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> Happy, well adjusted people don't form organized shoplifting gangs Happy and well adjusted people form shoplifting gangs with the risk/reward calculus says t

> Happy, well adjusted people don't form organized shoplifting gangs Happy and well adjusted people form shoplifting gangs with the risk/reward calculus says that they can make a lot of money with 0 risk! "Don't shoplift" is not some innate ethical virtue that humans adopt when they are happy and healthy; by trying to lean on virtues without maintaining a system for enforcing them you are simply spending down unquantifiable social capital in order to avoid making hard decisions.

idiotsecant 3y ago
I think you're wrong. Most people aren't kept from stealing because they're afraid they'll get in trouble. They are kept from stealing by an innate sense of social fairness. If you meet a man on the road in the middle of a remote forest in which you cannot possibly be observed do you murder him and take his things or not? If not, why not?
- justrealist 3y ago
  Like I said, you are parasitically running down the "innate sense of social fairness" that society has spent 10,000 years building. You want to believe it's innate, because it absolves you of the work of actually building a system to enforce virtue. That's laziness, it doesn't make it true. People do not want to rely on their "innate" sense of social fairness while watching the people around them be rewarded for violating those norms. People hold those feelings because they see the people around them do the same. When that's not true, they feel like suckers, and if you push them, you will find out how not-innate that sense is. --- Edit: And yes, for most of human history, "traveling in the woods in unfamiliar territory" was asking for a brutal death. Read some Jared Diamond or something on his work in New Guinea. We have actively socialized ourselves, through hard work over centuries, to make this relatively safe.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    I think the only one projecting here is you. You're terrified of the masses of people just waiting to do horrible things because those are things you would do. The rest of us don't need the threat of violence against us to be decent people because that's just what most people do.
- fragmede 3y ago
  That sense of social fairness is easily hacked to justify stealing whatever a thief wants to steal. A hypothetical random man in the forest, sure. But how do we know they aren't a highway man, that would have threatened you first, but you managed to get there first? What if they do threaten you? Would we be comfortable stealing/robbing this person? And what if it was a corporation that's done and is doing bad stuff? Like, say, Google trying to charge money for YouTube*. Thieves performing feats of mental acrobatics to make it okay to steal when it's an eeeevil corporation says it's an innate sense of wanting things for free that does it. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765

idiotsecant 3y ago

I think you're wrong. Most people aren't kept from stealing because they're afraid they'll get in trouble. They are kept from stealing by an innate sense of social fairness. If you meet a man on the road in the middle of a remote forest in which you cannot possibly be observed do you murder him and take his things or not? If not, why not?

justrealist 3y ago
Like I said, you are parasitically running down the "innate sense of social fairness" that society has spent 10,000 years building. You want to believe it's innate, because it absolves you of the work of actually building a system to enforce virtue. That's laziness, it doesn't make it true. People do not want to rely on their "innate" sense of social fairness while watching the people around them be rewarded for violating those norms. People hold those feelings because they see the people around them do the same. When that's not true, they feel like suckers, and if you push them, you will find out how not-innate that sense is. --- Edit: And yes, for most of human history, "traveling in the woods in unfamiliar territory" was asking for a brutal death. Read some Jared Diamond or something on his work in New Guinea. We have actively socialized ourselves, through hard work over centuries, to make this relatively safe.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  I think the only one projecting here is you. You're terrified of the masses of people just waiting to do horrible things because those are things you would do. The rest of us don't need the threat of violence against us to be decent people because that's just what most people do.
fragmede 3y ago
That sense of social fairness is easily hacked to justify stealing whatever a thief wants to steal. A hypothetical random man in the forest, sure. But how do we know they aren't a highway man, that would have threatened you first, but you managed to get there first? What if they do threaten you? Would we be comfortable stealing/robbing this person? And what if it was a corporation that's done and is doing bad stuff? Like, say, Google trying to charge money for YouTube*. Thieves performing feats of mental acrobatics to make it okay to steal when it's an eeeevil corporation says it's an innate sense of wanting things for free that does it. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128765