reduce natalism, he's pro White because only Whites & Jews can be woke, etc).
I like that "honor" and "honesty" are cognates. The most honest view of morality is that no two moral value sets are the same, not between individuals and not between tribes. This subjectivity is the only true moral universal and the only moral absolute, because uniqueness is absolute by definition. Because the term "moral realism" has been hijacked by moralists, the term I use to describe our view is "value realism" or "actualism".
What makes a moralist? It's not belief in the oxymoron of "objective morality" per se. It's the inability to accept the fact that other people do not believe in your morality and cannot be made to. This manifests in behavior that objectively undermines actualization of the moralist's professed values such as stridence, belligerence, and pointless kinds of purity-spiraling. Once can personally believe his morality "objective" but still maintain equanimity toward those of differing but broadly compatible values. A moral realist of strong character is objective about the functional subjectivity in behavioral tendencies redounding on his moral standards. What defines a moralist is the character weakness where the value of external validation of his value set subordinates all other values in that set.
I find this overall compelling, but I have two points that I'd like to address.
There's a reasonable countervailing thesis that "We don't need all kinds of people, we just have all kinds of people."
There's an adjoining assertion that the tribe has been displaced by the nation-state and to an extent I agree, but from a sociological perspective it seems like we are resegregating ourselves into tribes (or Network States, if you prefer) based on stovepiped media, social networks, digital communication that requires only ideological but not physical proximity; I recognize the inherent levity in even discussing this on Substack (or in Tortuga Chat) but to what extent do you find this plausible vs the "we all live in a society" view? (Which seems literally a parody meme at this point.)
seems like your less against moral universalism than moral monism. morality is downstream of temperament, downstream of our affective drives, but there is a finite set of them that suggest a moral pluralism is certainly universal
while your frame seems practical in the here and now and short-term exchanges, i find it constructive (at least among those intelligent enough to get it) to admit to evolved moral axioms/attractors, that we favor different ones in our nature, nurture, and context. this lowers the temperature in trying to dialectically find an enlightening compromise for all involved -- it takes all kinds, just like our tribal ancestors new, but now we have to recognize it more headily
as it stands there's a binary mindset between a monist and relativist perspective on human nature, while the big 5/mbti and moral foundations suggest there's a middle ground that i don't believe is beyond widespread comprehension in the medium- or long-term. but again your framing makes more pragmatic sense for now.
“all human knowledge stems from thoroughly unjustified axioms about the nature of existence taken entirely on blind faith. There’s no such thing as a “justified true belief,” because everyone has their own such axioms (most of which are entirely unconscious or impossible to reject without contradiction—think the laws of thought) and there’s no basis for designating one man’s axiom as more justified than another’s without begging the question as to where this purported objectivity is coming from.” Pretty elementary errors being made here.
"If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil." -- Baruch Spinoza
I like this quote and think about it from time to time, for reasons related to what you've written here. Every time I see the word "transactional" used pejoratively, I feel like I'm living in a modern Dark Age. There would be a lot more gains from trade if people didn't see trade as profane.
It certainly would be cool to reach a point where the "obscurantist banshees" are shamed and shunned in all serious negotiations. In the meantime, I feel that it's more effective to set a dignified example by explicitly owning one's own preferences and pointedly omitting moral language. Done right, this can come across as clear-headed, respectful, and high-status; as well as sending a costly signal that you cooperate with honest negotiators.
In his essay, "A Friedman doctrine‐-The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," Milton excuses the hypocritical virtue signaling of big corporations as understandable profit-maximizing behavior. He says we can nonetheless express support for companies that stick to more honest messaging. It kinda sounds like you're taking a stronger stance--suggesting that we get serious, build up some cultural clout, and then turn up the heat on the fake virtue signalers.
I more or less agree that morality is fake but I think that deep down most people are aware there is a "greater good" and are aware of who the parasites and hosts are in the "global society". Logically morality (probably) cannot be deduced, but that doesn't stop moral realism from potentially being true or people from believing in it.
