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“Ethics” as signaling

61 points by networked 11y ago

backpropagated 11y ago
"What is “I am a Buddhist” supposed to say about you? ... it signifies particular personality traits such as openness and agreeableness." Interestingly, the present Dalai Lama is ranked as low on both openness and agreeableness.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
RockyMcNuts 11y ago
Maybe 'religious labels as signaling' would be a better title. Religion is a rather complex institution, involving metaphysics, ie a dichotomy between the sacred/holy/divine and the profane/ungodly; human organizations and activities and social hierarchies; rituals; and yes, codes of behavior. Ethics is the study of moral principles that govern choices and behavior. I like to think that there are some universal moral principles that are instinctive or even game-theoretically necessary to cooperative human activities, and there are other ethical principles that particular societies or religions choose to agree on. To the extent someone views ethics as a signaling mechanism, it no longer fits the definition of ethics.
- lsc 11y ago
  >I like to think that there are some universal moral principles that are instinctive or even game-theoretically necessary to cooperative human activities, and there are other ethical principles that particular societies or religions choose to agree on. A lot of people think this... but the claim only seems to hold up if you speak in broad truisms rather than details. I mean, it's generally agreed that murder is unethical; but when you look deeply, this is largely a meaningless tautology, because it's only murder if it's wrong; two people can look at the same act of killing and one can call it murder, while the other can call it something just. Even within my own country; hell, within my own family, there's a lot of disagreement as to what murder actually is. Is abortion murder? Is killing in defense of property murder? Is killing as a judicial punishment murder? People I know and consider to be reasonable people disagree rather strongly on those details. Now, everyone I would consider to be reasonable, and nearly all current Americans would agree that killing someone for the crime of speaking out against a religion is murder, but there certainly isn't a global consensus on that; and really, not so long ago, there was something approaching global consensus that killing someone for the crime of blasphemy was a reasonable and just thing to do. You can claim that all people share a instinctual belief in a set of core ethics, and I'm not going to say you are wrong, but you have a lot of convincing to do.
  - RockyMcNuts 11y ago
    people feel empathy without being taught, for people and even animals they've never seen before. they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. they share the notion that there is some kind of reciprocity, or social contract, even if they differ on the details of what the contract allows. see also http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103849/Research-shows-toddlers-understand-right-wrong-just-19-months.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103849/Research-sho... animal experiments in fairness, etc. https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_mora... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds
    - lsc 11y ago
      If you are saying that believing in something like morals or ethics seems to be a universal, then I agree with you; it does seem to be a universal. However, if we talk about any moral or ethical value or set of values, I still don't see any that are universal in any meaningful way. Across time and culture they are so different that what is the greatest good can be the greatest evil and vis-a-vis. >they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. I'm taking this as "everyone thinks killing a human is a big deal" (implicit in your statement, I think, is that reasons like "because it gave me slight pleasure" or "because they slightly inconvenienced me" count as "no reason" - because otherwise the statement has no meaning. There's always a reason, even if it's a bad one.) My counterargument is slavery. Even Aristotle, the father of western philosophy, thought that slavery was a perfectly natural thing; that humans could, in fact, be property. Yes, I know, not all systems of slavery were absolute to the point where a master could kill a slave with the same ethical and legal consequences as I would face for destroying my old laptop rather than passing it on to someone would could make use of it, but in all systems of slavery, killing a slave was much less of a big deal than killing a noble, and in many systems, it would qualify as "not a big deal" I also point you at "ethnic cleansing" and religious violence, though part of that is that is my own values; I think that killing someone for their race or religious affiliation is killing for a trivial reason. I'm sure the people doing or organizing that killing disagree with me.
colanderman 11y ago
I've always thought this is partially why people of mainstream religions are often so scared of atheism: they subconsciously interpret the statement "I am an atheist" as "I do not subscribe to your ethics" and assume the speaker is liable to kill anyone at anytime.
- taliesinb 11y ago
  I think that's totally at odds with the OP's argument. Under the OP's view, atheists aren't scary because they might be violent -- most people aren't psychopaths, that's not what social signaling is for -- but because they've chosen to chuck out a large chunk of the signaling machinery that the "middle middle class and below" have habitually relied upon. In other words, if you've sworn off the dominant canon of ethical and social judgements, your position now suddenly requires just-in-time evaluation by the other, and that is threatening to people who don't trust themselves to reliably pull it off.
  - colanderman 11y ago
    I'm not sure how you interpreted what I said, but I meant it to mean exactly what you said! Isolated atheists have no signaling mechanism, and thus are often assumed to have no, or a very different, moral code. ("Else why would they not subscribe to my religion?")
intopieces 11y ago
This article puts into words a conglomoration of experiences and thoughts I've had over and over, but never really considered together as a concept. "To be middle-middle class, you need to have all the correct opinions.... This requires memorizing endless lists of taboos and shibboleths, which is a conspicuous waste of time. “The news” and the political internet are tools for this. The high cost of keeping track of all that meaningless noise, and the ease of verifying it by asking your opinion of last night’s synthetic outrage event, makes it an effective signal. To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what would be the correct opinion about things that are new to you. This requires conceptual sophistication: years of study not only of details, but also of ways to think. That is what a liberal arts education used to be for." To take this further, I think the New Upper Middle Class signaling strategy is to be conspicuosly ignorant of the latest "synthetic outrage" -- "I don't have a TV" is a refrain that comes to mind. "I don't have Facebook" is another. Then again, I find myself directly in between these two: a news junkie devoted to understanding "what really matters in the world." That is, my signaling strategy is to have the right opinions about the right topics while publically rejecting the wrong topics (and, in a non-confrontational way, the wrong opinons). It's a way to signal opennesss (an agreeable trait) while maintaining sufficient cost.
hosh 11y ago
Wow, something from the Meaningness blog got onto the front page of Hacker News. I did not expect that. I want to make a note of something here. The author is a practitioner. I don't know how he thought up of these things, but what he says here and in many of his other articles are worth listening to because many of the things he says here seem to come from practice on the cushion -- at least to me, he does. It's the meditative experience itself that loosens up beliefs and opinions. When they arise and you pay attention on the cushion, things you take for granted get seen in a new light. Many of the deeper observations result from seeing things that you'd rather not see. What's ironic is that, for some reason, many folks in Consensus Buddhism will have these strange, adverse reactions to this very questioning of the core beliefs of Buddhism, even though the meditative methods taught at the core of Buddhist practices will open up the questioning process. If you're practicing correctly, you'll run through layers of personality and deeper into tightly-held beliefs and world views. Releasing and opening those are often one of the hardest practices. (But hey, you can take what I just said as the ethical posturing; I get that reaction a lot too). This method does not apply to just Buddhist beliefs. It can apply to any belief system (religious, political, social, etc), including Atheism (Yeah yeah, atheism is an "absence of belief"; but not after you find out what beliefs really are on the cushion). So, while the insights in this article might be interesting, even practical, I doubt you'll really get it's full potential unless you replicate it by sitting on the cushion yourself. Just saying.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
hliyan 11y ago
I tried reading this article. But even as someone raised as a (Theravada) Buddhist, I found it confusing. Perhaps because it addresses something(?) that troubles mostly westerners? Even though I no longer subscribe to the rebirth/karmic aspects of the religion, the core of Buddhism is fairly self-evident to me. This article made me question my own understanding, and did so with a handling of the English language that, well, did not exactly help. Perhaps this kind of analysis comes across sounding different to those from a Buddhist background?

