All Thoughts Being Equal

At the beginning of summer I decided to detach myself from Facebook—no longer would I 'like' or comment on public posts, though I did keep up a bit with certain closed groups for stuff I was doing over the summer. And yet, since most of my friends are still posting on Facebook, I still look at it. This detached observation lends itself to philosophizing, as I looked at the nature of posts in my news feed and wondered: Is there anyone working on an ethics of digital public conduct? I. Certainly the ethics of physical public conduct go all the way back to the foundations of philosophy, all over the world: what constitutes the good life, what duties do we owe to others, and so on. And seeing what gets posted, from a meta level, sparked my curiosity in this Facebook IM discussion with a friend(my comments in bold): It seems like the mocking impulse comes from a similar place to the cult mocking impulse Like, these people think they've found a deep answer and t...

I. The other day (N.B. months ago at this point) I got into a very interesting discussion with C. Michael Pickens, a prominent member of the Washington State Libertarian Party, on what principles should form the proper ground of a theory of liberty. In his original Facebook post, Michael claimed that "Liberty is an optimistic concept based on the philosophy of self-ownership." Someone else asked whether liberty could be grounded in concepts of free will and autonomy; Michael replied that these are themselves based in self-ownership. In the discussion, I (and the other guy) both raised the possible issue of indentured servitude—I had in mind specifically the condition of indentured servants during the early American colonial period, which was a condition of chattel slavery in all but name. Michael wasn't arguing that slavery was permissible—obviously it isn't, regardless of your libertarian principles, unless you're a Confederacy-fetishist douchebag like, s...

I. In a discussion on Facebook tangentially related to my last blog post (insofar as it was about how political views aren't rational for a lot of people), my friend Briana made the following comment: I've never seen it [politics] as rational... there is an ideal that it can be, but I've never seen it in practice. Otherwise, we'd have started culling our own populations by now. I objected pithily that we don't need to cull humans because humans are capable of using birth control (including the decision not to reproduce), to which she elaborated: No, we cull other animals because we don't mind killing them from a moral standpoint (i.e. we are less repulsed emotionally). If we did mind as much as we do for ourselves, we'd find other ways to manage their populations like we do for ourselves. Culling is the rational choice (most economical, quickest and easiest). Finding other ways to appeal to our personal security that are less effective, ta...