this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
444 points (96.6% liked)
Not The Onion
12736 readers
1618 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
An act being seen as virtuous doesn't mean it actually is. Or it could be only a little virtuous, but outweighed by how smug and obnoxious someone is being about it.
It being seen as virtuous gives more credibility than an individual opinion, so yeah.
"gives more credibility"? Think about what consensuses various cultures through history and currently have arrived at about what is the right thing to do and who is worthy of admiration. Someone who assumes conformity = virtue would end up being pro slavery in most of those, public opinion on morality is wrong most of the time about most things, and pursuing it isn't the right thing to do at all, let alone the same thing as actually trying to be virtuous.
I look at history and I see countless peoples of all ages helping each other get by while individual opinions of fucking despots and warlords fuck it up for the rest of us.
Those guys also have an outsized influence over what someone would have to do to be seen as virtuous. The guy being pelted with rotten vegetables and publicly executed for opposing them? Not seen as virtuous. The guy running a church that does some good things but in a way that reinforces their power? Seen as virtuous.
Even if people are overall good, that doesn't mean they can translate that into successfully coordinating to come to correct collective agreement about complicated problems and be immune to elaborate efforts to distort their beliefs in particular directions. If you think, here is what people are saying about what I should do, so that must be an accurate expression of their combined good intentions, well no, it isn't, because that isn't something that is easily achieved by default.