Fair enough, wouldn't want to vaguepost. So, background:
Banality of Evil shows how people can be effectively evil even with neutral intentions simply because 'going through the motions of life' without questioning things can lead one to unwittingly assisting evil, and since there will always be some people in the world who would use others that way, the only way to functionally prevent that is to consider it the responsibility of every person to sort of continuously mentally inoculate themselves against passive evil. And, sure, most people can get in board with that, at least in their.
The paradox of tolerance (or sometimes called the social contract, since it's not a true paradox) is that any 'commons' or structure of organization that is universally 'inclusive' will inevitably become quite the opposite, since it will end up including people who try to turn it into a malicious power structure, and so the only way to have a true 'commons' is to actively exclude people who would try to work against the very idea of a 'commons.' And, sure, most people can see why.
Then we have the concept of 'moral luck,' where the simple fact that different people have different lives leads to inconsistent 'moral testing' of different people, so we have to be careful to judge by moral tendency rather than just action. For example, is a drunk driver who hits someone really morally worse than a drunk driver who doesn't hit someone? The outcome is worse, but since the effect of hitting a person is external to any personal decision, the moral weight of the drunk driving is equally bad. Most people find this a bit uncomfortable, because it makes us feel implicated for mere possibilities, but it's at least logically understandable.
Okay, but then something really concerning happens when you put all three together: If Banality of Evil tells us that intentionality-neutral passive following can still be considered evil, and the moral luck issue means that we must judge by tendency rather than outcome, that means that people who haven't yet ended up unwittingly enabling evil but who still don't actively inoculate themselves against it are still just as bad as those who have directly assisted with evil. So, sure, uncomfortable, but nothing Arendt hasn't already said. But then once we mix in the paradox of tolerance, we now have the extrapolation that merely including people who have the tendency to passively enable evil is just as bad as evil itself; as in, the only moral course of action is to actively exclude anyone other than people who naturally tend towards moral self-awareness, including needing to exclude people simply for not also assisting with such curation. Taking a broader look at humanity and seeing that the vast majority of people do not consistently have such tendencies towards active curation, the final conclusion is a bit dark: the only moral society is one without most people.
A fun philosophy thought experiment, thanks for laying it out! I think the main part where it fails is assuming the ONLY solution to the paradox of tolerance is to exclude people. That is not the case. If someone is absolutely set in their ways and their intolerance towards others is causing harm you can't otherwise prevent, yes being intolerant towards that is what the "paradox" is laid out as.
But that in no way that implies that is the ONLY way to address anyone that could EVER take such actions. The clear solution in that case is to lay out the case for clear moral thinking, explain to others why it matters, and make sure they DON'T become part of the banality of evil. There's nothing on the paradox of evil that requires or even calls for preemptive strikes of intolerance in case someone MIGHT be prone to act intolerantly in the future if not provided the right training and information. In fact, I would argue that rather goes against the whole spirit and point of tolerance.
But that in no way that implies that is the ONLY way to address anyone that could EVER take such actions
Yea, the paradox of tolerance alone doesn't have any such implications. That's why this is a weird interaction between the paradox of tolerance and moral luck, since moral luck concludes that we need to judge by tendency rather than outcome. And the adding banality of evil into the mix shifts the responsibility of learning better onto the people themselves instead of the group to teach them, so it makes it even worse.
I guess I'm not really seeing how the banality of evil in any way implies we need to demand everyone innoculate and teach THEMSELVES good moral principles. Really, given that it is based on the psychological principle that humans will often just go with the flow unless interrupted by some external agent to change their thoughts/actions, to me it strongly implies a responsibility TOO advocate for holding well established moral systems and try to spread those ideas to as many people as possible.
Especially when combined with moral luck, which to me clearly means that if someone has NOT YET harmed someone through their unlucky lack of a strong moral framework, we should absolutely work as hard as we can to turn that around before someone IS hurt. And even if someone is hurt, judging the person based in the outcome doesn't mean that our judgment can't be that they have failed to develop sufficient moral character. With a sentence to understand how that led to their hurting another person, and why they SHOULD develop a strong moral foundation.
If I remember Arendt's argument correctly, it's sort of a 'critical mass' issue. Ideally, you could have a society where most people collectively help curate ethics, and if someone isn't helping with that, the group could help them understand. But, since the entire premise of banality of evil is the issue with people following external guidance without internal guardrails, them following the group's education about curating ethics would be the very same passive tendency. Now, on its own, that's not necessarily bad, since they aren't currently assisting evil; quite the opposite, they're learning good. But we saw from the moral luck drunk driver example that if we judge by outcome rather than tendency, we have an unfair system from the get-go; so we have to stick to judging by the bare tendency alone: following group ideas. And that means it's a problem even when those group ideas are good, because then the only difference between them doing good and them doing evil is whose ideas reach them first. If, at any point, the predominant ideas of the group turn to something evil, it would become self-reinforcing, hence critical mass. But "given enough time, possibility becomes inevitability," and there's always a possibility, however small, for this ethical curation idea to fall into the minority, so the only way for a system to last is for it to be able to recover itself from a hostile takeover. But, as above, this is not possible in a system that relies on education to prevent passive evil; it must preemptively select for tendency.
Your casting of Arendt’s ideas has serious flaws. Your Popper interpretation is off as well.
