The way this is written feels condescending to both sides. Not that there aren't many dumb people on both sides, but if you're writing a Socratic dialogue, it feels more appropriate to lecture and defeat steel man rather than weaker versions of other side's views.
"Given this long and horrible history, I suggest both sides simply embrace the status quo."
Socrates must be turning over to hear weasel words like this put in his mouth. Persia at the time was a powerful imperialist state bent on conquest & expansion - much like Israel today. They had numerous colonies & wanted to annex Greece; which resulted in a series of wars over sixty years including the famous battle at Marathon - where the underdog Greeks were able to stave off the invading Persians & finally secure a pace treaty insuring their freedom. Palestinians today too are fighting for their freedom from 57 years (& more) of brutal Occupation - & now genocide - by the Jewish State. Given this long & horrible history, the last thing Palestinians could ever do is embrace the unbearable status quo. The protesters on campuses & public squares around the world - God bless them! - won't embrace this either. And neither surely, would Socrates.
Fighting has been actively counterproductive so far. Every single time violence has been tried it somehow ends with Israel getting larger and more powerful than it was before. If violence hadn't been used in 1948, Israel would be a much smaller country with a somewhat larger Arab minority than it has today. If Syria and Egypt hadn't launched a giant military buildup to prepare for invasion in 1967, the West Bank would be part of Jordan and Gaza would be part of Egypt. If the PLO hadn't stupidly tried to kill King Hussein, Egypt would probably feel safe letting the refugees in Gaza flee to Sinai (plus Hussein might have helped out more in the Yom Kippur war). If Hamas had stayed home on October 7, the IDF would not be invading Gaza.
Accepting the status quo would definitely be better, because every attempt to violently challenge the status quo has made it worse.
Upon dissolution of the Ottoman Empire post-WWI, the British were awarded a governing Mandate over Palestine. In 1947, via Resolution 181, the UN GA sought a peaceful solution to Jewish and Arab competing claims to the land, and recommended partition between the disputants. The Jews accepted the Resolution. The Arabs did not and instead embarked on a war to annihilate the Jewish State in 1948. They lost. The Arabs tried again in 1967 and 1973. Same outcome. In 2000, the Palestinian Arabs were offered a state in Gaza plus over 90% of the West Bank. Despite Israeli acceptance, and the urging of President Clinton and leaders of other Arab nations, they did not accept. Your suggestion that the Palestinian Arabs have been "fighting for their freedom" is thus without factual basis.
Sorry, what’s relevant here is the role of US support for Israel, and one doesn’t need to be an expert in the conflict to have the correct moral intuition.
Questions for Socrates: You haven't explained why you're sure that Leonidas's charitable contributions for sustenance of orphans is good, nor is it clear what you meant by that assertion. Did you mean that his charitable giving is inherently good, regardless of its consequences? Or that its consequences are either entirely or primarily beneficial? If the latter is what you meant, will you not concede that enabling an orphan to survive to adulthood could ultimately have worse consequences than letting it succumb to disease or starvation in childhood? What if a beneficiary of Leonidas's charity grows up to become a hardened criminal, robbing many and killing several victims who resist? Leonidas might say that his support for that orphan was well-intended, but can he rightly claim that its ultimate effect was good? Or what if all, or nearly all, of the orphans he supports are substantially less intelligent than most other Athenians; more crime-prone; less conscientious as regards truth-telling, promise-keeping and repayment of debts; less concerned for the welfare of others, including their wives, paramours, and/or offspring; and more sexually promiscuous -- and what if they produce considerably more progeny per capita than most other Athenians and their progeny inherit and pass on the same undesirable traits? Could he properly shrug that off because his motive was benign?
If you wanted to go drive somewhere to do something fun, would you feel a need to justify your actions to others because of the small chance you might make a mistake while driving and run someone over? Or that you might accidentally hit a tree and leave your loved ones mourning your passing? Of course not, unless you're drunk or otherwise impaired, the chance of that happening is so tiny it isn't even worth discussing.
The same is true for saving the lives of children. Sure, the chance one of the children you save might grow up to be a murderer isn't zero, but it's close enough to zero that it's not even worth discussing the possibility. The same is true for every other type of crime. It is still so unlikely that it is not worth discussing even if the orphans' parents were dumb and/or criminal.
