"Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until eventually an equilibrium is disturbed. Its battle cry is not 'Death to the unbelievers!' but 'If you're nice, you can join our cuddle pile!'" Scott Alexander, In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization
In order to avoid political debates and to, perhaps, extend the idea a little further, let's replace "liberalism" with "the Light Side."
To explain the Light Side by saying what it is not, here is the defining characteristic of the Dark: No matter what its professed goals may be, it is always the Dark Side that seeks to conquer by fire and sword.
Rather than distinguish the Light and the Dark by their goals, perhaps it would be better to distinguish them according to their means of operation: The Dark Side pulls no punches. It uses every bullet in its arsenal, real or metaphorical, whatever it thinks will let it win. Debate is just another tool, sometimes more convenient than bloodshed and sometimes less. It does not accept failure under any circumstances. The idea of the Dark Side is that its ends are self-justified, which we know because the Dark Side will bless every wrong and excuse every misdeed committed to achieve that end.
To the extent that this approach is taken, the Dark Side is present.
I have remarked to several of my friends, on various occasions, that I often prefer atheists to theists. This is because (ready the pitchforks) too many theists find themselves on the Dark Side. They may come to some correct conclusions as a result of flawed thinking, but that flawed thinking also leads to many flawed conclusions. I would much rather debate with an atheist than with someone who thinks that any argument no matter how well-supported by evidence can be defeated by making a particular appeal to authority.
The Light Side is the other side of the coin. It also pulls no punches, but this is because there are no punches to pull, so to speak. The Light Side has ends just the same as the Dark Side, but there are lines which it will not cross.
The Light Side speaks only the truth, and when it has discovered that its views are mistaken then it updates its beliefs in the face of new evidence, because it knows that to do otherwise is to become the Dark Side.
The Light Side does not condone the use of coercion in the pursuit of its goals. It is not a Gospel to be spread by the sword, and when its adherents fail to withdraw themselves from those who would make it so, the price of their failure is to become the Dark Side. Neither do they use the threat of the sword, nor emotional blackmail, nor any other form of coercion. The order of the day is "Keep the moral high ground, even if we perish," because the Light Side believes that if you have compromised your values then you have effectively declared that they are not so important after all.
If the message of your Gospel is love, and truth, and freedom, and the order of your Gospel is to proclaim peace, then you can do no worse thing than hating, deceit, enslaving, and sowing the seeds of conflict.
In the language of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Dark Side is defecting for any reason whatsoever, and the Light Side is cooperating. The Light Side is not cooperating because it wants to win, however. Everyone, to begin with, wants to win. The problem is that if you are only going to cooperate when there is no risk of your partner defecting then you are never going to cooperate.
And so the Light Side, being aware of this, chooses simply to cooperate. It does not condone violence. It does not condone logical fallacies. It does not condone defection for any reason whatsoever, no matter the stakes. And it does so because it believes that it is better to keep the moral high ground, and die, than to win and then look in the mirror to see that you have become the Dark Side.
If, knowing that no one will ever choose cooperation if they will only do so from a position of invulnerability, and knowing that this no one will ever hold this position, one wishes for cooperation to be chosen, then there is only one thing to be done: You must decide that whether you care most about winning or about a world where people choose to cooperate rather than defect.
In this world, the party which chooses to cooperate will often be met by a defector. This does not trouble the Light. The Light Side does not choose cooperation for the sake of victory, but for the sake of cooperation. In choosing cooperation, the Light Side has already won, and on its own terms.
The Dark Side refuses to lose, no matter the cost. The Light Side refuses to defect, no matter the cost. And at the end of the day, only one of them has managed to keep true to those values which it held in the beginning.
I find it interesting that you seem to think that calling it "The Light Side" rather than "liberalism" will avoid political debates. I would also like to point out that your Light Side is a rather extreme view. One that I doubt many adherents of would survive were it not for slightly more hard nosed people willing to support coercion in the form of, say, police departments. But this is besides my main point.
ReplyDeleteMy main interest is in how this classification pertains to my moral theory of choice- namely preference utilitarianism. While on the one hand clearly Dark Side (there being essentially no rules that utilitarianism is unwilling to break other than its primary statement of purpose), it seems to disagree with most of the rest of your classification of the Dark Side. Utilitarianism will not bless every wrong used to achieve its ends, because committing wrongs are in fact contrary to its ends (though not as strongly so as with deontological theories). Utilitarians will also cooperate in prisoners dilemmas, because definitionally, cooperation is the strategy that leads to the maximal aggregate utility.
On the other hand, prisoners dilemmas become more complicated on the meta-level. So usually in prisoners dilemmas the utilities listed on the two sides are roughly the happinesses of the individuals playing the game. In such a case utilitarianism will *always* cooperate. All good moral theories will generally cooperate, but most deontological theories (you Light Side included) will not cooperate if doing so breaks one of its inviolable rules. But there are also meta-level prisoner's dilemmas, where the payoffs are not the values assigned by the individuals playing but the values assigned by their moral theories. At this level, every theory I know of defects. Your Light Side would not give up an inch of its principles even to produce what I would consider a great moral good. Utilitarianism would not allow an ounce more net suffering even if it would allow it to expunge the use of coercion from its methods.
So to summarize (not that I had a coherent point to begin with):
* I'm not sure that the things you say that the Light Side does are all simultaneously realizable (for example if lying is required to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma)
* Your classification of Dark Side philosophies does not seem universally applicable
* Prisoner's Dilemma looks weird on the meta level
This post you suffered through is a demonstration of the worse side of my authorliness-- sometimes I get wordy and poetic. (thank you for suffering anyway, and for posting such a long response. You get +3 Kankri points)
DeleteA really succinct way of putting might be that the Light Side recognizes when a course of action implicitly contradicts the values that it claims to promote, and does not put up with that crap. The Dark Side, when it recognizes a conflict, doesn't care.
I think that my first description was overly-colored by my own philosophy.
There's a paper that I'm working on which addresses pacifism in this light, and under the auspices of rule consequentialism (which is what I subscribe to). The idea is that, if we accept that rule consequentialism is an improvement over vanilla consequentialism, then "don't kill people, even when you think that it will preserve lives" is a good rule to make, because history shows that we are so incredibly horrible at judging the fallout of murder and warfare that we are more likely to cause an even bigger disaster (see: the fruits of US foreign policy; or, for an even better example, the fallout from Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which unleashed not only two world wars but also the Cold War, every conflict which was a part of that, the birth of Wahhabism, and... well, you get the idea)
Part of the paper, if I allow it to blow up to huge proportions, will go to considering the negative fallout of major cases of nonviolent resistance, which is what I propose instead. Granted, now your people are dying, but it's also the case that most Horrible Regimes last more than a day only because too many people care more about preserving their own lives than about refusing to cooperate with the Machine.
Regarding the Light Side and the Prisoner's Dilemma, it may be helpful to put it in terms of my specific ethics. I don't support killing people. Once upon a time, I thought that it was perfectly reasonable to kill certain people in order to save other people. It could even be reasonable to kill some innocents in order to save more innocents.
But I don't support killing people (or rather, I don't believe in overriding a person's decision to live, which is an important distinction that keeps some other positions of mine from appearing contradictory). If we consider violence against others to be defecting, with defensive violence being defection rooted in the fear of the other person defecting, then we see that "We will only turn our swords into plowshares when the other side has done the same, or is rendered powerless" will never result in cooperation. My desire for nonviolence has to be stronger than my desire to live, or I may lose both.