The person has already accepted it as a personal problem, shaming makes no difference (or only motivates), because the person is already ashamed and using that shame to motivate change.EquALLity wrote:why would you condemn a person for that if that person is trying to fix the issue?
Shaming doesn't work for most people because they will rationalize and reject responsibility. For those who will accept it, it can. For others, the better approach is to identify the issue as a disease and say, "you are good, but your disease is bad and you need to be brave and face it".EquALLity wrote:When you say that it's 'accepting responsibility', it sounds like an implication that people who don't consider it apart of themselves are just pretending they are not responsible.
Either way, it's just a difference in outlook and mindset.
In that very line I did. You misunderstood me. I said it can be seen as a disease, OR a condition of chronic cowardice. These are two potentially equally valid perspectives.EquALLity wrote:Anxiety is the name of the disorder, and your response there was to my comment about anxiety specifically identifying it as a disorder.
You didn't say it was a matter of perspective anywhere in that post.
"Fault", and identity is largely a matter of perspective. It depends on whose perspective you agree with.EquALLity wrote:So you're saying that, even if people don't consider things apart of themselves, other people who say those things are apart of those people are just as right?
This contradicts the idea that people who have mental illnesses are not at fault.
If Bob says anxiety is a disease he has and isn't part of his personhood, then from Bob's perspective, this is not Bob's fault.
If John said Bob is full of it, and is just a coward, and that "anxiety" isn't a real disease and just means chronic cowardice and Bob is trying to offload responsibility based on a delusion.... then from John's perspective, it is Bob's fault (Bob is just in denial).
I'm more inclined to advocate for Bob's perspective, particularly for treatable conditions (when the person proves this is his or her perspective by actively treating them), because the only most objective determinate of who and what a person is at core is who and what that person says he or she is. Everybody else could have opinions on the subject ranging in severity between any extremes.
But, just an abstract philosophical notion of "fault" is of limited utility and doesn't mean much, since "you" itself is so indefinite.
That said, when we're talking about the utility of "fault" in [criminal] justice, the issue is very different: It was functionally your fault if most people would see it as your fault and if punishing you for it would deter others from acting in that way (consequentialism in punishment).
Please make sure to read that part of the deontology thread. This may be too off topic here.
Neutrality is a razor's edge. We talk about things like going to a movie instead of donating to charity as being morally neutral, but it's not necessarily that simple from every perspective of normalization (it's just a much easier shorthand that people can understand).EquALLity wrote:Or it could be neutral not to. I'm not saying that's true, but the opposites aren't the only options.
This could be a complicated discussion, and would be pretty off topic for this thread (which is already ridiculous ).
I don't think you understand.EquALLity wrote:And we can measure bravery/cowardice by whether or not your bravery is more significant than your cowardice.
If there are two people, and one person affects another person, that second person can say whether that was good, bad, or mostly neutral.
If there are two people, and one is brave or cowardly, there is no means by which to measure that directly since nobody's view on the matter is necessarily important, since bravery and cowardice in themselves as qualities don't directly affect people. You're not necessarily affecting others in a positive or negative way by being brave or cowardly.
Simply being cowardly, assuming you're never in a position where that cowardice will harm others, may not in itself be harmful.
Simply being brave, assuming the same, may not be helpful.
We can talk about virtue ethics all day, but it derives moral authority from the consequences of those virtues, and they aren't always relevant.
Being cowardly vs. brave may only be about as relevant as not being able to run as fast as another person, or not being as good at math in practice.
I think you're putting too much weight upon one single virtue.
A person could be cowardly, but still do more good than harm by working based on his or her abilities to do good, and avoiding situations in which his or her cowardice would pose as a liability.
That's all well and good, but I think you missed my point.EquALLity wrote:You had a metric before:
"Confessing, or giving up your friends, would be more cowardly than bearing the pain. It's a spectrum, or a ratio, that would take into consideration the degree of pain and fear, and the magnitude of the betrayal of your original will or duty."
At which point is cowardice and bravery precisely balanced? If one is negative and one is positive, where is zero?brimstoneSalad wrote:How exactly do you weigh those? Where's the balance point?
When we're dealing in something like good and bad, there's actually a razor's edge of a balance point (a few potential ones), where your actions are equivalent to having not existed by some form of normalization, or we can compare to amoral behavior based on some standard.
When we look at rationality, we can look at patterns of behavior and self-criticism (like comparing science to pseudoscience).
Looking at cowardice vs. bravery is a bit different from either of those.