I think Bryan picked "supporting orphans" because it's obvious that saving the lives of children is good, and obvious that the downsides are so statistically improbable that they aren't worth discussing unless you enjoy being pedantic and contrarian.
As most orphans presumably don't grow up to become murderers it would, indeed, make little sense to decline to support any particular orphan child on the off chance that it will eventually murder someone. But you're ignoring my second hypothetical question, which is not all that far-fetched.
It's still far-fetched enough and requires an extremely long chain of reasoning to work. You should let an orphan die because they might be selfish, shortsighted, and dumb and they might have children who are similar. These harms are more likely than murder, but also far less severe, and therefore less compelling against the certainty of saving a child's life. They are also more likely to be counterbalanced by the positive contributions that even the less intelligent make when working as part of the economic system.
Let's use the car metaphor again. You aren't that likely to kill someone or yourself while using it, you are about 25x more likely to be in an accident where someone is injured or the car damages property, which is expensive and inconvenient. Your vehicle pollutes and causes wear on the road. Having more vehicles on the road increases the chance there will be a traffic jam. These harms are much more likely than vehicular homicide, but we still discount them because they are small and diffuse.
Let's cut to the chase here. My underlying thought is that a universalist utilitarian ethic that puts no more weight on the well-being of members of one's own family, community, tribe, or fellow citizens than on that of foreigners and/or takes no account of dysgenic effects is perverse.
Is that what's going on in the dialogue? They just mention that Leonidas gives money to feed orphans, not that he gives every spare drachma to them, or that he cares as much about random orphans as his family. Bryan doesn't specify, but I suspect that he probably intended Leonidas to contribute as much to charity as the average middle class American, a nice amount, but not nearly as much as he spends on his family, friends, and local community.
I doubt that supporting orphans specifically has measurable dysgenic effects. Sure, some orphans' parents might be dead because they were irresponsible and dumb, but others died of accident, war, or some other circumstance that could happen to anyone.
Is the effect of government policies or individual courses of action on the median intelligence of future generations of any ethical importance? I submit that it is. Does any current government program have a perverse effect in this respect? Yes. AFDC, for example.
Should people gifted with high intelligence feel obliged to pass their genes on to descendants, and should those with similarly gifted spouses feel obliged to produce at least two offspring (i.e., reproduce at replacement level or better)? I say yes.
That was a very clear dialogue. It was not only in English but worded within present American culture. Wow. Is that Bryan speaking, or some other interpreter?
Seems to me Socrates left of what I think is The Most Important Failing in human nature; the desire for revenge. Even the most enthusiastic atheist regards vengeance religiously. It is something God seems obedient to obey. Shit.
Anybody know why Socrates didn't mention revenge as the cause here? Does he anywhere hold that it is an attribute of humans and not a command by the universe to be worshiped.
Let's consider a hypothetical situation that has surely occurred countless times in hominid history and pre-history. Nomadic foragers intruding into the pastoral domain of Clan A kill several clan members who were tending sheep, butcher a few of the animals and devour the meat, and wantonly slaughter the rest. One of the shepherds escapes, however, and runs back to apprise his compatriots of the calamity. Some of them, thirsting for vengeance, arm themselves, track the band of intruders down, catching them by surprise, and kill them all after a brief battle in which one member of A is also killed and several others wounded. A few other adult male members of the clan, however, refused to join the punitive expedition -- whether in deference to ethical scruples or due merely to timidity I leave to your imagination. Which behavior is more admirable and which better serves the long-run interest of the clan? Though the answer to the second question may not be obvious, I submit that any innate proclivity for pacifism was gradually culled out through a process of Darwinian selection.
Excellent point William. To your point; splitting Germany into four, and dropped a nuke on the Japanese worked out well for all. There couldn't have been better results.
So maybe Israel's slaughtering 35,000 mostly women and children in order to get at 25,000 Hamas military . . . might be worth it. Alas, so far, Israel has killed only 6,000 Hamas soldiers. So doing some math . . . they need to kill 110,000 more women and children to get at the 19,000 Hamas soldiers that remain. Hopefully they don't need to go that far and the Hamas soldiers will give up. 145,000 divided by the population of Palestine is less than 3%. That's about the same ratio as Lincoln caused to die in his Civil War. And everyone (but me) thinks that was worth doing.
I am rooting for revenge to be a bad thing. If it was bad, it would be a good reason to keep revenge away from government. But if revenge is a good thing and the feud nature of revenge ends up wiping out the inferior genes, then by all means it should be conducted by the government.