"Society needs all kinds of people. We observe meaningful variation in moral foundations because it was highly adaptive for paleolithic tribes to contain both mean-minded hotdog chuds and indulgent fibromyalgia aunts. We likewise needed both a healthy base of sheeple to consistently respect Chesterton’s Fence and some segment of degenerate bigbrains to gleefully kick it down and invent fire before developing goiters because they didn’t boil their Manioc Root."
I think this is a broader point about all systems (businesses, military, countries ect)
Every systems needs innovators that want the system to evolve and NPCs to fight to keep the system at is.
Ying and Yang/Chesed and Gevurah
This feels a lot like the difference between tantra(praxis) and sutra(rhetoric), or the spirit and letter of the law. Moral frameworks made into law are kinda retarded, we do the same shit with memorization in "education" without skill acquisition/actual change/growth.
Most religions have that exoteric schoolmarm rule following with threat of punishment and lure of reward, but for those of depth and maturity there's always been the core of deep work--which the exoteric can only steal from and formalize, forcing the truly spirited to pack their bags and leave the now rigid and antigrowth formalism
Surprisingly, this is a valuable article for social conservatives to read. Rather then attempting to cast a religious viewpoint as 'civic virtue' while modernizing the surrounding aesthetics, it is far better to preserve ones values in their entirety than to embark on a doomed effort to make them universal.
A practical example of this would be how the position of the Catholic church has changed in America. In the first half of the twentieth century, Catholic culture was largely intact, thriving and self-sufficient, but Catholics were largely separated from public life and government in the United States. However, in the Sixties, the Church largely traded cultural integrity for civic respectability and influence. Today, the religion is largely seen as normal, there have been two Catholic presidents and there are currently six Catholic Supreme Court justices, but Catholic birth rates have collapsed, churches are empty, and the after effects of Vatican II are still causing further damage. Therefore, it is far better to preserve ones values than to pursue national prestige or a "moral victory", and to approach public affairs in a transactional way.
Whilst I think this is a good map for the transactionally minded, epistemologies are as partial as every other story told at the end of the day… and not all people are transactionally minded.
My main critique would be that the aesthetics and so culture the transactional leads to would be… not beautiful.
That alone for me would be enough to not elevate the transactional as lead organising principle.
I’m still not entirely grasping what moralism is… but how is transaction not moralism?
There’s a connection to morals and aesthetics I think. As a Brit the style of moralism I enjoy is ‘there is a time and a place’ (for various things). So I disagree with your titled plan on this principle of ‘there’s a time and a place’, and I think your moral bashing should take place in… pubs, or ofcourse the internet. Where things happen and how they happen then builds the out there world. And transaction alone would build a world that looks like the inside of a bachelors pad… stinky, messy, not beautiful.
I think moralism does contain within it the shallowness of decoration. Of embellishment. Shallowness and depth are aesthetic moves. There is a time to go deep, there is a time to stay at the surface (courtship here is a moralism)
I think no less of shallowness because I don’t worship depth more than it. At its best moralism is the beauty of whim. At its worst it tries to evade its own lightness by feigning depth (i see the latter in wokeism, when it insists on its own deep purity, where depth is a measure of status and quality… ‘how far down does your goodness go?’ Etc.
But then ofcourse this seems like a movement of desire.
I think depth is what men pursue (like the Freudian phallus) as women already have the depth of the womb. So despite woke moralism aligning itself with minorities and women, I see it as an especially masculine moralism as it pursues the phallus of depth. The feminine proper, imo, does not relate to depth (conflated with the ‘real’) in this way. That is instead masculine ‘I have found the treasure of the real in the depths’ etc.