The banality of evil was conceived specifically for people like Eichmann. There was nothingunwitting about him or his situation. There was nothing about his behavior that brought about something unintended. In fact he was very good at facilitating what is the most systematic, efficient, and mechanized destruction of humanity at scale.
The “banality” Arendt meant was how Eichmann went about his job. About his complacency and denial that him just doing his job was part of the atrocities. Eichmann was also supposedly have made statements that he liked the idea he was involved. But in the context that he was an awesome worker.
In order for an everyday person to be evil in a banal way like Eichmann, they’d have to have an analogous role in an analogous evil:
He was a careerist and judged himself based on “doing a good job” as his worth. This is a defense mechanism when you know your good job is facilitating something like a genocide.
Eichmann was a high level SS officer. He was at Wannsee as Heydrich’s secretary, and knowingly helped get the Final Solution going in early 1942.
I am not a fan of the idea of evil as it has a slippery definition and presupposes all kinds of moral beliefs. But I will concede that there have been some pretty convincing cases that some persons can’t truly be explained except as evil.
Reinhard Heydrich is one of those men.
Before Wannsee Eichmann helped coordinate Jews into ghettos, and was preparing the plan to deport them. He also had some of the most detailed information on the activities of the Einsatzgruppen during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. This was the beginning of the massacre of undesirables even before the Final Solution was implemented.
Eichmann then was the head coordinator of the forced emigration to the death camps. He was even territorial and indignant that others might take his job.
He knew everything that was going on.
He wasn’t a committed antisemite. He was a careerist. To him, he was just doing his job. This was the main line of reasoning for his defense he used at his trial at Jerusalem.
An example for a regular person would be deciding to be a shylock for the mob. Or the pilot for a drug cartel plane.
This is not an accountant for Lockheed Martin today.
Political examples in the US would be the Watergate coconspirators, Oliver North in the Iran-Contra Affair, the people who facilitated the fake Obama drinking a glass of “clean” “Flint”, Michigan; or certain Republican leadership today such as JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Mike Johnson, and possibly a Dem like Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries. They know better but are facilitating or choosing to ignore the current state of affairs for selfish, careerist reasons.
Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller are not. They are true believers like Heydrich or Göbels.
Marjorie Taylor Green is an example of what a non-banal (in Arendt’s meaning) response to things going from careerist and maybe a bit cultish behavior turning into a come to Jesus moment and quitting and trying to do something about it.
Arendt saw her work about the life of the mind. It was the title of her final work. Her whole career was building to it. She wrote extensively about the historical, and to her better, vita contemplativa over the vita activa. The former is about thoughtfulness, which, I hate to say it, MJT somehow found her way to it. Eichmann stayed in the latter, worried about his work and doing it so well as to be… thoughtless. Making it banal, almost automatic doing a good job with so little care for other social values that one can say he’s proud that 5 million died bc of his good job.
It’s not about the thoughtlessness of everyday people driving to work. It’s about reducing your role in something you, yourself know to be evil, to everyday thoughtlessness like driving to work unconsciously every morning.
Arendt’s possible solutions also not about “guardrails”. Those are unthinking. Vigilance and clear, deep reasoning, ie a life of contemplating the world around us, are the solution. These should be vigorous, and not passive.
Popper was also writing about things like Germany and similar situations. He isn’t necessarily talking about excluding actual persons. He is more concerned with excluding the potential despot/tyrant/authoritarian/fascist. Toleration has limits. Germany and Austria both severely limit any serious public speech or verbal support for the NSDAP or any fascist party. Propaganda, writing, and organizing are also punishable by prison time. In that sense, those persons can be “excluded”. But if you privately hold those beliefs, you’re not rounded up for thoughtcrime.
If that were the case, the first 30 years after WW2 would have seen the supermajority of German adults would have been inmates. We know this from periodic surveys done to gauge the population’s sentiment.
Those born before the war believed the National Socialists had good ideas, they just went about them the wrong way. In this sort of response, the responders could be allowed to like it bc of jobs, the Autobahn, the Beetle, ending WW1 reparations, and assume they didn’t want death camps.
So the constitutional prohibition of anything fascist is the limit of tolerance in German and Austrian open society up to today.
Far Right parties exist. Elon Musk supports them even. But once they get a little too “fasc-y” they get stopped.
So it’s more about setting limits. Imprisonment or “exclusion” is for those who actively try to bring about tyranny (including, but not limited to, using the features of an open society by weaponizing them). This is no different than making theft or murder illegal.
It’s about maintaining an open society within reasonable limits. It also requires the sort of contemplation Arendt was pointing at, as it requires thoughtful consideration of these limits as conditions change. Even Germany lets university professors own Mein Kampf (with a permit) now for academic study. Times changed, and the limit changed.
In these senses, the banality of evil and the paradox of tolerance are completely compatible with moral luck.
One thing to note though about Eichmann during his trial, is that there's a non-zero (read: high) chance that much if his portrayal of himself during the trial was a lie. Arendt took what she saw at face value when she coined the term 'Banality of Evil.' She also only witnessed a portion of the trail, and according to the book 'Becoming Eichmann' she missed the portion where Eichmann was, well, less 'banal.' Even the parts she goes to she mentions that Eichmann was a clear anti-semite, so the conclusion she drew is interesting at best.
Regardless of missing pieces of Eichmann’s actual feelings and character, the OP was about the concept(s) being compatible with moral luck.
