Maybe a political philosophy is an injection f: A -> B which maps political opinions A to Accountable Opinions B? hm...might be taking this too far
so surely all men born in idk say Periclean Athens were irredeemably wicked start to finish on account of their reprehensible views of women thats pretty interesting youd've have thought that a reasonable fraction wouldve figured out the Correct 21C view but somehow no??
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Are there any societies that you do believe were irredeemably wicked - perhaps those that regularly performed human sacrifice, had institutionalized slavery, etc? It's hard to see how this argument, if accepted, doesn't generalize to every past society.
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If there is some sort of continuum between that evil society and a good society (like there kind of is between ancient Athens and the modern West) then maybe the wickedness was worth it. Aztecs were evil but were also a dead end, so their evil was not worth it.
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Arguably the Inca wouldn't have been, but the Aztecs, yeah.
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I feel more comfortable calling societies, separate from their collective human constituents, evil
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that makes sense, I think - is the general idea that personal morality is a function of the society one is born in, and thus individuals cannot be said to be good or evil, just societies?
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hmmm not entirely sure, this is a position coming from intuition rather than reason as I write this, occurs to me I'm also less inclined to judge an entire society than specific institutions and subsystems for--well, systematic ethical breaches
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I think the cohering model is something like: 1. individuals may be judged by their actions, in the context of the systems of which they're the substrates. 2. systems may be judged on a purely consequentialist basis 3. humans being limited in power and duration relative . . .
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to their surrounding systems, and having great difficulty altering those systems as individuals or even imagining what alterations might be possible, ought specifically be forgiven for baseline complicity in wicked systems beyond their practical control; but
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this, but unironically
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Lots of people study the classics and few study the blog posts of modern racist misogynists just in case there is wisdom buried there somewhere. On a level, they realize that a person who is a racist misogynist now is less good than a person who was racist misogynist back then.
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this seems reasonable.
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reasonable like its worth considering the context and setting in which a person developed their views when judging their moral character? :D
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anyway its a lucky thing that there are no more Moral Innovations to be had and we are all perfectly good and perma-orthodox now
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Being there for the End of History was so effing cool, I can't even tell you. I have a commemorative coin around here somewhere.
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like, the idea that people in the past were wicked because we hadn't figured out goodness seems uncontroversial? History is one long litany of misery and subjugation.
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hell, it's trivially extensible to the present, i'm fine with saying there is plenty of miserycausing stuff going on rn that we'll be judged for later.
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Yes, on account of how dead men (I'm going to assume no Periclean Athenians achieved immortality) can't change their minds.
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