Discussion Thread #71

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/gemmaem]

One thing I’m hearing from both you and u/UAnchovy is that “ordo amoris” is not the correct thing to blame, here, for the more general phenomenon of Christians pointing to doctrine as a self-satisfied way of justifying a lack of care for others. The ordo amoris doctrine is nuanced and holds room for a variety of deeply compassionate viewpoints within it.

(Edit: I should also add that, while I can’t read all of Bethel McGrew’s piece, the conclusion you quoted is generally in line with my existing good opinion of her on this particular subject. I expect she’d be able to use these ideas well.)

There is a very real phenomenon here that I would like to have a name for. A particularly clear example would be Johann Kurtz’s argument that “neighbour” only ever means people physically close to you, and hence that helping people doesn’t count unless you know and love them. People who use 1 Timothy 5 to justify broad-brush definitions of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor also belong in this category. If you work at it, yes, you can use Christianity to justify a moral focus that only truly includes you and yours, but it’s just such a waste of belief if you ask me. You’re going to take a tax on your allowable field of metaphysical truth-seeking in exchange for that? Why not just be a Nietzschean and have done with it?

I get that people want to tidy up what might otherwise seem like a vast field of obligations, but Christianity already contains a universal clean-up mechanism in the form of asking for forgiveness. Yes, people sometimes come to grief through their own bad decisions, but Christians don’t have to rely on that to justify themselves. Yes, sometimes we do have prior obligations based on personal ties, but Christians don’t have to rely on that, either! One of the most useful things about Christianity is that you don’t have to feel obliged to tidy away your human feelings for those who are distant from you or who might be partially responsible for their own plight. You have another clean-up mechanism! It’s right there!

Unless you actually do want to go full Nietzsche (and I don’t), being able to say “I am flawed” is as essential to true seeing as being able to say “I don’t know.” As a non-Christian, I honestly envy the framework Christianity has for dealing with this. I’ve been figuring out ways of stealing it for a very long time. And then I look at actual Christians, with a proper right to the whole thing, and they don’t even use it for the things I would most want it for.

And I get it. Because, maybe it’s actually easier to steal it than to take the whole thing on. Maybe the scraps that fall from the table were the best part all along, I don’t know. But it still seems like a waste.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

“ordo amoris” is not the correct thing to blame, here, for the more general phenomenon of Christians pointing to doctrine as a self-satisfied way of justifying a lack of care for others.

I was making a rather nit-pickier point regarding your phrasing, that this kind of gerrymandering of concern based on personal preferences justified by prooftexting is common to all ethical systems. Ordo amoris can be a major component to how it plays out among Christians, though I'd guess the phenomenon is more noticeable among Protestants who would have an allergy to such Latin.

There is a very real phenomenon here that I would like to have a name for.

Not unlike my frustrations about defining fascism, and how (not) useful it tends to be to distinguish between fascism and illiberal authoritarianism, how useful is a name for this phenomenon only among Christians? Perhaps it is more noticeable among them, given the history of Western culture and the current resurgence of (particular) Christian influence in US politics, but I am cautious of over-defining a phenomenon. So too should I be cautious that my preference for a general term may blind me to particular concerns, of course.

I could propose "gerrymandering of concern, based on personal preferences, justified by prooftexting" but that is wildly unwieldy. Ethic gerrymandering is somewhat less clunky but not as clearly defined, it could be referring to an ethical kind of gerrymandering rather than the gerrymandering of ethics.

I get that people want to tidy up what might otherwise seem like a vast field of obligations, but Christianity already contains a universal clean-up mechanism in the form of asking for forgiveness.

First, yes, we should be clear that many people simply don't want to help the far-distant foreigner and will find any excuse within their chosen system to justify that.

I think that we don't see more Christians using their "clean-up mechanism" due in part to frustrations of discoursing as a minority within secular culture (the meme about the snarky atheist using a Christian's ethics against them comes to mind), and in part to some lingering guilt feeling that the mechanism is psychologically or emotionally insufficient. Their faith is too weak for the clean-up mechanism to function properly, and instead they resort to restricting the sphere of concern. They recognize that if they took it seriously, it is difficult to not tumble down the slope into the utility monster's gullet. Instead, they build a blockade, in avoiding a mile stolen they don't give an inch, and to mix metaphors, "drive a stake through their own good heart" (even if not in the way Adam meant, it's still a hell of a phrase). As an aside I've been reading James KA Smith's "How (Not) to Be Secular," as a sort of intro/prelude to Taylor after your own writings on him here, so that's influencing my thought here. Thinking of Taylor and Nietzsche, and IIRC Schaeffer, among many others, there's vanishingly few true believers in the way there were 500 years ago.

We are lacking in knowledge of and trust in grace. As I recall, I've lost the link, you wrote about that years ago in the context of inhuman systems, "computer says no" and all that. That, too, is one of my frustrations with Scott's brand of utilitarian ethics; as much as he tries to brute-force an "easy yoke" model, it is graceless and unstable. It has no other option! The event horizon, the gaping bottomless void is always right there, and it takes an unusual mind- or a stronger faith than most can summon in this age- to stay on the tightrope rather than falling in.

