So I guess the question is, are we using fiction as evidence? Or are we using it as a shortcut to convey complicated ideas? And if it’s a bit of both, as I expect, then it’s (as you say) a question of where the balance is. So, OK. You clearly believe the balance here swings too far to “fiction as evidence,” which might be true, and is an important problem if true. What observations convinced you of this?
All the other examples I can think of of what I might call political fiction—using fiction to convey serious ideas—are organizations/movements I have negative views of. One thinks of Ayn Rand, those people who take Gor seriously (assuming they’re not just an internet joke), the Pilgrim’s Progress. Trying to cast my net wider, I felt the part of The Republic where Plato tells a story about a city to be weak, I found Brave New World interesting as fiction but actively unhelpful as an point about the merits of utilitarianism. Monopoly is an entertaining board game (well, not a very entertaining one to be honest) but I don’t think it teaches us anything about capitalism.
I’ve been highly frustrated by the use of “parables” here like the dragon of death or the capricious king of poverty; it seems like the writers use them as a rhetorical trick, allowing them to pretend they’ve made a point that they haven’t in fact made, simply because it’s true in their story.
I am genuinely struggling to think of any positive-for-the-political-side examples of this kind of fiction.
Well, ultimately my answer to this is that a lot of my friends are in poly relationships, and it seems to be working for them all right. This is also why I expect same-sex marriages to turn out OK, why I expect marriages between different races to turn out OK, why I expect people remaining single to turn out OK, and so forth.
I guess the main thing here is that if poly relationships worked (beyond limited polygyny in patriarchal societies, which evidently does “work” on some level) I’d expect to see an established tradition of polyamory somewhere in the world, and I don’t (maybe I’m not looking hard enough). Being single clearly works for many people. Gay people have shown an ability to form long-term, stable relationships when they weren’t allowed to marry, so it seems like marriage is likely to work. Widespread interracial marriage simply wasn’t possible before the development of modern transport technology, so there’s no mystery about the lack of historical successes. Is there some technological innovation that makes polyamory more practical now than it was in the past? I guess widespread contraception and cheap antibiotics might be such a thing… hmm, that’s actually a good answer. I shall reconsider.
if poly relationships worked [..] I’d expect to see an established tradition of polyamory... Gay people have shown an ability to form long-term, stable relationships when they weren’t allowed to marry, so it seems like marriage is likely to work
So, when marriage traditionalists argue that the absence of an established tradition of same-sex marriages is evidence that same-sex marriage isn’t likely to work (since if it did, they’d expect to see an established tradition of same-sex marriage), you don’t find that convincing… your position there is that: a) marriage is just a special case of long-term, stable relationship, and b) we do observe an established (if unofficial, and often actively derided) tradition of long-term, stable same-sex relationships among the small fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships, so c) we should expect same-sex marriages to work among that fraction of the population.
Yes?
But by contrast, on your account we don’t observe an established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships, so a similar argument does not suffice to justify expecting multi-adult marriages to work among the fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships.
You’ve accurately summarized what I said. I think on reflection point a) is very dubious, so allow me to instead bite your bullet: I don’t yet have a strong level of confidence that same-sex marriages are likely to work. (Which I don’t see as a reason to make them illegal, but might be a reason to e.g. weight them less strongly when considering a couple’s suitability to adopt).
I think we may need to taboo “work” here; if we’re talking about suitability as an organizational leader here then that’s a higher standard than just enjoying one’s own sex life. I would supplement b) with the observation that we observe historical instances of gay people making major contributions to wider society—Turing, Wilde, Britten (British/Irish examples because I’m British/Irish).
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
Um, polygamy? Concubinage? Both have long histories, and show up in cultures that are clearly functional.
Both of them are less gender egalitarian than modern polyamory, and it’s not clear to me that there’s ample real-world evidence of, say, Heinlein’s idea of line marriages working out.
The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favour more polygynous marriages. Yet, monogamous marriage has spread across Europe, and more recently across the globe, even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. Here, we develop and explore the hypothesis that the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects—promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. These predictions are tested using converging lines of evidence from across the human sciences.
I think it would be useful here to distinguish between what is/was/should be/might be the average and what is the acceptable range of deviation from that average.
A society where most men have one wife but some men have several is different from a society where most men have one wife and having several is illegal and socially unacceptable.
