40. Animals, Agency, and Accountability 🔗

Been thinking a lot about animal trials in medieval europe and how we've not just reversed the idea of animal criminal culpability, but extended it to certain classes of humans. Animal trial - Wikipedia

Anybody who gets away with a "look what you made me do!" defense for their actions is asking to be basically extended the protection of presumption of animal non-culpability for their actions. I hear it as "I'm an animal and I cannot be held responsible for my actions"

People on the right tend to make such arguments on their own behalf (both rich and poor... "look what the liberals made us do"). People on the left tend to make them on behalf of others less fortunate who may or may not appreciate the animal-status patronizing.

One reason I'm thinking about this is that now that we've stopped bothering about explanations for why Trump rose to power and to some extend assumed that his 2nd term is the null hypothesis, narrative energies are being diverted to judgment rather than explanation.

The explanation part for his rise has defaulted to the animal level. His supporters are not responsible for voting him into office, and he's not responsible for what he's done there so far. The judgment part for ongoing behaviors has become curiously suspended altogether.

It's an interesting symmetry break. Both sides agree on this for once: liberals have agency, conservatives don't. Liberals are governed by evil values and do evil things. Conservatives just respond as they must according to the natural order of spiritual karmic law.

So the Discourse is 100% about judgment of the left. In this narrative, the impeachment trial is not-even-wrong theater, like a medieval animal trial based on poorly scoped ideas about who has moral culpability.

Only the question of "How Woke caused the Weirding with malice aforethought" is judgment worthy. The guilty verdict for 100% of the blame is already in. Only sentencing remains. Other parties are not so much blameless as ontologically unfit to stand trial as humans with agency.

This is really surreal. A shit ton is going wrong in all parts of the world, on all sorts of fronts (climate, finance, war, tech). But the only people being morally held to account for any of it is those subscribing to woke ideologies.

An alien would be justified in concluding that homo sapiens is really 2 species. Morally culpable homo sapiens wokus, and morally non-culpable homo sapiens tradus.

As a thought experiment, what if actual condition is the reverse: everybody except the wokies has moral culpability. They've had their brains rotted by some sort of vague intersectional mind virus written in COBOL. Ignore and isolate them. This actually rings more true to me

On the one side, I hear sophomore wokies spouting robotic gobbledygook I can barely parse, and am not sure they can either.

On the other, I hear crystal clear messages of overt cruelty, hostility, vengefulness etc.

Which of the 2 is more responsible for their thoughts/words?

Not going anywhere in particular with this line of thought. I don't think blame and judgment subplots of narrativizing history are either futile or the whole story. Holding people morally accountable for things that are happening is one part of how humans process what to do next.

To the extent that the blame/judgment subplot has gotten itself into a weird narrative bind where only a tiny subset are subject to it, the narrative mechanism has broken, and either needs to be fixed, or other parts of the mechanism need to pick up the slack.

I think I know why we're in this condition. The thing is, ideologies only accept accountability for loci of agency they see as legitimate, so everything that happens at other loci is the fault of people who see agency there as legitimate.

ie if your philosophy only recognizes the legitimacy of individual agency in personal life, then collective failures are obviously the fault of collectivists.

Usually, this wonderful leap of logic involves attributing god-like correct functioning and infallibility to an emergent mechanism at the higher levels which would work great if only humans would cede all agency to the Higher Power at that level. Markets, gods, take your pick.

I'm blameless and doing everything right wherever I'm responsible for my actions.

There exists a higher power that would do everything right if only we'd let it.

Some evil people don't let it. They're to blame for everything wrong at other levels.

Thinking about how to get past this condition. I have no good ideas at present, but I'm thinking a first design commitment is to take agency abdicators at their word. If they want animal levels of non-culpability, even if it sounds insulting to me, let them claim it. Move on.

The implication is that I wouldn't attempt to argue with them anymore than I would attempt to argue with my cat. My cat does his cat-tricks to try to manipulate me, I do my human-tricks to prevail. Hard to say this in non-pejorative way... but I'm very nice to animals.

Pseudospeciation is an ugly tribalist move to dehumanize the outgroup. But what do you do when individuals and groups start doing it to themselves to reap the benefits of animal non-culpability? Call it auto-pseudospeciation?

Pseudospeciation - Wikipedia

Not sure what the reasonable test for acting human is. I think it means owning your actions and all consequences, right up to boundary of where others freedom of action begins. Nobody "makes" anybody else do anything past age 5. But if you insist I made you do something, so be it

I'm trying to reduce this thread to a single paradox contradiction. I think it's something like: what do you do when you want to attribute more moral agency to someone than they'll acknowledge having themselves?

I'm reminded of the oddest conversation about vegetarianism I've had, with an Egyptian. Most meat eaters accept moral agency/culpability that might be involved in choosing to eat meat. But this guy's response was "but the Koran tells us to eat everything!"

Cracked me up.

I'm vegetarian leaning vegan where/when I can, but not evangelical about it, and don't try to convert others. Meat eaters who raise the topic with me accept their agency in choosing to eat meat 99% of the time.

Denying such agency via appeal to religious duty is...odd

People who accept their moral agency are generally capable of surprising you. Sufficient, but not necessary condition. This includes you being able to surprise yourself. If you cannot surprise yourself you have an animal sense of yourself.

Why is surprisability key here?

The Internet of Beefs, IoB, is people who can’t be surprised either by themselves or by others. Tell: if you can mock somebody you’re predicting them. If you’re still mad at them it’s because they’re not accepting culpability where you want them to.

This means even where you and I agree that something has gone wrong rather than as designed by somebody, nobody is accepting responsibility. It’s a “who owns this externality” argument.

If the only consequences of your actions that you own are predictable ones, and all externalities are attributable to other people’s (predictable and mockable) misguided actions, are you really acknowledging any agency at all?

Real agency results in 2 kinds of surprise

1. Unexpected material consequences
2. Unexpected responses from others with agency

You’re not accepting your own humanity and attendant material and moral agency if you don’t act in ways that generate BOTH kinds of surprise.

If no unintended consequences are ever the result of what you chose to do, you are viewing your agency like an animal’s.

If people never respond to you in surprising ways it means something a bit more complex.

It is some combination of:

a) you’re only pushing their animal buttons
b) they’re like you, and only have animal buttons
c) you’ve blinded yourself to their surprising responses

IoB is b vs b.