• bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.social
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      1 month ago

      You’re right, if we had an actual equitable society, technology would make our lives better rather than worse. Capitalism is the root of many of our problems, not technology itself, because the profit motive gives corporations all sorts of adverse incentives. If we optimized for human happiness and quality of life instead of profits we’d have a far better world.

      • Silver Needle@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        If we optimized for human happiness and quality of life instead of profits we’d have a far better world

        Let’s respectfully leave the moralism in the church. We wouldn’t have a “better” world, whatever good and better are, we would have a world (an abstraction, I prefer the term “set of social relations”) that is in the interest of all that work, will work, and have worked to sustain reproduction of life, i.e. worked to continue to live.

        • bearboiblake [he/him]@pawb.social
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          1 month ago

          I’m not moralizing, I am talking about an improvement to material conditions, in real terms. We all know what the word “better” means, why the fuck would we not advocate for improvements to our quality of life? Why would you ever want to yield discussions of that topic to organized religions?

          • Silver Needle@lemmy.ca
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            1 month ago

            It is exactly so that everyone does not know what “better” and “improvement” means. Someone who is of a more libertarian persuasion because they got lucky with Bitcoin might see talk about improvements and betterment that entails it being impossible to own a private recreational nuke as being inconsistent. Betterment in your case can mean that a small business owner has his property forcibly converted into communally operated MoP. Those that enforce change in their interest might see their concept of humanity warped beyond recognition in a most certainly traumatic process of historical necessity. It’s kind of like saying the immune system is a good thing, for the viruses it’s not and autoimmune reactions are a huge complication to the lives of organisms with immune systems.

            With good and bad any further explication stops. Something is good. Okay. Why is it good? Because it is good. It nearly always plays out circularly like this, except if there is a scientific process of criticism that spawns from this line of questioning. The latter almost never occurs. All of morality, and much of ethics is circular.