this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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I'm not a fan of ideology.
What you're saying is that you're not self aware enough to realize that you have an ideology. Everyone has a world view that they develop to understand how the world works, and every world view necessarily represents a simplification of reality. Forming abstractions is how our minds deal with complexity.
I'm autistic.
Do you think people should be treated with respect? Do you think there should be consideration for your condition so you are not exempt from certain events, activities, opportunities?
These are matters of ideology. If you say yes to it, it is ideological in the same way when you say no to it. There is no inherent objective truth to these value questions.
Same for the economy. It doesn't matter if you think that growth should be the main objective, or that equal opportunity should be the focus or sustainability or other things. You will have to make a value judgement and the sum of these values represent your ideology.
I disagree. These values are based on objective observations.
Observations may be objective, but the values are always subjective. Two different people can look at the same set of facts and come to entirely different conclusions of what constitutes desirable actions based on their world view.
Two different people can disagree on whether a table is a table: this does not alter objective fact.
You entirely missed the point of what I said. Two different people can agree on an objective fact that a table is a table, but disagree on whether it's a good looking table.
It is an objective fact that a harmful act harms someone. That one observer likes that outcome does not alter the objective moral weight of the act. Harmful acts are objectively wrong, regardless of preference.
From a basic empirical observation of the effects of harm, one can arrive at a moral system based on objective reasoning. In this way, ideology can be avoided.
The reality is that real world is far too complex to be understood with perfect accuracy. Therefore, everyone necessarily makes assumptions and simplifications leading them to see different options as being more harmful. What you're describing is frankly an infantile understanding of how empirical observation works.
Will me being infantile stop humans from hurting each other? If not, why would I be motivated to change?
Will me growing up (to stop being infantile) get in the way of my refraining from hurting others? If yes, why would I be motivated to change?
In my infantile state, I can clearly see that - even in a complex world - harming other living beings is wrong. I don't like being harmed, so why would they like being harmed?
Maybe you need ideology to simplify the world. But that doesn't mean that I require it. That's part of the complex world you assert we live in, yes?
You've just explained your simplistic ideology in this thread, and you're not even capable of understanding why its simplistic when it's explained to you.
You have failed to show that it is an ideology. You have explained that you disagree with it, but that's not the same thing.
It's an empirical fact that living beings don't like being hurt. Therefore, it avoiding hurt is good. That's not an ideology, it's reasoning based on observable facts. An ideological position would be "we need to hurt living beings to further our interests". The ideological position involves those interests.
Seeing all living beings as equal (e.g. in terms of prioritising not harming them, just as I would prefer not to be harmed or to harm myself) is about not having an interest, and therefore is clearly not ideological. It's also objectively true, because in terms of cosmological time, the consequences of all living beings become equal.
I've explained to you what an ideology is repeatedly, you seem incapable of understanding what you're being told. The human brain is not capable of holding the entire complexity of the material reality, and therefore it must rely on abstractions and simplifications to do reasoning. You, just like everyone else, have biases and make simplifications leading you to understand things in the specific way that you do. This signifies your particular ideology.
There are plenty of cases where people try to use empirical evidence with best intentions resulting in great harm being done as a result. Having good intentions is not an ideology, it's an aspiration. The world view that guides your actions that you put into practice to try to achieve the goals that you believe to be desirable are what your actual ideology is.
I don't understand anything. Therefore I have no ideology.
that's an ideology of itself
There is no such thing as objective morality. One cannot observe that "harmful acts are objectively wrong". The "wrongness" and "rightness" of an action aren't observable, measurable or even well defined properties. It is possible to measure the duration of an action, the energy transformations of the action, the location of an action, ect, but not the morality of an action. What units would you even measure it in? Or is morality a dimensionless property?
The obsession with being "non-ideological" and reducing everything to base science, also known as "positivism" is also an ideology.
Objective observations made by what apparatus?
An absolute God?
The idea that objectivity requires a God figure would seem to me to be Berkeleyan idealism.
What is an ideology to you?
The dictionary definition.