That’s actually pretty unusual in the big picture. I’m guessing you’re North American, maybe European? In east Asia, no such thing ever happened, and even in the West, historically (pre-WWII) immigration and free markets were championed by the liberal parties. Ditto from what I know of conservatism in other regions.

Nationalism and communism have had pretty heavy overlap over the years, even if it didn’t start that way. If you accept conservative communism as being a thing, sure, I guess you could argue that.

I mean, it’s more nationalism. Not all conservatisms have been nationalist, and not all nationalism is conservative.

What are the implications of an actor being bad? There’s a reason we designated them. What for?

That’s kind of an interesting question. I think in this specific context, there’s just a social consensus that you don’t want to be bad, and the conversation was about why some people are anyway. On Lemmy, there’s not much we can do beyond discuss, and I’m putting this first because it’s important to remember that.

You don’t necessarily have to decide a person is bad, to decide an act is.

In real life, you have legal systems which try to achieve moral goals through rules and force. In that context, it becomes a matter of incentivising and supporting good behavior (respectively called deterrence and rehabilitation in penology), and of incapacitating people who are unavoidably bad and dangerous. Retribution for it’s own sake is also often cited, although that one is it’s own philosophical sticky wicket.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting that ideologically driven governments are a fairly recent development. There were pre-modern historical rulers that toyed with it a bit, going all the way back to Hammurabi, but largely states were brutal, blindly self-perpetuating structures. They were seen by their subjects as inevitable or divinely mandated more than as a social good)

Does this imply that human consensus drives the goodness / badness of an action and therefore the goodness / badness of the actor that brought about that action?

So, there’s the “is-ought” question that comes up here. There’s a strong argument that morality is relative, and only exists in the eye of the beholder.

Because Lemmy is for discussion, I default to the consensus. If there were non-humans capable of contributing to the discussion, I couldn’t necessarily rely on that. Ditto for the many contested edge cases that are out there. You can still talk about logical self-consistency without getting on anyone’s bandwagon, though.

Off what hook? What would being on the hook be for someone?

Off the hook of having to worry about if you’re a good person on the right side of things (by whatever standard). When people dualistically sort the world into good and bad people like that, an excuse to do whatever they want is always the goal. So, I felt the need to challenge it.

I would toss bad shoes. But also I know shoes don’t think about being tossed. I guess I could extend an earlier thought and say we do whatever the consensus is to that actor. That way we maximize goodness. Though I think leaving it at that would allow us to justify some radical things.

Radical things aren’t necessarily bad. A lot of what we like about present society was once very radical.

That being said, some kind of massive violent purge isn’t a new idea, and there’s a lot of ways it’s been shown to immediately backfire. If you just mean capital punishment for some small set of egregious deviants, that’s law in quite a few places already.

Yep. The whole idea of unbreakable marriages, and of being chaste outside of them, almost certainly comes from there being no contraceptives until recently. Although, it gets more complicated when you consider extended families used to play a big role in raising children as well.

I mean some ethics frameworks are quite incompatible.

Yes, I just meant I don’t have much to add that hasn’t been said already. I lean pretty consequentialist, if that’s relevant.

I guess I should say I don’t really believe in judging people either, per se. OP said the world is 1/3 assholes, which implies 2/3 are off the hook. 2/3 are not off the hook, pretty much everyone is part of one problem or another, and should do better (but won’t).

Doing something you consciously know will bring harm to others.

Drop “consciously know”. People who can rationalise things really well are common, and I wouldn’t distinguish in any sense between a bad pair of shoes and a bad person. Both are obstacles to the world being how I (and most people) think the world should be.

I guess I will include local causality, as a sort of distinction between internal and external. A human being as a subsystem can’t respond to information it doesn’t have as input. That goes for a computer or ordinary rock too.

It really is hard; I can even think of laws passed this century that turned out to have loopholes. (And FWIW policy writing is a separate discipline)

Even the most basic laws can have surprising nuances in order to make them specific enough to enforce, as well. I recall a case of a person who tried shoplifting a coat that was chained to the mannequin, and got caught when it went taught. They got off because while they had left the store without paying, being permanently chained to something meant they weren’t technically in possession of the coat.

Carbon taxes still allow you to waste as much energy as you want. It just makes it more expensive. The objective is to put a limit on how much they are allowed to waste.

So per person carbon rationing, maybe? During WWII they did something similar with food; you had to pay both cash and ration tokens to buy groceries or visit a restaurant.

Rationing is fairly out of style because it’s inflexible, though. There’s going to be certain people that have a very legitimate reason to pollute more, and a soft incentive in the form of price allows them to do that if absolutely necessary.

Ah, so we’re just brainstorming.

It’s hard to nail down “no working around it” in a court of law. I’d recommend carbon taxes if you want to incentivise saving energy with policy. Cap and trade is also seen as a gold standard option.

I mean, there’s all kinds of ethical philosophy out there. I don’t really deviate too far from it.

In practice, there’s a lot that most people can agree on without too much thought, too. For example, the classical case study for how being agreeable can work against doing the right thing is how ordinary and nice a lot of Nazis were, when not being ordered into atrocities.

I’d actually go way higher. The ones that seem nice are the easiest to externally pressure into doing bad things, which counts as being a bad person.

Out of curiosity, how would you define a product for that purpose? It’s pretty easy to tweak a few weights slightly.

IIRC it’s like a half or a third of the population that cheats, when research has been conducted. So, it’s normal in the sense of common. But, like others have said, your reunion people sound like were trying to convince themselves it’s normal in the sense of acceptable. And anecdotally it does tend to be the same people over and over again.

Polyamory is also getting mentioned, but that’s a different thing, and poly people are a couple percent of the population at most with far fewer actually living the lifestyle.

It’s not the standard approach, but there’s definitely examples. The trick being that swans have secret affairs fairly frequently as well.

That being said, it sounds like you’re talking about being poly, and as far as I can tell most philanderers just aren’t. They cheat but don’t want to be cheated on.