SanctusSalieri t1_j26o2r9 wrote on December 30, 2022 at 1:11 AM

Reply to comment by Cruciblelfg123 in How the concept: Banality of evil developed by Hanna Arendt can be applied to AI Ethics in order to understand the unintentional behaviour of machines that are intelligent but not conscious. by AndreasRaaskov

I explained that history as a profession emphasizes uniqueness due to it being an empirical discipline, and generational permutations of typical trends isn't a thing they do. That's not the same as incommensurability. It's fortunate that history has contingency and particularity, if we like the idea that things could be different than they are. But we don't focus on particularity because it's comforting, but because it's informative.

Cruciblelfg123 t1_j26puq9 wrote on December 30, 2022 at 1:24 AM

Are we in a disciplinary setting here? I can somewhat appreciate why history as a discipline would operate under such conditions because like you said it’s informative, but again it’s seems you’ve applied a pretty narrow group language to a general discussion and used it as an absolute rule.

My point being that fact that history as a study and discipline won’t bother drawing correlation between “typical trends” doesn’t mean there are none, it just means they aren’t worth secular study. Furthermore if you are going to state as fact that there is nothing the same between past acts and modern, and especially when it’s given such a wide berth saying they are “similar but one is clearly more extreme/heinous”, simply stating that historians don’t bother quantifying such a thing isn’t really an argument for it’s not existing

SanctusSalieri t1_j26qpbl wrote on December 30, 2022 at 1:30 AM

I specifically said you can compare, but the comparison made obfuscated both points of reference rather than illuminating anything. I became a historian because I'm convinced it's methodology is the correct one for precisely these kinds of questions.