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Well, for one thing, nothing is objectively good or bad. Value judgments come from people, and people have widely varying perspectives. For another, the reason
by exolymph 9y ago
Well, for one thing, nothing is objectively good or bad. Value judgments come from people, and people have widely varying perspectives.
For another, the reason there's no mass exodus from Facebook is that Facebook users do not perceive the company as harming them. They perceive it as a useful service for staying in touch with friends and family. The utility it provides outweighs privacy concerns, because most people do not care about digital privacy. They care that no one is watching them go to the bathroom or have sex, but they do not care whether advertisers can target them based on aggregated information.
- Domenic_S 9y ago> nothing is objectively good or bad Just pointing out that this assertion is unjustifiably presented as fact.
- dorgo 9y agocan you expand on this? How is good or bad not subjective?
- Domenic_S 9y agoI'm not really interested in expanding directly, but if you're curious, answering that question is an entire field of study called ethics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics
- chillacy 9y agoMy understanding is that for the study of ethics, morality is absolute in that there is an absolute answer, even if we don't know what that answer is. If there were no absolute answer, then ethics as a field can't exist. But that seems a bit tautological to me. Moral absolutism stood on more solid ground at a time when the world was smaller and more religious.
- dorgo 9y agoThank you. Seems like you associate objectivity with popularity. Like in if all/most people consider something good/evil then it is objectively good/evil. I wasn't aware of this view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_and_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_and_evil "... and that what is truly good or evil can be determined by examining what is commonly considered to be evil amongst all humans."
- sireat 9y agoThis is a dicy ground to enter. As Voltaire said about God, same goes for absolute morals. They ought to exist because without absolutes society is liable to collapse. That does not mean that absolute morals exist just that we sort of pretend they do. Take any human behaviour and you will find pros and cons in the good/evil category. Liqueur/weed laws, sexuality laws, voting laws, slavery laws, etc etc etc. Extreme example. Bio-hackers release a virus which manages to kill the whole of humanity on Earth including themselves. Evil/bad absolutely? Certainly bad for humanity if there are humans left on other planets. But otherwise the question is meaningless to humans. All morals are localized to time/space.
- RikNieu 9y ago> nothing is objectively good or bad Really? Nothing?
- mafuy 8y agoIt is about taking responsibility. That it not hurt right now does not absolve us from that. As an example, look into how Nazi Germany and the GDR used collected data. That is the reason why Germany has very strict privacy laws nowadays. But people like to forget about this by now...