A while back there was a writer known in communities I frequent (call her Jane) who wrote a think-piece explaining she was very, very upset about an issue.
I am honestly a little confused. The Whole City is Center article seems to be making the exact opposite case, that we should take away the negative connotation, and use the words already in existence in our language, as they allow efficient communication.
I am not at all aware how the conclusion "Scott thinks it’s very unfair to call someone lazy " was drawn, when he seems to be saying that it is totally fair to call someone lazy, just don't moralize and judge them as bad for it.
So there's a little bit of wiggle room in interpretation, obviously. But my take on the article is:
1. That there's Scott's section (where he either thinks using the word lazy is an ignorant moralizing action, or thinks people who say so are making a "pretty good point"
2. That there's Sophisticus' sections, where he universally opposes the use of the word lazy
3. That there's Simplicio's sections, which eventually revolve to this:
"Guilty as charged. But now I hope you better understand what I mean. There is a sense in which you’re right, and a sense in which I’m right. Words both convey useful information, and shape our connotations and perceptions. While we can’t completely ignore the latter role, it’s also dangerous to posit fundamental value differences between people who use words one way and people who use them another. My concern is that I’ve seen people say “I am the kind of person who doesn’t believe in laziness, or in punishment, or in judging others. But that guy over there accuses people of being lazy, wants people to suffer, and does judge others. Clearly we have fundamental value differences and must be enemies.” All I’m trying to do is say that those people may have differing factual beliefs on how to balance the information-bearing-content of words versus their potential connotations. If we understand the degree to which other people’s differences from us are based on factual rather than fundamental value differences, we can be humbler and more understanding when we have to interact with them."
Basically I read this as giving up all the "it's immoral to make a value judgement on someone based on their actions" ground Sophisticus is asking for, and just arguing a position that while Soph. is super right about it being wrong to judge anybody, it might get outweighed by a utilitarian need to communicate information.
I see the article as 90% on Simplicio's side and effectively taking the piss out of Sophisticus' position as effectively removing the ability to communicate, but being Scott he cannot help but steelman even that and gives a small out which is ultimately shown up by the Whole of the city is the center bit at the end which shows that in fact even Sophisticus wants to keep the information bearing content of words even if they can be seen as moralistic/judgemental
Nice piece. Calling a person "a liar" doesn't advance debate.
Is most of your post about the role of social norms in policing behaviour? For a norm to do this requires me to feel shame at failing to conform to the norm, whereas the SSC post seems to be written more from the POV of minimising personal shame so as to motivate better behaviour through guilt at not doing 'ones best'. ie if you want to negate a social norm, make it shameless.
I'm not sure why advancing debate would be my end-all-be-all. I know the rationalist movement is absolutely in love with mistake theory (it's actually part of what this article and others pushes back on) but that's had exactly zip-zero effect on debate for anyone but rationalists, who everyone else easily and safely ignores at least in part because they can be safely and easily lied to. Usually when I call someone a liar, it's a lot simpler: I want them and other people to know they are unreliable, and I want them to feel bad about doing bad things.
On norms: that's not how they work, or at least it's only a small part of how they work. Saying "I'd have to feel shame" avoids, for instance, caring about what other people think of you or social consequences that stem from that. There's a lot of people in the world right now who have shifted their behavior a massive amount in their lifetimes (on say, homosexuality or transsexualism) for reasons that have nothing to do with shame; they know if they don't they will be socially disapproved of, or fired.
It also works the other way; it's not just that adhering to a norm lets you avoid shame, but that sometimes it's what the "cool kids" are doing and people go all in on some behavior to increase their status with some group or another. That's one of the first things people notice about the movement generally labelled as woke; a lot of the people who are the most enthusiastic about it are pretty clearly trying to maximize their self-worth through group-signalling points, or something similar.
The point of my comment was to suggest that when people want to defang a social norm they move the discussion from shame (socially) motivated to guilt (individually) motivated behaviours.
Your comment: "Usually when I call someone a liar, it's a lot simpler: I want them and other people to know they are unreliable, and I want them to feel bad about doing bad things."
