Comments by "LS O\x27Brien" (@lsobrien) on "Would You Have Been a Nazi?" video.

Your emphasis on empathy being the basis of morality is important and well made. This is something the New Rationalists (read: New Charlatans), like Steven Pinker explicitly reject. It goes to show how too much time in the realm of thought experiments can severely lead someone astray. (So much so, that, in this case, the so-called classical liberals have completely lost their grounding in the tradition.)
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This is one of your best videos. By the way, there's a very fun article called Who Goes Nazi? by Dorothy Thompson in the Harpers archive. It was written when the Third Reich was very much alive, and Thompson assesses how different sorts of psychological profiles would respond to Nazi occupation.
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@thecolumbopause4961 Noticing the well-documented differences between treatment of in-group members and out-groups doesn't somehow invalidate empathy as a grounding for morality. Moral instincts can be turned to horrifying ends, absolutely - as can every conceivable human phenomenon or technology. Do you think morality must be ideal perfection? That's very much the problem with figures like Pinker. They do not take account of history and contingency - morality as it's actually existed: they've imagined a totally objective, rationalist, utilitarian morality, and anything, now or previously, that doesn't align, can be categorically dismissed.
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@tigerwolf2243 Peter Singer's idea of the "expanding circle" is about consciousness, not strictly empathy. Without grounding moral feelings, a basic consciousness of another's mind is a capacity shared by everyone from the Pope to serial killers. In fact the best manipulators have a phenomenal awareness of the consciousnesses found in others: all the best to use them. Although I must admit, Pinker has talked up the benefits of empathy: when it allows him to ingratiate himself with the cultural elite. He has argued, for example, that literary exercises in empathy-building has contributed to "human progress". A teleological form of thinking best left for the children.
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@tigerwolf2243 Pinker has a whole sub-chapter where he explains why he considers empathy overrated. If you have the book it's around page 350. You appear to have misunderstood my point re: progress. I was referring to his broader, liberal, "humanistic" teleological, stage-understanding of history (or History). In other words everything good that has occurred is a feature of our "Western Civilization," - it's very form, as Wittgenstein criticised. Everything bad that has happened can be considered an aberration, a rejection of that ideal civilisation. His Enlightenment Now expounds this view directly. It's a childish way of looking at the world, and I'm still amazed that anyone above the "age of reason" still hasn't seen through him.
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@tigerwolf2243 I do, and yes, you're right, it is a common framework people adopt. But if Pinker read literally past the first sentence (which he quotes) of Dialectic of Enlightenment, and beyond the spark notes of Bauman's work, he would realise things are more complicated than Progress = good. If you're interested in that idea, I really recommend the work of Adorno/Horkheimer and Zygmunt Bauman. Other than this channel's vids, I wrote about them through the links in my bio.
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