People who use the phrase "victim blaming" as a bad in and of itself (as you implied), rather than an instrumental bad because it will be perceived poorly, aren't pragmatic utilitarians or any kind of consequentialist. To make it clear you were coming from a pragmatic angle, you probably should have said, "We have to be careful not to be perceived as engaging in 'victim blaming' which could harm the endeavor", which I might partially agree with (if it were possible, I don't really think it is). The SJW movement is dominated by deontologists fixated on -- of course -- "Justice" as the highest virtue and source of good in and of itself (without anything resembling a coherent definition).viddy9 wrote: Well, no. As Henry Sidgwick pointed out, a utilitarian should assess whether a person or an act is blameworthy when it is expedient to do so (without believing that there's anything that is intrinsically blameworthy).
I could agree that we need to be careful not to be perceived as "victim blaming" whatever that means, in the same way we need to avoid being perceived as "racists" despite race being an arbitrary social construct -- because people see those as negative, not because they are or because they even really exist, but it seems like an impossible endeavor if speaking the truth and using effective rhetoric.
I'm happy to "blame" the "victim" if it's the most useful to yield positive change and reduce harm. And I have been led to believe it is. The distinction we have to make is the difference in instrumentality in terms of public perception and support.
Backlash against SJW culture and political correctness gone wild is growing. Trump is symptomatic of that, but there are also more rational proponents growing on the true left.viddy9 wrote:if the utilitarian wants them to stop being discussed, they're going to have to recognise that the status quo - one side calling the other "gross" and "racist", and the other saying "stop complaining stupid SJWs" - is going to get us nowhere.
Is a rational dialogue more useful than negation and a rhetoric based culture war that amounts to a shouting match? Yes, but only if it's practicable to engage such a dialogue.
The regressive intersectionalists are conspiracy theorists, and they are not amendable to rational argument because they form echo chambers and dismiss dissenting opinions and arguments as "racist" or "gross" or "victim blaming" rather than considering them. They're bullies, and they don't engage honestly in debate. And that goes even for VERY mildly worded and polite arguments that make every attempt to offer disclaimers. It's harder to be more civil than Sam Harris, for example.
The SJW/regressive behavior of late has been worse than the young Earth creationists; the only comparable ideology is the presuppositionalism of Sye Ten -- he won't even have a discussion about the details of his god until somebody agrees a god exists, and his only argument is that his god is the source of all knowledge and reason, so if you have a discussion it's founded on the hidden assumption that a god exists according to him; even an atheist must accept this in order to form a word of argument.
Watch this to get a sense of how futile such a conversation is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL8LREmbDi0
When rational discourse breaks down, something else takes over, and that's where we are.
Like presuppositionalism, intersectionalism probably just has to be crushed through insult and ridicule by as many people as possible to destroy it.
If you think you have an avenue by which to reason people out of these positions, I'm totally open to it. But without evidence of it being effective, it's not useful to say the shouting match will get is nowhere -- it's all we have.
We should address what can actually be fixed most easily, which usually means traveling down the chain of cause and effect until you reach the Earth it's anchored to, then backing up and looking for the first link we can actually break.viddy9 wrote:You say that we should get at the root of the problem: surely the root of the problem is that people are predisposed to become prejudiced and defensive (both in general, and when others are complaining about their situation).
How about focusing on the lack of evidence, and telling them to put up evidence? If they can and do that, they may actually do something useful and identify something which is actually evidenced to be a problem, then we can look at solutions. That would mean they have to understand what evidence is, though, which they do not.viddy9 wrote:At the same time, without acknowledging that what racists are doing is wrong, I doubt we're going to get people to stop complaining.
We can deflect the conversation. We can probably even shout over it. Maybe we just need to advance these true facts that people are currently shouting down as racist instead of considering. And we should keep shouting them until society is desensitized to them and accepts them as facts rather than racism -- then we can start talking about solutions. Being unavoidably perceived as victim blamers and racists by the SJW extremists may just be a burden truth speakers have to bear until society is desensitized.
I don't just say to stop complaining; I focus on the arguments that say the thing people are complaining about isn't true. Even if that means shifting the "blame" to the "victims" because it's effective to change the currently not very productive discourse. Or I just ignore it, because it's not my battle.viddy9 wrote:I just said "we" as in people making this argument "have to be careful" that we clearly do signal this, and don't fall into the trap of merely saying "stop complaining".
I don't see the instrumentality in that. It should be obvious that pretty much everybody is doing so. It's made obvious by the vast majority of people talking about these issues, and the SJWs ignore it and slander them anyway. Sure, we can add a few words of disclaimer (that will be ignored), but people already do this, signaling that they aren't racists, and that real racism is bad, BUT...viddy9 wrote:In other words, for instrumental reasons, we do have to signal that we're assigning some blame to racists, not just the victims (by any conceivable definition of the word, people at the receiving end of racism are victims.)