This is how social norms work. The definition of shame is "caring about what other people think of you or social consequences that stem from that".
Laws are state enforced social norms. I can feel a law oughtn't apply to me but one transgresses at the risk of punishment by the state so, in response, I judiciously adjust my behaviour (when in Rome etc).
I referred to debate because "liar" is often used as a slur when arguing against an opponent ('ad hominem'). In our NZ parliament we have a debating chamber overseen by a "Speaker" who polices the debate. One of the rules is that elected members are not allowed to call each other "liars", though they are free to describe examples of falsehoods. The rules resemble common law in that they have accumulated over time, though the actual quality of debate is very dependent on how well/dispassionately (the Speaker is drawn from the block in power) the Speaker polices it. While the speaker favours his block, the law produced acquires legitimacy, in part, from the quality of debate.
It's a bit unclear whether you think labels do have incentive power or not. You reference the twitter mobs policing 'racists', often on little more than a single instance of the pejorative; is it just traditional vices like 'liar' that have lost their sting?
I do like your point that it is useful to resolve definitional debates by getting to what each side is suggesting this means about reality. You say I'm a liar/x-ist/whatever, I say I'm not--what are we predicting about the future? Let the future resolve the dispute.
For certain strident activists, though, I think "voting for $_bad_party" is enough proof. Your character is tested in who you support, more than in how you act in personal interactions for many; unwisely, imo.
I think labels do have incentive power, but only in situations where they are agreed-upon-bad by almost everyone. To use the common example, take "Racist". We all actually agree that this term is bad; almost 100% people don't want to be thought of as racist, so they will do a ton of stuff to dodge it, including not being significantly racist in a way that conforms to the term as it was used, say, 20 years ago.
It's so effective that, for a while and still a little bit, people could use alternate definitions of the word (Like Kendi's "anyone who doesn't believe in equality of outcome") and still score some hits. Our agreement that that label is powerful actually let bad actors hack the term racist in to "anyone who disagrees with us on a number of different things having to do with race" and make some headway there.
I actually think that's stopped being effective in the same way, though. Most people know when the woke-side use racist they don't mean anything by it, or at least anything distinct; they just mean it as a slur, and a threat to use what social and political power they have to punish people. If you are woke and call someone a racist, he doesn't hear "You are actually racist and should change your behavior so people don't view you that way". He hears "I and my friends want you to bow the knee, or we will screw you up".
That's sort of the failure mode of not agreeing on a definition; you can still have labels and still even use them to enforce things, but it's not because someone doesn't want to be thought of in a certain way, it's because they don't want to get curb-stomped.
I think there really *was* a time when more precise definitions of those kinds of labelled were more broadly agreed upon. A thief was someone who stole at all, or at least someone who had stolen more than a few times; a liar was someone who said often said inaccurate things in a way that didn't have significant crossover with inaccuracies caused by simple stupidity. Most people agreed these were generally bad, and a lot of people would build personal codes around avoiding being thought of that way. I might be wrong about this, but it's my perception.
I might be wrong about that. I'm *definitely* doing a bad job of disambiguating what I mean. But the distinction is something like, say, having a somewhat defined range of a term like "liar" that a person can be clearly outside even if people disagree about thresholds, and having everyone agree that being outside of it is bad. And we would compare that to, say, a negative take on Fauci where most people agree (including him, sorta) that he lies fairly often in fairly big ways, but not everyone agrees that this makes him a liar, and even if they do a lot of people think that him being a liar is positive.
Very, very compact TLDR: I think we still have a form of this where you can use a label as a cudgel, and a few old labels (racist, rapist) that have "minimum" definitions people agree on that carry weight. But I think most labels, and most notably "liar" have lost enough of their sting that they aren't super useful anymore.
This is funny, because I took the exactly the opposite conclusion from The Whole City is Center. The way I read it, the conclusion was more like, if _all_ we mean by "lazy" is this constellation of traits that may have other causes, then the word itself goes back to being useful and we might as well use it. I went back and skimmed it again and nothing contradicted that for me (although I was too, ahem, lazy to read it again in detail).