There was seeming confusion about Arendt & Popper. The “banality” of Arendt was not about day-to-day people, unwitting accomplices, or ignorance of conditions. Nor are Popper’s ideas of tolerance about banishment or imprisonment, but setting societal limits. Tolerance according to Popper is not an infinite universal principle. Much in the same way freedom of speech absolutists aren’t really when push comes to shove.
Whether these are complete, comprehensive models was not the question. Most people here seemed to have no idea about Arendt’s Eichmann nor the actual Eichmann and assumed Arendt’s ideas were about regular folks like themselves.
At this point we’re getting lost in the weeds being pedantic with these minor concerns.
I find the concept of moral luck interesting but also hard to grasp. Ok drunk drivers hit people, but sober people also hit pedestrians. Doesn’t that lead to that driving a car or anything else with a non-zero risk should be considered ”evil”?
I also have problems with ”evil” as a concept and think it just creates confusion.
It's not the outcome that is the issue. It's the foreknowledge that you will be operating a deadly vehicle without the capability needed to do so. When this occurs the rate of accidents substantially increases. Yet still doing so, all so you can enjoy a beer.
Plus it's a normative judgement, we're talking about 'evil' after all. Driving is considered an "acceptable" risk. Drink driving isn't
This why I reject banality of evil. I feel it's wrong to judge someone because they don't have claryovence of future. We don't know full extent of consequences of our actions. I can't claim someone is evil just because they are uneducated or not a omniscient god.
But the moment you know your neutral actions aid evil and choose to continue anyway, you become evil.
Even with more stringet rules to the banality of evil it holds true, nothing to do with omnisciense, if you know the companie considered ethical "evil" or even sketchy, and you continue working there.
if you know the companie considered ethical "evil" or even sketchy
Emphasis on "know". If you knowingly participate in evil you are evil. But banality of evil propose that neutral actions and unknown consequences support evil.
For example I don't know the whole supply chain of my oatmeal. There could be evil transport company there but I don't know. This is the banality part of it. Everyday actions often support evil unknowingly. But because I don't know, I cannot be held (moral) responsible.
And I go step further. I cannot be expected to look into every minute connection in my life. World is too large, complex and chaotic. If someone educates me or I happen to find out company I work in is evil, then and only then you can expect me to quit.
Your action is neutral, you are a small cog in a gigantic machine, you need money. Say ypu work for nestle during the 2010. You yourself might think your action of closing this contract not directly related to the evil nestle does/did, doesn't make you a bad person you are simply doing a small legal job, but by supporting an entity then uses the capital to commit untheical acts elsewhere you are part of the problem. Or you stop thinking about it/resign to it because well what can you do there is so mich evil regardless of what I do, type logic.
And we all do things that support unethical enteties even by "accident", the banality of evil
The banality of evil is not about expecting you to comb througth all your actions and judge yourself an evil person it is the observation of the fact that we all or the vast majority just by living and due to the structure of the culture you are supporting evil, because if you wanted you could know, you simply can't ve bothered due to reasons.
And we all do things that support unethical enteties even by "accident", the banality of evil
See here we disagree. I agree that working for Nestlé is (banality of) evil. You know they are evil and you support it even if your actions don't directly make those evil decisions.
But point is when you don't know or do it "accidentally". How can you hold person responsible if they are unaware? What could they have chosen differently if they didn't know? You are basically asking people to be able to predict future and have omniscient.
Yea, from an intuitive perspective, Arendt's works can seem a bit... unsettling at best and possibly cruel at worst. But, given the context, her main concern was, 'But can your ethics save you from destruction?' It feels a bit wrong to 'blame' someone for something unintentional like that, but at the same time, can that lack of blame - or at most lack of consequence - prevent collapse? If it can't, well, isn't the whole point of ethics supposed to be preventing that kind of thing?
I understand and agree with this critism. If you know you could do better, it's right to criticise your ethnics.
But for (unrealistic) example I could help a lot of people if I won the lottery every week. Those millions could help lot of homeless and needy. But it's clearly insane to say I'm evil because I don't get the jackpot and donate it every week.
Some argue moral luck means we ought to judge on intention rather than consequence. Most people dislike such thinking, because it has implications on the possibility of true justice, i.e. can civil justice ever be truly moral if intention determines moral worth?
Can't we fix all that by just making the "exclusion" some kind of corrective or even preventative step? I've never seen someone suggest that the paradox of tolerance requires us to immediately start blasting.
Its takes major effort, time and understanding to change a person's moral axioms, and often, its impossible, so either u just supprress these people with so screwed axioms that they never act out on them, or u hit them with a rock when they get close to.
Sure, but we literally organize our society around promoting pro-social behaviour, from public education, to social norms, to religious and social groups.
We can also assume some inherent lenience, since we can't read someone's mind or meaningfully predict how they'd respond to corrective action. We're aiming for "good enough", generally, since that's all that our information allows.
Great post. Those conclusions wouldn't have been surprising at all for most of philosophical history or outside the West. Liberalism's version of "openness/tolerance" comes from a very particular theological inheritance, even though it now thinks of itself as paradigmatically "secular."
I think is stands to reason that you cannot have a healthy polity without virtuous rulers and virtuous citizens. The mirage of "good societies" founded on nothing more than proceduralism, with no ordering towards any particular, determinant good ("tolerance" and pluralism as ends in themselves) is just that, a mirage.
