Looking at contemporary western lefties, Realism - stop being so moralistic, focus on accurate strategic analysis - seems right. But when I look at historical socialist states I'm not like "damn why did they keep letting moral qualms get in the way of ruthless actions!?" Kinda the opposite, really. - ThreadSky

lastpositivist.bsky.social • 5 days ago

Looking at contemporary western lefties, Realism - stop being so moralistic, focus on accurate strategic analysis - seems right. But when I look at historical socialist states I'm not like "damn why did they keep letting moral qualms get in the way of ruthless actions!?" Kinda the opposite, really.

Comments

anarchomorphist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Could you define moralism in a way that would exclude you from being a "moralist"?

As in no longer condemning the genocide of Palestinians?

How can social movements escape moralism?

lastpositivist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Oh I'm unambiguously a moralist, I'm 💯 the kinda person the Realists condemn. I have a weird annotated bibliography where I say I'm a socialist for moral reasons.

https://philarchive.org/archive/BRIEL-2

anarchomorphist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Btw I loved that essay!

anarchomorphist.bsky.social•5 days ago

By "realist" you mean political realist, not moral realist? Moral realists wouls love you

lastpositivist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Oh lol in the same document I also reject moral realism. But aye op is referring to the political theory position.

anarchomorphist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Trotsky's "Their Morals and Ours" seemee to rhetorically reject moralism, but at the end he asserted the the end also must be justified (i.e. human liberation), so it's not merely strategic consideration, seems to me even the most hard nosed "political realist" still yearn to be moralists.

davidjorgonson.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's basically consequentialism I think

iwasalover.bsky.social•5 days ago

This is broadly my issue when these sorts of discussions pop up, there's always got to be a background of what you want to achieve. Also a bit of a tendency to orient discussion like it reduces to positive vs normative rather than realist vs whatever is being versused.

metaphysiology.bsky.social•5 days ago

Some* would say the seeds of the ultimate failure/full-circling of those states was planted with such ruthless actions.

*Notably again thinking of Jane Addams here, a radical whose concept of "lateral progress" nevertheless eschews fast but unstable "vertical progress" via, e.g., ruthless actions.

sqncs.bsky.social•5 days ago

In the end it was more about the journey than the destination.

richardrjensen.bsky.social•5 days ago

Surely there were plenty of "moral" socialists then as well. I imagine that their morality was just as influential on outcomes as ours today.

vem.bsky.social•5 days ago

People who call themselves “socialists” today are opposed from e.g. Lenin in a lot of ways.

Don’t have the aptitude to coordinate society, they are able to point out legitimately bad things but they sorta depend on liberal capitalist society to do so

lastpositivist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yeah often people are basically a glorified moral pressure group on left-liberals while pretending to be a radical alternative thereto. It's not really that coherent tbh.

elisennesh.bsky.social•5 days ago

Ooooh, where's that screenshot from?

dmiyasaki.bsky.social•5 days ago

Realism should be antimoralist, not anti- or amoral. Moralism is reductive, proper realism includes moral phenomena, e.g., asking what truly satisfies or modifies moral motives. Ruthless socialism may have resulted from combined moralism and false realism, which are often covert allies.

anthonybecker.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yeh, can we talk more about ethics instead?

“Cheating on your spouse is immoral” matters little to me.

“Breaking your intimate partner’s trust is unethical” is much more compelling

Ditto economic transgressions

bluealgae.bsky.social•4 days ago

can you describe how this is not just a semantic distinction?

anthonybecker.bsky.social•4 days ago

“Just” is a load-bearing word there for sure!

I think morals are an individual and religious matter on the main.

Ethics are something we can actually base our interactions in society on.

I don’t want people to be punished for poor morals. I want justice when ethics are transgressed.

anthonybecker.bsky.social•4 days ago

And that might be the key of the difference.

I probably picked up this idea from Jesus when he said “it’s not what goes in your mouth that defiles you, it’s what comes out of it”

anthonybecker.bsky.social•4 days ago

Philosophers have a lot more to say about this than me.

bluealgae.bsky.social•4 days ago

i am still failing to understand the real distinction here? "breaking agreements, such as spousal promises, is bad" and "cheating on your spouse is bad" are both normative statements. they're ises and not oughts?

cwonus.org•4 days ago

i like this view

nikvenkatesh.bsky.social•5 days ago

If only there was a middle way, a philosophical theory that was free of metaphysical baggage, strategically flexible and light on guilt and blame but also gave us moral guidance for humane and progressive politics

lastpositivist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Pic unrelated.

anthonybecker.bsky.social•5 days ago

What is in the pic? Alt text would be fantastic

nikvenkatesh.bsky.social•5 days ago

Oh yeah very sorry, my bad

lastpositivist.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's a picture of the stuffed copy of Jeremy Bentham presently housed at UCL.