I think that's broadly consistent with Simplicio's argument. He's basically saying something along the lines of "OK, fine, there's this whole constellation of traits, I accept for the sake of this argument that nothing is anyone's fault here, but we still need a way to talk about things, and you can't avoid having a negative connotation on something that describes a set of traits with negative outcomes".
To the extent he disagrees with Sophisticus, it's that Sophisticus is saying there shouldn't be any word for it at all; most people are going to get a negative connotation of the word "lazy" (or whatever you replace it with) so you should just approach every conversation about a lazy person in an awkward way where you say something like "because of many involuntary traits and effects the person can't help, they might not be the most reliable on this particular task" or similar. So you get:
----
Simplicio: If you’re right, I worry you’re going up against the euphemism treadmill. If we invent another word to communicate the true fact, like “work-rarely-doer”, then anyone who believes that people who play video games instead of working deserve to suffer will quickly conclude that work-rarely-doers deserve to suffer.
Sophisticus: Then let’s not invent something like “work-rarely-doer”. Let’s just say things like “You shouldn’t have Larry as a dog-sitter, because due to some social or psychological issue he usually plays video games instead of doing difficult tasks.”
Simplicio: I think people are naturally going to try to compress that concept. You can try to stop them, but I think you’ll fail. And I think insofar as you can communicate the concept at all, people are going to think less of Larry because of it. It’s possible you can slightly decrease the degree to which people think less of Larry, but only by slightly decreasing their ability to communicate useful information.
Sophisticus: Well, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Simplicio: If there were such a thing as laziness, but it was rare, then it would make sense to argue “most people aren’t lazy”, since lazy would be pointing at a particular quality that most people don’t have. But if you say there’s no such thing as laziness, then it sounds like maybe you’re kind of weird to insist on defining “laziness” to refer a quality that nobody has, yet refuse to use any word to refer to the quality that many people do have. It would be like wanting our language to have a word for “unicorn” but not for “horse”.
---
I think my basic read of Scott's argument is "It's clearly bad to use the term, unless there's just no other way". I think that's what the conclusion of the article is about; he concludes that it's possible some people are just using it informationally, and you can't call them bad-moral-judgers just because they want to relay information.
Where I'm sort of frustrated about the article is it's basically a really complex way to say this prompt:
"Let's say there was a state of being or disability that we assume you have through no fault of your own. Is it OK to use a term for that state of being or disability that you know has negative connotations?"
And he comes to a conclusion that basically nobody would find controversial, which is "Yes, but only if there's no workable alternatives and the downsides of not having an efficient term for the disability or state or being are worse than actually using it. Some people are going to misread that balance, so it's not fair to judge people who use the term as bad, mean people unless you actually know they are using the bad-balance option just to be mean".
The part that bothers me about the article most is that he talks about this fairly boring (once you unpack it from the excellent writing) thing, this non-controversial thing, but he does so asking you to accept as de facto true that laziness is not anyone's fault, using an argument that easily generalizes out to nothing ever being anyone's fault.
That's a big, big argument; if his principle for laziness is true (laziness not bad because psychology, and because people have different baselines) then it's basically true for all human behavior. It's not an argument we can't have; I actually think it's one of the big arguments society *is* having, in a lot of different ways. But it's a hell of a begged question on Scott's part.
I suspect that, as a psychiatrist, he's really going to tend towards that position - that human behavior isn't really the fault of the humans - at least in any individual's case. But you're right, I find Simplicio's position much more reasonable in this argument.
The question of whether people are morally responsible for their own behavior is (a) similar to the question of free will, especially in the sense that maintaining a belief in it seems necessary for living a good life, and (b) sort of the same as this laziness argument, in that, if you don't use "morally responsible" to mean this, what would you even use it to mean?