Whilst universalism is annoying, I think it comes hand in hand with complex globalisation… it seems? Universalism is the decorative shallow to globalisations depth, and the two are interacting
Even if absolute truth is unattainable (I personally believe mathematics gets pretty close, though), this is quite a good model about optimal social behavior, and one I am mostly onboard with, although I'd have probably labelled it differently, i.e., as non-realist contractualism.
yeah I was being a provocative asshole to get eyeballs
I have called it Moral Intersubjectivism in the past, but it takes a very high IQ to understand what distinguishes this framework from moral relativism so these days I prefer to somewhat churlishly shove the extent nomenclature down the garbage disposal so I can start fresh
Like "white nationalism", it's debatable as to whether we should even have a label (especially a public one) for our view, lest it connote concession to any legitimate debate over what is a matter of intractable identity. I often think the best answer to
"so man, do you believe morality is objective?"
is
"I don't care".
"So you don't think morality is important?"
"Morality is the most important thing there is for me personally, and because it's so personal I don't diminish it with intellectualizing dialectic."
White phosphorous take
If Walt ever shoots up a church this could be the Manifesto on the hard drive.
Even the asides hit the bullseye, like:
“consider that each new paradigm in physics requires an increasingly high IQ to substantively understand”. People still grappling with Relativity, much less Quantum
I appreciate the shoutout man. looking forward to chatting with you!
being both a philosophy and stem student which this essay managed to attack both i feel i have to comment , as i understand your essay you believe in scientific instrumentalism and skepticism about human reason being able to grasp the world as it really is , philosophy and specially moral and political philosophy goal is to manipulate people , the existense of different human temparments that lead people to have different values and different optimal life stratigies and this beliefs lead you to believe that the best way to manage a complex pluralist society is through adopting a honorable transactional mindset .
now i agree with walt that morality and moral language is oftenly used to manipulate what i donot understand is why walt idea of honor and duty is any less likely to be used to manipulate others which what bothers walt about morality in the first place , if honor is adopted as moral ideal the way tolerance or dignity are today wonot the same thing happen based on walt theory of power dinamics and different tempermants wonot honor be redefined as you are not honorable if you donot believe and practice sexsual chasity or donate to racial justice .
the second problem i have with this essay is that walt says that there is no way for us to study human nature in rigrous way without using some extreme methods i almost said unethical methods but i stopped myself yet walt uses the 5 peronality traits a psychological theory and john haidth moral foundation theory as evidence for his beliefs my question why are you not also skeptical of those theories too .
the third problem is walt power dynamics to be more formal and overt rather than subtextual but by logic of people having different temparmant and abilities making power dynamics more formal will advantage some people and disadvantage others , and why will the people who are advantged by power dynamics being subtextual will accept the change what do we have offer them for their loss power ?
there a lot more that i can say but this comment is getting too long , this essay is like a lot of walt other essay his really good at noticing hidden thing and unmasking them but not really good at offering a way forward
- Honor culture can absolutely be used to manipulate people. JD Vance talks about this at length in Hillbilly Elegy and I observed a lot of the same thing both in my own family and in the Alt Right. But compared to morality it offers the advantage of the manipulation coming primarily from within your ingroup and ensuring there are far fewer vectors of attack.
- Re: moral foundations and Big 5, I'd argue those are different because (like IQ) they're decently replicable metrics that assess a lower order characteristic and (at least compared to other shit in the social sciences) hold a ton of explanatory / predictive power. It's much easier to lie or fail to know oneself on surveys about more complex or higher order characteristics. Whereas at the very least scoring 100 in trait openness demonstrates you *strongly value openness* even if you might not display it as consistently as you purport.