By that logic, since no matter how strong you are, there will always be a rock too big for you to lift, then everybody is weak.EquALLity wrote:By what seems like your logic of doing one cowardly act makes you a coward, a person who gives information from torture is a coward. So by your logic everyone (because everyone would do that eventually) is a coward, and the word is completely meaningless.
Like physical strength, there are many ways we can potentially judge cowardice and bravery; one is against a standard (like an average).
If you're stronger/braver than X, then you're strong/brave. If you're weaker or more cowardly than X, then you're weak/cowardly.
Of course, that does make the word on its own less meaningful, since it has to be contextualized, but so does "tall" or "strong", and really, most other virtues and vices.
It shouldn't be ruled out. Not sure how this is relevant, though; in any case, fewer sample points will be less accurate than more. The spread of behavior, of course, varies by the trait you're looking at.EquALLity wrote:It *can*, but not necessarily.brimstoneSalad wrote:Yes, but one action can also reveal a tendency or habit that underlies that action. We are very often our habits.
For rationality, it just takes a small sample. For morality, it takes a very large one because our behaviors in that regard represent a huge mix (based on habit and culture). For cowardice, we might find occasional outliers in phobias, and then otherwise find that behavior is pretty consistent. So it would depend on what you're looking at. If we're talking about general anxiety, that would be a general trend (as opposed to just a single phobia), and require fewer sample points.
Science is about removing bias; teaching is not.EquALLity wrote: Religion isn't about removing your bias in the way that teaching is supposed to be.
This is why I talked about courts; that's one way to help remove bias from justice. Your example was a teacher acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Not conducive to controlling bias. Controlling for bias is very expensive and resource intensive.
They do need to set up a court if you want any hope of controlling for teacher bias.EquALLity wrote: What? I never said anything about trials.
"Excuse me, Kelly, what did you see Bill do to John?"
"Bill, what did you do?"
"John, what did he do?"
Nobody has to go to court for that.
This is why we do not administer justice like that in the real world.
Sources? I don't know what you mean by that. But bullying can be using physical or social power against somebody; it's easy enough to mob somebody and frame him or her based on a group's lie.EquALLity wrote: But in cases where it's pretty clear, like the kid being bullied has sources and stuff, it should be punished.
If any are ambiguous, you have problems with enforcement. Remember the psychology of random enforcement I talked about? It defeats the very important understanding of justice and cause and effect children need to develop.EquALLity wrote: It may sometimes be unambiguous, but I don't see reason to believe most forms of bullying are this way.
If you inconsistently or arbitrarily enforce rules, even with good intention, you may be doing more harm to the children by teaching them that authority isn't fair and that they might as well break the rules because it's just the bad luck of getting caught or blamed when innocent that matters. "If it's your day to get in trouble, you'll get in trouble, no matter what you do."
What if I'm joking? What if it's a friendly tease? What if you simply misheard what I said, and I said "that itch" in some context your misinterpreted?EquALLity wrote: Calling someone a 'fat bitch' is obviously an attack.
It wouldn't vary much with who you ask.
Have you ever supervised children? You can't tell. You have to guess. It's almost never obvious, and sometimes when it seems to be, you were wrong and you punished an innocent child.
I only agree that extreme cases of bullying are harmful for those particular children -- but only those children. On the whole, it may be more harmful to ALL children than helpful to the few to enforce rules against bullying.EquALLity wrote: You don't have evidence for this, and the evidence available contradicts it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying# ... evelopment
There's a lot of argument about the positive development that comes from bullying (moderate bullying, at least).
And again, the burden of proof isn't on me. I'm saying we don't need to spend resources on this; leave it as it is. You're advocating resource expenditure -- acting against normal social equilibrium.
The resources required to implement these policies. Class time, student time, teacher time, salary, school property, infrastructure, repairs. Nothing is free when done during school, or on school premises.EquALLity wrote: What resources?
If you don't consistently punish, it doesn't deter behavior well. Random punishment gives people the impression that punishment is random, and defeats the sense of cause and effect that we need to instill.EquALLity wrote: Why would that make it useless?
Random punishment, even for bad things, could even be much more harmful for those reasons.
It allows people to move around in online communities if they are being bothered without being followed and harassed. It limits the social function of the internet for people one knows in person, but that's a small price to pay. Bullying proper (rather than just conflict) requires an imbalance of power, and online anonymously can easily shift this by changing environments.EquALLity wrote:Not necessarily.brimstoneSalad wrote:Anonymity is fine for that.
