[lordnacho]

> The reasonable answer to where you draw the line is: when something is no longer compatible with your value system. And if that's not clear, the issue is that you haven't yet spent enough time defining your values. That's the thing to talk about, research, consider, ask advice on, etc. People having a solid, well-tested personal value system is critical to society's function, because that informs how groups of people like companies then operate, and so forth on up.

This sounds nice, but nobody has a clearly defined value system. Can you tell us what yours is?

Nobody can do that. At most people can write do is essays about why they decided one thing or another. If you ask them enough questions, you find contradictions.

I'm not trivializing what you're saying, either. I think you're onto a real human desire for consistency.

But if you read a bit about how people have thought about moral decisions, you find it's an endless rabbit hole. The history of moral thought doesn't have any conclusions. It's not like we can pick utilitarians and say "yep, that's the right one", because there are plenty of reasonable objections to any principle.

[barrkel]

That's a universal argument against having any morals. I wholly reject your apparent position. It is simply venal, wholly convenient for your own self-enrichment, damn the consequences - it's pretty much evil personified. You're a cog in a machine that runs on human suffering, and you're actively denying your culpability.

Yes indeed, we only find out where our line is when we consider problems in isolation. But just because you can only find out where the line is by poking out some other line and finding out where the two cross over, is no excuse not to define a line. It is absolutely not right.

[lordnacho]

You're beating a strawman here. I didn't say you can't make any moral judgements. Yeah, read it again.

I'm saying you can't expect people to have a "value system". It's just not a thing that someone other than a specialist would be able to enumerate.

> It is simply venal, wholly convenient for your own self-enrichment, damn the consequences - it's pretty much evil personified.

Well I hope that satisfies you to write. You, of course, had no skin in that game.

[unknownkadath]

Excellent point.

There is no excuse for any of us to behave like the moral equivalent of a paperclip maximizer.

[Ntrails]

> This sounds nice, but nobody has a clearly defined value system. Can you tell us what yours is?

Absolutes are generally horrific but without them it's impossible to codify any value system. With them you'll be driven to the edge of the line and asked how sure you are about it.

"Abortion is always wrong"

"what if doctors say the foetus has a 0% chance of being born alive and the mother has a 100% chance of dying without"

"Well, ok, maybe in that case"

"Ok, so the foetus is now 1% to survive and live for at most a year, and the mother 99% probability of death"

"Murder, abortion always wrong"

etc

[Faark]

There are no perfect value systems, yes. They are still great tools to prevent tragedy of the commons / prisoner dilemmas. And that's something we as a society must archive to thrive. An alternative is regulation, created by again some kind of value system like your utilitarians. I'd prefer not ending with a shitload of highly detailed regulation just because otherwise we'd fuck up the fabric society for personal gain. If there are effective alternatives in the first place...

[catholicworker]

There are consistent moral systems out there. Read Peter Maurin's http://www.easyessays.org/creating-problems/

[tomasien]

Demanding a bright line definition and rejecting any argument where one isn't provided is useless and unhelpful.