- You're absolutely correct that people who benefit from status/power being subtextual (primarily upper middle class neurotypical women, who currently control elite culture) would resist this change quite aggressively. But I'd posit that ultimately they'd take back their share of power and then some under a more formalist structure by returning to their old tactic of acting through men (which a huge number of them continue to do into modern times despite it no longer being even remotely necessary simply because abrogating agency is a vastly more effective strategy for seizing power than competing with men on male terms). So in practice women and feminine men would adapt to the new ruleset immediately and the power balance between the sexes would remain basically the same (as I'd contend it always has).
thanks for the reply but i disagree with you that the big 5 offer explanatory power and john haidth moral foundations is not a really good construct and that can easily be shown for example liberals value authority as much as conservatives (remember covid) the only different is which authority the same with sanctity ,the reason john haidth get the results he got is because of the questions he asked , i personally prefer the language of courage vanity and patience, virtues and vices to describe human beings .
your way of " honor and transactional " is more honest than " universal morality " but i am not sure its more effective at achieving your goals , if i am playing by the rules of honor and the other side is playing by the rules of morality who will win ? and how ?
I'm not attached to the specifics of Haidt's theory so much as to the general principle that moral foundations A) are downstream of temperamental factors determined mostly by genetics / early environment; and B) break down in a fairly consistent way across political lines. Big 5 meanwhile seems to be the most "scientific" way to categorize human behavior. But I'll own that the whole enterprise might be kind of silly to begin with.
>if i am playing by the rules of honor and the other side is playing by the rules of morality who will win ? and how ?
Good question. If I'm being totally honest the answer seems largely contextual.
Historically it certainly seems that nations governed by a morality culture usually dominated nations governed by a more transactional honor culture. But it likewise seems that honor cultures totally mog morality cultures in imperial politics and kulturkampf--consider how the Irish drove the Brahmins out of Boston or how the Italians and Jews seized control of New York.
What I'm basically arguing is that the old cishajnal way of understanding public morality (which maps to pre-Trump GOP sensibilities) is completely outmoded and that the transactional and coalitional sensibilities of the old Democrat coalition ought to predominate going forward even on the Right (ironically it seems the Dems are starting to adopt universalist WASP sensibilities).
side bar: i went to chatgpt to look up the term "cishajnal" -- and it specifically cites Walt Bismarck -- as the main source -- and points me to...
https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/the-mindset-of-conquered-people
Chatgpt: "In the limited instances where it [cishajnal] has been used, such as in the writings of Walt Bismarck, 'cishajnal' seems to refer to a subset of white individuals, possibly with connotations related to traditional or conservative mindsets..."
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bb4283-c38c-8001-904a-cf82c0e4e285
I will read your essay, "The Mindset of Conquered People", but, does chatgpt have it correct, above?
Also, as an aside, Tortuga Society members -- who are doing job-stacking, might like this substacker's writings -- he dissects corporate culture life:
https://chadofarabia.substack.com/archive
> (ironically it seems the Dems are starting to adopt universalist WASP sensibilities).
They always have it in them, it's just now being stretched out. Liberals are ultimately moral universalists - which is why they want "human rights" to be universal and enact UDHR and bully other countries to accept those standards.
(Interest: Like seeks like, and as someone from the third world I can say with absolute certainty that left-liberal UMC everywhere are practically alike. They want more people to be ideologically like them as a terraforming process so to say)
Meanwhile, more chuddish conservatives are ultimately are "LEAVE ME ALONE" Gribbline voters, but that also means they can be more pro pluralism as long as they're left alone & things are approached transactionally.
The thing is that foreign policy "cultural" and "moral" export-wise neoliberals and their predecessors (basically internationalist, pro UN, pro "human rights" moralizing (basically all the Democrat social issues talking points and moralizing exported really) — which today is a Democrat thing) have been utterly dominating ever since Jimmy Carter & the fall of Soviet Union.
Also, BTW. If you're ever going to talk to DeepLeftAnalysis you should discuss this since he's taking the opposite side (More moralism to provide new "religion" after Christianity, he wants to wipeout the chuds with McGenics while you want to use them as the mass troops for bum rush ("The chud is your Indian"), you want a 2. 1 TFR while he wants to reduce natalism, he's pro White because only Whites & Jews can be woke, etc).
