Beefing With Bismarck

Walt Bismarck is too prone to edgelordism and not sufficiently serious. Also, here I explain why I am a Democrat.

0 Introduction

Walt Bismarck is a substacker, former member of the alt-right, and podcaster. I’ve been on his podcast before. I enjoyed it, he seems like a nice guy. That said, I’ve begun to follow him more and more, and gotten increasingly annoyed. I think he’s wrong about lots of things, so I decided to write a long post explaining why—see here for me arguing with Walt about these criticisms.

I don’t intend this as a takedown piece. I’ve had, as I said, friendly interactions with Bismarck and find him to often be interesting. I assume Bismarck will respond to this. As a result, I expect this to be a helpful endeavor—if anyone wants to write a long post explaining where I go wrong, be my guest.

1 Moral confusion

I wrote a post a while ago about slave morality and why it’s a dumb phrase. Those who chide others for their slave morality are just advocating not caring about morality. Not caring about the vulnerable and weak makes you a jerk, and it’s not a sign of any great philosophical sophistication.

Bismarck wrote, in my view, a very confused response that strikes me as emblematic of his broader approach, similar to his response to me about animals. He begins his post by getting mad at someone holding a sign expressing disapproval of NASA for building space programs rather than feeding inner-city kids. Bismarck spends a lot of time expressing his outrage at that woman’s values. And then, bizarrely, he spends the rest of the post mostly criticizing me for criticizing others’ values. After quoting me saying you shouldn’t be a racist because skin color is obviously morally irrelevant, Bismarck says:

Don’t matter to whom, BB? Analytic philosophy professors? Liberal college students?

These things which “obviously don’t matter” to you obviously do matter quite a bit to the Hutu and the Tutsi, or to the perpetrators of farm murders in South Africa, or to Knockout Game enthusiasts. Race is an enormously impactful fact of life even in most American cities, let alone the broader world.

These things likewise matter to the numerous scholars of human biodiversity, who catalog politically or socially salient physiological and psychological differences between human subgroups, despite the considerable risk of professional censure (observe the case of Nathan Cofnas) or severe social ostracism this brings.

But you do not even bother making an argument for your position here—you are churlishly relying on the low social prestige of “racism” to simply position it as some exaggerated and unthinkable counterexample to your overall point.

And this is precisely why I don’t take Analytic Philosophy seriously anymore. Back when I majored in it a little over a decade ago, all my professors would do irritating shit exactly like this—basically assume that the tenets of their liberal worldview are true, and then boisterously assert the self-evidence of these tenets using the covert ad baculum of institutional power / social prestige / status bullying.

Now, Bismarck is not advocating for racism. Rather, his point is that you pick your values and we can’t use reason to decide upon them. But then why does he spend the first part of the article criticizing someone else’s values? If values are beyond rational criticism, what’s he doing? Emoting?

This is one big problem I have with Bismarck: I get the sense that he’s just sort of an elaborate troll. Not in the sense that he’s unserious—he means what he says—but in the sense that his positions seem maximally geared to sound edgy. The edgier position is “people caring about welfare suck, and also Nietzsche is right about values,” so that’s the one he has. I don’t claim, of course, that he’s being deliberately dishonest, just that he allows himself to lean too much into trollishness and is consequently frequently unserious.

What’s wrong with appealing to the obvious irrationality of racism? Just as it would be irrational to judge someone based on whether they’re left-handed, it’s silly to judge someone based on their race. It involves caring about obviously unimportant things. This is, I think, the project of moral philosophy—showing that certain views imply other unsavory conclusions, like caring about obviously unimportant things.

Most people don’t think that race itself is morally relevant. Not even racists do. Few people think that if they themselves woke up with black skin, they’d suddenly begin mattering only half as much. Instead, people notice that race correlates with other things, and argue those other things are morally relevant. But that only justifies differences in treatment in regards to the other things, not race intrinsically.