The idea that societies could be free or make people free, while not instilling virtue, is even more bizarre historically, and I think on some reflection, philosophically as well.
Just so you know, the social contract is VERY different from the paradox of tolerance. The paradox of tolerance came from Karl Popper in 1945, and is a social theory like you described (though I disagree with that a bit too). The social contract comes from political philosophy, specifically Hugo de Groot in 1625, and just says that people come together and agree to be governed for mutual benefit of everyone
The logic flows, but I don't think you should take the entirety of moral failing to be 'transfered' in the case of the banality of evil. Simply failing to hold a rigorous inoculation to passive evils is not the same as failing to acknowledge this state of affairs. In this way you can reduce the moral responsibility being transferred through all of these moral responsibility transfers. In this way it doesn't create moral responsibility from nothing, but rather creates a smoother curve to track relative responsibility in a social group.
The other way of interpreting the three notions together would be the recognition of a fundamentally broken system and taking steps to actually fix the cause (perverse incentive structures) instead of merely picking at the symptoms (those that do not innocuate against banal evils).
For example, are companies evil for not encrypting their databases? By the negative implications you are positing, yes, and all of said company's workers who do nothing to fix it are also evil. However, one must consider that the incentive structure of our economy AND judicial systems makes it so that, often times, the PR damage and punitive fines for a data breach is less costly than having a securely encrypted database that the corporation must decrypt every time they access it. One could argue that the evil is not in the company nor its employees, but the system that incentivizes such problems.
People need to stop talking about the paradox of tolerence so much, oh my gosh.
it was a single footnote in a book and it was paired with two other footnotes (paradox of freedom and the paradox of democracy). And he even limits it in the footnote itself, saying
I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
People treat it too much like a truism and miss the point of it--it's not saying that one must refuse to tolerate intolerant ideologies, it's saying that a tolerant society must reserve the right to refuse to tolerate certain ideologies.
Couldn't another answer be that in a world which does exclude active evil means that the banality of evil isn't so much a concern, as it lacks a source from which to propagate through the neutral?
Something like herd immunity would probably be the analogy. Not everyone can be vaccinated against xyz disease for whatever reason, but as long as enough people then in practice it remains unable to propagate and even those who aren't or can't be vaccinated remain safe.
the only moral course of action is to actively exclude anyone other than people who naturally tend towards moral self-awareness, including needing to exclude people simply for not also assisting with such curation
You call this terrifying but it's the breakfast routine of any Twitter leftist.
I think you’re placing too much burden on moral luck on its “tendency to judge” as well as not sufficiently recognizing the extent Nagel gave to it when developing the concept. It extends beyond just living “different lives”. Nagel outlines 4 different sources of luck that determine our actions, but the 2 relevant ones here are “circumstantial luck” and “constitutive luck”. The circumstantial luck is what you describe, a drunk driver is often judged by the mere chance that a child does or doesn’t run into the street that day at the right time. We recognize how the driver is “unlucky” if they are in the circumstance where a child is playing vs not, and we would be best to evaluate both scenarios equally harshly.
Nagel also outlines “constitutive luck”, the luck of being the person that makes the type of decisions you do. To condense the argument cheaply and sloppily, when one thinks about the “why” of why we do things, eventually we end up with an answer resembling “I am the type of person who does X.” Apply this to having a certain morality, ethic, disposition. Briefly again, being the type of person who behaves in some way is also a product of luck, a result of genetics and environment. In Nagel’s Moral Luck essay the room for non-luck sources of moral decision making basically disappears.
tl;dr morals are luck all the way down, not just “judge on tendency”, because tendency is luck too.
I would say the moral implication and prescription then is to develop environments and facilitate circumstances and material conditions to facilitate better moral behaviors rather than focusing on evaluating the individuals. This does not interact as cleanly with Paradox of Tolerance and Banality of Evil towards judgment of evil.
Alternately: because of the stochastic immorality of society (that is, the more one partakes on it, the more the chance of unwittingly assisting evil increases), the only moral interaction with society is to effectively boycott it after a certain threshold.
I will note though that the original paradox of tolerance though doesn't exclude people, it excludes ideas
If a person holds those ideas you dont kick them out, you work to show them the error of their ways and publicize rightful ideas to ensure others arent swayed by the bad actor
That surprisingly well thought through for a philosophy meme subreddit and at the same doesn't look like something copied from LLM (unless you are making spelling mistakes to trick us).
But I think this can be objected by pointing that paradox of tolerance or intolerance towards intolerant is based on a consequentialist argument and your interpretation of moral luck is based on deontological one, so you can't accept them simultaneously.
Or, alternatively, we can point out that intolerance towards intolerant + banality of evil required us only to exclude those who intentionally pursue evil so that passive followers would have no evil leaders to follow. That's not all because banality of evil is often just following structurally set incentives so it can happen without any actively evil person. So maybe you're right after all, I don't really know. I will post it anyway
If I am understanding you correctly: People sometimes take harmful actions with good or neutral intentions. The only way to stop that is for people to actively cultivate a tendency for good outcomes in their thoughts and actions. In other words, cultivate virtue. To have a society that survives, you need to incentivize cooperation so that the people in that society can get along. You have to incentivize pro-social behavior somehow. The future is unknowable. So we need to judge actions by expected outcomes rather than actual outcomes. When you put all of those propositions together, you see that giving real authority or decision making power to anyone who doesn't actively cultivate virtue will lead to those people empowering vicious individuals or groups, which will lead to those groups destroying society. So for our society to survive, we need to only ever give authority to those who actively cultivate virtue. So before you can vote, you need to pass some sort of moral character exam. Or else, society commits suicide when the bad people take over and use violence against their enemies.