In my view, moral responsibility clearly exists along some kind of a spectrum. Letting a dog in my care die of malnutrition is something I'd be morally culpable for, but a young child or mentally disabled person might not be. But it's hard to know where other people fall along that spectrum. I can tell (sort of) how hard something is for me, but I can't tell how hard it is for you. Getting your own level of moral culpability right is a big life project, and people can err in both directions (including feeling morally culpable for things that aren't even moral issues sometimes). I think only God* knows, really.
I realized after I wrote the reply that it was confusing (this happens with nearly everything I ever post, which suggests.....maybe stop posting, but that's a different matter). I agree with your statement that it's hard to know where other people fall along the [morality] spectrum.
Then I added the second sentence, which I think kind of flows from the statement of yours I agree with. I am not under the impression that you agree with the second sentence of my reply, nor would I insist that my second sentence *necessarily* flows from your statement. And there are probably so many caveats to what I said that they swallow the supposed rule in the first place. Here are some examples to illustrate my position:
Things I think I should say:
-"That would be illegal to do, so I shouldn't do it."
-"That would be illegal for your to do, so you shouldn't do it."
-"That would be immoral for me to do, so I shouldn't do it."
Things I think I shouldn't say, either because I have shaky grounds for saying so or because it isn't likely to do much good:
-"That would be immoral for you to do, so you shouldn't do it." (If asked, I would probably say something like, "if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't do it because I would view it as immoral. Whether you do it depends on whether you think it is immoral."
This got way too complicated. Hopefully I'm making some sense. Sorry for the initial confusion!
I think I understand what you are saying. I think the scenario you've built is something like going up to someone and saying "Hey, under the moral system I subscribe to and that you don't, you shouldn't do that thing that isn't illegal that you want to do and think is fine". I broadly agree with you (if that's what you are saying) that this wouldn't work.
The bigger question for me is if people can be persuaded to adopt a moral position. I mostly think that's a clear yes - if you look at, say, the shift on homosexuality over the last 20 or 30 years it's hard to argue that it's impossible. With something like lying, that's not synonymous with them actually completing said moral behavior, but it's a step.
I am honestly a little confused. The Whole City is Center article seems to be making the exact opposite case, that we should take away the negative connotation, and use the words already in existence in our language, as they allow efficient communication.
I am not at all aware how the conclusion "Scott thinks it’s very unfair to call someone lazy " was drawn, when he seems to be saying that it is totally fair to call someone lazy, just don't moralize and judge them as bad for it.
So there's a little bit of wiggle room in interpretation, obviously. But my take on the article is:
1. That there's Scott's section (where he either thinks using the word lazy is an ignorant moralizing action, or thinks people who say so are making a "pretty good point"
2. That there's Sophisticus' sections, where he universally opposes the use of the word lazy
3. That there's Simplicio's sections, which eventually revolve to this:
"Guilty as charged. But now I hope you better understand what I mean. There is a sense in which you’re right, and a sense in which I’m right. Words both convey useful information, and shape our connotations and perceptions. While we can’t completely ignore the latter role, it’s also dangerous to posit fundamental value differences between people who use words one way and people who use them another. My concern is that I’ve seen people say “I am the kind of person who doesn’t believe in laziness, or in punishment, or in judging others. But that guy over there accuses people of being lazy, wants people to suffer, and does judge others. Clearly we have fundamental value differences and must be enemies.” All I’m trying to do is say that those people may have differing factual beliefs on how to balance the information-bearing-content of words versus their potential connotations. If we understand the degree to which other people’s differences from us are based on factual rather than fundamental value differences, we can be humbler and more understanding when we have to interact with them."
Basically I read this as giving up all the "it's immoral to make a value judgement on someone based on their actions" ground Sophisticus is asking for, and just arguing a position that while Soph. is super right about it being wrong to judge anybody, it might get outweighed by a utilitarian need to communicate information.
I see the article as 90% on Simplicio's side and effectively taking the piss out of Sophisticus' position as effectively removing the ability to communicate, but being Scott he cannot help but steelman even that and gives a small out which is ultimately shown up by the Whole of the city is the center bit at the end which shows that in fact even Sophisticus wants to keep the information bearing content of words even if they can be seen as moralistic/judgemental
Nice piece. Calling a person "a liar" doesn't advance debate.
