One last example to round out the day’s discussion. This one comes to us courtesy of former FTBorg turned reluctant prophet to horrible people Al Stefanelli. In making a completely original argument comparing the Atheism+ forum to McCarthyism, he also rails against a new foe of all that is good and right in the world – radical feminism: … Continue Reading
Category: critical thinking
14 The duelling myth postulate examined: anti-Feminism
3 The duelling myth postulate examined: #IdleNoMore
Our next example comes courtesy of the comment threads from this story. I highly suggest that if you read Christie Blatchford’s execrable opinion piece, you take the time to read this patient takedown from Rabble. This comment is, admittedly, cherry-picked, but it is a relatively common argument that turns up pretty much every time racial justice and historical antecedents of racial inequalities are discussed. I don’t read the National Post, so I am not sure how typical the approval the comment is receiving is for that audience, or how representative it is of the general populace, but I’ve heard this line of argument many times before. I don’t find it a particularly egregious example (even though the racism is a bit more nakedly expressed than is usually considered polite): … Continue Reading
0 The dueling myth postulate examined: religious persecution
Let’s take a few examples that are not hypothetical, and see if we can apply the framework to statements and arguments made in the real world. Our first such example is one that is likely intimately familiar to most of us, Christian faux-persecution: … Continue Reading
1 Moral conflict in the dueling myth postulate
We can see from the previous discussion that it is trivially easy to imagine a situation in which two parties come into direct moral conflict over a single issue, owing almost entirely to their respective evaluations of the fairness of a system. Where one side sees a strong moral imperative to preserve a system, the other sees an equally-strong imperative to change the system completely. The conflict that arises therefore becomes about more than mere facts – it becomes a direct clash of two competing mythologies.
Let us consider for a moment a facile and hypothetical case example. A member of Parliament (MP Jones) proposes a bill that would raise the average amount of monthly income given to people receiving social assistance (welfare). A member from an opposing party (MP Nguyen) objects strongly to the idea: … Continue Reading
4 Ethical dimensions of the dueling myth postulate
It is profoundly mundane to merely point out “hey, some people don’t agree about some things“, but it’s when we consider the moral consequences of these disagreements that the ‘rubber hits the road’, so to speak. Because we have general agreement between parties that fairness is both morally good and important, but disagreement over whether or not a system is in a state of fairness, conflict arises immediately. … Continue Reading
5 The dueling myth postulate
I wish to postulate that it is useful to think of many disagreements as the collision of two opposing myths. The first myth, what I call the ‘fairness myth’ (and will heretofore refer to as f-myth) is very simply stated: the world is a fair place. You will undoubtedly have heard this described as the ‘just world theory’, ‘just world hypothesis’, or ‘just world fallacy’. I prefer the term ‘myth’ for the reasons I spelled out in yesterday’s post – it is a story that we tell about ourselves, the world, and our place in it. Those things we have were obtained fairly, and our position is justified according to our understanding of moral axioms.
The countervailing myth is, of course, the ‘unfairness myth’ (u-myth) – that our position in the world is not in accordance with moral axioms, and that we (or others – more on that later) are being arbitrarily deprived of access to a state of harmonious existence.
I would imagine that it is fairly trivial, at this point, to simply point at the f-myth and say “well we know the world isn’t fair, so this myth is obviously false”, but that would be jumping the gun a bit. Remember that ‘fair’ is not claimed to be an inherent property of the universe, but rather a social convention created by humans. A more precise way of stating the f-myth might be something like this: … Continue Reading
5 The audience for this argument
A final note to sum up the preamble to this discussion. This whole idea is predicated on an assumption for which there is abundant counter-factual evidence. The central dogma of the discussion is that people in disputes both agree that ‘fairness’ is a good and desirable thing. Yes, I can hear you snickering, because there are no shortage of folks who are of the “I got mine, so fuck you” persuasion, and this argument will have very little to offer them. I am intentionally delimiting this discussion to people who can at least agree that fairness, in principle, is a mutual goal.
It may also serve me well to note here (I plan to re-assert this in various places later on in the discussion) that this is an extremely speculative exercise, as far as I am concerned. I will not attempt to make truth claims, because there is very little by way of empirical evidence that I can marshall in defence of this idea. It is rather an attempt to make explicit an argument that I have made many times in the past, but in varying and often oblique ways.
Finally, what I am proposing is more of a rhetorical device than it is a psychological or cognitive framework. I may appear to have to twist the facts to fit the framework, but I hope it will not be too egregious.
Tomorrow I will begin to sketch the outline of my thesis.
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11 A primer on fairness
There is another term that I have to define, however operationally, before this conversation can continue. I will also be making repeated reference to the word ‘fair’. This is a much more difficult concept to define without someone raising an objection, or without descending into progressively more circular terms until I spiral inward upon myself and implode.
“Fairness” and “justice”, at least in the context of this discussion, can be considered largely interchangeable. I recognize that justice can take on a character that implies the intervention of a third party – in a religious case this would be the intervention of the gods, in a legal case this is a system of laws and law enforcers. I use ‘fairness’ specifically in order to avoid such associations, which would only serve to complicate a discussion that I anticipate will become highly complicated without any help from this particular semantic confusion. … Continue Reading
9 A primer on myth
In the coming posts, I will be making repeated reference to the word ‘myth’. Among a group of atheists and anti-theists, the word ‘myth’ has taken on a decidedly derogatory meaning. Religious myths are used in the place of facts to justify deplorable and immoral actions and policies. Indeed, the primacy of the ‘Adam and Eve’ myth alone has been used as the basis for everything from extorting money from people under threat of ‘original sin’ to the most absurd and yet powerfully harmful anti-gay sentiment. The entire young earth creationism movement, motivated by a flood myth, is working tirelessly to undermine science education. Myths about the proper role of women (and their role in the fall) are used to subjugate women and pigeonhole men into restrictive gender roles.
Without wishing to excuse the harms done by mythology, I do want to recognize that supernatural and religious myths are, in fact, only one particular subtype of myth. Indeed, our idiomatic language would be severely weakened in the absence of mythology – one might even say it is our Achilles’ Heel. And again, beyond the value of myth as a common point of cultural reference, we also use myth to explain the world around us. … Continue Reading
6 …I took the road most comfortably travelled by…
The following post is a continuation of a discussion we began this morning, looking at a paper by Daniel Effron and colleagues. In it, the authors conduct a number of experiments to investigate a phenomenon in which white people demonstrate a tendency to use salient examples of being “not racist” (choosing not to accuse an innocent black people in favour of a more guilty-seeming white person of a crime) to license more racist behaviours in the future.
The fourth investigation the authors conducted invited people to try and remember the number of racist decisions they didn’t make, after presenting them with statements that were either clearly racist, ambiguously racist, or racially ambiguous (i.e., no racial content). The authors hypothesized that, given a clear-cut and obvious example of a time when they were “not racist”, the drive to appear “not racist” would be satisfied, thus obviating the need to introduce “not racist” narratives into their memory. In other words, if you have a ready memory of choosing not to be overtly racist, you will have less motivation to seem “not racist” in a subsequent decision. … Continue Reading
Crommunist 