Politeness and privacy are, in fact, largely about maintaining impressions (especially positive impressions) through coordinating against the revelation of truth.
People don’t always agree with each other about what’s good and bad. Knowingly allowing someone to get away with something bad makes you bad. Coordinating against the revelation of truth allows us to get something productive done together instead of spending all our time fighting.
Knowingly allowing someone to get away with something bad makes you bad.
While some people have a belief like this, this seems false from a philosophical ethical perspective. E.g. even if eating meat is unethical (for you to do), that doesn’t mean forcing everyone to not eat meat would be ethical, as such coercion would result in additional costs.
Ethics is often about trying to avoid destructive conflicts, so “punish every unethical thing” is actually pretty unethical.
(Note that coordinating against revelation of truth also means you’re letting people get away with doing bad things, although in a hidden way)
Knowingly allowing someone to get away with something bad makes you bad.
While some people have a belief like this, this seems false from a philosophical ethical perspective.
I think a philosophical ethical perspective that labels this “false” (and not just incomplete or under-nuanced) is failing to engage with the phenomenon of ethics as it actually happens in the world. Ethics arose in this cold and indifferent universe because being ethical is a winning strategy, but being “ethical” all by yourself without any mechanism to keep everyone around you ethical is not a winning strategy.
The cost of explicitly punishing people for not being vegetarian is prohibitive because vegetarianism is still a small and entrepreneurial ethical system, but you can certainly at least punish non-vegetarians by preferentially choosing other vegetarians to associate with. Well-established ethical systems like anti-murder-ism have much less difficulty affording severe punishments.
An important innovation is that you can cooperate with people who might be bad overall, as long as they follow a more minimal set of rules (for example, the Uniform Commercial Code). Or in other words, you can have concentric circles of ethicalness, making more limited ethical demands of people you interact with less closely. But when you interact with people in your outer circle, how do people in your inner circle know you don’t condone all of the bad things they might be doing? One way is to have some kind of system of group membership, with rules that explicitly apply only to group members. But a cheaper and more flexible way is to simply remain ignorant about anything that isn’t relevant—a.k.a respect their privacy.
I don’t think ethical vegetarians deal with this problem by literally remaining ignorant of what other people are eating, but rather there’s a truce between ethical vegetarians and meat-eaters, involving politeness norms which make it impolite to call other people’s dietary choices unethical.
I agree that at least soft rewards/punishments (such as people associating more with ethical vegetarians) are usually necessary to keep ethical principles incentive-compatible. (Since much of ethics is about finding opportunities for positive-sum trade while avoiding destructive conflicts, many such rewards come naturally)
The important thing is that not only some but most people do, in fact, believe this. That is, I am fairly sure, what clone of saturn meant to convey—he was not claiming this is true, but alluding to the fact that it’s a commonly held view, and it is that social fact which makes it beneficial to maintain positive impressions in order to avoid counterproductive fighting.
People don’t always agree with each other about what’s good and bad. Knowingly allowing someone to get away with something bad makes you bad. Coordinating against the revelation of truth allows us to get something productive done together instead of spending all our time fighting.
While some people have a belief like this, this seems false from a philosophical ethical perspective. E.g. even if eating meat is unethical (for you to do), that doesn’t mean forcing everyone to not eat meat would be ethical, as such coercion would result in additional costs.
Ethics is often about trying to avoid destructive conflicts, so “punish every unethical thing” is actually pretty unethical.
(Note that coordinating against revelation of truth also means you’re letting people get away with doing bad things, although in a hidden way)
I think a philosophical ethical perspective that labels this “false” (and not just incomplete or under-nuanced) is failing to engage with the phenomenon of ethics as it actually happens in the world. Ethics arose in this cold and indifferent universe because being ethical is a winning strategy, but being “ethical” all by yourself without any mechanism to keep everyone around you ethical is not a winning strategy.
The cost of explicitly punishing people for not being vegetarian is prohibitive because vegetarianism is still a small and entrepreneurial ethical system, but you can certainly at least punish non-vegetarians by preferentially choosing other vegetarians to associate with. Well-established ethical systems like anti-murder-ism have much less difficulty affording severe punishments.
An important innovation is that you can cooperate with people who might be bad overall, as long as they follow a more minimal set of rules (for example, the Uniform Commercial Code). Or in other words, you can have concentric circles of ethicalness, making more limited ethical demands of people you interact with less closely. But when you interact with people in your outer circle, how do people in your inner circle know you don’t condone all of the bad things they might be doing? One way is to have some kind of system of group membership, with rules that explicitly apply only to group members. But a cheaper and more flexible way is to simply remain ignorant about anything that isn’t relevant—a.k.a respect their privacy.
I don’t think ethical vegetarians deal with this problem by literally remaining ignorant of what other people are eating, but rather there’s a truce between ethical vegetarians and meat-eaters, involving politeness norms which make it impolite to call other people’s dietary choices unethical.
I agree that at least soft rewards/punishments (such as people associating more with ethical vegetarians) are usually necessary to keep ethical principles incentive-compatible. (Since much of ethics is about finding opportunities for positive-sum trade while avoiding destructive conflicts, many such rewards come naturally)
The important thing is that not only some but most people do, in fact, believe this. That is, I am fairly sure, what clone of saturn meant to convey—he was not claiming this is true, but alluding to the fact that it’s a commonly held view, and it is that social fact which makes it beneficial to maintain positive impressions in order to avoid counterproductive fighting.