Bismarck also made a bunch of statements about my view that are obvious egregious errors. For example, I argued that one has a moral obligation to donate to effective charities. This is, I claim, in line with Singer, analogous to saving a drowning child. Just as you’d be morally required to save a nearby drowning child, even if doing so would ruin your expensive suit, because you’d be able to save a life at minimal cost, you’d be morally required to donate to effective charities to save lives. The fact that the child is far away is obviously morally irrelevant—you’d still have an obligation to save very far-away children. In response to my claim that proximity doesn’t matter, Bismarck said (the quote of me is in double block quotes):

Singer’s argument shows that those who don’t care about obviously stupid things like how far away people are should care about faraway children dying of disease.

This is utterly laughable. I’m sorry BB, but proximity not being a salient moral factor is by no means obvious—I’d say quite the contrary is true, and 99% of people on the planet would find Singer’s rejection of moral proximity retarded and contemptible.

My family is more important than someone else’s family. My countrymen are more important than foreigners. My cat is more important than a chicken in a factory farm.

I said that how far away a person is isn’t morally relevant. Bismarck replies by saying that whether someone is a fellow countryman is morally important, as is whether someone is a family member. Question dear reader: are either of these the same things as how far away someone is?

If you could wade into a pond to press a button that would save a far-away drowning child, you’d obviously be required to, just as you’d be if they were nearer. This is so even if the person is a Haitian non-family member. So the same is true of one’s obligation to give to effective charities.

This is the core of Singer’s argument: that our decisions not to donate to effective charities are very much like a person’s decision not to wade into a pond to save a drowning child. In both cases, you can save a life at minimal personal cost. Any morally relevant difference can be added to the drowning child case, and it seems like one would still have an obligation to save the child. For example, if you argue the difference is less great because they’re not a member of your country, we can imagine that the drowning child is from some foreign country.

Second, Bismarck claims that he’s refuting me by saying “people don’t give a shit about kids in Africa dying in cobalt mines to make our iPhones, because out of sight is out of mind.” But this is obviously not a response to my argument. Even if people don’t practically act to stop bad things that are happening far away that are not salient, it’s obvious that salience isn’t morally relevant. If you could save a drowning child, the fact that they weren’t literally in front of you wouldn’t make a morally relevant difference.

Third, Bismarck says:

My own stance is predicated instead on the descriptive heuristic that any ethical system that in practice will never be adopted by a psychologically normal human being is a weak paradigm that people will promptly discard the moment it’s inconvenient. It is my emotional / aesthetic preference to dismiss such a paradigm as impotent and gay.

Fellas, is it gay to want to maximize utility?

Bismarck says that utilitarianism is a weak paradigm. This is very confused and indicative of not knowing what one is talking about. Utilitarianism is not a political platform so it does not need to be widely adopted. His description of it as weak shows this confusion. There are basically two conceptions of morality, and on neither conception does it make sense.

One conception is moral realist. On this view, utilitarian moral claims are objectively true. It really is true that you shouldn’t torture people. Calling a truth claim impotent and gay and weak because normal people don’t adopt is is obviously confused—you wouldn’t say that believing Goldbach’s conjecture is a “weak paradigm,” for instance.

A second conception is anti-realist. On this view, morality is basically a preference. You like chocolate, I like utility. Again, calling a preference weak is super confused. Oh, you like chocolate? Weak and gay!

(I also am opposed to using gay as a pejorative because I don’t think being gay is vicious, and I don’t think Bismarck does either?? So I think it’s just him being edgy again).

Fourth, Bismarck says:

Please understand this nuance: precisely nobody is advocating we straightforwardly derive an ought from an is (except for you when you incorrectly define moral standards as objectively binding yet “coming from nowhere,” which is patently absurd compared to my more robust and flexible meta-ethical intersubjectivism… but I digress).

Where, pray tell, does being a moral realist who doesn’t think the moral facts have a source mean one derives an ought from an is? If this were so, then a sizeable chunk of moral philosophers would have been making straightforward logical errors for decades!

