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It's just a very complex topic. IIRC, there's a user called ReallyNicole on AskPhilosophy, who specializes in Moral philosophy, and makes really good breakdowns about it periodically. Try to seek them out. As far as HN is concerned, though, I think you should focus on this statement by my parent: > Progress is just change that the writer agrees with.There is no objective morality and the ""long arch to justice" is just a random walk. I don't think this is a good comment, or good attitude to bring into political discussion. You may not be able to pin down the notion of "Love" or "Art" or even "Game" to a definition, but they are still "real" enough as far as Philosophical Realism is concerned (here is where Wittgenstein may be useful), to discuss. To make quippy comments about how "there is no progress" seems to me like a cheap argumentative ploy in favor of a "fuck you got mine" life philosophy. The idea that women's liberation and the abolishment of slavery are "arbitrarily" positive things, and that we may like them exactly as likely as we may not via some senseless quirk of history, seems pretty asinine and lazy. I am a scientist, and I feel like sciency analogies to philosophical concepts are almost always dodgy, but I will try anyway: To me, it seems similar on some level to say that, because the particles of gas in a room could be here, or could be there agglomerated on a corner, there is no meaningful way in which we can talk about the temperature of a room. Truth is, some combinations and permutations have been observed to be way more likely than others, way before we could meaningfully articulate the underlying mechanisms with anything rigorous. This doesn't mean that the radically opposite conclusion is true either. You could go all the way against "there's no arc of justice", and become a Fukuyamaist or a Spanish Inquisitor: "there is an arc of justice, and it bends towards this". This is not a necessary outcome of Moral Realism though. Moral realism, to me, basically seems to say, that ethics and morality is not a "nonsense" discussion topic (again: Wittgenstein). |
Its not exactly arbitrary, its more dependent on the current state of the world. Take the trolley problem, if killing one person would save billions does murder become moral?
Similarly, (and more contentiously) we might look at pre industrial agrarian societies as barbaric for favouring male children but when your society/family is absolutely dependent on human labour and men are capable of providing far more for roughly the same amount of resources consumed you can see how that moral position could emerge.
Were they fundamentally evil for holding it?
* http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd... is short story which also talks about this.