[advael]

Cool analogy didja learn it in middle school english?

Seems everyone and their grandma wants to hold the torch of "rationality" and declare anyone who has an actual belief about something "dogmatic." It's intellectually facile and morally bankrupt

But no, fool, the principle of autonomy, or in this context that "the state shouldn't make decisions about what individuals can do to and using their own bodies" is not an arbitrary moral position, it's a meta-norm that has deep mechanism design implications in a functioning cosmopolitan society, ones that the balance of evidence suggest make that society work better for everyone except for the very lucky tiny percent of authoritarian busybodies that win the inevitable holy wars that come of structuring society around the premise that a state should be able to micromanage your individual life. I say that we have not achieved a state that truly doesn't meddle in this way (and one that are closest have in some senses backslid in the last century or so), but every move in that direction has produced both stability and prosperity

The very mindset you're espousing, that no one person's morals should determine the law, is a derived principle of enlightenment liberality. It's exactly why populism can't create a stable functioning human society

Liberality and consensual autonomy isn't a charter for total nihilist moral relativism and it doesn't call for every decision to be made by pure mob rule, it calls for government to act as a superstructure to allow democracy without lynchings and pogroms against political dissenters and laws against sex you don't like. It's a technology, not a religion

Moral nihilism doesn't imply that you're wise, it implies that you're spineless

[rayiner]

> every move in that direction has produced both stability and prosperity

Theatrics aside, it seems like you’re saying that the basis of your “principle” is empirical effectiveness. That is of course a reasonable secular basis for lawmaking. But that confronts two problems:

1) That still doesn’t give you a justification for overriding the democratic will. Empirical effectiveness is evidence that you might submit to the public about what policies would be beneficial. That doesn’t transform it into some “meta-norm” that by its own force overrides democratic law.

We have tremendous evidence that market economies are better than planned economies. But only kooky right-wingers think that makes capitalism a “meta-norm” that must override the popular will!

2) Your historical analysis falls short. China’s rise shows you can become rich and prosperous without embracing bodily autonomy as a principle. Even moral regulation of individuals in the west was quite stringent during the period when the west was getting rich—moreso than societies that were less regimented but didn’t get rich. Victorian England, for example, was a high water mark.

Moreover, the societies that have gone the furthest in embracing notions of bodily autonomy are uniformly on the path to extinction. Western Europe is slowly being replaced by Muslims from cultures that reject such notions.

[advael]

I mean actually nearly any resistance to an extremely oligarchy-friendly neoliberal idea of "free markets" is considered a fringe extremist position in at least the US and the UK, both in terms of the attitude of the culture at large and the levers of power available to anyone, so you must be in quite the left-wing bubble to believe that this is viewed as "kooky" by society at large. I agree with you that for most purposes meta-norms that create free markets (Which in many cases flows completely logically from a meta-norm of autonomy) are better for human flourishing than planned economies, including both cartel-planned ones and government-planned ones, with a few exceptions for things considered infrastructure where the incentives of a market are an ill fit to create guarantees of stability over long timescales. If you live in a western democracy, the vast overwhelming majority of people agree with that. I point out cartel-driven cronyism specifically because I would argue that most rich economies are not operating as free markets, but are essentially using the government as an enforcement arm of the power of incumbent players in many industries. I think that as compared to when this was less true, many of the societies underlying those economies are going into a bit of a tailspin, and that moving more toward free markets would actually do quite a bit to stop the bleeding and maybe turn it around. However, in term of pathos, "free trade" is still so popular that the kleptocrats who benefit from the capture of governmental institutions by industry constantly claim that is what they are doing to anyone who will listen, and the extant fringe of support for communism seeing a very slight uptick in recent years can be mostly explained as a backlash to these obvious lies told by those in power. Often backlashes are quite reactionary, and also water is wet