Probably not- I buy the arguments that the incentives generated by monogamy are better than the ones generated by polygamy, across society as a whole. (I am not yet convinced that serial monogamy enabled by permissive divorce laws is better than polygyny, but haven’t investigated the issue seriously.) I meant more to exclude the idea that polygamy is only seen in, say, undeveloped societies.
Where I’m going with this is trying to understand your position, which I think I now do.
My own position, as I stated a while back, is that I base my opinions about the viability of certain kinds of relationships on observing people in such relationships. The historical presence or absence of traditions of those sorts of relationships is also useful data, but not definitively so.
EDIT: I suppose I should add to this that I would be very surprised if there weren’t just as much of a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse as there was a tradition of people having active gay sex lives, and very surprised if some of those people weren’t making “major contributions to wider society” just as some gay people were. But I don’t have examples to point out.
I would be very surprised if there weren’t….a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse
Notoriously, Lady Hamilton and Horatio Nelson had a public affair in the 1800s, without any objection from Lord Hamilton.
Given this fact, I am now surprised by not having previously observed a seemingly endless series of jokes about it playing on the supposed indeterminacy of poly relationships.
Right. As I’ve said, I think relationships tend to have big negative spikes analogous to stock market crashes, so am cautious about judging from samples of a few years.
Even watching twenty-year-old poly relationships, as I sometimes do, isn’t definitive… maybe it takes a few generations to really see the problems. Ditto for same-sex marriages, or couples of different colors, or of different religious traditions… sure, these have longer pedigrees, but the problems may simply not have really manifested yet, but are building up momentum while people like me ignore the signs.
I mention my own position not because I expect it to convince you, but because you were asking me where I was going in a way that suggested to me that you thought I was trying to covertly lead the conversation along to a point where I could demonstrate weaknesses in your position relative to my own, and in fact the questions I was asking you were largely orthogonal to my own position.
All the other examples I can think of of what I might call political fiction—using fiction to convey serious ideas—are organizations/movements I have negative views of.
Just to pick a somewhat arbitrary example I was thinking about recently… have you ever read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?
Does it qualify as what you’re calling “political fiction”?
Do you associate it with any particular organizations/movements?
By happy coincidence I also read it recently. I’ve not seen it used to make political/philosophical arguments, so I don’t class it as such. To my mind the ending and indeed the whole story is more ambiguous than the examples I’ve been thinking of; if the intent was to push a particular view then it failed, at least in my case. (By contrast Brave New World probably did influence my view of utilitarianism, despite my best efforts to remain unmoved).
If I saw someone using it to argue for a position I’d probably think less of it or them, and on a purely aesthetic level I found it disappointing.
I guess maybe Permutation City is a positive example; it provides a useful explicit example of some things we want to make philosophical arguments about. Maybe because I felt it wasn’t making a value judgement—it was more like, well, scientific fiction.
Thinking about this some more, and rereading this thread, I’m realizing I’m more confused than I’d thought I was.
Initially, when you introduced the term “political fiction,” you glossed it as “using fiction to convey serious ideas.” Which is similar enough to what I had in mind that I was happy to use that phrase.
But then you say that you don’t class Omelas in this category, because it doesn’t successfully push a particular view. Which suggests that the category you have in mind isn’t just about conveying ideas, but rather about pushing a particular philosophical/political perspective—yes?
But then you say that you do class Permutation City in this category (and I would agree), and you approve of it. This actually surprises me… I would have thought, given what you’d said earlier, that you would object to PC on the grounds that it simply asserts a fictional universe in which various things are true, and could be misused as evidence that those things are in fact true in the real world. I’m glad you aren’t making that argument, as it suggests our views are actually closer than I’d originally thought (I would agree that it’s possible to misuse PC that way, as it is possible to misuse other fictional ideas, but that’s a separate issue).
And you further explain that PC isn’t making a value judgment… but that you still consider it an example of political fiction… which is consistent with your original definition of the term… but I don’t know how to reconcile it with your description of Omelas.
I’m trying to explore this as we go along; it’s very possible I’ve been incoherent.
I don’t class Omelas in any of these categories category because I’ve never seen it used in this kind of discussion, at all.
Permutation City was an example I only thought of in the last post. Fundamentally I feel like it belongs in a different cluster from these other examples (including the LW ones) - I’m trying to understand why, and I was suggesting that the value judgements might be the difference, but that’s little more than a guess.
I don’t class Omelas in any of these categories category because I’ve never seen it used in this kind of discussion, at all.
Well… OK. Let’s change that.
