When someone has an incomplete moral worldview (or one based on easily disprovable assertions), there’s a way in which the truth isn’t “safe” if safety is measured by something like ‘reversibility’ or ‘ability to continue being the way they were.’ It is also often the case that one can’t make a single small change, and then move on; if, say, you manage to convince a Christian that God isn’t real (or some other thing that will predictably cause the whole edifice of their worldview to come crashing down eventually), then the default thing to happen is for them to be lost and alone.
Where to go from there is genuinely unclear to me. Like, one can imagine caring mostly about helping other people grow, in which a ‘reversibility’ criterion is sort of ludicrous; it’s not like people can undo puberty, or so on. If you present them with an alternative system, they don’t need to end up lost and alone, because you can directly introduce them to humanism, or whatever. But here you’re in something of a double bind; it’s somewhat irresponsible to break people’s functioning systems without giving them a replacement, and it’s somewhat creepy if you break people’s functioning systems to pitch your replacement. (And since ‘functioning’ is value-laden, it’s easy for you to think their system needs replacing.)
When someone has an incomplete moral worldview (or one based on easily disprovable assertions), there’s a way in which the truth isn’t “safe” if safety is measured by something like ‘reversibility’ or ‘ability to continue being the way they were.’ It is also often the case that one can’t make a single small change, and then move on; if, say, you manage to convince a Christian that God isn’t real (or some other thing that will predictably cause the whole edifice of their worldview to come crashing down eventually), then the default thing to happen is for them to be lost and alone.
Where to go from there is genuinely unclear to me. Like, one can imagine caring mostly about helping other people grow, in which a ‘reversibility’ criterion is sort of ludicrous; it’s not like people can undo puberty, or so on. If you present them with an alternative system, they don’t need to end up lost and alone, because you can directly introduce them to humanism, or whatever. But here you’re in something of a double bind; it’s somewhat irresponsible to break people’s functioning systems without giving them a replacement, and it’s somewhat creepy if you break people’s functioning systems to pitch your replacement. (And since ‘functioning’ is value-laden, it’s easy for you to think their system needs replacing.)