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this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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That’s the entire point of the phrase, as far as how I’ve always interpreted it: don’t blame people for doing what’s best for them within a system they don’t control.
I can hate both. Morality is not subject to the whims of legislation. If you're a billionaire, you've done something immoral. Playing "within the rules" does not absolve you of all morality.
The reason that doesn't make sense, is billionaires are the only ones with the power to fix the economic system thru political donations.
The saying isn't meant for your example, because they're not just players. Their also the refs and the ones who wrote the rules for the game.
Like:
That makes sense if said between prisoners about how shitty jail is. But if a prison guard beat an inmate and then said that, it doesn't make sense.
Just because it's not true 100% of the time for 100% of people doesn't mean it's worthless. By that logic no phrase should exist
I agree, I've said that about this phrase before! I can hate the player too. Not one of my favorite maxims.
Legislation is not the only game being referred to by this saying.
No, but it was OP's example. Use it in any ither context, and I'll tell you why the player is also a shitty person, regardless of the game.
Is it a guy being emotionally manipulative to have relationships with multiple women? Yeah, he's a shitbag.
Is it a business resorting to underhanded, but profitable, practices to corner the market and boost income? Shitbags.
Is it the kid cheesing that one move to win every battle? Shit. Bag.
I mean, there are degrees of being a shitty person. But anyone saying "don't hate the player, hate the game," knows they are doing something shitty and are doing it anyway because they can.
If a game inevitably leads to billionaires unless you can count on all individuals being moral people, I take the liberty of hating the game that sets things up like that.
Any system can be abused. Amoral assholes will always exist. We have a system that rewards amoral assholes with wealth and power. Hate both the player and the game.
Of course you can hate both. But I think the phrase tries to make you focus on systemic issues instead of individualising them.
I can hate Elon Musk. But if he wasn't there, someone else would fill the dipshit shaped hole the system leaves for him.
I understand the meaning, and you're right that the system would just reward a different dipshit. But Elon is there, and he is a dipshit deserving of scorn. If it was someone else being a dipshit, then I'd hate them for being a dipshit.
The system should prevent people like Elon from amassing so much wealth and power. But even if it did, he would still be a dipshit.
Hate the game, hate the player, because both fucking suck.
We have a system that rewards people for producing value. You can see the effects of this system all around you, in the absolutely massive wealth that surrounds and serves you every day.
"Value" is a socially loaded construct. Some people value golf courses more that a healthy ecosystem.
Someone else has to suffer for the wealth you enjoy.
"Producing value." Nobody produces a billion dollars worth of value. It takes thousands of people to produce their value, and they keep most of it by fucking over the people that work for them.
The system is fundamentally exploitative and cruel, leveraging fear and violence to extract value from poor people for pennies on the dollar.
Clearly these people are unfamiliar with the prisoner's dilemma.
And what do you know about Nash Equilibriums?
After reading the Wikipedia page, absolutely nothing. It doesn't seem to be a thing that actually applies anywhere.
I don't know what to say. It's taught in a typical American economics class nowadays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXI-zPcDIM
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Yeah, you tell 'em, bot! Good boy!
Legality is not the same as moral or ethical. The rules of life, civility, and good society are not preordained. Aka we make our own norms and values.
No, we don’t make our own norms and values. There’s no reason to believe that is any more flexible than our reliance on iron or potassium to survive.
I'm sorry, but fucking what.
Have you any idea of the scope of existing human norms and values? Your statement is false based on the scope of people alive today.
But also, morality does fuck all to help you survive. Morality is absolutely useless for an individual, much to the contrary.
You heard it here lemmy, this guy thinks morality is "absolutely useless".
Yup! Doing things because some moral authority decided it was “right” is dumb as fuck and I’ll die on that hill.
What a lack of material analysis does to a mfer and all etc. etc.
So if you could get away with it, would you kill your granny?!
Or is there something inside of you which makes you feel uncomfortable about just the idea, even though in purelly logical terms the old lady is probably just a useless consumer of resources well past her breeding age so serves no useful purpose?
If there is that something inside of you (i.e. you're neither a psychopath nor a sociopath) that too is Moral.
I agree with your point about externally defined and imposed "Moral" (which is really Morality or Moralizing), it's just that most people also have their own internal Right-Wrong Compass (I suspect derived from one's empathy) and that too is Moral and it's not under external control.
What you suppose is your “internal” morality compass is an “internalised” one.
I wouldn’t kill my grandma because I love her, not because it’s “wrong”. I won’t kill anyone, I guess, because I don’t like seeing living beings suffer. Not because it’s “wrong”.
Morality is always an internalised “system”. It can’t be “natural”, it’s always ideological.
But that doesn’t mean that being materialistic in analysis of our existence as humans would make you do “evil” things. If you try to analyse us as a species scientifically, we realise that we literally evolved to cooperate and be nice to each other. Our chemistry makes that necessary. We hate being alone and seeing those around us suffer, because those things produce “feel bad” chemicals. We love helping each other because that produces “feel good” chemicals. On average of course (as you mention psychopaths do exist).
In fact, a purely material analysis of us would show that greed, individualism, destroying the planet, killing all animals on it, making large portions of our species to suffer in poverty etc. are counterproductive. Those things all make us individually feel worse and have worse lives. We would have the best lives if everyone around us had access to all amazing developments of the past centuries freely, if the animals and ecosystems of the world were protected, if the people around us cared about us and lived with us, not despite us. And none of that is moral, or based on morality. Just science and materialism.