It is and has been the declared aim of Hamas to render the land of Israel "Juden rein" and, to that end, to kill as many Israeli Jews as possible. An opinion poll indicates that a solid majority of Gaza residents approve that objective and, more specifically, approve the October 7 massacre. Some 300 Israeli civilians taken hostage in October have not been returned, and their chances of survival, if not freed by the IDF, are slim. Hamas has deliberately sited key military installations in and under schools, hospitals, and civilian population centers in order to maximize collateral civilian casualties from any military attack against its forces and consequently galvanize condemnation of such attacks and demands for cessation. If the IDF stops short of rooting out Hamas, however, past experience abundantly indicates that it will resume its ruthless war of attrition. In light of this, I think the Israeli government has ample justification for continuing the current offensive, despite the mounting toll of Gazan civilian casualties (which may not be as numerous as Gazan authorities and fellow-travelling NGOs would have us believe).
But that's not to say that all-out war is an appropriate or justified response to every provocation. World War I was a disastrous debacle, for instance, brought about by mulish adherence to ill-considered treaty obligations. US military intervention in Vietnam and Iraq accomplished nothing that justified the consequent cost in lives and treasure. And it's not clear to me that the US has any vital interest at stake that warrants further involvement in the current conflict in Ukraine -- the unacknowledged aim of which, I suspect, in the minds of proponents is simply to maximize Russian casualties, seeing consequent further Ukrainian casualties as an acceptable tradeoff.
PS I started a SubStack site some weeks ago and have a grand total of 1 subscriber and 9 followers to date. Here's a link to my maiden post in that space, which has generated 0 replies so far. https://substack.com/chat/2308350
Feel free to drop by and weigh in. Somebody? Anybody??
The way this is written feels condescending to both sides. Not that there aren't many dumb people on both sides, but if you're writing a Socratic dialogue, it feels more appropriate to lecture and defeat steel man rather than weaker versions of other side's views.
Like this post of Scott Alexander's.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck
You must be unfamiliar with the actual Socratic dialogues, one of which is, justly, described as “Socrates and sock puppets” :)
Much discussion is focused on the merits of the current protestors though, so it's fair to try to represent their ideas.
What's the point of 'fictionalizing' the dialogue in this way instead of simply writing 'Israelis' and 'Palestinians'?
Because it's fun and thematically appropriate to Greek history.
There's no Greek history involved, that's my point.
Trying to demonstrate a/the Socratic approach without instantly arousing emotional reactions associated with the present conflict.
A worthy goal, and device.
Anyone who doesn't literally live under a rock will immediately understand what he's actually referring to.
"Given this long and horrible history, I suggest both sides simply embrace the status quo."
Socrates must be turning over to hear weasel words like this put in his mouth. Persia at the time was a powerful imperialist state bent on conquest & expansion - much like Israel today. They had numerous colonies & wanted to annex Greece; which resulted in a series of wars over sixty years including the famous battle at Marathon - where the underdog Greeks were able to stave off the invading Persians & finally secure a pace treaty insuring their freedom. Palestinians today too are fighting for their freedom from 57 years (& more) of brutal Occupation - & now genocide - by the Jewish State. Given this long & horrible history, the last thing Palestinians could ever do is embrace the unbearable status quo. The protesters on campuses & public squares around the world - God bless them! - won't embrace this either. And neither surely, would Socrates.
Fighting has been actively counterproductive so far. Every single time violence has been tried it somehow ends with Israel getting larger and more powerful than it was before. If violence hadn't been used in 1948, Israel would be a much smaller country with a somewhat larger Arab minority than it has today. If Syria and Egypt hadn't launched a giant military buildup to prepare for invasion in 1967, the West Bank would be part of Jordan and Gaza would be part of Egypt. If the PLO hadn't stupidly tried to kill King Hussein, Egypt would probably feel safe letting the refugees in Gaza flee to Sinai (plus Hussein might have helped out more in the Yom Kippur war). If Hamas had stayed home on October 7, the IDF would not be invading Gaza.
Accepting the status quo would definitely be better, because every attempt to violently challenge the status quo has made it worse.