Bismarck doesn’t do derive an ought from an is very blatantly—he doesn’t say things like “X descriptive claim is true, therefore it follows logically and inescapably that Y normative claim is true.” But he’ll make these weird descriptive claims about many utilitarians being nerds, and then act like he’s refuted the view!

(Also, Bismarck does not have anything approaching an argument for his more robust and flexible meta-ethical intersubjectivism, while I have spent many pages arguing for moral realism…but I digress).

I could keep going through the article and pointing out the other errors, but the basic point should be clear: Bismarck is profoundly confused about ethics, in each case in a way designed to sound maximally edgy, in no case in a way that makes a convincing point.

2 Why is Bismarck right-wing?

Walt has an article where he explains why he’s right-wing. I think the article demonstrates Walt’s totally incorrect approach to politics where he cares a lot more about vibes, with occasional arguments as a relish to put on top of his emotional screed. If I were asked to explain why I’m left-wing, I’d say something like the following:

I’m left-wing because I think the left generally has better policies. I, like the left, support defending Ukraine, immigration, a foreign policy that has values, a decently robust welfare state, and so on. I think the current Republican party has a deleterious effect on institutions and am alarmed by Trump’s clear attempt to overturn the election. I also think Democrats are generally more stable, and thus better at reducing existential risks.

Walt begins his piece by talking about hierarchy being good and inevitable and talks later about how “Individual vitality requires pain and struggle.” This is all very abstract and indicative, I think, of Walt’s tendency to focus more on these sort of abstract notions than on very specific policies. After waxing poetically about hierarchy for a bunch of paragraphs, Walt says:

For instance, I know a girl in her early twenties who made $70k last year cleaning houses and dogsitting for rich people. Anyone who wants to increase her taxes is eternally my enemy. This is a chubby Mexican girl who definitely wasn’t coasting off her looks, and she probably has a 104 IQ. If you can’t achieve that what’s your excuse?

But the viability of that will no doubt depend on where one is. I know some people who work full time cleaning houses and are struggling to get by. Furthermore, as Bruenig notes, the Build Back Better bill passed by Biden benefitted “Children, individuals out of work for caregiving or medical reasons (paid leave), and the disabled.” So for that reason, I am broadly supportive of something like a universal basic income—I think that, because wealth has declining marginal utility, giving money to low-income people is generally good.

Though this is at the very bottom of my political priorities. I care a lot more about stopping the government’s egregious violations of the rights of many millions of people and potentially stifling the industry that might kill factory farming, the worst thing ever. Walt seems to care more about these abstract notions about hierarchy than about actual policy.

In his article criticizing my article on slave morality, Walt accused me of being more interested in abstraction and moral philosophy than actually having a successful political coalition. Now, this is true—I’m not trying to launch a political coalition. But Walt’s political views seem mostly about abstraction and moral philosophy, rather than actually getting good stuff done.

Walt discusses his support for big aspirational civilizational projects so that we can do cool things like colonizing Mars, rather than bad things like checking Twitter. He writes:

Let’s get society maniacally addicted to doing big and bold and impressive things. Space colonization is an obvious candidate, but fuck it, let’s also terraform Antarctica and the Australian outback. Lets build a bunch of mile-high skyscrapers. We need to go balls to the wall and give everyone a reason to be excited and try hard again.

Now, I agree that vibes-wise, the right is much more about big aspirational projects. But policy-wise, it’s the left that’s much more about those projects (Trump cut NASA’s budget, for instance, and Biden grew it). Furthermore, I think that Biden is way better than Trump on existential risks, being much better at working internationally to reduce nuclear risks and safely regulate AI. If what you care about is having a party that’s performatively tough and interested in grand projects, then be a Republican. But if you care about actually having those projects, then you should be a Democrat.

The rest of Bismarck’s post is philosophical—it focuses on the different outlooks of Democrats and Republicans rather than policy. But if you’re deciding which political party you’re going to be part of rather than which country club to join, then rather than focusing on philosophy, you should focus on the things the parties actually do.