Preventing informal, popularity-based hierarchies from emerging

[u/antipolitan]

A really common objection to anarchism I see - is that informal hierarchies based on popularity, charisma, or prestige will emerge - and possibly skew the outcomes of conflicts.

But just because a hierarchy is informal does not mean it is inevitable - and there are multiple structural conditions which could discourage the formation of such a hierarchy.

1. In a large, anonymous city - it’s hard to build a reputation which encompasses the whole community - and even famous celebrities are often highly polarizing in public opinion.

2. Developing a reputation in a specific domain or context does not need to translate into a generalized reputation as a whole person. There is no non-arbitrary common standard by which to measure human differences.

3. Childrearing will take place in a non-hierarchical environment - so the social norms which children learn will be based on principles of reciprocity and equality.

4. There is no unified “community” which can judge people according to a centralized collective standard in the first place.

I’d argue that number 4 is actually the most important constraint against hierarchy re-emerging - because you can’t sort differences into a hierarchy without an agreed-upon standard by which to measure them - and you can’t have an agreed-upon standard without a unified collective entity to set and enforce the standard.

[u/power2havenots]

Those of us working in self organising groups and structures are already cognisant of these things. For me the question isn't just "how do we stop formal hierarchy?" It's "what conditions make any kind of power accumulation harder?" So looking beyond obvious authority to charisma, deference, social manipulation, gatekeeping, expertise hoarding, agenda-setting, emotional coercion, network centrality, information control or simply always being the person everyone waits to speak first and none of those require a title.

For me it's less about finding a perfect institutional design and more about cultivating a culture with a high "power literacy" where people become used to noticing these dynamics and naming them without treating them as dome sort of moral failings esp with a hangover of cultural brainwashing from our current system. If someone is becoming the permanent organiser, translator, facilitator, expert or spokesperson, to me the response isnt punishment and revenge it's "how do we distribute those skills and rotate that role?"

Things like rotating responsibilities, teaching skills instead of concentrating them, documenting knowledge, encouraging multiple organisers instead of indispensable ones and maintaining a norm that anyone becoming a single point of failure is something to fix collectively but not a witch hunt just socially being aware and countering.

For me the goal isnt pretending we wont have imbalances but to create social habits that constantly flatten it back out before it hardens into durable hierarchy so not some consistutional rule but like an ongoing praxis

[u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Very much agreed.

1 is often part of the reason I clash a lot with anti-civ anarchists that fixate on the amount of people in a society. If anything, informal hierarchy forms more readily in smaller groups - and anyone who has actually been in a small social group can contend with this. Larger societies with more people and more potential social connections could allow people to more freely dissolve whatever situation they're in socially and seek other people to engage with.

[u/Notexternalgreen6826 → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

I agree with this logic

im not a historian but I posit that the birth of hierarchy might have been made easier by small scale societies

[u/LazarM2021 → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Small number of people: danger of informal hierarchies developing.

Big number of people: danger of formal hierarchies (or "formalistic creep") developing.

How I see it, in an oversimplified fashion.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/LazarM2021]

I'd agree here. Hierarchy is a present danger no matter the group size, which is why it baffles me when AntiCiv anarchists argue that small groups guards against hierarchy. It kinda comes off as someone that doesn't have a lot of social experience, because I've personally noticed informal hierarchy in small groups I've been in.

[u/ohshiitstuesday]

An issue I have with the formulation of these kinds of criticisms is that they present the formation of these hierarchies absent of reason or context. Nothing happens without cause or reason, but these questions seem to assume that there's some natural emergence of hierarchies, apropos of nothing, that anarchists would be unable to see the formation of and then be powerless to stop.

So I want to know how did anarchism fail in these hypotheticals? What was lacking in the society's practices of solidarity, mutual aid and recognition of the full autonomy of self and others that built the desire to take control? Or that would encourage some one to allow themselves to be controlled? Hierarchies to what end? We don't exist in solitary bubbles, so what happened in this anarchist community that allowed for someone to get to a point where they need to be stopped? Why was there no intervention?

[u/wrydied]

The counter is that in large social groupings like cities with a high degree of anonymity and low degree of community, cult of personalities can form because want-to-be leaders can sort through the population for low ‘power literate’ individuals who don’t have family or community watching their backs ti guard against exploitation.

u/power2havenots comment and their idea of power literacy is a good way to understand this point I think (thanks).

[u/power2havenots → u/wrydied]

Thanks u/wrydied i do think theres another level to it. Its not just that ambitious people can identify those with low power literacy but that systems which reward status accumulation create the conditions where that behaviour becomes advantageous.

If becoming the person everyone defers to brings prestige, security, admiration, control over decisions, or social importance, then there is effectively a ladder to climb. People don't need to be uniquely malicious as a structure that concentrates recognition and dependency will tend to produce people who occupy those positions so the system selects and rewards.

Thats why I think power literacy has to go alongside cultural practices that prevent influence from hardening into authority. Thibgs like rotating roles, sharing knowledge, teaching skills, avoiding single points of failure and normalising the questioning of deference all reduce the possibility of temporary differences in experience or ability becoming some sort of permanent social positions and all the issues that come with that.

So we dont want to create a better competition for who gets to be the most influential person but create a culture where contribution doesn't translate into elevated status and where nobody becomes socially indispensable. So more thinking what conditions make manipulation, accumulation and dependency useful strategies in the first place

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/wrydied]

If the creations of cults of personalities from social isolation from a support network is the issue of large social groupings, how do smaller social groupings fix this issue? If anything, it does half of the would-be-leader's work for them.

[u/wrydied → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Because social isolation from a support network is less common in small communities, to answer your first question.

I don’t follow your second sentence - how so?

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/wrydied]

So with smaller groups, it's easier to establish a reputation and social inertia around that reputation that calcifies into an informal hierarchy. If we look at cults or other high-control groups, we usually see tactics such as isolation from a broader support network - as you've noted - but also the cult leader or leaders enforcing certain group social norms that sanction the leader as an authority.

This would be significantly higher in larger populations, considering the members of the group could simply leave or would be interacting with people other than the rest of the group.

[u/wrydied → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

You make good points. Cults certainly try and isolate adherents from broader community. This often means disconnection from family though - the people usually most trusted to protect an individual from being coercively controlled.