Upon dissolution of the Ottoman Empire post-WWI, the British were awarded a governing Mandate over Palestine. In 1947, via Resolution 181, the UN GA sought a peaceful solution to Jewish and Arab competing claims to the land, and recommended partition between the disputants. The Jews accepted the Resolution. The Arabs did not and instead embarked on a war to annihilate the Jewish State in 1948. They lost. The Arabs tried again in 1967 and 1973. Same outcome. In 2000, the Palestinian Arabs were offered a state in Gaza plus over 90% of the West Bank. Despite Israeli acceptance, and the urging of President Clinton and leaders of other Arab nations, they did not accept. Your suggestion that the Palestinian Arabs have been "fighting for their freedom" is thus without factual basis.
Sorry, what’s relevant here is the role of US support for Israel, and one doesn’t need to be an expert in the conflict to have the correct moral intuition.
What
Oh dear God! No wonder the Athenians killed him. Socratic dialogue is the last thing that would be needed in such circumstances.
Questions for Socrates: You haven't explained why you're sure that Leonidas's charitable contributions for sustenance of orphans is good, nor is it clear what you meant by that assertion. Did you mean that his charitable giving is inherently good, regardless of its consequences? Or that its consequences are either entirely or primarily beneficial? If the latter is what you meant, will you not concede that enabling an orphan to survive to adulthood could ultimately have worse consequences than letting it succumb to disease or starvation in childhood? What if a beneficiary of Leonidas's charity grows up to become a hardened criminal, robbing many and killing several victims who resist? Leonidas might say that his support for that orphan was well-intended, but can he rightly claim that its ultimate effect was good? Or what if all, or nearly all, of the orphans he supports are substantially less intelligent than most other Athenians; more crime-prone; less conscientious as regards truth-telling, promise-keeping and repayment of debts; less concerned for the welfare of others, including their wives, paramours, and/or offspring; and more sexually promiscuous -- and what if they produce considerably more progeny per capita than most other Athenians and their progeny inherit and pass on the same undesirable traits? Could he properly shrug that off because his motive was benign?
If you wanted to go drive somewhere to do something fun, would you feel a need to justify your actions to others because of the small chance you might make a mistake while driving and run someone over? Or that you might accidentally hit a tree and leave your loved ones mourning your passing? Of course not, unless you're drunk or otherwise impaired, the chance of that happening is so tiny it isn't even worth discussing.
The same is true for saving the lives of children. Sure, the chance one of the children you save might grow up to be a murderer isn't zero, but it's close enough to zero that it's not even worth discussing the possibility. The same is true for every other type of crime. It is still so unlikely that it is not worth discussing even if the orphans' parents were dumb and/or criminal.
I think Bryan picked "supporting orphans" because it's obvious that saving the lives of children is good, and obvious that the downsides are so statistically improbable that they aren't worth discussing unless you enjoy being pedantic and contrarian.
As most orphans presumably don't grow up to become murderers it would, indeed, make little sense to decline to support any particular orphan child on the off chance that it will eventually murder someone. But you're ignoring my second hypothetical question, which is not all that far-fetched.
It's still far-fetched enough and requires an extremely long chain of reasoning to work. You should let an orphan die because they might be selfish, shortsighted, and dumb and they might have children who are similar. These harms are more likely than murder, but also far less severe, and therefore less compelling against the certainty of saving a child's life. They are also more likely to be counterbalanced by the positive contributions that even the less intelligent make when working as part of the economic system.
Let's use the car metaphor again. You aren't that likely to kill someone or yourself while using it, you are about 25x more likely to be in an accident where someone is injured or the car damages property, which is expensive and inconvenient. Your vehicle pollutes and causes wear on the road. Having more vehicles on the road increases the chance there will be a traffic jam. These harms are much more likely than vehicular homicide, but we still discount them because they are small and diffuse.
Let's cut to the chase here. My underlying thought is that a universalist utilitarian ethic that puts no more weight on the well-being of members of one's own family, community, tribe, or fellow citizens than on that of foreigners and/or takes no account of dysgenic effects is perverse.
Is that what's going on in the dialogue? They just mention that Leonidas gives money to feed orphans, not that he gives every spare drachma to them, or that he cares as much about random orphans as his family. Bryan doesn't specify, but I suspect that he probably intended Leonidas to contribute as much to charity as the average middle class American, a nice amount, but not nearly as much as he spends on his family, friends, and local community.
I doubt that supporting orphans specifically has measurable dysgenic effects. Sure, some orphans' parents might be dead because they were irresponsible and dumb, but others died of accident, war, or some other circumstance that could happen to anyone.