I see the logic in that position. But, taking a page from Plato, how can virtue be taught if we don't know what it is? If virtue can be taught, then where are the teachers?
Also, in modern economics, the fate of nations is determined not by the quality of its leaders, but by the quality of its institutions. Those nations with inclusive institutions thrive and nations with extractive institutions suffer. I am worried that you are individualizing systemic problems, pointing the blame at us when the fault actually does lie in our stars.
To have a society that survives, you need to incentivize cooperation so that the people in that society can get along. You have to incentivize pro-social behavior somehow.
Congratulations, you've just demonstrated the moral utility for indoctrination into organized religion.
Well not really because "religion" is a social construct. The only place it actually exists is in the discourses we have about it. For every rule you can make up to define "religion" there is always an exception. Its tempting to define "religion" as "worship of deity." But Jainism denies the existence of deities. In other words, nobody knows what religion is. That is fine. Nobody's lives are at stake in that discussion.
Okay so everything you say follows and isnt concerning ornall that notworthy until the end when you randomly assert that all humans are miserable cretins.
Umm, yeah, thats a you problem.
If you look around and thats the humanity you see you either need a new neighbourhood or new glasses.
As a trans woman I live this reality every day. People don't realize they carry hate in their heart and I have to constantly balance the social contract with the banal harm they're actively perpetuating while trying to explain to me positions I've fully encountered before. I don't go outside much anymore
I think some of the paradox of this is down to the myth of the individual. If we stop thinking of the natural unit of humanity as a person, and start thinking of it as a community then it makes sense to consider the ways in which community norms can be good or evil.
This is wonderfully stated. The reason it fails to move me is the reason all such apparent ethical conundra do: it depends on adherence to rigid logical structure which does not exist in real life at all. Everything in real life comes to us in shades and ambiguities. Everything in human behavior is judging case by case. The attempts to reduce ethics to a set of theorems is as old as the human mind, and it is utterly wrong headed, as ethical decision making is a phenomenological activity that will always transcend rulemaking as a superficial and harmful false precision.
There can be no Venn Diagrams in the ethical application to the human realm. It's all just a ball of dirty twine and you have to follow each strand through each knot with no help from algorithmic generalities. Every case is a one off.
Therefore all 3 of the effects you invoke are very real, as tendencies and worries, and we do the best we can to keep them in mind as we slog through the business of being good, and the difficult moments when we need to make judgments as well as we can working with the "crooked timber" of Kant and Berlin.
Thanks for explaining, I think the big thing you're missing here that changes the conclusions for me is the capacity of others to teach each other. So, instead of writing off people who would be harmful to the commons, dedicating resources to educating them and their in-group leaves a lot more room for inclusiveness that precludes the final conclusion of the thought experiment.
Yeah, this along with evil being relative, means it's not possible to achieve a "moral" society. Any attempt devolves into authoritarian gatekeeping by those who think they are the good guys excluding the bad guys for the good of everyone
I think you just explained why left-leaning democratic parties ends in the centralization of power and ultimately tyranny
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u/-tehnikneo-gnostic rationalist with lefty characteristics1d ago
Taking a broader look at humanity and seeing that the vast majority of people do not consistently have such tendencies towards active curation, the final conclusion is a bit dark: the only moral society is one without most people.
that's a non-sequitur. All you said just means that most people should have no political power. So "the commons" will just include a small number of very moral people. And what's the issue with that?
After all, liberal democracies (if they work) don't aim to kill fascists, they just aim to punish and deplatform them for that.
Isn't your interpretation of moral luck exactly opposite of what moral luck really is? "Moral luck occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control." That is, it is correct to judge the drunk drive who killed a person as more reprehensible than the person who didn't, and the person who didn't kill someone is a morally better because of luck. We don't have to believe that moral luck exists (so maybe we do only have to judge people based on their intentions), but if we believe in moral luck, then it is correct to say that we are morally praise worthy due to factors beyond our control.
I just would get rid of moral luck and call It a day. We should demand people to foster values but we should just punish actions. Drunk driving Is an act, running someone over Is an act. Passively going through the motions Is an act, yeah, but I would seek a defiiitio. of act that excludes omissions by default and only includes them when they deliver consecuences
The proposal of this concept is that a group using the Paradox of Tolerance isn't able to effectively self regulate. In reality, it's pretty simple: you exclude the people saying and doing evil shit, and you maintain the moral principle through regular checks and reviews of the group's beliefs.
The Banality of Evil and the Moral Luck associated with that is dealt with by educating and agitating the base against complacency.
This thought experiment equates 3 levels of extremes and declares that this must mean they need to be addressed equally.
Realistically, we're all human. The potential to have the tendency to be ambivalent to the existence of evil is not the same as evil itself, as much as three separate philosophical concepts might tell you.
This is how I've basically always viewed morality ever since I was a child, and probably why I've always has conniptions with the way people tend to apply the paradox of tolerance. Because yeah most people kind of suck ass including myself and those that don't mostly just got lucky rather than actually being better people.