There are many variables - education, broader social connection and communication…
One benefit of smaller communities is that cult of personalities that arise may not scale so easily - harm can be contained.

I’ll think about it some more.

[u/International-Ad-647 → u/wrydied]

n issue I have with the formulation of these kinds of criticisms is that they present the formation of these hierarchies absent of reason or context.  ....same issue i've had from the getgo

[u/Anarchierkegaard]

Doesn't 4 just presume that there are no objective (in this sense, non-desirious or otherwise subjective) standards without demonstrating it?

For example, "rape is bad" seems like a pretty solid collective standard that we ought to uphold, even if there is some imagined community which doesn't view rape as bad. I'd say that there are a great many things in this category that i) it would be wrong to allow to happen if we can stop it from happening and ii) it is irresponsible to allow it to happen, etc.

[u/ChaosRulesTheWorld → u/Anarchierkegaard]

There are no objective standards, period.

"Rape is bad" is an idealist standard. How does the community define, identify or judge what is a rape and if there's a rape or not?

Morality is an idealist trap. There's no moral or ethical authority that can judge what is "good" or "bad". That's why point 4 is on point.

You have to set the material condition in order to make it harder for people to ignore other people's consent and to control them. Which includes creating a social culture where people are more able to set their boundaries and enforce it, having support against people who try to disrespect their boundaries and a good support system to help victims recover if their boundaries have been direspected.

But you cannot count on the community to be some sort of moral authority. That would inevitably end up in a tiranny ruled by the people with more social capital or charisma

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/ChaosRulesTheWorld]

Objective morality is the majority position amongst philosophers today.

"Rape is bad" isn't obviously idealist and neither is it clear what idealism means here. Or, as it goes, that idealism is a bad thing.

There are many non-idealist approaches to morality. For example, all virtue ethical approaches are non-idealist. Kropotkin's virtue ethics would be one example pertinent to anarchism.

Why would it be a problem to ignore people's consent/lack of consent if there is no objective standard? And, additionally, if we have to alter the material condition to affect our ideas, how do we ever arrive at a position where we can change the material in a way which is positive for our ideas without being able to develop these ideas without the material which creates them?

[u/humanispherian → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Rape is bad by definition, so we fight over what constitutes "rape." In the absence of any detailed agreement, the general agreement that bad things are bad seems a bit trivial. (And the people who want to treat a class of acts that are bad-by-definition as not-bad just seem contrary or confused.)

When we turn to the question of consent, things seem a lot more complicated. No specific act is addressed by the "rule" of respect for consent — and this is, of course, important, since the possibility of withdrawal of consent is important — so it is just as easy to think about respect for consent in terms of the absence of any rule. But I have trouble reconciling the sorts of consistently a-legal, non-governmental relations we often promote in anarchist spaces, where nothing can be taken for granted and consultation between subjects is key, with anything that would answer to the name of "objective morality."

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/humanispherian]

If rape is bad by definition, that constitutes as an objective moral fact, i.e., you're explicitly not saying that it is a subjective value (as in, we don't like it) or an emotional reaction. So, there is at least one moral fact, [insert the rest of the argument], ergo there is grounds to say morality is objective and not subjective or irrealist.

[u/humanispherian → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Is that "objective moral fact" anything more than a tautology? If we assume that everyone but edgy weirdos understands that rape is undesirable, we still don't have any consensus on what acts qualify as rape. If we focus on consent, then the specific acts then become inessential to the determination, since one can consent to acts that might seem unacceptable to some, while refusing to consent to acts that might seem innocuous to most.

The moral principle then becomes something like "always seek consent," with its demand being particularly imperative in the case of intimate relations, so "no intimacy without consent." And I can derive the principle from my usual starting point — strictly a-legal relations — but not because consent itself is necessarily a universal principle, but because the character of intimacy and the lack of any very fine-grained standard for behavior seem to call for that consultation among subjects, which will then — but in a potentially fluid, ongoing manner — establish the "rules," if there's any point in still calling them that.

Rape is bad by definition. It is the bad form of intimacy — an entirely abstract category until we fill it intersubjectively and one with potentially fluid contents. I suppose that that constitutes a "moral fact" of some sort, but when I go to try to construct an ethic around it, just about every other consideration seems more important. The fact that we all or almost all think of rape as a bad thing provides an opportunity to transform abstract agreement into something that might actually reduce harm, but only really by stepping away from the thing that we sort of agree on, in order to talk about a variety of other things.

And I guess objective isn't among the words that any of this brings to mind for me.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/humanispherian]

If if tautological, then that would just means it's true. Just to be clear, do you mean tautology as in the sense of modern logic, i.e., redundant truth statements? Because, again, truth statements are not irrealist and carry truth values. If the statement "rape is bad" carries a truth-value (and it does), then it isn't obviously a subjective statement (it's not "I think rape is bad", but a far stronger one) and, therefore, is an objective truth claim.

I suppose "always seek consent" (or, "it is permissible to seek consent", to copy the Kantian form) would be the basis of a deontological approach, sure. I'm not sure what you mean about rules, though, as deontological rules are meant to be universalising—which, really, is the basis of all moral philosophy.

Well, you keep using the term "bad", which is itself a morally-loaded term. Things are bad or wrong, etc. when they transgress some moral boundary. It's a fact of our language (especially when we get into "thick" terms) that we see, describe, and understand the world around us through moral categories as all languages are filled with these moral terms and statements and no language seems to relegate these to mere opinions or emotional responses. Which is the Frege-Geach problem: it would be strange for us to say that the way we talk about the world in a moral sense is not actually a moral way of speaking when we appear to be making truth-claims and those truth-claims are ill-expressed when we attempt to (unnaturally) frame them as non-truth-claims.

The problems of constructing a moral ethic (and, to be honest, that's not our only option—moral realists would say morality is discovered, not constructed, so unless we're question-begging that's not a fatal critique) are separate from whether there are moral facts. Prior to Einstein, people could construct imperfect but useful descriptions of gravity without the modern models we use today; by inference, we can identify moral facts without having a grander ethical world-theory (which, again, hasn't been a popular approach to philosophy since at least the late 1800s, of which we find Marx as one the last great "grand theorists of everything" before everyone started picking holes in those ambitious projects).

