Dan Kim

Thanks for the kind words, anon. ;w;

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Hard to say -- I've met absolutely brilliant people who find it utterly impossible to get the words to hook up in the right way to allow outsiders access to their thoughts, but it may be an actual incompatibility between their thoughts and nature of our everyday langauge (most of these folks were highly skilled programmers and program ideas/concepts/structures don't naturally lend themselves to precise description in normal language). So I think, first off, you ought to have reasonable expectations depending on the things you want to talk about.

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Besides that, I think getting about with your words is like getting about with any other set of tools -- you keep using 'em and paying attention to the results of their transactions with the world under various conditions. Sometimes you can set up special circumstances where you can deploy a very precise range of abilities under controlled conditions to gain a finer appreciation of what kind of sentences commit you to what (e.g. using special legal language in legal settings) but that may not help you at all in other settings -- you may become overspecialized and even try to use those special tools where they don't do that much good simply because it's what you're used to... (e.g. using legaleese in everyday life might be as unhelpful as using a surgeon's scalpel to carefully dissect your dinner).

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Some rough tips, not to be taken /too/ seriously: I think reading old books may help. Reading "dry" documents that trade in subtle distinctions and precise relations (supreme court opinions, philosophical papers, business contracts, etc.), may help. A lot of things might help -- just talking to lots of different folks and seeing what really matters to them and why might help. Trying to be honest and avoiding the temptation to engage in rhetorical judo helps, too, I think.

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Hmm.. there are probably some standard books or guides to help folks about this sort of thing. I'm sure some anon will reply with suggestions. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful! ;w;

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I honestly don't care about this issue. The idea that fictional works -- that is, packages of poetic lies -- should be used as a source of knowledge about the world is frankly bizarre. Just think about it: if two people disagree about whether an artistic work represents the facts (moral or otherwise) accurately, where do they go? They go to the facts. They go to reason and arguments. So cut out the middleman -- go straight to the facts, reasons and arguments! What we should do is de-emphasize the importance of the arts as a source of moral instruction and views about the world. You want to know about the world? Read non-fiction, philosophy, economics, history, physics, etc. and talk with about people about their actual needs and desires in their own vocabulary.

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Furthermore, I think that race/class/gender are not natural categories and deserve no special consideration above other categories. In fact, those terms don't even really mean what they purport to mean -- look at how the terms are used (e.g. terms like "people of colour") and you'll see that what folks are really talking about is much narrower: the legacy of american slavery, the plight of some blacks and hispanics in America, and what the folks in the humanities departments think they can do with leftover theoretical tools of marxism to "help" the situation. But there's a lot more suffering in the world than that, and we need different tools for different jobs and these jobs and tools may not be compatible with each other. You'll notice that there are no Homelessness Studies, Sick Kids Studies, Solider Studies, Elderly Studies, etc. because they are not marginalized classes in the relevant sense. These blind spots are themselves due to certain historical legacies and structural limitations in the university system in America -- that is, they don't fit into a story about one class oppressing another and you can't write a paper on that and expect tenure. We should not allow ourselves to think that academy's intellectual fashions should be a guide (or the only guide, anyway) to doing good in the world. We should take this race/gender/class talk for what it is: it's what you get when a bunch of folks who believe in the power of fiction try to create a structured interpretation of the world out of the west's intellectual baggage without using science or math. It has its uses, but where it's not useful we should feel free to discard it.

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As for your actual question, do what you think is important! If you want things to be accurate, research diligently. If you want artistry, you may have to make compromises to accuracy. It's all trade-offs.

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I'll do you one better -- under any set of conditions that attacking a man first would be justified, attacking a woman first would also be justified. Of course, we have a strong genetic predisposition to find the screams of babies, children and women more horrific, and any actual policy has to take the actual conditions, constraints (some of these are very serious biological constraints), and desires of the population into account or risk introducing serious deformations and instabilities.

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For example, our love of cake is absolutely a the result of mismatch between our biological urges and modern condition. We would be better off if we didn't find it so tasty. There is every argument not to eat it. But you can't make a cake taste bad by argument, and so long as it continues to taste good it has a value that has to be accounted for. Any attempt to overconstrain and overregulate our consumption of cakes will quickly lead to black markets, anger, misery, self-appointed cakepolice and cakeinquisitors and cakepriests who will ride the moral high ground to higher status, etc. It seems to me that for similar reasons the elimination of so-called double standards may come with costs so serious that most of us will be unwilling to pay them.

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What I'm getting at, anon, is the unpleasant idea that the rationality, self consistency, and universality of a moral theory may NOT a property of the moral theory that would be best for us. It may even be that the idea of moral theories being a THING that people HAVE or OUGHT TO USE simply has to go out the window in any situation outside of a seminar. It may be that all all we have is a pool of competing animal desires and moral memes which fight like bacterial strains for a larger share of an ever-changing cesspool. It may even be that a "healthy" cesspool requires constantly fighting strains. If that's the case, all we can hope for are temporary equilibriums in that cesspool and then negotiate, manage, compromise, make trade-offs, and then create temporary local piecemeal resolutions given the current situation. The best that any moral theory or moral vocabulary could hope to help us do is give us a some tools with which to do our animal business, and that they ought to be used or discarded on the basis of that and not "justifiability".

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If that's the view, then what I personally believe is justified isn't important -- what's important are the tradeoffs available and the limits of popular opinion. And I don't think popular opinion will make it okay for men to treat women as the same as men and hit them first (not any time soon, anyway).

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As for your original question, I think popular opinion may be changing. I saw this clip from The View:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlQV9MySDH8

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