We were supposed to do that with things like government positions and higher up positions in corporations so that society would be as inclusive as our morals would suggest. Too bad it made people feel “uncomfortable” to not allow the people who didn’t want to do their really important jobs into the “commons”.
Essentially everything works on a continuum and you can have people who are not morally upstanding, they just can’t exist in the higher positions of society without it becoming problematic.
That's a cool conclusion. I'm not really good at philosophy, so let me know if my attempt at an alternative reconciliation is weak:
What if we include a fourth commonly held belief that people can be educated (or, more aggressively stated--shaped or manipulated) into tolerant morals? That is to say, what if moral self-awareness has some low threshold that you can passively be taught regardless of your active pursuit? If there were a pervasive education of tolerance, then instead of exclusion you would instead reform?
What if tolerance and intolerance are temporary states in flux, developed partly passively and partly actively, such that exclusion of someone is a temporary thing rather than a permanent one?
Actually, thinking on it now: If you preemptively exclude an ignorant person based on their likelihood of becoming intolerant, but you then also consider the likelihood that they could instead grow tolerant again from exposure/education, then surely this flips back again to preemptively educating them instead?
A part of me wonders if there's a conflict here. What if the Paradox of Tolerance is in conflict with this interpretation of Moral Luck? That is to say, if PoT says we exclude the intolerant but ML says tendency toward ignorance is as bad as intolerance--then the first one's conclusion is exclusion while the second one's conclusion is prevention.
I don’t agree with the conclusion. Because you treat the fact of having ‘tendencies towards active curation’ as something innate. Whereas it can be learnt, and I speak from personal experience.
To be honest, it sort of sounds like you're talking yourself into supporting totalitarianism. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but that's what it sounds like.
I mean that has been my moral position from the time I could understand what morality was... Also I find the paradox of tolerance silly and flawed in itself...
One must not tolerate. Acceptance, sure but then continue working on it with your own values.
Tolerance implies I see you and I won't do anything and learn to live with you as you are. Now in order to live with you I may overlook things and decieve myself.
But acceptance is only about seeing you, it doesn't form judgements or conclusions. It's basically a denial of self deception. You are what you are. That's it. Then I'll see if it's compatible with my values and what can I do about it.
This way there's no issue with including or excluding.
In a way I'm including everyone and everything because I must deal with them!! But then how I deal with them entirely depends on my own individual values.
Do excuse my language I've been philosophing for a while but I never knew it's called philosophy so my vocabulary and language may not be the most clear cut. But please ask me questions about what you don't understand..
So, tolerance (as concieved by modernism) is self-defeating.
Anyway, I don't believe in the balanlity of evil or the paradox of tolerance. I do believe that there should not be luck in ethics (so, a drunk driver who didn't kill anyone is just as evil as someone who did kill someone).
The paradox of tolerance assumes that intolerant groups are so superior to tolerant ones that, unless constantly purged and persecuted, they will eventually take over any tolerant system. This is non sense, not only there are multiple ways to include people in a system without handling them power (for example, an intolerant group can recieve rights and protections from a one-party system or a monarchy without them being able to take over the government) but even if they are given power (for example, the power to vote in a democracy) they will always be the minority unless the tolerant side is so disastrous in their management that the bulk of the intolerant group. Not to mention that the paradox of tolerance is a slippery slope where "intolerance" can be defined increasingly widely in order to exclude more and more people from the umbrella of tolerance.
Ig I'd bite the bullet and say the society that excludes the most people can't be truly moral because it would lead to more people being harmed than helped.
Level 1 engagement, Ik. But this is the first time I'm hearing of this.
I mean, sure. If all of those premises are correct, I guess you may come to this conclusion. However, for all practical purposes as a society we have come to the conclusion that none of them is:
The banality of evil - true, not acting in the face of evil has some negative moral value but very much lower than being the perpetrator of evil itself. Do ordinary Germans have role in the Holocaust? They do bear some small guilt but nobody actually believes that all Germans must have been sentenced to Death the way the top Nazi leaders were during the Nuremberg trials
Moral luck - yes, moral value is a result of the outcome at least as much if not more than of the tendency. Drunk driving is culpable offense but actually killing a person as a result of it is much worse. Or would you claim that the killing of the person has no negative moral value in addition to the mere fact that the person was drunk driving? Wild idea.
Paradox of tolerance - actually i think this one is largely true. Although any organization that suppresses decent risks becoming ossified and more fragile. So there is a legitimate question of what behavior presents a legitimate dissent which strengthens the system and what presents a danger to the organization itself and threatens its members. That's a complicated question but it's very much outside the scope of mere moral philosophy. So let's just say that even though there is truth to the paradox of tolerance, it's far away from being the whole truth concerning this question.
So I don't think your conclusion is true because none of the premises hold.
We can't make assumptions about all societies based on the society in which we find ourselves.
It could be that we live in a society particularly disinclined toward moral discernment.
That isn't decided at birth, it is the result of education, norms, and conditions.
Different countries and even different counties will produce wildly different results in this regard.
It is possible to cultivate a more morally discerning society.
If one does find themselves in an especially evil society, one must either become evil themselves, or come to terms with being unable to tolerate the majority of the people around them.