This absolutely delusional view of popular opinion and government priorities - along with the Great Replacement conspiracy nonsense - has led me to conclude that your preoccupation with the accusation that "people who merely believe in free markets" are right wing kooks might have more to do with your own being objectively and obviously a right-wing kook living in a fantasy world than it has to do with any reality about the general public's attitudes and beliefs in aggregate. Of course if you're one step from joining the next great wave of populist fascisms you think everyone's a tankie. Anyway, I think it's pointless to try to talk sense into someone who believes that anything remotely resembling "muslims taking over" is a serious existential threat to like, all of NATO? or whatever counts as "Western" this week, (Or for that matter, somehow an existential threat to white people as a whole worldwide, which seems to be what you lot tend to actually mean by that euphemism). There is a real war going on in Europe that has nothing to do with muslims, and you idiots worry about a slight uptick in brown people immigrating because some charismatic suits told you to. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. I'll leave you to your frothing madness

[rayiner]

Dude, can you turn down the edge-lord a bit? I’m just trying to have a conversation. We don’t have perfectly free markets in the west precisely because most of the public, including in the US, and UK, believes in some sort of regulated neoliberalism. But that’s a policy choice—it doesn’t support your notion that an empirically-based principle can override democratic will. Many european countries in fact experimented with greater degrees of socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, and moved back towards market economies. But all that happened democratically. Capitalism is a policy tool subject to the popular will, not a religious mandate (like how you treat the principle of bodily autonomy).

As to Muslim migration to Europe: I’m not invoking any “Great Replacement conspiracy.” Quite the opposite. I’m from a Muslim country, and I've come to believe that our rejection of individual autonomy is empirically superior to European embrace of that concept (at least to the extreme it has been taken in post-Christian Europe). The notion of individual autonomy has made their societies literally unsustainable. Those countries must resort to importing population from Muslim countries in order to just to continue existing.

So to recap: “full bodily autonomy” is just a principle (frankly, it’s a cultural precept of European culture). And its empirical results are mixed. So why should such a principle override the popular will?

[advael]

I looked back on that and yeah, I went in a little hard there and made some assumptions. I think I'm on edge because I've been dealing with some family members who are getting taken in pretty deep by this conspiracy stuff, and it's been difficult, both because it tends to turn them against anyone who isn't in it, and because it really is for them a gateway into some pretty life-ruining scams I can't help them avoid because they think I'm an enemy agent or something

Paranoia and edginess begets more paranoia and edginess it seems. I projected stuff onto you that wasn't fair. I sincerely apologize for that

With that said, you're still dead wrong on universal rights. I evoked outcomes because my claims of better outcomes are in vogue as an epistemic path currently, but it's far from the only one that favors it. As I said before no government has existed that fully respects human autonomy (And this isn't that surprising honestly. A government is at the end of the day fundamentally the winner of a contest to see who has power over people, and people who want power tend to want to use it), but as we have asymptotically approached these perhaps unachievable ideals from numerous directions, we can study the trends empirically and say that freer societies on balance tend to do better over time. Sure, there's no single definition of "better" in the world, but quite a few correlated ones. If you permit degrees in your model, the information landscape's structure becomes a lot more apparent. Periods of more freedom for individuals (whether in life, love, commerce, whatever) produce better outcomes across numerous dimensions (more active economies, more great art is made, more scientific discoveries, more people who want to fuck off and have a simple life with people they care about can have it without as much fear of being targeted by powermad states as their will becomes more predictable - predicated on strong meta-principles - and less arbitrary and based essentially their taste, as you have tried to claim all morality is). Obviously there are points in every tradeoff space where other factors may outweigh this correlation. But for individual autonomy this is pretty rare. Feel free to cite a counterexample if you think it's so apparent they're there.