Is most of your post about the role of social norms in policing behaviour? For a norm to do this requires me to feel shame at failing to conform to the norm, whereas the SSC post seems to be written more from the POV of minimising personal shame so as to motivate better behaviour through guilt at not doing 'ones best'. ie if you want to negate a social norm, make it shameless.
I'm not sure why advancing debate would be my end-all-be-all. I know the rationalist movement is absolutely in love with mistake theory (it's actually part of what this article and others pushes back on) but that's had exactly zip-zero effect on debate for anyone but rationalists, who everyone else easily and safely ignores at least in part because they can be safely and easily lied to. Usually when I call someone a liar, it's a lot simpler: I want them and other people to know they are unreliable, and I want them to feel bad about doing bad things.
On norms: that's not how they work, or at least it's only a small part of how they work. Saying "I'd have to feel shame" avoids, for instance, caring about what other people think of you or social consequences that stem from that. There's a lot of people in the world right now who have shifted their behavior a massive amount in their lifetimes (on say, homosexuality or transsexualism) for reasons that have nothing to do with shame; they know if they don't they will be socially disapproved of, or fired.
It also works the other way; it's not just that adhering to a norm lets you avoid shame, but that sometimes it's what the "cool kids" are doing and people go all in on some behavior to increase their status with some group or another. That's one of the first things people notice about the movement generally labelled as woke; a lot of the people who are the most enthusiastic about it are pretty clearly trying to maximize their self-worth through group-signalling points, or something similar.
The point of my comment was to suggest that when people want to defang a social norm they move the discussion from shame (socially) motivated to guilt (individually) motivated behaviours.
Your comment: "Usually when I call someone a liar, it's a lot simpler: I want them and other people to know they are unreliable, and I want them to feel bad about doing bad things."
This is how social norms work. The definition of shame is "caring about what other people think of you or social consequences that stem from that".
Laws are state enforced social norms. I can feel a law oughtn't apply to me but one transgresses at the risk of punishment by the state so, in response, I judiciously adjust my behaviour (when in Rome etc).
I referred to debate because "liar" is often used as a slur when arguing against an opponent ('ad hominem'). In our NZ parliament we have a debating chamber overseen by a "Speaker" who polices the debate. One of the rules is that elected members are not allowed to call each other "liars", though they are free to describe examples of falsehoods. The rules resemble common law in that they have accumulated over time, though the actual quality of debate is very dependent on how well/dispassionately (the Speaker is drawn from the block in power) the Speaker polices it. While the speaker favours his block, the law produced acquires legitimacy, in part, from the quality of debate.
Now consider how guilt motivates me.
It's a bit unclear whether you think labels do have incentive power or not. You reference the twitter mobs policing 'racists', often on little more than a single instance of the pejorative; is it just traditional vices like 'liar' that have lost their sting?
I do like your point that it is useful to resolve definitional debates by getting to what each side is suggesting this means about reality. You say I'm a liar/x-ist/whatever, I say I'm not--what are we predicting about the future? Let the future resolve the dispute.
For certain strident activists, though, I think "voting for $_bad_party" is enough proof. Your character is tested in who you support, more than in how you act in personal interactions for many; unwisely, imo.
I think labels do have incentive power, but only in situations where they are agreed-upon-bad by almost everyone. To use the common example, take "Racist". We all actually agree that this term is bad; almost 100% people don't want to be thought of as racist, so they will do a ton of stuff to dodge it, including not being significantly racist in a way that conforms to the term as it was used, say, 20 years ago.
It's so effective that, for a while and still a little bit, people could use alternate definitions of the word (Like Kendi's "anyone who doesn't believe in equality of outcome") and still score some hits. Our agreement that that label is powerful actually let bad actors hack the term racist in to "anyone who disagrees with us on a number of different things having to do with race" and make some headway there.
