mikedilger on Nostr: Dear Listeners: Did I insist that "the normative grounding of [his] ethics needs to ...

Dear Listeners: Did I insist that "the normative grounding of [his] ethics needs to be erased"? brockm: you can do what you please, good sir. I can only explain my beliefs and how they differ from yours.

You claim "common good" or "collective interest" exists (I infer this from your use of the word ontological). I claim that the concept is so messed up as to just lead to bad ideas. I might be wrong. I am only having these thoughts just now I never really pushed that lever this far before. But we don't seem to have the same ideas about what that thing is, or at least we are not on the same page.

I claim that instead of "collective interest" what really exists is pairwise shared interests which we only discover for sure by interacting with each other. We have to run a bunch of tit-for-tat-with-forgiveness games with every person we encounter, and treat them each differently depending on our state machine we have for them. And presuming that a large swathe of people have the same interests is, well, quite presumptive and very disrespectful to them. It is what fascists and authoritarians do after all, isn't it?

I recently critiqued a U.N. poster about universal human rights. I don't have the same idea about "collective interest" or "common good" that the U.N. has. How can that be if there is a true "collective interest"?

I just think it is more productive to come at it from a different direction. But you can do as you like, I'm not trying to erase you.