Omelas is a good illustration of the intuitive problems with a straight-up total-utilitarian approach to ethical philosophy. It’s clear that by any coherent metric, the benefits enjoyed as a consequence of that child’s suffering far outweigh the costs of that suffering. Nevertheless, the intuitive judgment of most people is that there’s something very wrong with this picture and that alleviating the child’s suffering would be a good thing.
OK… now that you’ve seen Omelas used to in a discussion about utilitarian moral philosophy, does your judgment about the story change?
Hmm. I was not fond of the story in any case, so this use would need to be particularly bad to diminish my opinion of it.
The fundamental lack of realism in the story now seems more important. Where before I was happy to suspend disbelief on the implausibility of a town that worked that way, if we’re going to apply actual philosophy it I find myself wanting a more rigorous explanation of how things work—why do people believe that comforting the child would damage the city?
Do I think using the story has made the discussion worse? Maybe; it’s hard to compare to a control in the specific instance. But I think in the general, average case philosophical discussions that use fictional examples turn out less well than those that don’t.
If I thought the use of the story had damaged the discussion, would that make me think less of the story or author? I think my somewhat weaselly (and nonutilitarian) answer is that intent matters here. If I discovered that a story I liked was actually intended allegorically, I think I’d think less of it (and to a certain extent this happened with Animal Farm, which I read naively at an early age and less naively a few years later, and thought less of it the second time). But if someone just happens to use a story I like in a philosophical argument, without there being anything inherent to the story or author that invited this kind of use, I don’t think that would change my opinion.
From my perspective, Omelas does a fine job of doing what I’m claiming fiction is useful for in these sorts of discussions… it makes it easy to refer to a scenario that illustrates a point that would otherwise be far more complicated to even define.
For example, I can, in a conversation about total-utilitarianism, say “Well, so what if anything is wrong with Omelas?” to you, and you can tell me whether you think there’s anything wrong with Omelas and if so what, and we’ve communicated a lot more efficiently than if we hadn’t both read the story.
Similarly, around LW I can refer to something as an Invisible Dragon in the Garage and that clarifies what might otherwise be a hopelessly muddled conversation.
Now, you’re certainly right that while having identified a position is a necessary first step to defending that position, those are two different thigns, and that soemtimes people use fiction to do the former and then act as though they’d done the latter when they haven’t.
This is a mistake.
(Also, since you bring it up, I consider Brave New World far too complicated a story to serve very well in this role… there’s too much going on. Which is a good thing for fiction, and I endorse it utterly, since the primary function of fiction for me is not to provide useful shortcuts in discussions. However, some fiction performs this function and I think that’s a fine thing too.)
I think there is a good deal to be said for the interpretation according to which many of the features of the “ideal” city Socrates describes in Republic are intended to work on the biases of Glaucon and Adeimantus (and those like them) and not intended to actually represent an ideal city. Admittedly, Laws does seem to be intended to describe how Plato thinks a city should be run, so it seems that Plato had some pretty terrible political ideas (at least at the end; Laws is his last work, and I prefer to think his mind was starting to go), but nonetheless it’s not at all safe to assume that all the questionable ideas raised by Socrates in Republic are seriously endorsed by Plato.
I completely agree that Brave New World seems unhelpful in evaluating utilitarianism.
it’s not at all safe to assume that all the questionable ideas raised by Socrates in Republic are seriously endorsed by Plato.
Which is I think the fundamental problem with this kind of political fiction. It allows people to present ideas and implications without committing to them or providing evidence (or alternately, making it clear that this is an opposing view that they are not endorsing). But then at a later stage they go on to treat the things that happened in their fiction as things they’d proven.
I found Brave New World interesting as fiction but actively unhelpful as an point about the merits of utilitarianism.
Brave New World is intended as a critique of utilitarianism: the Fordian society’s willingness to treat people as specialized components may not be as immediately terrifying as 1984, but it’s still intentionally disutopian. My apologies if I’m misreading your statement, but many folk don’t get that from reading the book in a classroom environment.
I guess the main thing here is that if poly relationships worked… I’d expect to see an established tradition of polyamory somewhere in the world, and I don’t (maybe I’m not looking hard enough).
Some subcultures have different expectations of exclusivity, which may be meaningful here even if not true polyamory.
Is there some technological innovation that makes polyamory more practical now than it was in the past? I guess widespread contraception and cheap antibiotics might be such a thing...
Communication availability and different economic situations, as well. The mainstream entrance of women into the work force as self-sustaining individuals is a fairly new thing, and the availability of instant always-on communication even more recent.
