Nassim’s Sword of Social
Justice (aka D’Sousa’s Razor)
Identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in the Medium article: The Merchandising of Virtue" - May 27, 2017
"Kids with rich
parents talk about “white privilege” at such privileged colleges as Amherst –but in one instance, one of them could not answer D’Souza’s simple and logical suggestion: ‘Why
don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to a minority student who was next in line?’
Hence the principle:
If your private
life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private
life.
and
If your private actions do not generalise then you cannot have general ideas.
This is not strictly about ethics, but information transfer. If a car salesman tries to sell you a Detroit car while driving a Honda, he is signalling that it may have a problem."
The video Taleb is referencing is:
SO SATISFYING: Dinesh D'Souza absolutely shreds SJW over "white privilege" - Young
America's Foundation
Published 09
Jun 2018. Recorded at Amherst College.
If you hold an intellectual ideal, but your real world actions do not reflect or enforce this ideal. Then your actions cancel out this ideological stance. You cannot say to the
words "I am a
vegan" and claim the moral virtue for such an identity, but occasionally eat chicken. The act of eating the chicken cancels out any moral or ideological virtue or superiority claimed by being
vegan.
Student: "We have numbers that demonstrate precisely how much wealth was stolen, and that's money that in some way could be given back."
D'Sousa: "You're willing to have social
justice with other people's pay, but you're not willing to pay.
So that's the problem. And that's the problem with the progressivism that marches behind social
justice, while protecting its own privileges. You know, how you said, we all have to survive, really, you have to be at Amherst to survive?
You
don't have to be at Amherst to survive, you have to be at Amherst to benefit.
You have to be at Amherst because you're getting opportunities at this college that many other people are not getting.
So if you say you believe in equal opportunity, you're a hypocrite because you are taking advantage of opportunities unavailable to others. But for you this
hypocrisy is fully justified because you are militating on behalf of the poor. But if it's if you're against privilege - this college is privilege. So there's a glaring hypocrisy, and you will never turn your moral mirror on yourself to say, What am I doing about it?
That's my point. For you -
society should act before you do - to enforce your moral
code.”
____________
Person A: “I’m a
vegan but I occasionally have some chicken.”
Person B: “By the logic of Nassim's Sword of Social
Justice - the act of eating the chicken cancels out your
vegan claim, regardless of what you say about yourself.”
