Affective Altruism

Affective Altruism

 

Redirecting another post over here because I apparently have no willpower and could not stop myself from piling on to it until the end product became unacceptably oversized for YouTube’s community tab. It’s fine though, this one probably merits a spot on here anyway.

 

Will MacAskill back on the Making Sense podcast:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/228-doing-good/

Too much of this turned out to be a rerun of their 2016 edition, so I’ll spare you a retelling of the more substantive objections I’ve already aired in the wake of that first conversation. Right now I want to delve into an altogether different observation that keeps bugging me about these two. I’m finally able to recall how the same something managed to irritate me during the first go-round as well. It’s one of those vague somethings that never fully crystallized for me, until a few days ago.

 

We Are All Deplorables Now

Joyful vs. Diffident Victories 

No matter how impressive a philosophy, ideology, system, institution or modest set of prescriptions comes across as being, it should not be spoken of glowingly. It should not be fawned over publicly, or even in the privacy of its adherents' minds.

The antithesis of it should likewise not be spoken of disparagingly or demonized in the privacy of said minds. Tall orders, these two.

It's normal to ask why. Why shouldn't you feel the way you naturally do? Why pretend that your objectively accurate or wise beliefs stop short of turning you into a protagonist, and that their inaccurate or insane beliefs do something other than turn them into the antagonists?

Since the why is so normalized and psychologically embedded, we might conclude that it is reasonable to run with it. So when a snarky meme comes along and points out that taking pride in one's beliefs is puerile, not only is it acceptable to ask why, it's downright imperative to do so. But no one asks why when called upon to acknowledge the circus that is Party Politics vis-à-vis their individual voting history.

No one with an IQ above room temperature lionizes their 2016 Clinton-Will-Do vote (anti-Trump vote), or their Trump-Will-Do/anti-Clinton vote. Only the electoral flat-earther engages in such lionization. It is generally understood that the options are wretched, that party loyalty is gullibility, and that the more conscientious a voter is, the readier they will be to hold their nose in the booth and select one type of evil to stave off the eviler evils. Apparent anti-idealists love to point all of this out, especially when an inveterate idealist who sat out the last election gets all up in their grill about the impurity of it all.