EDIT: I agree that there are structural concerns if a sufficient portion of the leadership are both poly and in a connected relationship, but this has to do more with network effects than polyamory. The availability and expenditures of money are likely to trigger the same network effect issues regardless of poly stuff.
Brave New World is intended as a critique of utilitarianism
Yes. I thought it would be clear that I knew that, since I don’t think my statement makes any sense otherwise?
I found Brave New World, in so far as it is taken as an illustration of a philosophical point, actively unhelpful; that is, its existence is detrimental to the quality of philosophical discussions about the merits of utilitarianism (basically for all the usual reasons that fictional evidence is bad; it leads people to assume that a utilitarian society would behave in a certain way, or that certain behaviors would have certain outcomes, simply because that was what happened in Brave New World).
(Independently, I found it interesting and enjoyable as a work of fiction).
All the other examples I can think of of what I might call political fiction—using fiction to convey serious ideas—are organizations/movements I have negative views of. One thinks of Ayn Rand, those people who take Gor seriously (assuming they’re not just an internet joke), the Pilgrim’s Progress. Trying to cast my net wider, I felt the part of The Republic where Plato tells a story about a city to be weak, I found Brave New World interesting as fiction but actively unhelpful as an point about the merits of utilitarianism. Monopoly is an entertaining board game (well, not a very entertaining one to be honest) but I don’t think it teaches us anything about capitalism.
I’ve been highly frustrated by the use of “parables” here like the dragon of death or the capricious king of poverty; it seems like the writers use them as a rhetorical trick, allowing them to pretend they’ve made a point that they haven’t in fact made, simply because it’s true in their story.
I am genuinely struggling to think of any positive-for-the-political-side examples of this kind of fiction.
I guess the main thing here is that if poly relationships worked (beyond limited polygyny in patriarchal societies, which evidently does “work” on some level) I’d expect to see an established tradition of polyamory somewhere in the world, and I don’t (maybe I’m not looking hard enough). Being single clearly works for many people. Gay people have shown an ability to form long-term, stable relationships when they weren’t allowed to marry, so it seems like marriage is likely to work. Widespread interracial marriage simply wasn’t possible before the development of modern transport technology, so there’s no mystery about the lack of historical successes. Is there some technological innovation that makes polyamory more practical now than it was in the past? I guess widespread contraception and cheap antibiotics might be such a thing… hmm, that’s actually a good answer. I shall reconsider.
So, when marriage traditionalists argue that the absence of an established tradition of same-sex marriages is evidence that same-sex marriage isn’t likely to work (since if it did, they’d expect to see an established tradition of same-sex marriage), you don’t find that convincing… your position there is that:
a) marriage is just a special case of long-term, stable relationship, and
b) we do observe an established (if unofficial, and often actively derided) tradition of long-term, stable same-sex relationships among the small fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships, so
c) we should expect same-sex marriages to work among that fraction of the population.
Yes?
But by contrast, on your account we don’t observe an established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships, so a similar argument does not suffice to justify expecting multi-adult marriages to work among the fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships.
Yes? Have I understood you correctly?
You’ve accurately summarized what I said. I think on reflection point a) is very dubious, so allow me to instead bite your bullet: I don’t yet have a strong level of confidence that same-sex marriages are likely to work. (Which I don’t see as a reason to make them illegal, but might be a reason to e.g. weight them less strongly when considering a couple’s suitability to adopt).
I think we may need to taboo “work” here; if we’re talking about suitability as an organizational leader here then that’s a higher standard than just enjoying one’s own sex life. I would supplement b) with the observation that we observe historical instances of gay people making major contributions to wider society—Turing, Wilde, Britten (British/Irish examples because I’m British/Irish).
But yeah, that’s basically my position. Interested to see where you’re going with this—is there such an “established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships” that I’m just ignorant of?
Um, polygamy? Concubinage? Both have long histories, and show up in cultures that are clearly functional.
Both of them are less gender egalitarian than modern polyamory, and it’s not clear to me that there’s ample real-world evidence of, say, Heinlein’s idea of line marriages working out.
Clearly functional… but as functional? http://www.gwern.net/docs/2012-heinrich.pdf
I think it would be useful here to distinguish between what is/was/should be/might be the average and what is the acceptable range of deviation from that average.
A society where most men have one wife but some men have several is different from a society where most men have one wife and having several is illegal and socially unacceptable.