But there are lots of tools for examining complex systems instead of just resorting to the solipsism of "Well some people disagree so there's clearly no way to know." Game theory is an attempt from the realm of logical models rather than empirical ones, and the equilibria of oppression always tend toward cycles of dystopian contraction and bloody revolution, not just because that's littered throughout history, but because when we purport that we can better society by intruding in people's ability to self-determine, there will always be a subset of people for whom rebellion and if possible destruction of the order imposing tyranny will be the only viable course of action. And killing or jailing all those people is already getting pretty dicey for this whole "This world is better for everyone on balance" propositon, but doing that is also a feedback loop. It's pretty apparent why seeing the atrocities of power, even from a wholly selfish perspective, the "what if I'm next someday, or someone I care about is, etc" could lead many to become opposition themselves.

Every time people say "Well my tyranny will make society better", they always mean "For me and mine", an in-group, which may be as small as close friends and family, and may be as large as "people who don't get ground to dust by the tyranny directly and will fall in line instead of rebel". Like the American neotraditionalists point to some (usually at least partially imaginary) time in the distant past when no, really, everyone was a christian, and everyone was super happy and prosperous! Nonsense. Even if my rose colored glasses come from the fact that my ancestor I'm thinking of was literally the king of a christian nation, and thus are probably pretty correct in saying that guy had it quite good back in the day, every king has the blood of the conquered on his hands, and every tyranny made life worse for a lot of people. Anti-semitic pogroms pervaded medieval Europe. Lots of women who didn't accept the life of a second-class citizen were and still are directly harmed by the mechanisms that enforce that choice on them in societies where we do not have equal rights. And to be clear, this does permit degrees and improvement in equality is good even if it's not perfect. Degrees matter everywhere.

So let's say you're renaissance Britain or, hell, modern Iran or Uganda, and you put your gays to death. Those gays hella didn't have a better life, and by saying "well we consider it immoral so it's justified", you just said "Those are bad people anyway, because I said so. Their happiness and prosperity doesn't count." Same for people who worship a different god or do the wrong dances about it or whatever. It's circular reasoning.

You have said that my position that human rights are of value is an arbitrary dogma, but I think the kids these days have it right when they say the thing about accusations and confessions. When our crimes as a society have victims, we can straightforwardly say "No, it's good we lock up the murderers, the harm they do to others outweighs the harm we do them by not allowing that behavior, and sometimes even preventing it by harming them directly, by quite a lot". Your principles may be arbitrary preferences, but that does not mean it's impossible to have principles that aren't

When you can have crimes with no victims, you have to invoke either literal imaginary beings or deeply complicated abstractions ("Monocultures are good because something something social cohesion so it's totally a net good to kill the heathens, trust") to make the morality make sense. I can tell utilitarianism is in vogue because of how often these people grasp at some complicated sociological theory when trying to justify their weird vendettas. Maybe in the giant pile of bullshit that every super complicated economic or sociological model there's One Neat Trick Free People Hate that will Be Good Tyranny Actually, or maybe one of these unfalsifiable literal angry demiurges will end up being real, but I doubt it, and it doesn't seem worth trying every charlatan's rationalization to let them oppress people they hold responsible for some nebulous harm like "social decay" that you supposedly need three advanced degrees to even talk about to find out

The project of modern democracies has always been trying to find the way to grasp the dove's wings and be responsive to the will of the people without just going and burning a witch every time someone popular and charismatic enough drums up a big enough mob. The fact that this is falling apart in an age of unprecedented wealth disparity and unprecedented power to disseminate propaganda is not uncorrelated with the fact that people feel worse off and angrier. Occam's razor likes the argument that that's what's happening a lot better than my aunt's argument that the rainbow rays that come off her gay landscaper neighbors are somehow doing this. When the argument that pagans or queers or weirdos of some other kind aren't objectively batshit, they sound more like arguments that not having to deal with people they don't like would optimize the last sharp corners of the world for people who are already not really suffering, not like this urgent and existential threat they tend to sell it as when trying to open a can of "will of the people" on some people they basically just don't like the aesthetics of