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This is a common confusion. My argument is with profits and not with human nature because human nature is malleable. People can change their eating habits, they
by poetically 5y ago
This is a common confusion. My argument is with profits and not with human nature because human nature is malleable. People can change their eating habits, they can change their transportation habits, they can change institutional arrangements that favor profits over well-being, they can change the forms of market transactions they find valuable.
This isn't anything deep. These are just basic facts.
- AbrahamParangi 5y agoSo you believe that you have a way of changing the nature of humanity? This seems like the big claim, rather than the small one.
- poetically 5y agoRead what I said instead of projecting what you think I said. I did not say anything about changing human nature.
- someguydave 5y agoyou wrote “human nature is malleable”
- poetically 5y agoThat's a fact. If you were born somewhere else you would be an entirely different person. You'd be speaking a different language, you'd be involved in different social arrangements and institutions, and you'd think the axioms of your reality were entirely different.
- someguydave 5y agoWhere is your evidence for that claim?
- poetically 5y agoThat you'd be an entirely different person in another time and place? That's pretty obvious to anyone that has traveled anywhere other than the place they were born.
- someguydave 5y agoNot at all. For instance, identical twins raised apart have remarkably similar IQ test results, personalities, and habits.
- dvtrn 5y agoSaying "I believe humans have the capacity to change certain habits" isn't close the same thing as saying "I have the means to make people change".
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoSo you don't have a solution?
- dvtrn 5y agoI'm afraid not. The brevity of my prior statements was never a suggestion that I had one, so if that's where the confusion you have is coming from, my bad.
- mlyle 5y agoGrandparent said. > > Money is the medium of transaction of human needs and desires. Profit causes global warming only in so much as it fulfills human needs and desires for light, heat, transportation, industry, and energy in general. Vs. > My argument is with profits and not with human nature because human nature is malleable. People can change their eating habits, they can change their transportation habits To the extent that people change to not demand things that cause global warming, providers of such things will not be rewarded with profits. So, I don't understand the gymnastics to point at a "profit" motive rather than intrinsic motivations from this "human nature".
- poetically 5y agoWhat exactly in human nature requires profit?
- mlyle 5y agoNo one has said human nature requires profit. You made the claim that profit motive, and not human nature was behind all these ills; others claim that those ills being profitable just represents human nature.
- nawgz 5y ago> I don’t understand the gymnastics 100 corporations produce 70% of the pollution, this is the common mantra right? I don’t think there’s any gymnastics here. It’s clear that the unchecked power of corporations - structures entirely dedicated to profit - has lead to unchecked damages against the environment as single men are enabled to take terrible actions and then hide (legally speaking) behind the amorphous profit entity. Perhaps this is “human nature” in as much as the nature of the most depraved of us is to destroy everything in pursuit of self interest, but it’s, philosophically speaking, an extremely weak and narrow-minded argument you make here to imply the modern man is to blame for the modern problems, and not those powerful in his society
- mlyle 5y ago> 100 corporations produce 70% of the pollution, this is the common mantra right? If you don't ascribe any of the pollution to the individuals and industries using their products, and only to the initial production, sure. E.g. if you blame the company making the gasoline and not the person burning it in their car. Or the company shipping goods to consumers, but not the consumer ordering and receiving them. I don't view this as a particularly useful way to view things, though. That is, capitalism is really efficient at delivering on what end-customers want. If that ends up being bad in some way, well-- the only solution is one of: * Convince people not to want the thing * Prevent the thing from causing the harm, by regulation or taxing the externality * Choose a less efficient economic system and hope that the problem goes away by being less efficient
- slibhb 5y agoFar from basic facts. Human nature changes on an evolutionary timescale but not otherwise. Cultures change rapidly but we don't change them.