Thanks for the response. Below, I'll propose _alternatives_, the plausibility of which I
believe to greater or lesser extents. What I believe to be the case is irrelevant,
though. The point is to provide alternatives (what "Millian" might actually
mean, in contrast to what Haidt seems to think it means).
On 12/05/2016 09:14 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
A) Are /Truth/ and /Social Justice/ in any way different?
I think they are categorically different... they represent different goals and
values. This is not to say that they are fundamentally incompatible, however. I
*think* your argument implies that you believe that they are very compatible, possibly to
the point that the pursuit of truth serves social justice, or in the strong "they
are no different" case, that social justice *also* serves truth. My own belief is
that the pursuit of truth should be bounded by reasonable merits of social justice and
that social justice should be grounded in truth. I *think* this is different than
saying that they are no different from one another.
Consider the idea that social justice (equality and equality of opportunity for
all) is the most _powerful_ way to, or the most efficient path toward, a
maximimally effective biosphere. Every person (or plant or animal) that dies
is a loss of power, a loss of productivity. Every poor or underprivileged
person hyper-constrained by their environment results in suboptimal world.
Now, consider the idea that truth is two-fold: a) understanding the world well
enough to b) effectively control the world.
But this alternative is not, as you put it, truth in service to social justice
or vice versa. They are one and the same thing. You cannot effectively
understand/control the world without social justice or vice versa. Since the
two always, exactly overlap, then they are the same. (Perhaps in some Platonic
ideal, they are different. But that leads to a distinction without a
difference.)
I think this idea could be made (eventually) falsifiable. Those who disagree
with it should help in the formulation, rather than simply denying it.
B) Apparent conflicts we have seen are (or not) between /Truth/ and /Social
Justice./
[...]
Trying to make them identical seems to confront what I apprehend to be a fundamental truth
about Truth and that is that in it is nominally absolute, it is not relative while Social Justice
is fundamentally relative to the "Social System" or "Ideals" we are trying to
provide justice for or around?
But this ignores plenty of good arguments against naive realism. Even if there
is a unitary truth out there that we might be able to find/perceive/manipulate,
there's no guarantee that our structures (physiology, hereditary mechanisms,
social systems, etc) are capable of finding/perceiving/manipulating that
unitary truth. We may be stuck with pluralism no matter what we do. Hence,
reality would be plural just like our social systems (and vice versa). Again,
this could be (and has been to some extent in more speculative physics)
formulated so that it's (almost) falsifiable. But we haven't yet falsified
pluralist truth. So, it's an alternative we must consider.
But when I said that to Eric, I had in mind the more banal cases that we could
pick apart (like getting someone like Curtis Yarvin uninvited from a
programming conference or somesuch). I _bet_ that I could formulate an
argument that uninviting such jackasses _is_ the pursuit of truth. Whether or
not anyone would take the time to hack their way through my argument is another
story, of course. 8^)
C) This alleged conflict is somehow more critical than others which ...
I think the discussion emerges from decades of their appearing to have been
such a conflict, especially in the domain of education.
Hm. I tend to think it's just apophenia. People really really _want_
institutions to be simple things. They really want it to be _easy_ to, say,
plant and harvest a garden, even in New York City. They _want_ students to
listen to them. They want it to be easy to program firmware devices. Etc.
But, unfortunately, EVERYTHING IS HARD (at least until it's easy 8^). The
oversimplification made by Haidt is just evidence that he wants his social
psych problem to be easy. He wants to have identified the culprit and spend
the rest of his days yapping about his solution. I certainly empathize. I
didn't want to spend dozens of hours tracking down my last memory leak, either.
But that difficulty doesn't cause me to blanketly assert that the cause of all
memory leaks is _unitary_ and I should adopt a single, inviolable good to
pursue.
--
☣ glen
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
