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I actually wrote up a detailed response to your original comment but you appear to not be arguing in good faith after the addition of your last 3 paragraphs. Cl

by dcow 4y ago

I actually wrote up a detailed response to your original comment but you appear to not be arguing in good faith after the addition of your last 3 paragraphs. Clearly you have no idea what I'm talking about or if you do you're not interested in a real rebuttal and have opted instead for the word soup let's feed it to GPT at best call it a fallacy but in reality just some lame snide attempt at internet points. All I'll say is this: I originally replied to sneak who rhetorically questioned whether illegal actions are always wrong. That's called moral relativism and I explained that when you live in a society your ethics are governed to some extent by your peers. So, while you can believe and in large part do whatever you want, illegal actions don't somehow become ethical because you found a few people who happen to be interested in challenging the moral framework behind the laws in question. I find it quite useless and unproductive to bring such a juvenile response to a serious discussion because it takes things to a place where you can just say whatever you want and be right, as evidenced by your inclusion of GPT-2.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
worik 4y ago
> rhetorically questioned whether illegal actions are always wrong. That's called moral relativism It could be called "moral relativism". But I do not think it really is. The moral content of my actions is entirely independent of the legality of my actions. There is correlation, a lot of bad things and few good things are illegal. But legality does not imply good and vise versa.
- dcow 4y ago
  I understand that. My argument is that, practically, we're talking about the past actions of a certain individual within a certain legal context on a social scale where societal justice has already been served so you necessarily have to tie the two together otherwise society falls apart. What DPR did is not allowed by the laws of the land in which he did it. Therefore it is logical to assert that his actions are unwanted in that society. It's a bad idea to do illegal things and get caught. The semantics of it doesn't change the principle.
  - sneak 4y ago
    > What DPR did is not allowed by the laws of the land in which he did it. Therefore it is logical to assert that his actions are unwanted in that society. I don't think that logically follows, either.
    - dcow 4y ago
      It does because he committed a crime and is rotting in jail. That’s literally what that means. You can disagree forever about whether you specifically would accept his actions in some ideal society in your head, but that doesn't change reality. Simply, nobody is discussing the your imagination.
      - sneak 4y ago
        > It does because he committed a crime and is rotting in jail. That’s literally what that means. The fact that he is in jail, or that it is a crime, does not confirm nor disconfirm that society considers his alleged actions unwanted; as the law is not a perfect or even approximate representation of society's preferences. All it tells you is that it's illegal. It doesn't tell you whether or not society considers it unwanted. They are not congruent. There are literally thousands upon thousands of US federal felonies that society has no opinion whatsoever on. Oftentimes laws are passed with the involvement of only a handful of members of society. They are largely disconnected from the wants and views of the wider world.
- kragen 4y ago
  BTW that account where you and I disagreed about whether they were trolling? They got banned for trolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049186
  - worik 4y ago
    Yes. I need to redefine my definition of trolling. I am too tolerant, and could be accused of it myself if my definition so far off. A learning experience
    - kragen 4y ago
      I think they were just doing a very good job of trolling, and they caught you. I was pretty unsure at first, too, because the exaggeration of sincere (but misguided) rhetoric was pretty subtle. In this case I don't think our interlocutor is trolling; they're just throwing out words and phrases they think are applause lights without much regard to what they actually mean, with the intent of sincerely signaling their emotions—political sloganeering as a prophylactic against rational thought. It can look like trolling because, as in trolling, the person is saying things that are false and even self-contradictory, and isn't concerned about this; but the motivation is different. Unfortunately my comment upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064946 seems to have gotten flagged by the sort of people who prefer political sloganeering to careful rational deconstruction of political sloganeering; perhaps if you think it's a useful contribution to the discussion you could "vouch" it?
kragen 4y ago
There is no plausible reason to believe I wasn't arguing in good faith, although I guess "you appear to not be arguing in good faith" is the sort of thing that people post on here, so you posted it anyway. As for whether I have any idea what you're talking about, I don't think that there is in fact a thing that you are talking about, so it would make no sense for me to know what it was. I think you're contradicting yourself in the same unselfconscious way as the neural network output (which, by the way, probably is not from GPT-2 any more). The standard definition of "moral relativism" is the belief that there is no absolute standard of morality, not the belief that the law is not an absolute standard of morality. There are merely descriptive, meta-ethical, and normative variants, but nobody has advanced any of them in this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism However, your idiosyncratic definition of "moral relativism" as "questioning whether illegal actions are always wrong" is, I suppose, satisfied! The belief in an absolute standard of morality usually entails that the law can come into conflict with it; the only way to avoid that is for the law to be the unique and only standard of morality. This entails, for example, that the act of making or repealing laws has no moral weight, except if you violate the proper parliamentary procedure in the process; even if the law you enact, for example, licenses you to confiscate the possessions of your political enemies and give them to your supporters. It also entails that, for example, if the law orders you to torture your mother to death when you reach 25 years old, it is moral for you to do it and immoral for you to refuse. I have never encountered anyone arguing seriously for such a standard. However, it would be possible for a sufficiently extreme moral relativist (in the standard sense, not your idiosyncratic definition) to argue that such a morality was valid or acceptable even if they did not themselves happen to hold it. In short, the only way to not be a "moral relativist" by your idiosyncratic definition is to be the most extremist sort of moral relativist by the standard definition. Any other person who engages in the smallest amount of moral reasoning will immediately see that in the world there are many sorts of laws: good laws, bad laws, laws that sink to the vilest depths of depravity; and, even if they believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law, even a bad law, they will easily see that in many cases disobedience to the law is the least wrong thing a person can do. Many other people believe that there is a moral obligation to obey some laws, but not others. For example, I believe that there is a law with heavy penalties that prohibits you from insulting the King of Thailand, whether or not you are in Thailand, and there are several similar laws in different countries that prohibit insulting one or another nobleman or religious leader, alive or dead. Very few people believe that there is a moral obligation to obey all of these laws, but wars have been fought over them; the Peace of Westphalia established an uneasy Schelling point that has held to some extent for some centuries. As another example, currently both the ROC and PRC claim sovereignty over Taiwan, and their laws impose conflicting obligations in many cases; for example, the ROC's laws require 4 months of military service in the ROC military of all men at the age of 18, while serving in the armed forces of the ROC is illegal under the PRC's laws. Very few people believe that there is a moral obligation for Taiwanese men to obey both of these conflicting laws, which is impossible. Other people believe that there is no fundamental moral obligation to obey any law, because governments are not the sort of thing to which moral obligations can exist, although of course they may consider it instrumentally useful to obey laws at times in pursuit of other ethical goals, such as preventing violence. Some of these people are moral relativists, but others believe in absolute standards of ethics, such as God, the welfare of all people, or the categorical imperative. As for people whose ethics are governed to some extent by their peers, I have a word for those people, which I'll include here since you've already launched into name-calling. I call them "unethical", or in more detail, "devoid of a moral compass".

