1/16/2000 In response to my last ramblings, Beemer was wrestling with the idea that Good is obliged to "be nice" to Evil, and was wondering if there could be some sort of "fight fire with fire" principle involved. To take a more concrete example (and one I've thought more about), if we are tolerant people, do we have to be tolerant of intolerant people? Does that tolerance have to extend to people like racists, religious bigots, etc? Or are we allowed to treat them with their own behavior of intolerance? My first inclination in this is that it is never right to act against your principles no matter what the provocation. It may be justifiable, and even warranted, but hypocrisy is one of my pet peeves, and so making my actions and my beliefs coordinate is very important to me. To reiterate a point I made last time, I believe that each person is morally responsible for their own choices. So it is wrong for me to try to take those choices out of their hands, even when I believe they are making the wrong choices. In the case of tolerance, I think it's deplorable that people won't give others a chance based on their skin color, religion, or what have you. But I can not change them. I can try to explain to them why I think they are wrong, and I can demonstrate the advantages of living a different way, but in the end, they are the ones who are going to have to change themselves. A friend of mine pointed out this tendency to me. They noted it's impossible to help somebody who doesn't realize they need help. It may be so easy for you to see what's wrong with their life, but presenting them with a solution and trying to impose it on them will do absolutely no good at all, until and unless they say "Hey, I have a problem." Otherwise, the solution will just get ignored as unwanted outside interference. An alternative way of looking at it is to reverse the situation. If a racist were to come to me and tell me that I was wrong in being tolerant, and I had to change, I would consider that wrong. So is it any more moral for me to tell them the same thing? My inclination is to say no. Does that mean that when one is confronted with a morally repugnant person, one just has to let them be? That seems wrong, too. But maybe it's the way it has to be. I think it has been shown by various people throughout history that you do not have to sink to your opponent's level in order to succeed in demonstrating the righteousness of your cause. Gandhi and Martin Luther King come to mind (the fact that it's now MLK day is merely a coincidence. Honest!). I'd like to believe in a world where living your life righteously is enough for you to demonstrate the strength and quality of your beliefs. In fact, those are the people that I am always the most impressed with: those who quietly and proudly live their life. They don't feel the need to get in your face and tell you all about their beliefs, or how you are going to hell, or how you need to show some feeling for the plight of the Native American. If you ask them why they're so peaceful and serene, they'll tell you, and if you ask for advice, they'll give it to you, but it will only be at your request. I am probably a little bit allergically sensitive on the subject because I've seen far too much holier-than-thou behavior in the form of people telling me how I should behave, and what I should believe. I tend to blow off such advice much to the chagrin of many of my nearest and dearest. I resent being told what to do, and so, (a bit childishly I admit), I don't do it, even when it may be good advice. But if that's the case for me, somebody who tends to be relatively reasonable and self-aware, how much more will it be the case for somebody who has behaved one way their entire life? What good will it do to attempt to reason with somebody like that and persuade them of the error of their ways? So it doesn't make sense to intervene with people to attempt to change their beliefs on a purely pragmatic level as well. Quote from a book by Lois McMaster Bujold, a sci-fi author whom I like quite a lot, in the book "Memory": "Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant." I tend to have a similar sentiment when it comes to issues of religion, politics, and ethics (three topics which are often intertwined in a Gordian fashion). It comes back to the same question I asked last time: How can one judge competing systems of morality? I guess my answer at the moment is that you gotta live your life the way you feel it should be lived. If it is a clearly superior lifestyle, then it will be adopted by others. If it doesn't, then maybe you should ask yourself why other people don't seem to recognize it as superior. I'm deliberately being vague about defining superior. In my head, I have this vision of competing systems of morality winnowed away in a process of Darwinian natural selection, as each of them demonstrates its advantages and disadvantages, and people make appropriate syntheses of the various systems until we are left with a surviving system that theoretically is the "best". Of course, it may just be the best at surviving, not at matching what one would consider Good. Beemer brought up another point which is worth mentioning: "you'd be able to tell that Good was Good because Evil eventually annihilates itself when correctly applied." I'd like to think that this would happen in such a neo-Darwinian ethical system. I'm even vaguely tempted to take a stab at showing how it might. But that'll be another time... Ack, this is getting a tad long, and it's getting late, and with a ton of work to do this week, plus three rehearsals for the Symphony Chorus, I should really shut up. So I will leave for another time the other topics I wanted to touch on except for these bullet points: -- Is it possible to construct a society from the bottom-up, in terms of people behaving "properly" towards those around them, rather than from the top-down, the hugely hierarchical nd bureaucratic monstrosity that we know now? Would this be anarchy? -- My pet theory as to why US media is taking over the world: US media has developed techniques to attract the attention of the most media-jaded population ever. Such media acting on populations who have not built up similar levels of tolerance is like shooting flies with a laser cannon (another Bujold analogy). Oh, and I'm going to start including my reading list at the bottom of these things, cuz I feel like it and I'm always looking for new books, even though I'd need about 3-6 months just to read the books I already own. -- Sluggy rules! (http://www.sluggy.com) -- Lois McMaster Bujold, whom I mentioned above. -- Sorting Things Out by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star - a study of classification systems and their consequences. It tends to reinforce my belief that reality is really a human construct. So many of the distinctions and differences we believe are set in stone are the results of long hours of negotiation and all-too-human bias. -- How We Believe, by Michael Shermer (http://www.howwebelieve.com). A look at America's desire for belief by the president of the Skeptic's Society. Haven't started this one yet, but I'm looking forward to it. -- Serious Play, by Michael Schrage. A book by a Media Lab Fellow explaining why rapid prototyping is the way of the future. Since a lot of my job involves rapid prototyping, I thought it'd be interesting, but it's way too "business-speaky" for me. I'd still like to finish it at some point. -- The Economist (http://www.economist.com). A great magazine that I don't get to nearly often enough. -- Red-rock-eater (http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html). Phil Agre, a professor of information studies at UCLA, has an e-mail list to which he sends anything that he finds interesting. And since his interests often overlap mine, this list is great. Like the Economist, though, I'm not even close to keeping up with it. That's a wrap. Eric