4 ms·

I think the lefty one is more accurately that the children cannot help what kind of home their parents provide. Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do

I think the lefty one is more accurately that the children cannot help what kind of home their parents provide. Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?

glitchc 1y ago
The counterargument is : If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility? Ultimately this argument does not have a clear answer because it's driven by beliefs, not facts.
- monknomo 1y ago
  the consequences and responsibility fall on different parties. Children inherently cannot have responsibility because they are children. It's a wrong-headed counterargument. I'll agree that people can argue about the answer, but it is perfectly clear to me. I'd also say it's a value-system driven argument which I see as different than a belief driven argument
  - glitchc 1y ago
    Beliefs separate from values.. that's a strange dichotomy. Do you harbour beliefs that conflict with your values?
    - godelski 1y ago
      > Do you harbour beliefs that conflict with your values? I'm not sure how long you've been human for, but this is in fact a common thing. Common for all living creatures really. Unfortunately we cannot always uphold the full idealized versions of our beliefs due to constraints of the world we live in. But on the other hand, if your beliefs weren't beyond our capabilities then we'd never improve. (I'll assume it is "not very long")
      - glitchc 1y ago
        I can tell from the ad hominem that you have confused pop philosophy for the real thing. A book on ethics might be a good start. I suggest Blackburn. We'll just leave it at that.
        godelski 1y ago
        Idk man, I didn't say anything that radical. We live in a world where the most conservative people tend to worship people that say feed the poor. That seems pretty hypocritical to me. All humans are to some degree, but there's a difference between internal and external based concessions
- godelski 1y ago
  > If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility? Sorry, but if a starving child is not enough of an incentive, I'm not sure we're talking about people that can be incentivized. Either they want to provide for their children but are unable to or they just don't care. Punishing the former does nothing to help the child, likely only exacerbates that situation as, last I checked... parents who care for their children really do not like their children being taken away from them. Punishing the latter, you can only incentivize the latter to maybe do the bare minimum, skirting whatever they can get away with. You end up in an endless cat and mouse game needing to constantly check in and monitor kids. I mean child abuse is already illegal, and we don't seem to be able to get this problem solved. Personally, I think it is a lot cheaper to just feed kids than to fund the services needed to constantly monitor parents, all the legal fees to prosecute them, and then all the fees to put children in foster care where the situation might repeat itself. Feeding them also has the added benefit of them not starving while all those things are happening. It guarantees the child gets food. I'm all for punishing negligent parents, I'm not sure anyone is against that. But you know what I'm also against? Starving kids. Stop making this false dichotomy. It just ends up with starving kids.
  - glitchc 1y ago
    I'll try once more. There are children starving globally every day. How many of them are you saving personally? If not all, why not? How many should we save collectively? And which "we" should be responsible for which children (neighbourhood, town, city, country, region)? If so, why? These are not trite questions. Think carefully before answering.
    - godelski 1y ago
      Don't move the problem. We weren't discussing world hunger.
      - glitchc 1y ago
        Your objection to the first question is already captured in the ones that follow. Try to put some more thought into it, yeah? Okay, I'll tone down the snark (it's only there because you got my back up). Ultimately as you think about these questions, you will realize that the answers are not absolute, but based on degrees. You might think "hmm, I can't solve world hunger, but maybe I can help all the kids in my neighbourhood/city/state." Essentially what you will settle on a quantity and duration that seems reasonable to you. The thing with reasonable is that if you scratch the surface, it's little more than a line in the sand. Your own personal line based on your personal beliefs and values. Turns out everyone else has a personal line too, just in a slightly different spot, based on their different beliefs and values. That's why there's no one right answer. In civil society, everyone compares their lines and through debate, settle on one. Since it's a compromise, no one is actually happy with the outcome, but it's the best outcome we can arrive at given the problem. Your current position is one of intolerance: It seems impossible for you to understand why the line could be in any spot other than the one you picked. If that's the starting point, then you can never come to an agreement.
gpt5 1y ago
I think that both of you are close but missing the real moral debate. Assume for a moment that doing homework is a positive thing for kids. The debate is whether you should give homework if there are potentially kids whose home environment is not conducive for doing homework at home. I.e. do you choose a path that lifts the average (providing homework), but could put some kids at a disadvantage, or do you aim for the weakest, at the cost of the average?
- godelski 1y ago
  There's a simpler way to re-frame your question: Prioritarianism Or: should we help the worst off at the expense of everyone else? Most people will answer no. Mostly because this is a race to the bottom. And in a framework like education, you risk a slippery slope of making the bar progressively lower. Left wing politics tends to focus on egalitarianism, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This is the current school structure. Both the bottom and the top students get lower quality education in order to provide the best education for most. It is a logistics problem. But your framing is bad. It need not be a zero sum game. We can lift the floor without costs to the middle or top.
godelski 1y ago
> Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence? This has always been the fundamental position for me. They're children. They don't have (legal) autonomy. They have no (legal) independence. There is no contention between the belief that parents should bear the responsibility for their children while also being in favor of programs like free school lunches. I cannot understand how people are against such things. Sure, I don't want to pay for other people's kids, but what's the alternative? They starve? I guess we could make people sterile until they prove they have the income to support children and implement programs to constantly monitor the children's well being. But honestly a nation wide sterilization program and child monitoring service sounds wildly more expensive than these other programs. Not to mention insanely dystopian. Sounds much cheaper to just hand out free meals at school.