Re-read your own first 2 paragraphs.
Then go ahead and figure out how "I don’t like seeing living beings suffer" is consistent with the idea that a moral compass is wholly "internalised". Are you saying that your dislike of seeing suffering is "internalized"?
I'm exactly pointing out that how you feel about about harming and hurting others will be part of defining your moral compass (quite literally by leading you away from harming and hurting others because doing otherwise makes you feel bad).
Yeah, absolutelly, a lot of "Moral" is internalized, but a lot of it is just outsiders trying to claim as their invention that which is already human nature and the natural compass we have due to things like love and empathy.
Consider the possibility that societal Morality is really just a way to capture and subvert natural human "morality" (which is not at all a formal "Moral") so as to get people to act outside that natural moral (for example, would Capitalism exist if people just followed a natural tendency to stop hurt when they see it and take from those who have much to give to those they see starving?).
Morality is the basis for social cohesion, which is necessary for the survival of the individual. Try to survive without the help of any other person, including parents, teachers, employees, ...
That has nothing to do with morality. You don’t help people because it’s right. We help each other because we literally evolved to be social animals. Our biology in many ways depends on others. We feel individually sad and bad if we are isolated. And we feel good when we help others and see that people around us are doing well.
Morality has not been present throughout our evolutionary or even social history. Moralism only became an essential part of society after Christianity and other religions like it took over.
Things being “wrong” or “right” don’t help us really, materially. In fact, it’s mostly been used to control people and keep them in-line. After all, who decides what’s “moral”?
I consider morality to be a societal representation of our social nature.
Imposition of "right" and "wrong" guidelines from outside are called "ethics".
morality noun principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. "the matter boiled down to simple morality: innocent prisoners ought to be freed"
There isn’t much of a distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics is mostly spoken of as a philosophical question, and morality as an ideological one. Ethics is usually associated with the ancient Greeks, and morality to Christianity.
What I mean is that if we allow external entities and “authorities” to dictate to us what is right or wrong (an ideology, the Pope, a philosopher we like etc.), we aren’t living materially and objectively, but ideologically. We are being controlled by externalities.
You should also look up the definition of ethics, if you do so for morality:
Ok? Not sure what you mean by this hahaha
The difference between morality and ethics is commonly used as such:
When you claim that
then that is due to the ethics invoked by these externalities which try to impact your individual moral compass.
The christian church usually claims that morality is absolute, since it comes from god. If this was true and you consider that "there's no salvation outside the church", this makes the church the arbiter of ethics and by extension: morality. At least in their logical framework. Therefore, it is only natural for the church to talk about morality, when it actually is talking about their ethics.
I think the point is that Morality can very simply be an evolved human trait due to the massive second and third order effects that derive from it or the lack of it.
Let me put things this way: psychopathy is a condition people are born with, were they are unable to empathise with others so amongst other things they don't feel the hurt of others and are thus capable of inflicting great hurt to others, lie and do all sorts of socially-reprehensible things without feeling a shred of guilt. In practice they will do what's best for themselves with no consideration for others except for the purelly rational "can they punish me if I do this" (in simplifying all this a bit since psychopathy is actually a range rather than simply an Yes/No thing).
Anyways, around 3% of people are born high in the psychopathy spectrum. Now, if psychopathy is "doing what's best for yourself with no consideration for others, no guilt, no conscience to be weighted on" - on other words, no moral, just limitless personal upside maximization - which one would expect is the best possible survival and reproductive strategy there is, why doesn't human evolution lead to 100% of people being born psychopaths?
My theory is that societies with too many psychopaths collapse, removing the psychopaths from the genetic pool, plus psychopaths have trouble cooperating (for the obvious reason they only care for themselves) and thus can't survive the kind of danger that can only be defeated by a group of people.
How would that be. Well, they're pure takers - why tire oneself by making if you can get away more easilly with taking - and they're not good at cooperation (both because they only care about themselves and because when other people spot their character, they don't trust them and don't want to cooperate with them), so any society with too many psychopaths is less productive, has less resources available (too many takers too few makers), it stops evolving, can't properly organise a collective defense system and eventually gets overwhelmed by some other society without such problems.
In other words, even whilst the 1st order effects of being entirelly amoral and purelly out for yourself are pretty positive for that individual, the 2nd order effects (such as others tending to shun that individual) and 3rd order (societies with too many such people end up collapsing or conquered) make being amoral a non viable strategy, except if they're a small fraction and most people around are moral.
This last part is just my theory for why, but certainly the part that only 3% of people are born like that is a pretty good indication that for whatever reasons an amoral behaviour in humans is not a winning evolutionary strategy even though some might think at first sight that it would be.
Psychopaths can just as well have morality systems… they will just look very different from yours.
Morality is ideological definition of right or wrong. To you, scamming someone might be wrong. To a psychopath, getting money from a sucker who’s less smart/strong/awesome than you is right.
Might makes right is a moral system… it might be “imoral” to you, but it’s a moral system nonetheless.
In this particular context regulatory capture and political donations is the unseen bullshit of the claim. Corporations DO make the rules
The system is large and powerful. However, it's perpetuated by individuals. Apathy is a lack of empathy...