61 points by networked 11y ago

"What is “I am a Buddhist” supposed to say about you? ... it signifies particular personality traits such as openness and agreeableness." Interestingly, the present Dalai Lama is ranked as low on both openness and agreeableness.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

RockyMcNuts 11y ago

Maybe 'religious labels as signaling' would be a better title. Religion is a rather complex institution, involving metaphysics, ie a dichotomy between the sacred/holy/divine and the profane/ungodly; human organizations and activities and social hierarchies; rituals; and yes, codes of behavior. Ethics is the study of moral principles that govern choices and behavior. I like to think that there are some universal moral principles that are instinctive or even game-theoretically necessary to cooperative human activities, and there are other ethical principles that particular societies or religions choose to agree on. To the extent someone views ethics as a signaling mechanism, it no longer fits the definition of ethics.

lsc 11y ago
>I like to think that there are some universal moral principles that are instinctive or even game-theoretically necessary to cooperative human activities, and there are other ethical principles that particular societies or religions choose to agree on. A lot of people think this... but the claim only seems to hold up if you speak in broad truisms rather than details. I mean, it's generally agreed that murder is unethical; but when you look deeply, this is largely a meaningless tautology, because it's only murder if it's wrong; two people can look at the same act of killing and one can call it murder, while the other can call it something just. Even within my own country; hell, within my own family, there's a lot of disagreement as to what murder actually is. Is abortion murder? Is killing in defense of property murder? Is killing as a judicial punishment murder? People I know and consider to be reasonable people disagree rather strongly on those details. Now, everyone I would consider to be reasonable, and nearly all current Americans would agree that killing someone for the crime of speaking out against a religion is murder, but there certainly isn't a global consensus on that; and really, not so long ago, there was something approaching global consensus that killing someone for the crime of blasphemy was a reasonable and just thing to do. You can claim that all people share a instinctual belief in a set of core ethics, and I'm not going to say you are wrong, but you have a lot of convincing to do.
- RockyMcNuts 11y ago
  people feel empathy without being taught, for people and even animals they've never seen before. they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. they share the notion that there is some kind of reciprocity, or social contract, even if they differ on the details of what the contract allows. see also http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103849/Research-shows-toddlers-understand-right-wrong-just-19-months.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103849/Research-sho... animal experiments in fairness, etc. https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_mora... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZurINLlVds
  - lsc 11y ago
    If you are saying that believing in something like morals or ethics seems to be a universal, then I agree with you; it does seem to be a universal. However, if we talk about any moral or ethical value or set of values, I still don't see any that are universal in any meaningful way. Across time and culture they are so different that what is the greatest good can be the greatest evil and vis-a-vis. >they will agree harming or killing someone for no reason is wrong, even if they might have a different threshold for what would be a valid reason. I'm taking this as "everyone thinks killing a human is a big deal" (implicit in your statement, I think, is that reasons like "because it gave me slight pleasure" or "because they slightly inconvenienced me" count as "no reason" - because otherwise the statement has no meaning. There's always a reason, even if it's a bad one.) My counterargument is slavery. Even Aristotle, the father of western philosophy, thought that slavery was a perfectly natural thing; that humans could, in fact, be property. Yes, I know, not all systems of slavery were absolute to the point where a master could kill a slave with the same ethical and legal consequences as I would face for destroying my old laptop rather than passing it on to someone would could make use of it, but in all systems of slavery, killing a slave was much less of a big deal than killing a noble, and in many systems, it would qualify as "not a big deal" I also point you at "ethnic cleansing" and religious violence, though part of that is that is my own values; I think that killing someone for their race or religious affiliation is killing for a trivial reason. I'm sure the people doing or organizing that killing disagree with me.