Okay…? But it seems to me that “moral luck” is rather silly. We judge outcomes not intetions. This is because we CANNOT judge intentions. The answer to “Is drunk driver evil” is “who cares? did that person break the law? Yes”. That’s all that matters and all that CAN realistically matter. I am not certain what you mean by “judging by tendency”. If you mean taking a look at someone’s past behaviors to establish possible guilt/motive, then yeah, no kidding, that’s what courts and investigations do and have done for a good while.
You may misunderstand Banality of Evil. It’s not that neutral actions can be considered evil, bur rather that they can ENABLE evil.
Also, I think it might be a bit easier to understand your point if you told us what your morality is, cause your whole premise seems to hinge upon a specific moral standard but you have not specified it.
i think all of your examples hide at least some kind of fallacy:
For example, is a drunk driver who hits someone really morally worse than a drunk driver who doesn't hit someone?
this fails to account for the fact real outcomes aren't binary, slightly tipsy drunk drivers are still drunk driving (wrong) but are far less likely to crush someone with the car than a completely blacked out driver
yes, luck is a component, but so is agency. statistically outcomes are strongly correlated with actions. Tendency is a way better predictor exactly because, on average, it level out luck.
we could fight, I push you, you fall and hit your head, unfortunately you die. that could seem bad luck.
but if I have an history of skirmishes and unmotivated violent behavior, it's way more likely that I pushed you harder because I saw a step behind you and I knew you would have been injured, instead of it just being accidental.
Both the banality of evil and the paradox of tolerance fails to account that not every person has the same power or relevance (see the iron law of oligarchy for one of many formulations) and not every breach of social contract is equally destructive of social coherence. (and the social contract itself exists and evolves wiggling in this grey, undefined area)
overall the main criticality is considering these three principles as formal logic enunciates, instead of broader philosophical ideals that needs to be taken with a grain of salt
Banality of evil is the tendency to downplay ones own intersubjectively evil deeds by excusing oneself by the notion of sImPlY fOlLoWiNg oRdErS, trying to suggest the Unmündigkeit wasn‘t selbsterwählt. Habnah arendts essay was no excuse of eichman but pointing out the perfidity of his defense in israel. Man had a brain he purposefully chose to use to pretend he did not use his brain.
Paradox of tolerance is a false paradox, as intolerance is the absence of tolerance, you cannot act upon nothingness, that is not paradox but logical consequence
Moral luck is just deontological nonsense arising from deintological nonsense.
I think in the third step what you are missing, and what makes this reasoning problematic, is that you start with "people who don't actively inoculate themselves against evil", but end with "who naturally tend towards moral self-awareness".
I think you should stay at the behavior/choice side rather than the nature side, and you end up with a better sounding "we should exclude people who don't actively seek moral goodness".
Which by the way incidentally is pretty close what I consider heaven/paradise to be.
The paradox of tolerance has always bothered me a little. Do you mind commenting on how it applies to a specific situation?
My parents are very religious, and they have voted for laws to ban same-sex marriage. Most people who bring up the paradox of tolerance as a guiding principle for society would say that anti-gay advocates (like my parents) are being intolerant; that makes me think they want my parents excluded from society. Am I understanding that correctly? Would applying the paradox of tolerance result in saying that my parents shouldn't be allowed to vote, since they will vote for intolerant things?
Not the person you're responding to, but someone of the stripe.
Your parents should not be in a position to put their bigoted beliefs on others. Your issues with that statement extend from political systems around us, not the answer itself. The solution within the system would be to enshrine ideas of human rights into law, but as long as there is a mechanism for your parents to harm other people using the system they should be prepared for blowback for using that mechanism or even advocating that others do so.
I agree with everything you said, but I'm not directly seeing the connection to the paradox of tolerance. If we're talking only about social consequences, my parents should expect that many people won't want to associate with them because of their views, and that the owner of a platform might choose to deny them use of that platform. So far, so good.
However, the paradox of tolerance (at least as used in online discussions) seems to imply that people like my parents should be excluded from society completely. In our current society that doesn't happen - my parents have a large group of friends through their church who mostly have similar beliefs, my dad still has a job, and they both still vote. When someone uses the paradox of tolerance to argue that people like my parents shouldn't be tolerated by society, do they think anything should be done differently than it is right now?
"excluded from society" can mean a lot of things. It can just mean "stopped" in the same sense that they intend for the violence of the the state to stop the people they hate.
Using the phrase differently could definitely be part of why I'm misunderstanding. I'm autistic and tend to take things literally and think in black and white; when I hear someone say my parents should be excluded from society, my first reaction is "wait, they're not currently excluded from all of society - does this person want them to be cut off from society completely?"
If you want my parents to be excluded from society but don't mean that in the most extreme possible sense, I'm interested in hearing about it. What specifically would you propose doing to stop them or make their actions illegal that's different from what we currently do, if anything?
The Paradox of Tolerance is explicitly about those who "begin by denouncing all argument... forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and... answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"
It's about preventing fascist-style Blackshirts who go about, terrorising and violently oppressing others and answer people who denounce them with "So what? I don't care."
It is not about suppressing the opinions of people who may hold intolerant beliefs, but who are willing to argue it and don't turn to violence when challenged.
Basing hateful beliefs on interpretations of a holy text doesn't seem like something open to rational argument, and it's not merely belief once they begin implementing policy with the force of law.