I actually think that's stopped being effective in the same way, though. Most people know when the woke-side use racist they don't mean anything by it, or at least anything distinct; they just mean it as a slur, and a threat to use what social and political power they have to punish people. If you are woke and call someone a racist, he doesn't hear "You are actually racist and should change your behavior so people don't view you that way". He hears "I and my friends want you to bow the knee, or we will screw you up".
That's sort of the failure mode of not agreeing on a definition; you can still have labels and still even use them to enforce things, but it's not because someone doesn't want to be thought of in a certain way, it's because they don't want to get curb-stomped.
I think there really *was* a time when more precise definitions of those kinds of labelled were more broadly agreed upon. A thief was someone who stole at all, or at least someone who had stolen more than a few times; a liar was someone who said often said inaccurate things in a way that didn't have significant crossover with inaccuracies caused by simple stupidity. Most people agreed these were generally bad, and a lot of people would build personal codes around avoiding being thought of that way. I might be wrong about this, but it's my perception.
I might be wrong about that. I'm *definitely* doing a bad job of disambiguating what I mean. But the distinction is something like, say, having a somewhat defined range of a term like "liar" that a person can be clearly outside even if people disagree about thresholds, and having everyone agree that being outside of it is bad. And we would compare that to, say, a negative take on Fauci where most people agree (including him, sorta) that he lies fairly often in fairly big ways, but not everyone agrees that this makes him a liar, and even if they do a lot of people think that him being a liar is positive.
Very, very compact TLDR: I think we still have a form of this where you can use a label as a cudgel, and a few old labels (racist, rapist) that have "minimum" definitions people agree on that carry weight. But I think most labels, and most notably "liar" have lost enough of their sting that they aren't super useful anymore.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
I mean I said "I think" a bunch of times. This ain't exactly a subject you can fit cleanly in a spreadsheet.
This is funny, because I took the exactly the opposite conclusion from The Whole City is Center. The way I read it, the conclusion was more like, if _all_ we mean by "lazy" is this constellation of traits that may have other causes, then the word itself goes back to being useful and we might as well use it. I went back and skimmed it again and nothing contradicted that for me (although I was too, ahem, lazy to read it again in detail).
I think that's broadly consistent with Simplicio's argument. He's basically saying something along the lines of "OK, fine, there's this whole constellation of traits, I accept for the sake of this argument that nothing is anyone's fault here, but we still need a way to talk about things, and you can't avoid having a negative connotation on something that describes a set of traits with negative outcomes".
To the extent he disagrees with Sophisticus, it's that Sophisticus is saying there shouldn't be any word for it at all; most people are going to get a negative connotation of the word "lazy" (or whatever you replace it with) so you should just approach every conversation about a lazy person in an awkward way where you say something like "because of many involuntary traits and effects the person can't help, they might not be the most reliable on this particular task" or similar. So you get:
----
Simplicio: If you’re right, I worry you’re going up against the euphemism treadmill. If we invent another word to communicate the true fact, like “work-rarely-doer”, then anyone who believes that people who play video games instead of working deserve to suffer will quickly conclude that work-rarely-doers deserve to suffer.
Sophisticus: Then let’s not invent something like “work-rarely-doer”. Let’s just say things like “You shouldn’t have Larry as a dog-sitter, because due to some social or psychological issue he usually plays video games instead of doing difficult tasks.”
Simplicio: I think people are naturally going to try to compress that concept. You can try to stop them, but I think you’ll fail. And I think insofar as you can communicate the concept at all, people are going to think less of Larry because of it. It’s possible you can slightly decrease the degree to which people think less of Larry, but only by slightly decreasing their ability to communicate useful information.
Sophisticus: Well, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Simplicio: If there were such a thing as laziness, but it was rare, then it would make sense to argue “most people aren’t lazy”, since lazy would be pointing at a particular quality that most people don’t have. But if you say there’s no such thing as laziness, then it sounds like maybe you’re kind of weird to insist on defining “laziness” to refer a quality that nobody has, yet refuse to use any word to refer to the quality that many people do have. It would be like wanting our language to have a word for “unicorn” but not for “horse”.