by dcow 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

worik 4y ago

> rhetorically questioned whether illegal actions are always wrong. That's called moral relativism It could be called "moral relativism". But I do not think it really is. The moral content of my actions is entirely independent of the legality of my actions. There is correlation, a lot of bad things and few good things are illegal. But legality does not imply good and vise versa.

dcow 4y ago
I understand that. My argument is that, practically, we're talking about the past actions of a certain individual within a certain legal context on a social scale where societal justice has already been served so you necessarily have to tie the two together otherwise society falls apart. What DPR did is not allowed by the laws of the land in which he did it. Therefore it is logical to assert that his actions are unwanted in that society. It's a bad idea to do illegal things and get caught. The semantics of it doesn't change the principle.
- sneak 4y ago
  > What DPR did is not allowed by the laws of the land in which he did it. Therefore it is logical to assert that his actions are unwanted in that society. I don't think that logically follows, either.
  - dcow 4y ago
    It does because he committed a crime and is rotting in jail. That’s literally what that means. You can disagree forever about whether you specifically would accept his actions in some ideal society in your head, but that doesn't change reality. Simply, nobody is discussing the your imagination.
    - sneak 4y ago
      > It does because he committed a crime and is rotting in jail. That’s literally what that means. The fact that he is in jail, or that it is a crime, does not confirm nor disconfirm that society considers his alleged actions unwanted; as the law is not a perfect or even approximate representation of society's preferences. All it tells you is that it's illegal. It doesn't tell you whether or not society considers it unwanted. They are not congruent. There are literally thousands upon thousands of US federal felonies that society has no opinion whatsoever on. Oftentimes laws are passed with the involvement of only a handful of members of society. They are largely disconnected from the wants and views of the wider world.
kragen 4y ago
BTW that account where you and I disagreed about whether they were trolling? They got banned for trolling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049186
- worik 4y ago
  Yes. I need to redefine my definition of trolling. I am too tolerant, and could be accused of it myself if my definition so far off. A learning experience
  - kragen 4y ago
    I think they were just doing a very good job of trolling, and they caught you. I was pretty unsure at first, too, because the exaggeration of sincere (but misguided) rhetoric was pretty subtle. In this case I don't think our interlocutor is trolling; they're just throwing out words and phrases they think are applause lights without much regard to what they actually mean, with the intent of sincerely signaling their emotions—political sloganeering as a prophylactic against rational thought. It can look like trolling because, as in trolling, the person is saying things that are false and even self-contradictory, and isn't concerned about this; but the motivation is different. Unfortunately my comment upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32064946 seems to have gotten flagged by the sort of people who prefer political sloganeering to careful rational deconstruction of political sloganeering; perhaps if you think it's a useful contribution to the discussion you could "vouch" it?

