In my idiolect, saying someone is “trying to X” means that, within the limits of their general agentiness and willpower and whatnot, they exert some effort in the direction of X versus not-X. Just how much depends on context.
If you take one of those people you describe as not trying to live, point a gun at them, and say “your money or your life”, they will probably give you their money. If you take one of those people you say are not trying to have their friends live and tell them credibly that their friend has a deadly but reliably curable disease, they will probably urge their friend to seek treatment.I say this means they are trying to live and trying to have their friends live, and it’s perfectly consistent with failing to take some measures that you would take if trying to live, if those measures are for whatever reason harder for them to take or harder for them to recognize as needing to be taken. (Or, for that matter, harder for you to recognize as not needing to be taken.)
Once again, in the matter of vitamin D, consider Scott Alexander. He may be right about vitamin D or he may be wrong, but he reckons it’s not particularly helpful against Covid-19. That indicates that it is possible for a very smart person, in contact with many of the same people as you, thinking about the matter pretty hard, to come to the conclusion that vitamin D is not very helpful against Covid-19. And I claim that means that others equipped with merely average-human levels of curiosity and brainpower and energy for investigating such things are not doing anything inexcusable, or incompatible with truly wanting to live, if the ambient state of the evidence on that matter doesn’t inspire them to look closely.
I agree that it’s clear that for many people “you must make costly sacrifices because X” is a message that resonates, and that things are apt to feel more virtuous when they involve costly sacrifices. I think there is a morally, logically and psychologically important difference between “many people feel that making costly sacrifices is virtuous” and “many people try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty”. (I suspect that this is another of those things that comes down to a general worldview difference: e.g., perhaps you regard it as obvious that anything that presents itself as virtue is best understood as “signalling loyalty”, whereas I don’t.)
It isn’t obvious to me that the widespread promotion of sacrifice for its own sake in religion and the like is good evidence of some strong coordination mechanism, at least not if I’m understanding correctly what sort of things you class as coordination mechanisms. For instance, it seems possible to me that this is just a quirk of human brains, doubtless with some fascinating evolutionary origin. (Maybe related to the fact that, to whatever extent moral behaviour functions as a signal of particular character traits, it’s a more reliable signal when the behaviour is personally costly.) I guess you might consider “we all have much the same evolutionary history” as a coordination mechanism, but I wouldn’t.
I remark that what you originally said wasn’t that you know some people who try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty, but that what Fauci says publicly is optimized for reception by people who try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty.
In my idiolect, saying someone is “trying to X” means that, within the limits of their general agentiness and willpower and whatnot, they exert some effort in the direction of X versus not-X. Just how much depends on context.
If you take one of those people you describe as not trying to live, point a gun at them, and say “your money or your life”, they will probably give you their money. If you take one of those people you say are not trying to have their friends live and tell them credibly that their friend has a deadly but reliably curable disease, they will probably urge their friend to seek treatment.I say this means they are trying to live and trying to have their friends live, and it’s perfectly consistent with failing to take some measures that you would take if trying to live, if those measures are for whatever reason harder for them to take or harder for them to recognize as needing to be taken. (Or, for that matter, harder for you to recognize as not needing to be taken.)
Once again, in the matter of vitamin D, consider Scott Alexander. He may be right about vitamin D or he may be wrong, but he reckons it’s not particularly helpful against Covid-19. That indicates that it is possible for a very smart person, in contact with many of the same people as you, thinking about the matter pretty hard, to come to the conclusion that vitamin D is not very helpful against Covid-19. And I claim that means that others equipped with merely average-human levels of curiosity and brainpower and energy for investigating such things are not doing anything inexcusable, or incompatible with truly wanting to live, if the ambient state of the evidence on that matter doesn’t inspire them to look closely.
I agree that it’s clear that for many people “you must make costly sacrifices because X” is a message that resonates, and that things are apt to feel more virtuous when they involve costly sacrifices. I think there is a morally, logically and psychologically important difference between “many people feel that making costly sacrifices is virtuous” and “many people try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty”. (I suspect that this is another of those things that comes down to a general worldview difference: e.g., perhaps you regard it as obvious that anything that presents itself as virtue is best understood as “signalling loyalty”, whereas I don’t.)
It isn’t obvious to me that the widespread promotion of sacrifice for its own sake in religion and the like is good evidence of some strong coordination mechanism, at least not if I’m understanding correctly what sort of things you class as coordination mechanisms. For instance, it seems possible to me that this is just a quirk of human brains, doubtless with some fascinating evolutionary origin. (Maybe related to the fact that, to whatever extent moral behaviour functions as a signal of particular character traits, it’s a more reliable signal when the behaviour is personally costly.) I guess you might consider “we all have much the same evolutionary history” as a coordination mechanism, but I wouldn’t.
I remark that what you originally said wasn’t that you know some people who try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty, but that what Fauci says publicly is optimized for reception by people who try to hurt themselves and others to signal loyalty.