colanderman 11y ago

I've always thought this is partially why people of mainstream religions are often so scared of atheism: they subconsciously interpret the statement "I am an atheist" as "I do not subscribe to your ethics" and assume the speaker is liable to kill anyone at anytime.

taliesinb 11y ago
I think that's totally at odds with the OP's argument. Under the OP's view, atheists aren't scary because they might be violent -- most people aren't psychopaths, that's not what social signaling is for -- but because they've chosen to chuck out a large chunk of the signaling machinery that the "middle middle class and below" have habitually relied upon. In other words, if you've sworn off the dominant canon of ethical and social judgements, your position now suddenly requires just-in-time evaluation by the other, and that is threatening to people who don't trust themselves to reliably pull it off.
- colanderman 11y ago
  I'm not sure how you interpreted what I said, but I meant it to mean exactly what you said! Isolated atheists have no signaling mechanism, and thus are often assumed to have no, or a very different, moral code. ("Else why would they not subscribe to my religion?")

intopieces 11y ago

This article puts into words a conglomoration of experiences and thoughts I've had over and over, but never really considered together as a concept. "To be middle-middle class, you need to have all the correct opinions.... This requires memorizing endless lists of taboos and shibboleths, which is a conspicuous waste of time. “The news” and the political internet are tools for this. The high cost of keeping track of all that meaningless noise, and the ease of verifying it by asking your opinion of last night’s synthetic outrage event, makes it an effective signal. To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what would be the correct opinion about things that are new to you. This requires conceptual sophistication: years of study not only of details, but also of ways to think. That is what a liberal arts education used to be for." To take this further, I think the New Upper Middle Class signaling strategy is to be conspicuosly ignorant of the latest "synthetic outrage" -- "I don't have a TV" is a refrain that comes to mind. "I don't have Facebook" is another. Then again, I find myself directly in between these two: a news junkie devoted to understanding "what really matters in the world." That is, my signaling strategy is to have the right opinions about the right topics while publically rejecting the wrong topics (and, in a non-confrontational way, the wrong opinons). It's a way to signal opennesss (an agreeable trait) while maintaining sufficient cost.

hosh 11y ago

Wow, something from the Meaningness blog got onto the front page of Hacker News. I did not expect that. I want to make a note of something here. The author is a practitioner. I don't know how he thought up of these things, but what he says here and in many of his other articles are worth listening to because many of the things he says here seem to come from practice on the cushion -- at least to me, he does. It's the meditative experience itself that loosens up beliefs and opinions. When they arise and you pay attention on the cushion, things you take for granted get seen in a new light. Many of the deeper observations result from seeing things that you'd rather not see. What's ironic is that, for some reason, many folks in Consensus Buddhism will have these strange, adverse reactions to this very questioning of the core beliefs of Buddhism, even though the meditative methods taught at the core of Buddhist practices will open up the questioning process. If you're practicing correctly, you'll run through layers of personality and deeper into tightly-held beliefs and world views. Releasing and opening those are often one of the hardest practices. (But hey, you can take what I just said as the ethical posturing; I get that reaction a lot too). This method does not apply to just Buddhist beliefs. It can apply to any belief system (religious, political, social, etc), including Atheism (Yeah yeah, atheism is an "absence of belief"; but not after you find out what beliefs really are on the cushion). So, while the insights in this article might be interesting, even practical, I doubt you'll really get it's full potential unless you replicate it by sitting on the cushion yourself. Just saying.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

hliyan 11y ago

I tried reading this article. But even as someone raised as a (Theravada) Buddhist, I found it confusing. Perhaps because it addresses something(?) that troubles mostly westerners? Even though I no longer subscribe to the rebirth/karmic aspects of the religion, the core of Buddhism is fairly self-evident to me. This article made me question my own understanding, and did so with a handling of the English language that, well, did not exactly help. Perhaps this kind of analysis comes across sounding different to those from a Buddhist background?