Probably not- I buy the arguments that the incentives generated by monogamy are better than the ones generated by polygamy, across society as a whole. (I am not yet convinced that serial monogamy enabled by permissive divorce laws is better than polygyny, but haven’t investigated the issue seriously.) I meant more to exclude the idea that polygamy is only seen in, say, undeveloped societies.
Where I’m going with this is trying to understand your position, which I think I now do.
My own position, as I stated a while back, is that I base my opinions about the viability of certain kinds of relationships on observing people in such relationships. The historical presence or absence of traditions of those sorts of relationships is also useful data, but not definitively so.
EDIT: I suppose I should add to this that I would be very surprised if there weren’t just as much of a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse as there was a tradition of people having active gay sex lives, and very surprised if some of those people weren’t making “major contributions to wider society” just as some gay people were. But I don’t have examples to point out.
Notoriously, Lady Hamilton and Horatio Nelson had a public affair in the 1800s, without any objection from Lord Hamilton.
Off the top of my head, Erwin Schrödinger.
Given this fact, I am now surprised by not having previously observed a seemingly endless series of jokes about it playing on the supposed indeterminacy of poly relationships.
I detect a horrible gap in the fabric of the universe! We need to create some ASAP!!
SMBC is on to it.
Right. As I’ve said, I think relationships tend to have big negative spikes analogous to stock market crashes, so am cautious about judging from samples of a few years.
Sure, absolutely.
Even watching twenty-year-old poly relationships, as I sometimes do, isn’t definitive… maybe it takes a few generations to really see the problems. Ditto for same-sex marriages, or couples of different colors, or of different religious traditions… sure, these have longer pedigrees, but the problems may simply not have really manifested yet, but are building up momentum while people like me ignore the signs.
I mention my own position not because I expect it to convince you, but because you were asking me where I was going in a way that suggested to me that you thought I was trying to covertly lead the conversation along to a point where I could demonstrate weaknesses in your position relative to my own, and in fact the questions I was asking you were largely orthogonal to my own position.
Just to pick a somewhat arbitrary example I was thinking about recently… have you ever read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas?
Does it qualify as what you’re calling “political fiction”?
Do you associate it with any particular organizations/movements?
By happy coincidence I also read it recently. I’ve not seen it used to make political/philosophical arguments, so I don’t class it as such. To my mind the ending and indeed the whole story is more ambiguous than the examples I’ve been thinking of; if the intent was to push a particular view then it failed, at least in my case. (By contrast Brave New World probably did influence my view of utilitarianism, despite my best efforts to remain unmoved).
If I saw someone using it to argue for a position I’d probably think less of it or them, and on a purely aesthetic level I found it disappointing.
I guess maybe Permutation City is a positive example; it provides a useful explicit example of some things we want to make philosophical arguments about. Maybe because I felt it wasn’t making a value judgement—it was more like, well, scientific fiction.
Thinking about this some more, and rereading this thread, I’m realizing I’m more confused than I’d thought I was.
Initially, when you introduced the term “political fiction,” you glossed it as “using fiction to convey serious ideas.” Which is similar enough to what I had in mind that I was happy to use that phrase.
But then you say that you don’t class Omelas in this category, because it doesn’t successfully push a particular view. Which suggests that the category you have in mind isn’t just about conveying ideas, but rather about pushing a particular philosophical/political perspective—yes?
But then you say that you do class Permutation City in this category (and I would agree), and you approve of it. This actually surprises me… I would have thought, given what you’d said earlier, that you would object to PC on the grounds that it simply asserts a fictional universe in which various things are true, and could be misused as evidence that those things are in fact true in the real world. I’m glad you aren’t making that argument, as it suggests our views are actually closer than I’d originally thought (I would agree that it’s possible to misuse PC that way, as it is possible to misuse other fictional ideas, but that’s a separate issue).
And you further explain that PC isn’t making a value judgment… but that you still consider it an example of political fiction… which is consistent with your original definition of the term… but I don’t know how to reconcile it with your description of Omelas.
So… I’m genuinely confused.
I’m trying to explore this as we go along; it’s very possible I’ve been incoherent.
I don’t class Omelas in any of these categories category because I’ve never seen it used in this kind of discussion, at all.
Permutation City was an example I only thought of in the last post. Fundamentally I feel like it belongs in a different cluster from these other examples (including the LW ones) - I’m trying to understand why, and I was suggesting that the value judgements might be the difference, but that’s little more than a guess.
Well… OK. Let’s change that.
OK… now that you’ve seen Omelas used to in a discussion about utilitarian moral philosophy, does your judgment about the story change?