Is the effect of government policies or individual courses of action on the median intelligence of future generations of any ethical importance? I submit that it is. Does any current government program have a perverse effect in this respect? Yes. AFDC, for example.
Should people gifted with high intelligence feel obliged to pass their genes on to descendants, and should those with similarly gifted spouses feel obliged to produce at least two offspring (i.e., reproduce at replacement level or better)? I say yes.
That was a very clear dialogue. It was not only in English but worded within present American culture. Wow. Is that Bryan speaking, or some other interpreter?
Seems to me Socrates left of what I think is The Most Important Failing in human nature; the desire for revenge. Even the most enthusiastic atheist regards vengeance religiously. It is something God seems obedient to obey. Shit.
Anybody know why Socrates didn't mention revenge as the cause here? Does he anywhere hold that it is an attribute of humans and not a command by the universe to be worshiped.
Let's consider a hypothetical situation that has surely occurred countless times in hominid history and pre-history. Nomadic foragers intruding into the pastoral domain of Clan A kill several clan members who were tending sheep, butcher a few of the animals and devour the meat, and wantonly slaughter the rest. One of the shepherds escapes, however, and runs back to apprise his compatriots of the calamity. Some of them, thirsting for vengeance, arm themselves, track the band of intruders down, catching them by surprise, and kill them all after a brief battle in which one member of A is also killed and several others wounded. A few other adult male members of the clan, however, refused to join the punitive expedition -- whether in deference to ethical scruples or due merely to timidity I leave to your imagination. Which behavior is more admirable and which better serves the long-run interest of the clan? Though the answer to the second question may not be obvious, I submit that any innate proclivity for pacifism was gradually culled out through a process of Darwinian selection.
Excellent point William. To your point; splitting Germany into four, and dropped a nuke on the Japanese worked out well for all. There couldn't have been better results.
So maybe Israel's slaughtering 35,000 mostly women and children in order to get at 25,000 Hamas military . . . might be worth it. Alas, so far, Israel has killed only 6,000 Hamas soldiers. So doing some math . . . they need to kill 110,000 more women and children to get at the 19,000 Hamas soldiers that remain. Hopefully they don't need to go that far and the Hamas soldiers will give up. 145,000 divided by the population of Palestine is less than 3%. That's about the same ratio as Lincoln caused to die in his Civil War. And everyone (but me) thinks that was worth doing.
I am rooting for revenge to be a bad thing. If it was bad, it would be a good reason to keep revenge away from government. But if revenge is a good thing and the feud nature of revenge ends up wiping out the inferior genes, then by all means it should be conducted by the government.
It is and has been the declared aim of Hamas to render the land of Israel "Juden rein" and, to that end, to kill as many Israeli Jews as possible. An opinion poll indicates that a solid majority of Gaza residents approve that objective and, more specifically, approve the October 7 massacre. Some 300 Israeli civilians taken hostage in October have not been returned, and their chances of survival, if not freed by the IDF, are slim. Hamas has deliberately sited key military installations in and under schools, hospitals, and civilian population centers in order to maximize collateral civilian casualties from any military attack against its forces and consequently galvanize condemnation of such attacks and demands for cessation. If the IDF stops short of rooting out Hamas, however, past experience abundantly indicates that it will resume its ruthless war of attrition. In light of this, I think the Israeli government has ample justification for continuing the current offensive, despite the mounting toll of Gazan civilian casualties (which may not be as numerous as Gazan authorities and fellow-travelling NGOs would have us believe).
But that's not to say that all-out war is an appropriate or justified response to every provocation. World War I was a disastrous debacle, for instance, brought about by mulish adherence to ill-considered treaty obligations. US military intervention in Vietnam and Iraq accomplished nothing that justified the consequent cost in lives and treasure. And it's not clear to me that the US has any vital interest at stake that warrants further involvement in the current conflict in Ukraine -- the unacknowledged aim of which, I suspect, in the minds of proponents is simply to maximize Russian casualties, seeing consequent further Ukrainian casualties as an acceptable tradeoff.
PS I started a SubStack site some weeks ago and have a grand total of 1 subscriber and 9 followers to date. Here's a link to my maiden post in that space, which has generated 0 replies so far. https://substack.com/chat/2308350
Feel free to drop by and weigh in. Somebody? Anybody??