Irrelevant. The issue is how this affects human psychology. People equate low probability of punishment with virtually none, and focus more on avoiding being caught than on not doing the acts. You are teaching children to be more effective criminals, and teaching them the psychology of criminals when you show them that authority is not consistent or fair.EquALLity wrote:Why would it not be useful when it's less consistent?
It might be less useful, but the threat of getting in trouble remains.
This is a huge misconception.EquALLity wrote:Innocent people might be punished occasionally, but it wouldn't happen that much where it'd outweigh the good done from people being punished rightfully.
Have you ever been punished unjustly for something you didn't do?
This fosters a mindset of "fuck authority, I'm going to get in trouble anyway". It gives children the sense -- which becomes the criminal mentality in adulthood -- that crime and punishment are not causally related. You'll be randomly punished or not whether you do crimes or not.
This is one of the worst things you could possibly do to children during their development. Probably worse than beating them when you get drunk. Worse than neglect. Children need, above all else, structure and fair rules that teach them causality so they can be civil and follow rules as adults.
My experience supports the random punishment hypothesis -- I just happen to be smart enough to understand that's not true. In retrospect, I can remember that I was punished unjustly about as often as I was punished justly, and I can also remember only a few times other peers were punished when they should have been in conflicts (the vast majority of times they got away with it, because it was random), and almost as many times them being punished when they did virtually nothing.
Most children coming out of that kind of experience aren't able to reason that school is a particularly bad environment for rule enforcement, since the rules they try to enforce are impossibly strict and there aren't enough resources to do so.
Your cost-benefit analysis is skewed to a great degree because you've failed to consider the immense and long-lasting harm it does to punish a child unjustly. An hour of detention is nothing -- teaching them for a lifetime that authority is unfair and punishment is arbitrary and not associated with breaking the rules does profound harm to society.
One in a hundred, or even one in a thousand misdiagnoses of bullying and punishment because of it is unacceptable. All the supposed good you do in preventing bullying (and I don't believe it does any good, because I don't believe it prevents it in a cost effective way, and I don't believe that moderate bullying is a net harm anyway) is vastly outweighed by the harm done in teaching children that actions have no consequences and punishment is a random affair.
If you're going to enforce any kind of rule, you need to do it with laser precision, 99.9% of rule breaking must be promptly caught and dealt with, with a false positive so low (and without bias) that even children will not get the wrong idea from it.
The resources to do that are not available, and falling short of that is probably only harmful.
Take a guess, in dollars, what that costs. Hint: It's in the thousands of dollars range.EquALLity wrote:The cost could be an easy informational assembly with a power-point, and the benefit would be less bullying.
This is an over-simplification, and not very accurate. Is this what they have taught in the bullying lessons? It's kind of wrong. Rhetoric, most likely.EquALLity wrote:I think you do, for most bullies. They want to bully to put other people down so that they feel better about themselves. It doesn't matter what they use to put a person down, so long as they have something.
Children bully to fit in, and groups bully for entertainment. A more engaging school environment is more likely to reduce bullying than a boring school environment where you've told them not to or else.
Children also bully when they form adversarial relationships and a power difference develops, usually from friendships that have fallen out. These cases need counseling between the pairs or groups to discuss their differences, and settle the feuds.
Other children, who are abused, may bully because that's how they've been taught to behave. This is an issue of home life, and needs to be handled by social services.
It's a start, but it's a very poorly done study, with very poor reported metrics. This kind of stuff needs to be vastly improved before we can see what's cost effective.EquALLity wrote: Well, I found this: https://www.bullyfree.com/school-progra ... eness-data
Again, you can't necessarily tell the difference.EquALLity wrote:It becomes shaming when it becomes a personal insult as opposed to critiquing a behavior.
Many times, yes.EquALLity wrote:Are they actually using ten times the resources of the average person?
They aren't. You don't get that fat eating beans. Anyway, no, I don't think wasteful purchases are useful.EquALLity wrote:Also, if you spend a lot of money on food that are better for the environment, would that be a good thing, because it would cause people to be more likely to invest in those foods instead of animal products?
When you reduce deviation in the extreme outliers (the ones most at risk for suicide), the bullying gets distributed better and becomes much less harmful (and more mutual, and no longer bullying when there's a more equitable power level -- it's the extreme one-sided bullying that's most harmful, not the little back and forth quarrels). It will often form more between groups, or just in feuds, which should be addressed differently.EquALLity wrote:There are always going to be kids who are the most 'weird' or 'ugly'. I'm not sure what your point is.