mattweiner19.bsky.social•5 days ago

fortunately when a philosophical movement based on thoroughgoing utilitarianism began to gain influence, the effects were nothing but good

how do I delete link
https://philpapers.org/rec/MINCEB

nikvenkatesh.bsky.social•5 days ago

well nobody's perfect

mattweiner19.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think the synthesis here is that neither Western lefties nor utilitarians should organize everything around the One True Moral Goal, but what they both need is a respect for procedural justice and institutional design, including/especially within their own movements

nikvenkatesh.bsky.social•5 days ago

yeah - Bentham himself focussed on institutional design (Schofield's Utility And Democracy good on this).

i like utilitarianism's 'one goal' way of thinking because it allows us to evaluate without simply relying on intuition. but needs to be applied with humility and as you say, good procedure

mattweiner19.bsky.social•4 days ago

this is the way

https://bsky.app/profile/peligrietzer.bsky.social/post/3lj4dqqqsss2v

nikvenkatesh.bsky.social•4 days ago

absolutely

dannywardle.org•5 days ago

I think the dispassionate strategist vs emotive moralist thing is driven by personality more than anything.

I always found the moralistic case for lesser evilism more persuasive than the 'pragmatic' one, but most people I read and engage with are dispassionate strategists.

paelicanista.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think the problem was that a lot of previous revolutionaries expected, that once capitalism is abolished, socialist morality will manifest automatically.
And they really, really panicked when it didn’t

olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social•5 days ago

can never tell which people consistently distinguish between moralism and morals so can never tell what's meant by the criticism of moralism

michaelkates.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yes! That's also my pet peeve re: "moralism" critique. It makes no sense. Either you're a complete moral skeptic (which is fine, but difficult to motivate socialism on that basis), or you're not (which means that there's nothing inherently wrong with moral discourse, so cut out the "moralism" crap).

harishevek.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's moralism if it annoys me personally and common sense if I agree with it duh

harishevek.bsky.social•5 days ago

No but seriously: I think it is less an issue of being too moralist and more an issue of our de-institutionalized present.

In all walks of life we do not have judiciary bodies or other institutions to settle conflicts, so people who disagree argue in front of a "court of public opinion" that is...

harishevek.bsky.social•5 days ago

...never giving any ruling. Last week a friend of mine told me about an episode in the Linux community where programmers started fighting over code and ended up accusing each other of ableism or whatever on Twitter.

harishevek.bsky.social•5 days ago

In a better world there would be the co-op version of an HR department hearing both sides, giving a verdict and the conflict is over.

Instead, we have a public falling out which divides thousands of people over the use of the word "cancer" in an email or something.

niral.bsky.social•5 days ago

The optimal ratio of strategic to moralistic is like an inverted U. At a certain level of socialism (easily identified), the balance should shift increasingly to moralism (easily implemented).

lastpositivist.bsky.social•5 days ago

Finally someone gets it

enzoreds.bsky.social•5 days ago

In all honestly I think the unity of means and ends is good epistemic hygiene. Marxist-Leninism’s victory there was a disaster.

davidjorgonson.bsky.social•5 days ago

IR realism is unrealistic

majestic8.bsky.social•5 days ago

I'm as moralistic as the next fella, so maybe I just feel called out. But sometimes I feel the calls for being "realistic" are "stop talking about things I don't want to deal with". Which doesn't mean those things disappear.

tjradcliffe.bsky.social•5 days ago

Moralism caused those actions. Lefties are right about many of the problems they see and wrong about almost all the solutions they propose, which boil down to, "Give good people (like me) absolute power." But there are no good people who seek power. Orwell understood this. If you focus on...

tjradcliffe.bsky.social•5 days ago

...pragmatics you become a social democrat (which I am, despite being an anarchist by disposition... but you'd have to be pretty incontinent to let your disposition dictate your politics.)

bill-of-lefts.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think the missing piece is that many of the brutal actions weren’t taken out of pragmatism but ideological commitment

bill-of-lefts.bsky.social•5 days ago

Less so for the Soviet Union but many of the very brutal things mao did don’t make sense from a pragmatic point of view but do make some sense from an ideological point of view

onedayinjune.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think there were pragmatic *and* ideological reasons for a lot of things both the USSR and Maoist China did. If your definition of 'pragmatic' also includes consolidating the party leader's power!

boringjuniper.bsky.social•5 days ago

I know it's an unpopular position but I think the left could do with a lot more moralism in the sense of understanding how values motivate people to help them organize. Right now, it seems like we're treating them like billiard balls being knocked around instead of active agents.