In defense of the rationalist bros

to discourage absurd debate is to discourage curiosity itself

Rationalists and objectivists tend to get a lot of hate. First, there are the causes they rally around that seem bizarre or are irrelevant to most people, especially to those whose empathy lies closer to home than where objectivist focus usually takes us, like malaria nets or the welfare of a subspecies of shrimp no one has heard of.

An amoral reality of the way we are

Then — what I am going to focus on here — there are the bizarre hypotheticals, debates about which will find their way into the far reaches of otherwise-unrelated Substack, Twitter, and beyond, baffling and grossing everyone out and causing waves of backlash to the mere act of asking the questions at all.

There are a number of more prominent philosophers and/or rationalists putting forth these questions or hypothetical moral dilemmas and thought experiments for public debate and who, as a result, attract the most hate. They also perform various stunts or agree to say silly things for their causes, which ironically enough end up sometimes quite literally being successful in helping advance their obscure cause.

A couple of the most controversial topics as of late include making AI child porn and, most recently, Hanania’s argument that more old men should date teenagers for the sake of possibly getting them pregnant and helping the fertility crisis, and that we should actively stigmatize dating women past peak fertility age.

The criticism to rationalist ideas, whether real or hypothetical, vary in specifics, but what they all share in common is a visceral disgust for the subject matter, and a desire to put a stop to such things being discussed in the public sphere out of a sense of decency.

Contra the Rationalist haters, I think their commitment to absurd debate is not only fine, but in fact an active public good in many cases. Even when the ideas most people find absurd are put forth seriously and not in the form of a hypothetical like Hanania’s most recent, it’s not useless for the public to assess, reassess, or even just reaffirm where they stand after reading another perspective on the topic. Knowing where you stand and being strong in your convictions is a virtue, and it’s a convenient symptom of a culture that encourages rigorous debate stemming from imagination and curiosity.

Encouraging the suppression of debate in this way, based primarily on the disgust response elicited, is the same impulse as managerial HR speech repression that stifles and “feminizes” speech not because they — like literally everything — are directly comparable, but because the end results of their utilization are similar: an effective suppression of open curiosity, and the suppression of the extremes of allowable speech leads to a fear of discovery and further truth:

The incentive for the diminution required in female space stems from competitive suppression. In groups, women default to this mode of speech, which purposely lacks substance, for that would require a hierarchy of ideas and would expose that some women are simply more intelligent than others. Denial of variance in intellect among women is also related to the denial of sex differences.

Both imagine the others' speech to be societally harmful, but don’t see — or acknowledge — the potential for negative consequences in their own. Both decide that the curiosity itself — about crime and IQ statistics, noticing controversial patterns, introducing the absurd hypotheticals — is the real problem. Both have decided it's necessary to shut down debate because of the offense — nay, disgust — the subject matter causes them, specifically, and demands their sensitivity be catered to by those less emotionally reactive to such topics who have no need for such guardrails and are perfectly capable of separating the entertaining from the acceptance of ideas, surprisingly forgetting that without anyone to stomach the most grotesque of humanity to investigate and learn about it, how will we protect ourselves from it at all?

We need defense of the debate itself without presumed attachment to the premises of them, which is the most frustrating aspect of the way the anti-rationalists argue: they think that to even propose such a hypothetical is evidence of a mental illness or other pathology and should not be taken seriously on those grounds alone, but I counter that even if the willingness to propose such an idea is evidence of mental illness or social pathology, so what? Why not ask these questions, expose them to sunlight? Why not inspire people to think about these questions that, no matter how unrealistic, may be mirrored or harkened back to in later days when some lesser, more routine moral dilemma arises? What are we still afraid of?

Yes, ew. Counterpoint: and?

We're not really arguing or mostly even disagreeing about whether or not any given idea is disgusting, but whether we should be asking if people think it is at all, and I say yes. Yes, of course we should ask the question if we want to ask the question. Of course we should encourage debate, especially in polarizing times, especially about unrealistic and far-fetched ideas which help us connect and determine our own limits both psychologically and philosophically, and ultimately, politically and personally.

A refusal to personally engage is one thing; a preference for or against a conversation topic is certainly normal and we all have an obvious right to talk, or not talk, about whatever we'd like. But to suggest we discourage open debate and encourage mockery of those who participate in it because it includes certain "icky" topics is to squash the very nature of curiosity itself. The society that can't stomach the grotesque eventually flattens the mundane, further narrowing the Overton Window.

More credence needs to be given to the reality that one can entertain an idea without endorsing it, and that it is, in fact, a virtue to be able to do so and not a sign of moral weakness. The ability to discern one's morality from the hypothetical is as human as it gets.

Aristotle didn’t actually say this, exactly, but the sentiment remains true