For one good example, look at how school uniforms reduce bullying (over differences in clothing or fashion, or lack thereof).
If you have a kid with really bad acne, that kid needs medication -- the whole school doesn't need an anti-bullying program. You have a kid with a lisp? Speech therapy. Huge nose? Nose job.
All of these are both longer lasting and cheaper solutions to extreme cases of bullying, and things which improve self esteem much more than coddling.
Take some time to look at the kids in your class who may be targets of bullying, and itemize why. Look at the costs of addressing these issues directly to cut the bullying off at its source; the social power difference.
Because a better solution for everybody might be weight loss.EquALLity wrote:I don't see why it matters why it's aesthetic.
It's a smoking gun that proves the actions.EquALLity wrote:It shouldn't be obesity shaming, though. It should be against the actions, not the result of them. Being obese isn't inherently unethical; it's the actions that lead to it that are.
As a social experiment, try going around and telling obese people that. See how long it takes for you to be branded a bully and fat shamer.EquALLity wrote:If you say, "It's wasteful for you to consume that much food, because you don't need it, and it's harmful to the planet", then that's fine, and it's not obesity shaming.
You won't like the results, but you'll learn what I mean by anti-bullying bullies.
I feel like you may just not have experienced it. Try the above experiment.EquALLity wrote:It doesn't create that effect at all in my school.
That's not a chilling atmosphere, it's an atmosphere of terror. Chilling is something else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effectEquALLity wrote:It creates a chilling atmosphere in that it makes people afraid to be bullied, and in that it makes those who are bullied afraid to go to school.
However, that only exists for some students, and there are better ways to address this than trying to tackle the symptom of the problem (which we do not have the resources for).
Apparently as important as Intelligent Design, as a matter of dogma, since they aren't even teaching it properly.EquALLity wrote:Yes, but bullying is an important topic.
If they want to teach legitimate psychology, that may have value in itself. But a bunch of PSA rhetoric is something I can't really agree with wasting education resources on.
Being a Muslim is a choice, like being a card carrying member of the KKK. Do you agree that it's equally bigoted to discriminate against the latter?EquALLity wrote:They're a religious group, yes, and it's bigoted to be discriminatory towards them.
You can't refuse to serve them if they come into your store -- neither of them -- but there are still plenty of things we can and should have leeway to discriminate on without being branded as haters and have all of our arguments misrepresented or ignored.
Is there evidence that he's a racist?EquALLity wrote:When have they been politically correct? They refuse to even call Donald Trump racist.
What do you define as bullying that you think you can find somebody who can honestly claim to have never experienced an iota of it in his or her life?EquALLity wrote:It is a reality. Not everyone is bullied.
We all run into bullies now and then, and we've probably all been guilty of doing a little bullying. It's a spectrum, and while it's usually habitual, it doesn't have to be, The only requirement is a perceived power difference (although you don't seem to have been suggesting that).wikipedia wrote:Bullying is the use of force, threat, or coercion to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively dominate others. The behavior is often repeated and habitual. One essential prerequisite is the perception, by the bully or by others, of an imbalance of social or physical power, which distinguishes bullying from conflict.
What are you talking about?EquALLity wrote:There's a difference between one kid saying one comment and bullying.
One "fat bitch" doesn't count as bullying, but some arbitrarily high number of such events from the same person to the same person does?
Where do you get this from? That asshole is probably bullying.EquALLity wrote:Again, there's a difference between one asshole saying one thing and bullying.
No, not if they're socially despised ideas. Children in a predominately X area where X people despise Y religion will overwhelmingly opt not to adopt Y in adulthood, regardless of parents. Peers, not parents, have the most influence on ideology during childhood development.EquALLity wrote:The ideas won't go away on their own because people can't publicize them. People will pass them onto their kids etc..
It'll go extinct. Not really a concern from a dead ideology.EquALLity wrote:And it'll create resentment.
Again, this can take years. And now religions are starting to isolate themselves on the internet too, into bubbles where they can't be bothered by reason.EquALLity wrote:They win on the Internet, where we have the free exchange of ideas.
How much suffering has to happen while we patiently wait for good arguments to slowly win out?
These situations are very rare. Overt physical assault I agreed on. For others, I think you vastly overestimate the ability and competence of teachers.EquALLity wrote:I agree that you can't totally stop bullying without stopping the free exchange of ideas in practice, but there are still many situations in which bullying can be stopped in practice without hurting the free exchange of ideas.