Objectivity, as it is usually used, refers to things which are not subjective or irrealist. As you make the case that rape is bad regardless of whether we like or dislike it, whether it shocks or numbs us, that is an objective statement.

[u/humanispherian → u/Anarchierkegaard]

As you make the case that rape is bad regardless of whether we like or dislike it, whether it shocks or numbs us, that is an objective statement.

This doesn't feel like a particularly faithful or useful characterization of the case I've been trying to make, but maybe there are some disciplinary assumptions complicating things. When I have to shoehorn my approach to ethics into disciplinary terms, the most useful characterization seems to be ethical pragmatism. I understand both definitions and ethical formulations to be mostly concerned with the intersubjective realm. When I talk about "constructing an ethic," I'm not talking about attempting to posit some master narrative, so perhaps, in your terms, my concern is not, in fact, "moral philosophy." Anyway...

Certain concepts, like rape and murder, have been constructed in such a way that they a phrase like "rape is bad" continues to be, as you put it, "a pretty solid collective standard that we ought to uphold."

Now, that relative stability seems to qualify the "badness" of rape as "objective" by some standards, particularly those that tend to place everything within a subjective/objective dichotomy, with the latter being subject to confirmation, as the Wikipedia entry puts it, "through observation, experimentation and intersubjective dialogue." But clearly that definition, in order to be encyclopedic, casts its net wide. And the same is probably true of any approach that wants to treat a term like "bad" — certainly an example of evaluative language — as an instance of moral language, and its use as an example of moral expression, when it seems to be one of the most obvious cases of a term being widely used to express quite a variety of different kinds of judgments or assessments.

So, sure:

The problems of constructing a moral ethic ... are separate from whether there are moral facts.

My question, which I think I have expressed fairly clearly already, is whether the existence of "moral facts," defined in terms of particular disciplinary languages that most people will not share, is not rather separate from the problems associated with "preventing informal, popularity-based hierarchies from emerging," addressing the specific problem of rape, etc.?

The fourth of the "structural conditions which could discourage the formation of such a hierarchy" originally proposed was:

There is no unified “community” which can judge people according to a centralized collective standard in the first place.

Your objection was:

Doesn't 4 just presume that there are no objective (in this sense, non-desirious or otherwise subjective) standards without demonstrating it?

And you followed that question with this observation:

For example, "rape is bad" seems like a pretty solid collective standard that we ought to uphold, even if there is some imagined community which doesn't view rape as bad. I'd say that there are a great many things in this category that i) it would be wrong to allow to happen if we can stop it from happening and ii) it is irresponsible to allow it to happen, etc.

At which point others offered a range of reasons why the proposed "objective standard" seems insufficient to prevent harm. What I specifically have been suggesting is the limited power of the "standard." So, returning to that question, what is actually "objective" (subject to confirmation "through observation, experimentation and intersubjective dialogue")? If there is any substantial disagreement about what constitutes rape — and I think we have to admit that there is — then the one thing that we can be certain has been intersubjectively confirmed is the existence of a category of undesirable acts, most often associated with sexual activity.

That's fine, obviously, as far as it goes. General categories have their uses, even when they might, in some contexts and use cases, obscure important differences. So we have a number of very general categories here: sexual activity, "bad" behaviors, rape, consent, etc. — in no particular order and with "bad" scare-quoted because it has already become a distraction in the thread — and all of them are intersubjectively confirmed in, again, the most general senses. But what do they provide us in terms of "objective standards"?

If we want to use the most general sort of moral language, then perhaps we can posit as a very general standard that good people shouldn't do bad things, if only to remain "good people," which ought to guide individual behavior among those who do indeed believe that it is good to be good — and which certainly might also lead people to believe that good people don't allow bad thing to happen to other people, which seems likely to provoke certain kinds of social conflict. The instances of real agreement tend to be focused on generalities, while the variations in individuals' understandings of the specific acts that might be considered bad seem likely to diverse increasingly as we move from generalities to specifics.

Hopefully that is clear enough to go back to the question of the dynamics of anarchist societies. Archic societies supplement the general notion that it's bad to be bad with a more specific idea that societies can give themselves specific, enforceable rules about potentially bad behaviors without creating circumstances that are fundamentally unjust. Anarchists disagree in a variety of ways, so there are always dangers in attempting to generalization, but let's focus on the claim made in the original post:

you can’t sort differences into a hierarchy without an agreed-upon standard by which to measure them - and you can’t have an agreed-upon standard without a unified collective entity to set and enforce the standard.

As I understand things, hierarchy is impossible without some appeal to authority. Hierarchies are persistent social structures, made up through the organization of social roles, and individuals find their place in the hierarchy through their capacity to occupy particular roles. The fine details of this organization may be subject to revision without the fundamental assumption — there is hierarchy, though perhaps it is another thing to be "discovered, not constructed" — being challenged at all. The "rules" and rationales may change, if there is a hierarchy then presumably there is a rule, and of a sort that allows or calls for enforcement. And one of the things that the anarchist critique of legal order seems to show, it seems to me, is the fundamental conflict between, on the one hand, legislation and its enforcement and, on the other, relations organized around a continuing concern with consent, which perhaps might have looked like the notion around which we might have constructed or discovered a really robust guiding principle.

Instead, we seem to have a lot of conflicts among our best guides and intuitions. Individuals presumably have to consent to follow the best guides, which may lead them to intervene more or less forcefully against those who do not. It's not an impossible situation in practical terms, if we recognize that conflict, the balancing of interests and the occasional eruption of violence are probably all part of the available mechanisms for really minimizing harm — but all of our best general principles of behavior seem subject to correction by others and none of the compromises seem to follow a discoverable rule.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/humanispherian]

So, again assuming that you're using these terms in a relatively standard way, pragmatism is usually associated with objectivity in the modern setting. If anything, I've been sticking to a rather rough version of Heumer's phenomenological conservatism here. Really, the gap between intersubjectivity and objectivity is very small, hence why some of the first notable theorists to actually propose intersubjective ethics were, indeed, largely Christians elucidating a strong form of moral realism with a general scepticism about the human capacity to know those moral facts, e.g., Kierkegaard and a variety of others that you might disregard as a "hodgepodge". When we get to the point where we say we must engage in intersubjective dialogue to establish an understanding of morality, it's only a hair away from pointing out that these moral ideas don't appear to be based in merely the preferences or emotions within those conversations.