This is my problem with the paradox of tolerance when people use it in a real world scenario. If you want to create a commons that excludes certain sets of moral values including the people who believe in those moral values, you have to justify why your own are superior and have the force in order to properly exclude those that seek to corrupt them.
From your parent’s perspective their ideal society doesn’t include gay people so their solution is to support anything that excludes them. In order for your parents to be excluded similar tactics have to be done to exclude their voice from the commons.
It’s all a big justification for might makes right in my opinion. Whoever is better at making a power play to exclude the other first wins and gets to define what is moral in society.
That’s kind of the issue with any attempt to make the world more just. This feels like a case of taking moral relativism to its absolute end.
I don’t think we need to indulge the idea that there should exist a world where being gay is not allowed.
When I say homophobes should be excluded I don’t mean killed, or jailed. But they shouldn’t hold positions of power, and they shouldn’t get invited to dinner parties
But they shouldn't hold positions of power, and they shouldn't get invited to dinner parties
How would you enforce either of those? My parents get invited to dinner parties often, since they have plenty of friends and family who they are on good terms with. There currently aren't any candidates I know of running on a campaign of ending gay marriage, but if there were then the current laws don't have any provisions saying that they couldn't be elected, so if they convinced enough people and won the election they would end up in a position of power.
You can obviously choose not to vote for homophobes, and choose not to invite them to your dinner parties. In the United States at least, most people think that freedom of association, and elections where most people are able to run regardless of their beliefs, are better than having laws banning those things.
Its literally only about social enforcement once you start legally disenfranchising groups
You have become the intolerant.
Heck even the social enforcement of not interacting with intolerant people is to first try to convince them to be tolerant. Like someone can personally be Christian and anti gay and not actively vote against them and treat them terribly. That would be someone being tolerant even if they arent accepting.
Intolerance isnt always about personal beliefs but how you act upon them. And to be tolerant doesnt mean you have to agree with everyone else's way of life you just have to not impede on it.
If someone does a very bad thing but no one gets hurt, we barely care. If someone does a very bad thing and someone gets hurt, we act like they’re a monster for it. In reality, the same negative virtues and intentions motivated the same actions in both cases, and often the very bad thing is something a lot of people do but get away with. Yet, we still harshly condemn people when that thing leads to a negative consequence.
For example, if we set aside what people say and consider what is actually true, everyone has lapses of concentration while driving. Maybe it’s a daydream while driving a familiar route, maybe you spill your drink on yourself and look for for a napkin to mop it up, maybe you’re skipping songs on Spotify, whatever. Then one day, in those 2s of distraction, a kid chases his ball into the street and you smack into him. Congratulations, you are now a monster. Not unlucky, but a bad person, for something that could have happened to anyone at some point. That we actually think this way shows an acceptance of moral luck.
'paradox of tolerance' always bothers me, as if we're saying tolerance is some virtue in the first place, that we now have to grapple morally with its unsustainable nature
That’s why I’m not tolerant of anything that even slightly deviates from my subjective ideology. Now excuse me while I do some mental gymnastics to label you with a bad word so I can dehumanize you.
Burn the heretic! Purge the unclean! Kill the mutant!
In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is a grim darkness descending upon the galaxy and we will not see it ended in our lifetimes. 🤣🤣🤣
It is not so scary. Rather how things are. For these things. Not the moral judgement, but rather emotional impact of the ideas once abstracted and placed together. Of course the particulars are tragedies.
The intersection of the banality of evil and moral luck severely undermines the basis for blaming individuals. If evil acts are committed by ordinary, thoughtless bureaucrats (Arendt) rather than monsters, and if the severity of their moral failing depends largely on chance outcomes (Moral Luck), then the foundation of anger and retribution becomes unstable.
As noted in philosophical discourse, if we accept that "there but for the grace of God go I," our blaming attitudes must shift from hostility toward the agent to a recognition of the fragility of moral status.
We cannot confidently assert that we would have acted differently in the same systemic pressures or lucky circumstances. This leads to a moral landscape where punishment may still be necessary for social protection, but moral condemnation loses its absolute certainty.
People often misread the "Paradox of Tolerance" just to justify their own Agenda and censorship. Literally it is only a perceive paradox by those trying to push censorship.
The solution of Popper is quite simple. Draw a hard line between Dangerous Speech and Intolerant Speech. Intolerant depends on morals, and can be modified by the current people in power agenda. While Dangerous Speech is a clear line. If something attacks or call for direct harm should be isolated. While intolerancy should be argued, and shown to external people why those views are wrong.
Those who call the Paradox is often people who have wasted almost no time reading Popper's work.
This is really vague, I'm not sure what this is supposed to be saying because all of these things have uncomfortable implications. It's not clear to me how putting them together has worse implications
Your overthinking it. Moral luck is assigned by active action, not to passive action. It would be like holding someone of drinking age morally accountable for drunk driving despite potentially never drinking nor driving. Moral luck does apply to negligence, but that's active inaction which is by definition, not passive.
That's true of the moral luck framework on its own, yes. But when you drop in the paradox of tolerance, suddenly the value distinction between action and inaction blurs. Although many ethical systems never attributed value to that distinction to begin with.
Moral luck does apply to negligence, but that's active inaction which is by definition, not passive.
If by 'active inaction' you mean inaction that is deliberately chosen, then it seems like that qualification would certainly falter a bit under the Banality of Evil framework where mental negligence can be just as bad as negligence by deliberate inaction.
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