I like that "honor" and "honesty" are cognates. The most honest view of morality is that no two moral value sets are the same, not between individuals and not between tribes. This subjectivity is the only true moral universal and the only moral absolute, because uniqueness is absolute by definition. Because the term "moral realism" has been hijacked by moralists, the term I use to describe our view is "value realism" or "actualism".
What makes a moralist? It's not belief in the oxymoron of "objective morality" per se. It's the inability to accept the fact that other people do not believe in your morality and cannot be made to. This manifests in behavior that objectively undermines actualization of the moralist's professed values such as stridence, belligerence, and pointless kinds of purity-spiraling. Once can personally believe his morality "objective" but still maintain equanimity toward those of differing but broadly compatible values. A moral realist of strong character is objective about the functional subjectivity in behavioral tendencies redounding on his moral standards. What defines a moralist is the character weakness where the value of external validation of his value set subordinates all other values in that set.
I find this overall compelling, but I have two points that I'd like to address.
There's a reasonable countervailing thesis that "We don't need all kinds of people, we just have all kinds of people."
There's an adjoining assertion that the tribe has been displaced by the nation-state and to an extent I agree, but from a sociological perspective it seems like we are resegregating ourselves into tribes (or Network States, if you prefer) based on stovepiped media, social networks, digital communication that requires only ideological but not physical proximity; I recognize the inherent levity in even discussing this on Substack (or in Tortuga Chat) but to what extent do you find this plausible vs the "we all live in a society" view? (Which seems literally a parody meme at this point.)
Wow. Dense, worthy, on point.
Here you are, still writing philosophy papers all these years later! John Stuart Mill would be pleased.
B+
seems like your less against moral universalism than moral monism. morality is downstream of temperament, downstream of our affective drives, but there is a finite set of them that suggest a moral pluralism is certainly universal
while your frame seems practical in the here and now and short-term exchanges, i find it constructive (at least among those intelligent enough to get it) to admit to evolved moral axioms/attractors, that we favor different ones in our nature, nurture, and context. this lowers the temperature in trying to dialectically find an enlightening compromise for all involved -- it takes all kinds, just like our tribal ancestors new, but now we have to recognize it more headily
as it stands there's a binary mindset between a monist and relativist perspective on human nature, while the big 5/mbti and moral foundations suggest there's a middle ground that i don't believe is beyond widespread comprehension in the medium- or long-term. but again your framing makes more pragmatic sense for now.
Sorry but I think Aquinas would win in an argument.
“all human knowledge stems from thoroughly unjustified axioms about the nature of existence taken entirely on blind faith. There’s no such thing as a “justified true belief,” because everyone has their own such axioms (most of which are entirely unconscious or impossible to reject without contradiction—think the laws of thought) and there’s no basis for designating one man’s axiom as more justified than another’s without begging the question as to where this purported objectivity is coming from.” Pretty elementary errors being made here.
"If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil." -- Baruch Spinoza
I like this quote and think about it from time to time, for reasons related to what you've written here. Every time I see the word "transactional" used pejoratively, I feel like I'm living in a modern Dark Age. There would be a lot more gains from trade if people didn't see trade as profane.
It certainly would be cool to reach a point where the "obscurantist banshees" are shamed and shunned in all serious negotiations. In the meantime, I feel that it's more effective to set a dignified example by explicitly owning one's own preferences and pointedly omitting moral language. Done right, this can come across as clear-headed, respectful, and high-status; as well as sending a costly signal that you cooperate with honest negotiators.
In his essay, "A Friedman doctrine‐-The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," Milton excuses the hypocritical virtue signaling of big corporations as understandable profit-maximizing behavior. He says we can nonetheless express support for companies that stick to more honest messaging. It kinda sounds like you're taking a stronger stance--suggesting that we get serious, build up some cultural clout, and then turn up the heat on the fake virtue signalers.