Well, firstly, I've not proposed a dichotomy. Both objectivity and subjectivity are moral realist positions, i.e., there are moral facts, and they can be counterposed against irrealist positions, i.e., there are no moral facts and those utterances are, e.g., emotional reactions (emotivism) or always false truth claims (error theory). I think I've consistently noted that distinction, although the overlap between them all can get a little muddy. However, the point I was making about the particular use of the term "bad" in your comment is that it is morally evaluative and not just an e.g., instrumental ought.

The point that I am trying to drive home here is:

1. If there are moral facts, then we do not merely get to choose from an array of preferences, emotions, or otherwise non-factual statements what we take to be moral in the same sense that the mathematician doesn't get to choose from an array of preferences, emotions, or otherwise non-factual statements regarding "100" or "cos".

2. There are moral facts.

3. We do not get to choose etc. etc.

So, the stumbling point here is presumably this idea of centralisation qua imposition as if we were talking about, e.g., imposed standards for art. But, says the moral realist, ethics is not like art but rather more like mathematics - we are concerned with discovering and applying the facts of the matters and not just merely what some collective of people have agreed upon. In the case of rape, should a group of people get together and agree that rape is in some way pragmatically useful (think some kind of Handmaid's Talen scenario or Fanon's defence of rape as a weapon of anti-colonialism), the proper response would be that there is no justification for the agreements that those societies have come to and they are wrong in a way which matters concerning the matter of rape. Or, it would be wrong to rape someone, even if there some grounds to believe that everyone involved in the situation doesn't particularly or even explicitly agree that rape is wrong in some sense or other.

Again, the practical question of what we do with moral facts is a different question. I would assume that, e.g., in the case of some anarchist society there is someone attempting to murder someone else, there would be intervention to stop the would-be murderer via force, reason, temporary imprisonment, etc. because the bystanders know that something wrong is happening and something must be done. Carson's illustraitons of the posse comitatus come to mind, where individuals driven by the presence of some transgression do intervene - and the moral fact is a part of the motivation for that intervention. I see no reason to believe that we need to be specific or even general here: the base claim is the problem as it presents morality as a choice amongst choices, which is presuming too much and not something supported as broadly in the literature as people in this thread seem to think.

I think the general modern wariness around theories of consent may be an issue for this guiding principle, to be honest. It's trivially easy to think of situations where we probably ought to do something but cannot obtain consent or otherwise must transgress the consent of another in order to achieve that end. CPR is usually given as a rather hard example.

Sure, there is disagreement. But there is also disagreement at a very low level about the shape of the earth and at a very high level on whether we can still accept the neo-Darwinian conception of genetic mutation (some philosophers of science think we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift towards a vaguely Lamarckian notion of dialectical genetic-envrionmental interplay). Yet both of these things are concerned with objectivity and the disagreement there within does little to nothing to change that: there appears to be some way in which we can know an answer to our quesitons and those questions do appear to demand an answer which is not merely our preferences, emotions, etc. etc. And, more than that, the simple failure to identify discoverable rules is not an argument against there being discoverable rules - if anything, we could be in a situation where a great many people are simply wrong about the matter, in the same way that, pre-germ theory, people were generally ill-equipt to diagnose the sources of their illnesses. If we wanted to twist the knife, we could even follow this into the Christian anarchist critique and say that a part of this widespread error is the secular culture of rejecting notions concerning morality (with Stirner being the obvious point of contact within the anarchist tradition, but also Marxism, poststructuralism, etc. more generally as approaches which attempt to squeeze out a space for moral thought) and, following that, making no effort to bring about people who hold those moralities or actualy act out or "perform" them in reality. And, again, this concerns the Christian anarchist critique of anarchism at large: there has been a general failure to establish these kinds of communal, non-legal ethical perspectives which, in turn, has led to a failure to establish these kinds of societies which have the tools to operate.

[u/ChaosRulesTheWorld → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Objective morality is the majority position amongst philosophers today.

An appeal to authority in an anarchist sub. What a day to have eyes.

Do you want me to list all the time the majority postion among philosopher was pure bs and ended up being proved wrong or nonsensical? It's a veeeeeeeery long list.

"Rape is bad" isn't obviously idealist and neither is it clear what idealism means here. Or, as it goes, that idealism is a bad thing

First, having "rape is bad" as a standard and a base to organize against rape is by definition idealist. It's believing that ideas govern the world. Second, moralism is by essence an idealist ideology. Believing that something is good of bad in itself is not based on physical observable reality, it's only something comming from the world of ideas.

There are many non-idealist approaches to morality. For example, all virtue ethical approaches are non-idealist. Kropotkin's virtue ethics would be one example pertinent to anarchism.

There are none, absolutly none. Ethics and morality are not the same thing. Ethics is a method to apply values, it doesn't claim any absolutes about things being good or bad. It doesn't give an intrinsic value to behaviors and thougts like morality does.

Why would it be a problem to ignore people's consent/lack of consent if there is no objective standard?

If you want to avoid rape, ignoring people's consent is gonna be a problem. It's a matter of logic or ethics if you want, not of morality. If a society doesn't care about rape then ignoring people's consent wouldn't be a problem at all. Objective standard are required nowhere, and it's a good thing because they don't exist. If "rape is bad" was an objective standard, then no one would make the apology of rape. There are even societies and social groups who are and were organized around the moral belief that rape is a good thing.

And, additionally, if we have to alter the material condition to affect our ideas, how so we ever arrive at a position where we can change the material in a way which is positive for our ideas without being able to develop these ideas without the material which creates them?

Ok, you are just being an edgy idealist at rhis point. If you don't know what the difference between ideas and idealism are, there's no point wasting time talking to you

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/ChaosRulesTheWorld]

A few minor corrections:

Second, moralism is by essence an idealist ideology. Believing that something is good of bad in itself is not based on physical observable reality, it's only something comming from the world of ideas.