---
I think my basic read of Scott's argument is "It's clearly bad to use the term, unless there's just no other way". I think that's what the conclusion of the article is about; he concludes that it's possible some people are just using it informationally, and you can't call them bad-moral-judgers just because they want to relay information.
Where I'm sort of frustrated about the article is it's basically a really complex way to say this prompt:
"Let's say there was a state of being or disability that we assume you have through no fault of your own. Is it OK to use a term for that state of being or disability that you know has negative connotations?"
And he comes to a conclusion that basically nobody would find controversial, which is "Yes, but only if there's no workable alternatives and the downsides of not having an efficient term for the disability or state or being are worse than actually using it. Some people are going to misread that balance, so it's not fair to judge people who use the term as bad, mean people unless you actually know they are using the bad-balance option just to be mean".
The part that bothers me about the article most is that he talks about this fairly boring (once you unpack it from the excellent writing) thing, this non-controversial thing, but he does so asking you to accept as de facto true that laziness is not anyone's fault, using an argument that easily generalizes out to nothing ever being anyone's fault.
That's a big, big argument; if his principle for laziness is true (laziness not bad because psychology, and because people have different baselines) then it's basically true for all human behavior. It's not an argument we can't have; I actually think it's one of the big arguments society *is* having, in a lot of different ways. But it's a hell of a begged question on Scott's part.
I suspect that, as a psychiatrist, he's really going to tend towards that position - that human behavior isn't really the fault of the humans - at least in any individual's case. But you're right, I find Simplicio's position much more reasonable in this argument.
The question of whether people are morally responsible for their own behavior is (a) similar to the question of free will, especially in the sense that maintaining a belief in it seems necessary for living a good life, and (b) sort of the same as this laziness argument, in that, if you don't use "morally responsible" to mean this, what would you even use it to mean?
In my view, moral responsibility clearly exists along some kind of a spectrum. Letting a dog in my care die of malnutrition is something I'd be morally culpable for, but a young child or mentally disabled person might not be. But it's hard to know where other people fall along that spectrum. I can tell (sort of) how hard something is for me, but I can't tell how hard it is for you. Getting your own level of moral culpability right is a big life project, and people can err in both directions (including feeling morally culpable for things that aren't even moral issues sometimes). I think only God* knows, really.
(*If that God exists.)
Agree with Tam. If something isn't illegal, you get nowhere trying to convince someone not to do the thing on morality grounds.
Wait, what? I don't agree with that at all!
I realized after I wrote the reply that it was confusing (this happens with nearly everything I ever post, which suggests.....maybe stop posting, but that's a different matter). I agree with your statement that it's hard to know where other people fall along the [morality] spectrum.
Then I added the second sentence, which I think kind of flows from the statement of yours I agree with. I am not under the impression that you agree with the second sentence of my reply, nor would I insist that my second sentence *necessarily* flows from your statement. And there are probably so many caveats to what I said that they swallow the supposed rule in the first place. Here are some examples to illustrate my position:
Things I think I should say:
-"That would be illegal to do, so I shouldn't do it."
-"That would be illegal for your to do, so you shouldn't do it."
-"That would be immoral for me to do, so I shouldn't do it."
Things I think I shouldn't say, either because I have shaky grounds for saying so or because it isn't likely to do much good:
-"That would be immoral for you to do, so you shouldn't do it." (If asked, I would probably say something like, "if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't do it because I would view it as immoral. Whether you do it depends on whether you think it is immoral."
This got way too complicated. Hopefully I'm making some sense. Sorry for the initial confusion!
I think I understand what you are saying. I think the scenario you've built is something like going up to someone and saying "Hey, under the moral system I subscribe to and that you don't, you shouldn't do that thing that isn't illegal that you want to do and think is fine". I broadly agree with you (if that's what you are saying) that this wouldn't work.
The bigger question for me is if people can be persuaded to adopt a moral position. I mostly think that's a clear yes - if you look at, say, the shift on homosexuality over the last 20 or 30 years it's hard to argue that it's impossible. With something like lying, that's not synonymous with them actually completing said moral behavior, but it's a step.