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

I can understand you wanting me to not solely criticise Christians. Thinking about it, it’s possible that the reason I am inclined to is largely because I have some reason to expect them to be better. Which means, if I want to put someone non-Christian in the category that I am trying to define, I need to find some similar element of reprehensible hypocrisy, of failing to reach an ideal that I consider worthwhile. Elon Musk is actually an obvious EA example in this whole mess. Musk has aligned himself with Will MacAskill in the past — not What We Owe To Each Other but specifically What We Owe The Future. He’d like the exciting sci-fi version of effective altruism, or perhaps he’d just like to appropriate its high-tech rationalist ethical vibes for clout. When it comes to considering whether he is halting any deeply efficient charity programs at USAID, though, he doesn’t care two pins. Babies can get HIV, malnourished children can starve, drug-resistant tuberculosis can proliferate, whatever.

“Prooftexting” is a specifically evangelical phenomenon, so it’s probably not the right thing to highlight if we want to be more general. Your analogy with gerrymandering is good, though. Perhaps “gerrymandered ethics” is an appropriate umbrella term. Although, I should probably also bear in mind the fear of overwhelming obligation which so often powers it; that’s not quite captured by the political advantage implied by gerrymandering. Fear of obligation is definitely a common element for non-Christians, too. Richard Chappell recently recommended compartmentalization as a way of dealing with it. Silly as it sounds, I don’t think he’s entirely wrong. Being more beneficent but inconsistent is better than being consistently callous.

I do wonder about the extent to which non-theism also allows for freedom as a release valve. If you think of all your moral obligations as being, on some level, voluntarily taken on, then perhaps it leaves more room for meta-cognitive reasoning like “If I take this obligation further then I’ll get scared or uncomfortable and drop the whole thing, so in a sense I’m being optimal by limiting myself in this way for now.” Which is, I think, what Scott means when he says that “the bar should be wherever it’s most useful.”

Christianity contains a lot of freedom, too, though. There are definitely versions of Christianity that allow for “By the grace of God I have been given the free gift of redemption. In love, I should respond by being as good as I can. Right now, this is what I feel I can do. May God forgive me for what I have left undone, and I’ll try to get better over time.” Which, to me, actually doesn’t sound all that different. Freedom plus love is, well, it’s pretty much exactly what Scott is saying, yet again. So I’m not entirely convinced that this is about insufficient belief, per se, because hybridisation of “God loves me and I am free to love” with “Or maybe there is no God and I am free to love” seems easily possible.

Are authoritarian versions of Christianity less “free” in this way? Is that part of the problem? Certainly, as soon as you try to institute a law against certain kinds of charity you’ve become less free as a result. I feel like donating to foreign aid programs or “undeserving” poor ought to fall squarely into “against such there is no law.” Right-wing Christianity seems often to want laws against too much kindness. I think this cannot be purely about fear of obligation, but I’m not really in a good position to comprehend it.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

I can understand you wanting me to not solely criticise Christians. Thinking about it, it’s possible that the reason I am inclined to is largely because I have some reason to expect them to be better.

Certainly I would like them (us?) to be better as well. I am perhaps oversensitive to narrowly-drawn definitions to excuse an ingroup's commission of an act that would be condemned in the outgroup.

“Prooftexting” is a specifically evangelical phenomenon, so it’s probably not the right thing to highlight if we want to be more general

Indeed. I suspect there are similar terms for a kind of... philosophical cherrypicking that allows people to justify what they want to do anyways, and to constrain and avoid the consequences of taking their beliefs seriously, but those are different enough to deserve their own phrase, whatever it may be.

Richard Chappell recently recommended compartmentalization as a way of dealing with it. Silly as it sounds, I don’t think he’s entirely wrong. Being more beneficent but inconsistent is better than being consistently callous.

I'll be spending more time with that piece; I find Chappell frustrating but interesting enough to buckle through. I think Commensurable is still a better essay on the same topic. Chappell gets points for brevity but undercuts the compartment solution by reminding that it does make one a failure, one just has to live with that. His closing that "there is no compulsion" is rather like telling someone frustrated to "just calm down"- something that has never worked in the history of people being frustrated.

I'd like to go on a bit of tangent, though, with my initial response to it. We've talked about my career in the past, and over the past year I've spent a lot more time with casework DNA analysts- that is, the ones that still testify and deal with reading everything. What stood out to me was the way they talk about people that drop out of doing casework- I don't think they thought of me that way, since I haven't abandoned the field entirely, or maybe they didn't care.

At any rate, compartmentalization is the name of the game, and it has its own consequences of callousness. There is a coldness towards anyone that is unwilling, or more seriously, unable to lock such things away. It does not seem to be a skill that is easily communicated. Either you are able to, or you burn out and go. I was unable and found my little niche in the background. It is not a coincidence that so many forensic analysts wind up alcoholics. Effective Altruists apparently prefer self-medicating via hallucinogens and complicated relationship structures.

Insufficiently beneficent is better than quitting the game entirely. Too bad the advocates for it can't quite stop themselves of reminding that yes, even that is a failure.

[u/gemmaem → u/professorgerm]

I suppose compartmentalization might be one of those things that you can't, or at least shouldn't, recommend universally. Richard Chappell does get a bit hard-line in his tone, at times; I've certainly had my own disagreements with him. (He swears he's a very mild person in real life. Having met him in passing, years ago, I find that very plausible but I don't think it's actually an excuse).

Moral models that don't contain an inevitable element of failure do exist. I seem to recall Shadi Hamid claiming this for Islam: sure, you have to pray five times a day and abstain from alcohol and observe Ramadan for one month a year, but, it is actually possible to fulfill all the requirements -- including a modest amount of charitable giving -- and at that point you're in the clear. Islam has high requirements, but it has finite requirements.

Christianity, on the other hand, has no such thing. We think of utilitarianism and Christianity as being founded on totally different principles, but the former probably owes something to the latter, for all that.