Alpha Centauri 2

Community => Recreation Commons => Topic started by: Elok on July 02, 2018, 05:13:25 PM

Title: Broad vs. narrow ethical focus
Post by: Elok on July 02, 2018, 05:13:25 PM

A few weeks back, I read a BBC puff-piece about some celebrity awareness initiative to help women.  A quote that stood out: "Poverty is sexist, and that's a big problem."  Which raised the obvious question, "would poverty be any less of a problem if it affected men and women equally?"  I have similar feelings about other aspects of identity politics; it's too easy to become so concerned about the plight of one group that you lose sight of the big picture.  OTOH, I don't think it's illegitimate to have a special concern for one's own group/family/culture.  I'd actually expect a woman to put the interests of her own child ahead of strangers' interests.  From an efficiency perspective, you're also more likely to be able to solve nearby problems, in groups you know and understand, than distant ones.  Our Iraq debacle came about in part from our noble desire to help fix a problem we knew basically nothing about.
Where and how does one decide to draw the line?

Title: Re: Broad vs. narrow ethical focus
Post by: Lorizael on July 02, 2018, 08:13:45 PM

I think we should all work on the problems we're motivated/interested in solving, while being aware of the possibility that our frame of reference is best thought of as a useful conception/heuristic rather than an arbiter of truth. Like, those jokes about doctors examining a patient with weird symptoms: the oncologist thinks it's cancer, the OBGYN think you're pregnant, the podiatrist think it's athlete's foot, etc.

We would never get anywhere without specialists who can quickly and reliably find the signs of or solutions to specific problems, but that power comes at the cost of needing to manufacture a world view centered around their one thing. Worldviews are kind of definitionally all-encompassing, so it pays to have a voice in the back of your head saying, "Hey maybe check with someone else because you always think it's X" and then a willingness to see the positives of other perspectives.

Which brings me to a related point. With medicine, one of those doctors is probably actually correct about which disease it is, and the others are all probably wrong. But that's not always how the world works. Like, we can look at the brain. Is the correct way to analyze it at the abstract level of psychology, the biological level of neurons, or the physical level of action potentials and ion gates? There likely isn't a right answer there, and all approaches have some measure of validity that can complement each other and provide a fuller understanding of the phenomenon. But as above, you're unlikely to have one person who completely understands the brain from all three perspectives, so it's valuable to have specialists with their own worldviews collaborating and finding inspiration from other approaches.

In terms of poverty and sexism, that means I can see value in adding that dimension of thought to the issue of poverty, and vice-versa, but I would only do while not trying to get caught in thinking that this is the real way to look at the problem. It's a way that may be more useful than some ways, less useful than others.