[sullyj3]

What you're gesturing at is that it's illogical to make value judgements, period, without a standard that your object of interest is being judged against. This fact, which is blatantly obvious once pointed out, is obscured by the shortcomings of our language.

Usually the standard is implicit, but obvious from context, for instance if we were talking about racing, we could say that a Mclaren is better than a Volkwagen, and elide that we mean "better at moving quickly around a racetrack".

It certainly makes sense to judge cultures, as long as you remember to have a standard in mind. For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

The fact that different cultures value different things shouldn't be a problem for discourse, as long as your interlocutors have values in common. Lack of objective truth about values shouldn't prevent one from working towards the values that they personally hold.

Relativism isn't (or at least shouldn't be) "there's no objective truth about values, so therefore every value system should be treated as equally valid". That would be an objective normative claim, and making it would be inconsistent with relativism. Relativism is just "there's no objective truth about values", and it stops there. Nothing about that prevents you from preferring your own values to those of others.

[leohutson]

> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

But it might be hard to convince a 1850s white American to adopt that standard.

It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter.

Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.

All you need to decide is if the other culture is similar enough to tolerate it.

[sullyj3]

> Any culture that isn't similar your culture is by definition inferior when held to your cultural standards, so there is no reason to do so.

Ok, so, suppose we met a culture that thought it was a good thing to burn children alive as sacrifices to Moloch. Would you say, "Hey let them do their thing, all cultural practices are equally valid", or would you say "I'm going to try to prevent this from happening, even though my belief that the practice is wrong is due to my particular cultural upbringing"?

I'm assuming the second one. So doesn't that constitute an act of holding another culture to your own cultural standards? And here, the point is to save lives.

Again, to reiterate, just because different cultures value different things, and the question of which value system is "correct" is not really coherent, does not prevent me from condemning practices from within my own cultural framework, and having good reasons to do so.

[interfixus]

> It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter

Which definition would that be?

[leohutson]

I can't respond to your other question, but the particular value we were discussing was this:

> For instance, by the standard of the general wellbeing of African Americans, it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s.

Shouldn't really be controversial, but America is going through a regression right now so who knows..

[interfixus]

Being Scandinavian, I do not really partake of whichever American regressions you may be thinking of.

I most certainly admire and find inspirational a lot of the values that built the US from the ground up. Hard work, frugality, dedication, diligence, and self-reliance, to name a few of the qualities that not least Northern Europeans brought to the expanding frontier.

Nor did they particularly hold with the slavery ways of the South.

Also, you may recall, there was a war fought over that issue.

[leohutson]

How is that relevant to what was being discussed earlier in the thread? It was merely an example.

That you share some values with a historical culture is hardly important information, if you look hard enough you can probably find something you like in all cultures, historical and present day.

[interfixus]

> It's tautological to say that as by definition 1850s white Americans culture is extremely distasteful to a modern HN commenter

Weak tautology, then. And a squishy definition. 1850s white Americans' culture by and large is not distasteful to me.

You may of course invoke 'modern' and a No True Scotsman line of argument.

[leohutson]

We'll perhaps there are some HN commenters that have those values, but I hope not!

But 1850's American culture is distasteful to me and also to sullyj3 as they say:

"it's manifestly obvious that modern American culture is superior to American culture of the 1850s"

[interfixus]

What are "those values"?

[khedoros1]

There was an assumption of the inequality of the races and acceptance of slavery on that basis. That's probably what was meant by "those values".

For the regressions, and continuing with my previous assumption: President Trump has been soft on some of the white supremacist groups, for example, being slow to disavow the support of those groups' leaders. This has emboldened some racists to be bolder. Previously, in places like California, racism almost seemed like a thing of a bygone era (at least, it wasn't as overt).

[xelxebar]

Even more concretely, the terms better and worse are only capable of encoding relative positions on a linear scale.

I find it instructive to look for those scales directly--e.g. rates of violent crime, GDP, life expectancy, etc. This also makes it more natural to recognize specific problems with such linear reductions.

[leohutson]

All those scales are valued differently by different cultures.

If I show a conservative American gun crime statistics that we agree on and we agree that are caused by American gun culture, I cannot tell them that American gun culture is inferior, because I just get back "Thats the price of freedom!"

Life expectancy, "It's not the years in your life but the life in your years!"

GDP is the most hilarious one, because it's not even per-capita. Assuming that its a high median per capita GDP: "That's materialistic! We're much happier than those greedy capitalists"

[xelxebar]

This is a good point. Any particular statistic probably doesn't capture the nuances of human values. I think statistics are quite useful though, since they make it easier to differentiate between "facts we can share" and "personal values".

In my experience, a lot of disagreement gets chocked up to opinion differences when in fact it's mainly a failure to unpack beliefs into sets of values and facts.

I like to distinguish between so called "terminal values" which are things we intrisically care about, versus "intermediate values" which are things that matter to us for their external effects. For example, I think the internet is good because of the communications it facilitates. If it did the opposite, I'd probably feel oppositely as well, so my feelings on the internet are an intermediate value. On the other hand, I probably value my mom intrinsically.

Of course, we could further unpack that. Are my feelings on "facile communication" terminal or intermediate? My mental image here is of a sort of a branching set of trees, a forest, of values where the root nodes are our terminal values and the intervening nodes are our intermediate values.

I doubt that we humans actually differ all that much on terminal values. If we take this stance axiomatically, it certainly makes a lot of sense to deconstruct intermediate values into the causal links they're composed of, i.e. facts and statistics.

[kazagistar]

I'm not sure it's so easy to differentiate, since terminal values are feelings, wishy washy and prone to contradicting each other. I would say that any terminal value can become an intermediate value when you find a contradiction between it and other terminal values. Then, you either find a way to rationalize, ignore the problem, or discover a new terminal value to make the choice and downgrade one of your terminal values to an intermediate, conditional one.

Nonetheless, it's a very useful lens. Take property: many people consider it to be terminal, but I have always seen it as intermediate, a useful tool for accomplishing good things as a society, but not some sacred absolute.

[adrianN]

There are attempts to measure "happiness". They surely have their own problems, but if we could measure that relatively objectively it seems to me that "average happiness" would be a good starting point to use to compare different cultures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report