kragen 4y ago

There is no plausible reason to believe I wasn't arguing in good faith, although I guess "you appear to not be arguing in good faith" is the sort of thing that people post on here, so you posted it anyway. As for whether I have any idea what you're talking about, I don't think that there is in fact a thing that you are talking about, so it would make no sense for me to know what it was. I think you're contradicting yourself in the same unselfconscious way as the neural network output (which, by the way, probably is not from GPT-2 any more). The standard definition of "moral relativism" is the belief that there is no absolute standard of morality, not the belief that the law is not an absolute standard of morality. There are merely descriptive, meta-ethical, and normative variants, but nobody has advanced any of them in this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism However, your idiosyncratic definition of "moral relativism" as "questioning whether illegal actions are always wrong" is, I suppose, satisfied! The belief in an absolute standard of morality usually entails that the law can come into conflict with it; the only way to avoid that is for the law to be the unique and only standard of morality. This entails, for example, that the act of making or repealing laws has no moral weight, except if you violate the proper parliamentary procedure in the process; even if the law you enact, for example, licenses you to confiscate the possessions of your political enemies and give them to your supporters. It also entails that, for example, if the law orders you to torture your mother to death when you reach 25 years old, it is moral for you to do it and immoral for you to refuse. I have never encountered anyone arguing seriously for such a standard. However, it would be possible for a sufficiently extreme moral relativist (in the standard sense, not your idiosyncratic definition) to argue that such a morality was valid or acceptable even if they did not themselves happen to hold it. In short, the only way to not be a "moral relativist" by your idiosyncratic definition is to be the most extremist sort of moral relativist by the standard definition. Any other person who engages in the smallest amount of moral reasoning will immediately see that in the world there are many sorts of laws: good laws, bad laws, laws that sink to the vilest depths of depravity; and, even if they believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law, even a bad law, they will easily see that in many cases disobedience to the law is the least wrong thing a person can do. Many other people believe that there is a moral obligation to obey some laws, but not others. For example, I believe that there is a law with heavy penalties that prohibits you from insulting the King of Thailand, whether or not you are in Thailand, and there are several similar laws in different countries that prohibit insulting one or another nobleman or religious leader, alive or dead. Very few people believe that there is a moral obligation to obey all of these laws, but wars have been fought over them; the Peace of Westphalia established an uneasy Schelling point that has held to some extent for some centuries. As another example, currently both the ROC and PRC claim sovereignty over Taiwan, and their laws impose conflicting obligations in many cases; for example, the ROC's laws require 4 months of military service in the ROC military of all men at the age of 18, while serving in the armed forces of the ROC is illegal under the PRC's laws. Very few people believe that there is a moral obligation for Taiwanese men to obey both of these conflicting laws, which is impossible. Other people believe that there is no fundamental moral obligation to obey any law, because governments are not the sort of thing to which moral obligations can exist, although of course they may consider it instrumentally useful to obey laws at times in pursuit of other ethical goals, such as preventing violence. Some of these people are moral relativists, but others believe in absolute standards of ethics, such as God, the welfare of all people, or the categorical imperative. As for people whose ethics are governed to some extent by their peers, I have a word for those people, which I'll include here since you've already launched into name-calling. I call them "unethical", or in more detail, "devoid of a moral compass".