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UT: Cisgender Student Under Police Protection as Trans Panic Rages On
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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Ironically the religious view that evil exists in certain types of people is something that I've recently adopted.
Really? Over the last decade or so I've moved more towards a material conditions view, where material conditions is inclusive of neurotype - some people are naturally high anxiety, low openness, high purity sense, and high traditionalism, and that's not something they have direct control over - and even if they did, they wouldn't have control over the algorithm that drives them towards a given set of values for those parameters, and even if they did, they wouldn't have control over the algorithm that decides which algorithm to use for deciding which algorithm to use for deciding those values, ad infinitum. The buck grounds out in things outside our control.
I've never seen this line of thinking as useful. For practical things-- the actions you take and the beliefs you express-- their effect is not connected to whether you're a conscious, free-willed entity, or whether you're a collection of chemical and physical processes that emulates the first option.
It's the same argument as "I have no free will, so it's not my fault I'm committing this crime." Ok, well then it's also not my fault that I'm arresting you.
In short, just because you can explain why a certain action is taken, that doesn't mean that the action is justified.
I would suggest that on the contrary, it suggests a useful point of intervention. A great deal of crime descends from poverty. If you don't like crime, you could focus on it being about the individuals committing the crime, or you could focus on fixing the poverty. Doing the former has gotten us the highest proportion of our population in prison in the world, higher than any police state that I am aware of.
If you're using it to diagnose or study and not to justify then yes it's an excellent tool.
I think of myself as a consequentialist. I care about outcomes, and having an understanding of the inputs and the function gives you much better control over the outputs.