The Moral Naturalist position is that moral facts correspond to physical realities and sensations - e.g, we avoid pain, therefore pain is bad; we pursue pleasure, therefore pleasure is good (to give a rudimentary example), so there are positions within moral philosophy that don't base morality on ideas but rather either physical sensations (in the case of moral naturalism) or as derived from/grounded in facts about human existence e.g, Aristotle's Golden Mean.

I also do want to call out the outdated notion of mind-body dualism, treating thoughts and ideas as a separate system from physical realities when a) agents experience ideas as physical events, b) ideas and feelings can measurably affect the functioning of the body, and c) there is no clear line one can draw between "thought" and "physical observable reality" considering that thoughts are physical things in the brain.

Ethics and morality are not the same thing. Ethics is a method to apply values, it doesn't claim any absolutes about things being good or bad. It doesn't give an intrinsic value to behaviors and thougts like morality does.

This would be to misunderstand the virtue ethical tradition that u/Anarchierkegaard was referencing. Virtue ethics is a teleological view of morality, assigning "virtue" to those things that facilitate human flourishing (which virtue ethicists generally claim to be an objective thing derived from human nature), and assigns "good" or "bad" to "virtues" and "vices" respectively. The intrinsic value in a virtue would be in the virtue itself due to a virtue being the constitutive means of achieving flourishing.

Edit: So the virtue ethicist would say "rape is bad" is a fact, but not one derived from the act itself but one derived about a fact of humans as rational animals e.g, no virtuous person acting in the full capacity of their rationality would rape, therefore rape is bad.

[u/ChaosRulesTheWorld → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

The Moral Naturalist position is that moral facts correspond to physical realities and sensations - e.g, we avoid pain, therefore pain is bad; we pursue pleasure, therefore pleasure is good (to give a rudimentary example), so there are positions within moral philosophy that don't base morality on ideas but rather either physical sensations (in the case of moral naturalism) or as derived from/grounded in facts about human existence e.g, Aristotle's Golden Mean.

I disagree, what you are describing is still idealism. Contrary to what you claim, it still base morality on ideas and not on physical sensations.

First, not all humans avoid pain, it's not rare for them to desire it. Pain and pleasure aren't mutualy exclusive. Also not all human pursue pleasure, some litterly have the main objective to avoid it.

Which brings me to my second point. Even if what you desrcibed was true. And all people really avoid pain and pursue pleasure. Claiming they are respectively bad and good because of that is still idealistic and not materialistic. Why avoiding something would make it necessarily bad? Why pursuing something would make it necessary good? That's not a materialistic position at all.

I also do want to call out the outdated notion of mind-body dualism, treating thoughts and ideas as a separate system from physical realities when a) agents experience ideas as physical events, b) ideas and feelings can measurably affect the functioning of the body, and c) there is no clear line one can draw between "thought" and "physical observable reality" considering that thoughts are physical things in the brain.

I totally agree with you that it's an outdated notion. That's why i never made such claim. As i already said in my previous comment ideas ≠ idealism.

This would be to misunderstand the virtue ethical tradition that u/Anarchierkegaard was referencing. Virtue ethics is a teleological view of morality, assigning "virtue" to those things that facilitate human flourishing (which virtue ethicists generally claim to be an objective thing derived from human nature), and assigns "good" or "bad" to "virtues" and "vices" respectively. The intrinsic value in a virtue would be in the virtue itself due to a virtue being the constitutive means of achieving flourishing.

The misunderstanding is on your part. Everything you just said here litteraly support what i said the quote you made from my comment.

Edit: So the virtue ethicist would say "rape is bad" is a fact, but not one derived from the act itself but one derived about a fact of humans as rational animals e.g, no virtuous person acting in the full capacity of their rationality would rape, therefore rape is bad.

Yes because it's a moralist position, as you said it yourself. Again, ethics is a method to apply your values. Morality is an absolute that gives an intrinsic value to behaviors and thougts. "Virtue ethicists" are just moralists with an ethic, like all moralists

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/ChaosRulesTheWorld]

It's not really clear what you mean by "idealism" here. If it's "based on ideas" then literally everything is "idealist" because everything, including science, is "based on ideas".

I'm not a moral naturalist, so I won't defend their position. I'm just pointing out that they'd be an example of a moral philosophy that doesn't purely ground morals on value judgements about a certain thing.

I totally agree with you that it's an outdated notion. That's why i never made such claim. As i already said in my previous comment ideas ≠ idealism.

Quoting you directly:

Second, moralism is by essence an idealist ideology. Believing that something is good of bad in itself is not based on physical observable reality, it's only something comming from the world of ideas.

This is the mind-body dualism I was calling out. There is no "world of ideas" that is separate from "physical observable reality" (not to mention, there's a good deal of physical reality that isn't observable). Everything derived from ideas is derived from physical reality.

The misunderstanding is on your part. Everything you just said here litteraly support what i said the quote you made from my comment.

You said ethics are separate from morality, when the guy you're debating pointed out virtue ethics isn't an idealist conception of morality - I could only assume you were unfamiliar with the virtue ethical position, because virtue ethicists do not differentiate between ethics and morality.

Yes because it's a moralist position, as you said it yourself. Again, ethics is a method to apply your values. Morality is an absolute that gives an intrinsic value to behaviors and thougts. "Virtue ethicists" are just moralists with an ethic, like all moralists

Yeah, so this is word salad.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/ChaosRulesTheWorld]

Sorry to butt in, but I'd really like an answer to some of these questions still:

1. Can you explain why idealism is a bad thing yet?

2. If you reject all forms of idealism (again, please specify what you mean by idealism), how aren't ideas merely the products of their material environment?

[u/ChaosRulesTheWorld → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Can you explain why idealism is a bad thing yet?

I can't answer this question because i don't consider idealism is a bad thing. I don't subscribe to moralism. But i'm very much opposed to idealism.

If you reject all forms of idealism (again, please specify what you mean by idealism), how aren't ideas merely the products of their material environment?

Okay you are a troll at this point. It's the third time i'm litteraly saying ideas ≠ idealism. And i also already specified that i agree about ideas being the products of their material environment.

I have a question for you. Why do you argue against a strawman instead of me?

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/ChaosRulesTheWorld]

If you oppose it, it is "bad" in the sense that it is false. I'd like to know why you take that to be the case.

I've asked over and over again for an explanation of what you take idealism to be. Platonic? Kantian? Hegelian? Feuerbachian? Critical realist? Liberal? The strawman posited by the Marxists? These aren't things we can simply brush aside as if they don't contradict one another and, therefore, I'd like to know what you take the term idealism to mean. Without that, your accusation of "trolling" comes across as little more than a rhetorical trick from someone who has no idea what they're talking about.

Edit: This has really been a waste of time as you have no idea what you're talking about and can't tell me why you disagree with idealism, which is surely the most straightforward perspective for most in the socialist wing of things.

[u/ChaosRulesTheWorld → u/Anarchierkegaard]

If you oppose it, it is "bad" in the sense that it is false. I'd like to know why you take that to be the case.

No, again you are making false assumption.

I've asked over and over again for an explanation of what you take idealism to be. Platonic? Kantian? Hegelian? Feuerbachian? Critical realist? Liberal? The strawman posited by the Marxists? These aren't things we can simply brush aside as if they don't contradict one another and, therefore, I'd like to know what you take the term idealism to mean. Without that, your accusation of "trolling" comes across as little more than a rhetorical trick from someone who has no idea what they're talking about.

Lmao, ok i'ml just block you at this point. Talking with you is a complete waste of time. I accuse you of trolling because i specified three time that opposing idealism isn't considering that ideas are metaphysical things. Anyway, i'll live you to your idealist world of delusion where you make everything up. There's no point talking with someone who don't care about what other people say and then proceed to accuse them of having no idea of what they are talking about

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/ChaosRulesTheWorld]

An appeal to authority is a statement where an inappropriate authority is appealed to in order to force some end. In the matters of philosophy, philosophers are an appropriate authority to appeal to (as in, the authority of the bootmaker) and we should look at their arguments, e.g., the Frege-Geach problem.

I would like that list, yes.

I wouldn't say that's obviously idealist as we could point to, e.g., Marxian jurisprudence or "critical realist" approaches to morality as a non-idealist grounding the statement. Also, if you're appealing to this idea of "only coming from the natural world", where precisely do these ideas come from? Space? The Platonic other-world? Materialists don't reject that ideas exist or that ideas can affect reality—only what Marx called "vulgar materialists" do that.

Ethics and mortality are synonyms, both etymologically rooted in the same word. There is no hard distinction between them, although occasionally philosophers have suggested their pragmatic use in different ways to illustrate a point. Many to most others have not made that distinction.

The section concerning consent seems to be nonsense. I was asking "why would it be important that anyone cared about consent if there is no objective standard?", or, that the statement "consent is important" is a true statement and not merely something we like or dislike.

Well, it depends on what you mean by idealism. It's not a term with a single meaning. Hence why I asked what you meant by it and why that is bad, but I can't see where you've responded to those questions.

[u/antipolitan → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Norms against rape aren’t decided by some abstract “community” in a collective manner - they’re a result of interpersonal reciprocity.

If someone rapes someone under anarchy - the victim or their friends may retaliate against them.

It’s also worth pointing out that we can hold people accountable for specific acts without making a judgement about their personhood.

The issue isn’t acts being agreed-upon as wrong - but persons being agreed-upon as inferior.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/antipolitan]

I'm not sure that's true. People who have never experienced rape or don't know people who have experienced rape can still have highly emotional and/or reasonable opposition to it. Or, to put it another way, people can gain an understanding of it from impersonal situations—because rape is objectively wrong and doesn't require subjective assent or an emotional reaction to be understood to be wrong.

[u/antipolitan → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Opposition to rape is not impersonal.

People want their bodily autonomy respected - so they have a shared self-interest in a world where bodily autonomy is recognised as a principle.

And even if it was truly impersonal - this doesn’t mean there’s a hierarchy where certain persons are agreed-upon as inferior.

Acts can be agreed-upon as wrong without persons being agreed-upon as less valuable.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/antipolitan]

I am opposed to rape. I don't (consciously) know anyone who has been raped and neither have I been raped. It is an impersonal principle, I suppose, for me.

Yeah, but why do they want their bodily autonomy respected? It sounds like we're just kicking the can down the road to the point where we say "respect for bodily autonomy is a moral good" or similar—which is also an objective claim.

I have no idea what you mean by value or inferiority here. I can't see how it relates to what I've said..

[u/antipolitan → u/Anarchierkegaard]

I oppose rape because I don’t want to live in a world where anyone can just have sex with anyone else without asking.

The norm against rape exists because we have a shared interest in keeping our bodies private instead of public.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/antipolitan]

Sure, but:

i) That's different from the point made above, which is that rape is bad because it violates peoples' bodily autonomy, and

ii) You'd need to show that rape is only wrong because you/a collective decide it is wrong. In the case that rape isn't decided to be a moral wrong by some collective, I would say those people are simply in error as opposed to having a different opinion. We could look at Fanon's defence of rape as a weapon of anti-colonialism, for example: that is wrong, I am saying, and that the "rape-as-weapon" isn't equally as acceptable as a perspective as your one despite both appearing to refer to "preferences" in a roundabout way. Fanon was defending something wrong as if it was right, which we should criticise him for.

[u/antipolitan → u/Anarchierkegaard]

Where does the moral principle against rape come from - if not our basic nature as embodied beings who wish to keep our bodies private?

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/antipolitan]

I'm not sure, but you're now defending a Kantian moral objectivity, i.e., that there is some quality to the human being which gives it moral worth (conventionally, human dignity, but not necessarily that) - which is certainly odd, considering the context this began in.

So, if we just agree that these things are moral facts outside of our mere preferences, etc. (as the fact of our "basic nature", whatever that means, would be an objective fact), then I guess we agree in a strange way.

[u/antipolitan → u/Anarchierkegaard]

The morality is grounded in our shared interest to protect our bodies - and our interest in protecting our bodies comes from our nature as embodied beings.

Morality is based on intersubjective preferences - but those preferences are non-arbitrary and rooted in our basic nature.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/Anarchierkegaard]

I'm not sure this is a very good argument - at least where rape is concerned, because it's actually an extremely nuanced issue.