Hmm. I was not fond of the story in any case, so this use would need to be particularly bad to diminish my opinion of it.
The fundamental lack of realism in the story now seems more important. Where before I was happy to suspend disbelief on the implausibility of a town that worked that way, if we’re going to apply actual philosophy it I find myself wanting a more rigorous explanation of how things work—why do people believe that comforting the child would damage the city?
Do I think using the story has made the discussion worse? Maybe; it’s hard to compare to a control in the specific instance. But I think in the general, average case philosophical discussions that use fictional examples turn out less well than those that don’t.
If I thought the use of the story had damaged the discussion, would that make me think less of the story or author? I think my somewhat weaselly (and nonutilitarian) answer is that intent matters here. If I discovered that a story I liked was actually intended allegorically, I think I’d think less of it (and to a certain extent this happened with Animal Farm, which I read naively at an early age and less naively a few years later, and thought less of it the second time). But if someone just happens to use a story I like in a philosophical argument, without there being anything inherent to the story or author that invited this kind of use, I don’t think that would change my opinion.
OK, fair enough. Thanks for clarifying your position.
Interesting.
From my perspective, Omelas does a fine job of doing what I’m claiming fiction is useful for in these sorts of discussions… it makes it easy to refer to a scenario that illustrates a point that would otherwise be far more complicated to even define.
For example, I can, in a conversation about total-utilitarianism, say “Well, so what if anything is wrong with Omelas?” to you, and you can tell me whether you think there’s anything wrong with Omelas and if so what, and we’ve communicated a lot more efficiently than if we hadn’t both read the story.
Similarly, around LW I can refer to something as an Invisible Dragon in the Garage and that clarifies what might otherwise be a hopelessly muddled conversation.
Now, you’re certainly right that while having identified a position is a necessary first step to defending that position, those are two different thigns, and that soemtimes people use fiction to do the former and then act as though they’d done the latter when they haven’t.
This is a mistake.
(Also, since you bring it up, I consider Brave New World far too complicated a story to serve very well in this role… there’s too much going on. Which is a good thing for fiction, and I endorse it utterly, since the primary function of fiction for me is not to provide useful shortcuts in discussions. However, some fiction performs this function and I think that’s a fine thing too.)
I think there is a good deal to be said for the interpretation according to which many of the features of the “ideal” city Socrates describes in Republic are intended to work on the biases of Glaucon and Adeimantus (and those like them) and not intended to actually represent an ideal city. Admittedly, Laws does seem to be intended to describe how Plato thinks a city should be run, so it seems that Plato had some pretty terrible political ideas (at least at the end; Laws is his last work, and I prefer to think his mind was starting to go), but nonetheless it’s not at all safe to assume that all the questionable ideas raised by Socrates in Republic are seriously endorsed by Plato.
I completely agree that Brave New World seems unhelpful in evaluating utilitarianism.
Which is I think the fundamental problem with this kind of political fiction. It allows people to present ideas and implications without committing to them or providing evidence (or alternately, making it clear that this is an opposing view that they are not endorsing). But then at a later stage they go on to treat the things that happened in their fiction as things they’d proven.
Brave New World is intended as a critique of utilitarianism: the Fordian society’s willingness to treat people as specialized components may not be as immediately terrifying as 1984, but it’s still intentionally disutopian. My apologies if I’m misreading your statement, but many folk don’t get that from reading the book in a classroom environment.
Some subcultures have different expectations of exclusivity, which may be meaningful here even if not true polyamory.
Communication availability and different economic situations, as well. The mainstream entrance of women into the work force as self-sustaining individuals is a fairly new thing, and the availability of instant always-on communication even more recent.
EDIT: I agree that there are structural concerns if a sufficient portion of the leadership are both poly and in a connected relationship, but this has to do more with network effects than polyamory. The availability and expenditures of money are likely to trigger the same network effect issues regardless of poly stuff.
Yes. I thought it would be clear that I knew that, since I don’t think my statement makes any sense otherwise?
I found Brave New World, in so far as it is taken as an illustration of a philosophical point, actively unhelpful; that is, its existence is detrimental to the quality of philosophical discussions about the merits of utilitarianism (basically for all the usual reasons that fictional evidence is bad; it leads people to assume that a utilitarian society would behave in a certain way, or that certain behaviors would have certain outcomes, simply because that was what happened in Brave New World).
(Independently, I found it interesting and enjoyable as a work of fiction).