glitchc 1y ago

The counterargument is : If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility? Ultimately this argument does not have a clear answer because it's driven by beliefs, not facts.

monknomo 1y ago
the consequences and responsibility fall on different parties. Children inherently cannot have responsibility because they are children. It's a wrong-headed counterargument. I'll agree that people can argue about the answer, but it is perfectly clear to me. I'd also say it's a value-system driven argument which I see as different than a belief driven argument
- glitchc 1y ago
  Beliefs separate from values.. that's a strange dichotomy. Do you harbour beliefs that conflict with your values?
  - godelski 1y ago
    > Do you harbour beliefs that conflict with your values? I'm not sure how long you've been human for, but this is in fact a common thing. Common for all living creatures really. Unfortunately we cannot always uphold the full idealized versions of our beliefs due to constraints of the world we live in. But on the other hand, if your beliefs weren't beyond our capabilities then we'd never improve. (I'll assume it is "not very long")
    - glitchc 1y ago
      I can tell from the ad hominem that you have confused pop philosophy for the real thing. A book on ethics might be a good start. I suggest Blackburn. We'll just leave it at that.
      - godelski 1y ago
        Idk man, I didn't say anything that radical. We live in a world where the most conservative people tend to worship people that say feed the poor. That seems pretty hypocritical to me. All humans are to some degree, but there's a difference between internal and external based concessions
godelski 1y ago
> If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility? Sorry, but if a starving child is not enough of an incentive, I'm not sure we're talking about people that can be incentivized. Either they want to provide for their children but are unable to or they just don't care. Punishing the former does nothing to help the child, likely only exacerbates that situation as, last I checked... parents who care for their children really do not like their children being taken away from them. Punishing the latter, you can only incentivize the latter to maybe do the bare minimum, skirting whatever they can get away with. You end up in an endless cat and mouse game needing to constantly check in and monitor kids. I mean child abuse is already illegal, and we don't seem to be able to get this problem solved. Personally, I think it is a lot cheaper to just feed kids than to fund the services needed to constantly monitor parents, all the legal fees to prosecute them, and then all the fees to put children in foster care where the situation might repeat itself. Feeding them also has the added benefit of them not starving while all those things are happening. It guarantees the child gets food. I'm all for punishing negligent parents, I'm not sure anyone is against that. But you know what I'm also against? Starving kids. Stop making this false dichotomy. It just ends up with starving kids.
- glitchc 1y ago
  I'll try once more. There are children starving globally every day. How many of them are you saving personally? If not all, why not? How many should we save collectively? And which "we" should be responsible for which children (neighbourhood, town, city, country, region)? If so, why? These are not trite questions. Think carefully before answering.
  - godelski 1y ago
    Don't move the problem. We weren't discussing world hunger.
    - glitchc 1y ago
      Your objection to the first question is already captured in the ones that follow. Try to put some more thought into it, yeah? Okay, I'll tone down the snark (it's only there because you got my back up). Ultimately as you think about these questions, you will realize that the answers are not absolute, but based on degrees. You might think "hmm, I can't solve world hunger, but maybe I can help all the kids in my neighbourhood/city/state." Essentially what you will settle on a quantity and duration that seems reasonable to you. The thing with reasonable is that if you scratch the surface, it's little more than a line in the sand. Your own personal line based on your personal beliefs and values. Turns out everyone else has a personal line too, just in a slightly different spot, based on their different beliefs and values. That's why there's no one right answer. In civil society, everyone compares their lines and through debate, settle on one. Since it's a compromise, no one is actually happy with the outcome, but it's the best outcome we can arrive at given the problem. Your current position is one of intolerance: It seems impossible for you to understand why the line could be in any spot other than the one you picked. If that's the starting point, then you can never come to an agreement.

gpt5 1y ago

I think that both of you are close but missing the real moral debate. Assume for a moment that doing homework is a positive thing for kids. The debate is whether you should give homework if there are potentially kids whose home environment is not conducive for doing homework at home. I.e. do you choose a path that lifts the average (providing homework), but could put some kids at a disadvantage, or do you aim for the weakest, at the cost of the average?

godelski 1y ago
There's a simpler way to re-frame your question: Prioritarianism Or: should we help the worst off at the expense of everyone else? Most people will answer no. Mostly because this is a race to the bottom. And in a framework like education, you risk a slippery slope of making the bar progressively lower. Left wing politics tends to focus on egalitarianism, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. This is the current school structure. Both the bottom and the top students get lower quality education in order to provide the best education for most. It is a logistics problem. But your framing is bad. It need not be a zero sum game. We can lift the floor without costs to the middle or top.

godelski 1y ago

> Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence? This has always been the fundamental position for me. They're children. They don't have (legal) autonomy. They have no (legal) independence. There is no contention between the belief that parents should bear the responsibility for their children while also being in favor of programs like free school lunches. I cannot understand how people are against such things. Sure, I don't want to pay for other people's kids, but what's the alternative? They starve? I guess we could make people sterile until they prove they have the income to support children and implement programs to constantly monitor the children's well being. But honestly a nation wide sterilization program and child monitoring service sounds wildly more expensive than these other programs. Not to mention insanely dystopian. Sounds much cheaper to just hand out free meals at school.