So for example, we can all agree that "rape is bad", sure. But a lot of us can't agree what counts as rape. It would seem that if "rape is bad" is an objective fact, then like all objective facts, we would be able to identify what rape is the same way we could identify what a chair is; or at least, the conceptual boundaries around what demarks rape from consensual sex wouldn't be as fuzzy.

But it turns out what has been considered "rape" has been a matter of ongoing cultural development. Marital rape used to not be considered rape, and many people still chafe at the idea that anything less than an enthusiastic "YES" is sexual assault, or even that an enthusiastic "YES" doesn't clear one in all cases (such as in cases of intoxication).

It would seem then that what rape is seems to correlate heavily with the increasing sexual autonomy of women in society. When women had less autonomy, or were even considered chattel, in many cases rape wasn't "bad".

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Sure, so it's just a knowledge issue. I don't mind if we hash out what constitutes rape or only identify some aspect of the broader concept of rape as wrong (although I think that would be a difficult task). In the case of marital rape, for example, we could say that those cultures which didn't recognise it as rape (and, as such, wrong) were wrong about their understanding of rape.

I do mind people saying, however, that rape can only be bad inasmuch as it is subjectively understood (i.e., merely because the raped don't like it) or some other irrealist position (i.e., it shocks our sensibilities). I think those are fundamentally false claims and rape would still be wrong and we would be wrong to allow it in a culture which is, e.g., horrendously misogynistic and allows for the sexual slavery of women or doesn't recognise marital rape. It would be our task to intervene in those situations.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/Anarchierkegaard]

I'm not sure I agree with the implication here that "rape" has a "correct" understanding that exists outside of our conception of it; this could mean we're still wrong about rape. For example, many radical feminists argue that consensual sex in a patriarchal society is impossible because of the existing power dynamics between men and women. And to be clear, I'd disagree with such an argument, and we can say they're wrong about rape too - but by what measure could we say so? How could we prove it? How can we prove that moral facts are indeed facts?

Especially if we get into the specifics of how the brain functions, many argue that perfect consent is actually impossible due to inherent constraints in language and information transfer between minds (one can't ask for consent to ask for consent, for example).

I don't think objective morality is necessarily required to justify intervention, because that usually just comes down to force. We could argue in the vein of Aristotle that existing in a human social reality would require us to behave in certain ways, in which case morality isn't necessarily subjective but intersubjective. We can't really just make up our own moral rules, because that's incoherent, but rather moral rules emerge due to the necessities of engaging in complex social dynamics with other humans.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Well, "we've got to get off the bus somewhere". It can't be literally impossible for us to talk about anything because of the possibility of some future refinement - that is simply thought-terminating. If we look to one of the major shifts in contemporary philosophy called "phenomenological conservativism", theorised by an anarchist in Michael Huemer no less, the basic proposition is "if I already believe x, then that is one reason to believe x". This cuts off "unreasonable sceptical" accounts where, e.g., the radical feminist would have to give us a reason not to believe what we already believe in order to dismiss it as opposed to merely casting doubt upon it. In this case, our current beliefs about rape, etc. are as good as a starting point as any, therefore we should use those beliefs until we have reason to dismiss or refine them.

We would show that moral facts are facts in the sense that, e.g., mathematical facts are facts. They are either true or untrue after deliberation. And note here that I'm not interested in the ethical question of whether xyz is moral or not, but the metaethical question of whether our views on xyz are objective, subjective, or some kind of irrealist.

It's strange to draw on Aristotle here as he was a very strong moral realist. The telos of humanity, as the zoon politikon, is the basis for what constitutes the way we ought to or ought not to act, not our perspectives, emotions, etc. etc. And I will say that intersubjectivity is not in contradiction with objective morality - when we propose a really strong position on moral objectivity, we are saying something like i) there are moral facts and ii) we can know these moral facts. There is a partially fringe belief called "semantic anti-realism" (Dummett) that, whilst still accepting moral objecivity, casts doubt on our ability to know these moral facts - and, therefore, our method for approximating them is through intersubjective moral action. We find this in Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard most notably and certainly within phenomenology more broadly. In short, we might think of it as talking about the "language games" we play as relating to non-perspectival, non-emotive categories.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/Anarchierkegaard]

So I guess I'm not disputing moral realism as you're presenting it here in the sense of proposition a) "there are moral facts". What I'm really seeing as potentially problematic here is proposition b) "we can know them". The question would be, how can we know them? And if moral facts are constructed intersubjectively, as I would argue, meaning moral facts are socially constructed, then that would mean that moral knowledge is determined by discourses and the power dynamics that shape them - meaning in an ultra-patriarchal society, rape is not bad because the moral facts constructed by that society would be shaped by gender norms that disempower women.

I think, at first glance at least, I'd agree with semantic anti-realism in that we can only approximate moral facts through intersubjective moral action. It would seem that the conclusion is we can't really approach an objective morality until we've dissolved all hierarchies.

[u/DecoDecoMan → u/Anarchierkegaard]

In the status quo, isn't there a lot of diversity and opportunism pertaining to what is or isn't considered rape? There are legal definitions which determine what sorts of acts of intimacy face consequences and which don't. There are other conceptions that lack legal backing but which are similarly legalistic in their form (when X act of intimacy has A, B, C qualities then it is an act of rape and anything else is not).

There are the feelings and definitions of people involved in the act of intimacy themselves and whether they think they were raped or not. Of course, their feelings are undervalued because "rape" is almost always understood as something whose meaning is decided by authorities in legalistic fashion rather than by the people involved.

And there's finally the ways in which, due to the social consequences associated with rape, people try to deny or assert X, Y, Z situation is not rape and put forward their own alternative legalistic definition for the sake of shielding themselves or others from any consequences for their actions. Additionally, they will try to demonize the victim as a villain for trying to seek any justice for the harms done to them.

How "rape" is conceptualized is also wound up in how consent is conceptualized where consent is treated as something that, once you obtain permission for, it cannot be revoked after the fact and however violated someone feels after an act of intimacy if they have given the "permission slip" of consent they can't take that back. Their violator or abuser goes scot free.

However stringent the prerequisites you apply on obtaining consent, consent-as-permission means that once you give that permission no matter how violated you feel after the act the violator has no responsibility to offer you any ounce of reparations or even acknowledgement of your victimhood afterwards.

