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Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 25th 2025 at 9:51:19 AM
"Liberty" has been said to represent the balance between individual personal freedom, and civil obligation. A "Liberty Curriculum" would be an interesting take on this problem. Just how does a good citizen balance their own self interest with their social responsibilities? I can imagine a class project centered around volunteer work.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.IMO Ethics courses should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. People should be taught to know what things like utilitarianism and deontological/consequentialist virtue are, but in such a way that they are still allowed to come to their own conclusions rather than the teacher establishing a clear right versus wrong. If the course is being taught correctly, students should be plenty able to figure out why things like fascism, murder, and treachery are immoral by their lonesome without a teacher needing to drum it into them.
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I haven't taken too many ethics courses but from what I have taken I suspect most are taught in this way, some may not be (bad professors exist everywhere of course) but I suspect it's less common then the alternative.
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To be fair, I'm pretty sure Alley Oop is just talking about the high-level ethical concepts. I don't think they're suggesting that we should have enforced neutrality everywhere.
@Redmess: Carrying on from US Politics.
The answer is, in my opinion, that if a fascist party can actually contest for power, that means that there's fascists in the country who are voting for it. Therefore, banning a party in a democracy won't solve the problem, because they'll found a new party, they'll hijack an existing party, or they'll start voting for parties that try to suck up their votes and out-right each other. For example, if we banned the US Republican Party, they'd just immediately swarm the Libertarian Party and turn it into Republican Party 2.0.
The only way to keep fascists out of the process, in a situation like this, would be to disenfranchise the voters in question. And if you have the power to do that to a substantial swathe of voters, then you've given up on democracy.
Edited by Ramidel on Jan 24th 2022 at 7:38:58 AM
That, plus the fact that the endpoint of your suggestion is either useless (see: Germany's BfV or will end in some form of Crushing the Populace.
I mean, in America, how the hell are you going to disenfranchise 74 million people? That's how many voted for putting children in cages, for mobbing Congress, for sabotaging our nation's democracy. People who are either literally addicted to hate, or who are enabling those who are for selfish reasons. Even if you can identify all of them, how can you say that this big of a segment of the population don't count, even if each of them deserves to be discounted, and still have a country afterwards?
"You cannot kill an idea." Sometimes, that's rather unfortunate as well as true.
Edited by Ramidel on Jan 25th 2022 at 12:09:26 AM
One could ban the openly fascist parties as well as attack outlets sympathetic to fascist beliefs to weaken it and its supporters to a point of irrelevance. The US was able to decimate influence of any communist parties or outlets to the point of irrelevance in its country without resorting to disenfranchisement of a section of voters wasn't it? If so, why couldn't the same be done for fascism?
Edited by xyzt on Jan 25th 2022 at 3:04:10 PM
I wouldn't say that the US "decimated" communist influence, so much as "the communists never had much influence in America to begin with." Which kinda emphasizes my point. Nearly half of America's voters support fascism, which is...a different beast.
Now, assuming you have the proper constitutional tools, penalizing hate speech may have more of an effect than party bans.
Edited by Ramidel on Jan 25th 2022 at 12:44:05 AM
Probably because the powers that be don't see fascism as an inherent threat to their own wealth and status as they do with communism.
In fact, fascism usually collaborates with pre-existing elites to seize and consolidate power.
Despite what people seem to believe, Hitler wasn't elected into power - he was propped up by Germany's conservative establishment and captains of industry.
Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jan 25th 2022 at 10:45:34 AM
We learn from history that we do not learn from historyIt is worth noting that the US never actually banned the Communist party, and, in fact, it still exists
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Yeah, I'm talking about neutrality with regard to teaching general concepts like Kantianism, mind/body dualism, the social contract, and so on. Naturally I'd expect any thorough ethics class to bring up the paradox of tolerating the intolerant at some point. Though I do believe that such a class should at least strive to avoid making definitive statements on ultra-specific ideologies like the validity of specific indigenous Native religious practices and such, as I think that far outstretches its bounds.
Like, there's a difference between going "here is a broad list of the various virtues and human rights which many societies including ours presume to be a basic guarantee, from which I will assign you an essay in which I want you to write out all the ways in which fascism is aggressivelyunvirtuous", and "the only righteous ideology is X and this is the list of tenets you should follow in order to be properly virtuous (most of which is probably the party line)".
An effective ethics class should be able to arm its students with information on why something is good or bad beyond just stating that it is, not rely on recitations of the Little Red Book which is presumed to be innately wise because the teacher said so or any of that hogwash that my parents had to go through.
Edited by AlleyOop on Jan 25th 2022 at 9:46:52 AM
This is the whole "tolerating the intolerant" thing all over again, then. Our very values demand that we support those who would destroy them.
Your values do, mine are more sensible.
Responding to the Paradox of Tolerance with "I choose mindless tolerance!" just shows that one missed the point.
It is worth noting that the US never actually banned the Communist party, and, in fact, it still exists.
And Russia still has opposition parties. Legal status means nothing in the face of repression.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jan 26th 2022 at 5:18:23 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangWe don't have to tolerate the intolerant, although one's response should be proportional to what was done. Someone who is "intolerant" in the form of trolling people for the lulz, or in the form of hate speech is one thing, actively contributing to a genocide is another. But that said, in general, tolerance is based on what I will call a "reciprocity of consideration"; you are a member of my moral community, and therefore deserving of being treated with respect, if I am a member of yours. For example, a Jew can accept the humanity of a Nazi and still remain a Jew, but a Nazi cannot accept the humanity of a Jew and still remain a Nazi. The two moral arguments are not symmetric, and the reciprocity of tolerance encourages us to treat the ideas and beliefs of Jews with greater respect than those of Nazi's. The same underlying idea can be applied to any community of belief.
Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 26th 2022 at 5:17:07 AM
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.@Fourthspartan: Reacting with intolerance without first checking to see if you have anything to be intolerant with isn't the solution either. (Also, really nice strawman there. I did not say I supported mindless tolerance.)
Like I said, unless you can identify and disenfranchise 74 million Americans without creating a dictatorship, you have to realize that those people aren't going anywhere and their values will be expressed in their votes. That doesn't mean to appease them (ideally, I favor a mixture of counterargument, deplatforming, social isolation, meeting illegal action with aggressive legal action, and waiting for the older reactionaries to die), but if you wanna punch Nazis, your fist will break before all their faces do.
Yeah, these quips about "tolerance of intolerance" tend to ignore that these people do exist and you need a way to coexist with them, and these quips do not work as a way to coexist with them. I chalk this up to the tendency of Internet activists to ignore/disregard practicality.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman![]()
I think that making openly fascist parties and outlets as well as open spouting of fascist hate speech illegal could also help a lot though, since even if the fascists try to latch onto other parties, those parties still have to refrain from openly espousing fascist views if doing so is illegal (and frankly present day fascists voters and outlets are not exactly masters of subtle styles of propaganda as far as I know), not to mention said fascist voters would then still have to share their influence with the non-fascist ones as well as not go too far with their displays of their ideals, meaning their influence won't be on the same level compared to if they had openly fascist parties and outlets to support as far as I understand. And these steps don't risk disenfranchising one's voters or going into a straight up dictatorship.
Edited by xyzt on Jan 27th 2022 at 4:20:57 PM

Hell, my parents said that when they were in school, they learned how to throw hand grenades in gym class. I think there could be a better way to teach children to become better students.
To be fair, given the very real possibility of invasion in the past training citizens early on for combat is rather sensible.
That's not to say that your overall criticism is baseless but grenade training is rational given the context.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang