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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 18m

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 1h

Just kant imagine that

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 2h

But your having done that gives no one else any special obligation to accept your principles themselves, which is a big difference from e.g. physics.

Leon Kass thundering about how stem cell research violates human dignity reflects, I’m sure, a lot of careful thought but I still don’t agree

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 2h

I think (thinking aloud) the point I have in mind is clearest in bioethics, a field where it’s even easier to be evil than here. How ethical principles apply to some complicated situation is not necessarily obvious and someone who’s thought hard about that has a lot to contribute

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 2h

<3 jay rosen

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 2h

Oh definitely it’s a valuable thing to study and for others to pay attention to scholarship on, I just notice this tendency to treat ethicists of various kinds as secular priests able to give blessings or anathematizations with special weight and I think that’s not what they can or should do

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 2h

The proper role of an ethicist is more limited than popular understanding or the institutional imperative to have a guy you can ask “well bob, are we being evil” would suggest

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 2h

the whole idea of an expert in ethics — not in the history of ethics or of the ways people have behaved unethically in the past, but in what moral conduct looks like — always struck me as a category error

That’s not the kind of thing one can have scientific expertise in, it’s is vs ought

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 7h

Yeah sure I have a health care plan, check my website, but have you heard about my plans for the implacable imposition of punishment on the guilty???

John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 7h

The fact that he talks like that when no one is supposed to be listening is alarming

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 7h

…concluding that it was a great example of journalism holding power to account

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 7h

I’m going to be angry about that and their total lack of reckoning with the mistake until the heat death of the universe

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 8h

The reason I care about this is that the description helps pursue the normative vision

Human nature won’t change easily but communication technology can. the more social media is involved in political dysfunction the more there may be essentially technical fixes

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 8h

the best alternative is probably a combination of the 2008 crash, the covid pandemic and common economic trends in western countries, and sure there’s probably not just one cause

but I think a lot of signs point to social media too

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 8h

This certainly isn’t the only way for people to go crazy and politics to be dysfunctional but 2005 also wasn’t like this!

We had a pretty rapid change with parallels in many other countries, which points to a cross-national explanation — imo social media is by some distance the best explanation

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 8h

Political life happens on social media now which means it’s more tribal, more conspiratorial, more anti-intellectual, less functional

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 8h

I do think that apart from what either side thinks (and apart from the influence of the *companies*) the influence of the internet platforms is responsible for most of this

The right for example is radicalizing itself on X; after the 1918 flu we did’t have a big movement to ban smallpox vaccination

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 10h

:(

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John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 10h

The right solution is to recognize that being screamed at by thousands of strangers doesn’t improve ~anyone’s character and change social media platforms so it stops happening

John Q Public @conjurial.bsky.social · 10h

This is an unrealistically positive view of human nature, I’d say. A person getting mobbed typically won’t calmly consider the point, they’ll either radicalize in the other direction or disengage.

Both of these processes have made the right much crazier since Elon bought Twitter

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