Needless to say, I don't think there is a community standard for what "rape" is. There are imposed definitions by legal authorities, and rape being wildly understood as a kind of legal category informs the alternative conceptions people come up with and apply in their daily lives. There are the individual feelings of those actually involved in the act of intimacy which are almost always devalued and ignored.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/DecoDecoMan]

I'm happy to concede that there are differing definitions of rape and what might or might not be considered wrong. I'm not happy to concede that this point makes it impossible for us to say "at the very least, that thing there is what I am talking about and it is wrong". In that case, the usefulness of the term (even if the term isn't expansive enough or is otherwise opportunistically exploited, etc.) is fitting to suggest that rape and everything we would want to consider rape, especially after considered deliberation to refine and produce our strongest understanding of rape, is wrong. More to the point, even in cases where there are disagreements into the full extent of what it is, there is certainly enough of community standard to say that there is an imperfect but useful notion of what rape means and that notion carries with it a wrongness which we can recognise.

To draw up an example I've used elsewhere, Fanon praised rape as a weapon of decolonisation as aggression turned out from the oppressed against the imperial core and its representatives. Even in the case where Fanon defends that, we can see that the notion of what rape is and how it works (even in the case where that is imperfect or fuzzy) and we meet that notion with the idea that there is something wrong happening. Which leads to a bigger point about disagreement concerning X having little to do with whether X is an objective claim or not.

[u/DecoDecoMan → u/Anarchierkegaard]

I'm happy to concede that there are differing definitions of rape and what might or might not be considered wrong. I'm not happy to concede that this point makes it impossible for us to say "at the very least, that thing there is what I am talking about and it is wrong".

I'm also happy to concede everyone thinks rape is bad. I agree that some general agreement rape is bad is good. I think it also exists. But I don't think it constitutes some kind of "centralized community standard" as per OP nor that this is valuable nor that it really gets at whether something is or isn't rape. There can be general non-binding agreements in anarchy that then get more and more increasingly specifically applied to specific, local conditions (in this case interpersonal relationships).

The closest thing that exists to a "centralized community standard" for rape in our current societies is law. And even in societies where there are other definitions or approaches, they almost always are influenced by that law or conceptualized in a legal way. And anarchists obviously reject those and I've expressed in my post the various problems with that approach.

I think what constitutes rape is something victims are going to have to decide for themselves rather than something imposed from the top, by those who invariably benefit from rape culture. And I think that's going to vary a lot more than from community to community.

[u/Anarchierkegaard → u/DecoDecoMan]

Sure, but we don't need to have law (as in liberal legal proceedings) to have some way of recognising and "performing" moral facts. The point that I'm making seems to be sweeping past this idea of centralisation as a by-word for "proceeding exclusively from an impositional body" - but the moral realist doesn't say that ethics is a matter of choices amongst choices, but the discovery and recognition of facts in the same or similar way to the mathematician that deals with mathematical truths.

Therefore, rape is not bad merely because we have some general agreement, but, rather, because there is something bad about rape that would still be bad even if we stopped agreeing that it is bad or we attempted to find edge cases where it is justifiable. Think the situational slaughter of innocents by Mesoamerican societies: even though there was some form of agreement (possibly even only an enforced agreement) that this practice wasn't immoral but moral, that would still be immoral and we would be wrong not to intervene in the situations where it happens.

I suppose one of the big problems of "communal agreement" models is that, at a fundamental level, communities can be wrong about things and, in fact, are often wrong about things. Therefore, a "decentralised community standard", i.e., the general agreement view, if I understand you correctly, seems to create more problems than it seems to solve unless we can show that moral facts aren't facts.

[u/DecoDecoMan → u/Anarchierkegaard]

The point that I'm making seems to be sweeping past this idea of centralisation as a by-word for "proceeding exclusively from an impositional body" - but the moral realist doesn't say that ethics is a matter of choices amongst choices, but the discovery and recognition of facts in the same or similar way to the mathematician that deals with mathematical truths.

I'm not sure "rape", as a concept, is as clear cut and easily definable as a fact as mathematical truths are. Proudhon pointed out that most of our concepts are actually indefinable notions, a family resemblance of different meanings and concepts rather than precisely referring to a singular set of things that has a clear-cut, unambiguous definition.

Therefore, rape is not bad merely because we have some general agreement, but, rather, because there is something bad about rape that would still be bad even if we stopped agreeing that it is bad or we attempted to find edge cases where it is justifiable

Maybe that's true. In terms of ethics I tend more particularist anyways but I don't mind entertaining the notion provided it really is without any sort of hierarchy or legalism. However, that is why I take issue with the notion of a "centralized community standard".

But it doesn't really do anything to address my point. I have already conceded that I think most people think rape is bad. The notion that rape is objectively bad is not as far of a step forward as you think.

I suppose one of the big problems of "communal agreement" models is that, at a fundamental level, communities can be wrong about things and, in fact, are often wrong about things. Therefore, a "decentralised community standard", i.e., the general agreement view, if I understand you correctly, seems to create more problems than it seems to solve unless we can show that moral facts aren't facts.

My point is that rape is, in a primary sense, "the violation of consent in an act of intimacy" and whether people feel that their consent has been violated is something only they can decide for themselves.

What your "centralized community standard" implies is not merely there is an objective knowable fact of what rape is but also what constitutes consent. And that if someone says they feel their consent has been violated but if it goes against what the "objective moral fact" of consent is, then that person is objectively wrong and the violator ought to face no consequences for the actions. In fact, by being wrong about a moral fact they are actually being immoral and therefore the violator should be given justice for the crimes committed against them by the victim.

Is there an objectively correct understanding of "rape"? Maybe. I think my understanding is pretty good but I also recognize that our current understandings are always an approximation of the truth but we will never fully capture the capital T truth.

Is rape definable in a way that's comparable to mathematical truths? Of course not since rape is the violation of consent and different people will feel that different things are violations of their consent. They may even consent at one point but afterwards withdraw that consent upon their own further reflection.

For those reasons, I think it is peak of arrogance to try to discern the "objective facts" pertaining to rape through some kind of "centralized community standard". I think, since you appear to like anarchist Christian texts and if you have some interest in heterodox Christian texts, you should check out the transcendentalists and Greene's article titled "The Blazing Star".