[hnthrowaway6543]

> But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.

the current conflict in the middle east shows why this doesn't work in the long run.

despite what a generation that grew up consuming Marvel films was led to believe, not every conflict is a clearly defined superhero-vs-supervillain, good-vs-evil affair. eventually, you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.

[beardedwizard]

Very underrated comment. Right and wrong are largely a function of culture, not universal law.

[sbarre]

I dunno man.. When someone advocates for treating another person as "not human" or wants to deny them basic human rights, that's universally wrong in my book.

[nathan_compton]

I think talking about whether it is universally wrong or not is a distraction. It is sufficient to simply _not like it_ without having to get the universe (which almost certainly doesn't care, at least not enough to step in and do something about it) involved.

Personally, I am a moral skeptic - I don't really believe that moral truths exist in the same way that physical truths exist. For me, the only questions are what kind of world do I want to live and and what power do I have to make the world that way?

[yread]

dehumanization of the other side is one of the most used tools of war propaganda of all sides. Just look at people in the west joking about orcs

[gedpeck]

But if someone acts inhuman then it’s justified. Russia’s war crimes are well documented and they started the war. When you are the baddies then expect to be called so.

[foxglacier]

You're still in the goodies-vs-baddies mindset. Western media pushes people into that way of thinking but it's the Marvel level view and is wrong. Also, look at all the people who think Russia is the baddies for starting that war, but Israel is the baddies despite not starting its war. That's an arbitrary standard people invented to justify their simply goodie-baddie view. If you apply a different standard to every war, then it's not really a standard, is it?

[gedpeck]

It’s mostly about willful acts of violence against innocents. This might be a nuance that is too subtle though. Bad acts and bad actors should be called out. Russia is the bad actor in the Ukrainian invasion. Hamas and IDF are bad actors in their conflict.

[yread]

Wait are we still in the thread discussing that it's childish to call one side baddies?

[gedpeck]

It’s not childish to call bad people bad.

[kelnos]

But that's still too simplistic. It's certainly not fair to say that every single Russian (or non-Russian!) soldier who is or has been in Ukraine is a "baddie". Some are trapped by their circumstances to fight in a war they don't believe in and don't agree with.

It's easy to say, "well then they should refuse to fight", but you are not that person, and you don't know their struggles or what they feel they are capable of doing.

I think it's reasonable to say that Putin and his war-mongering crones are baddies, but you just said "Russia" and "they started the war". Lumping all people together like that is how we dehumanize people and fail to find common ground that can improve everyone's situation.

[nradov]

OK, but in practice what sort of common ground do you think we can find here? Because it sure seems like the only possible solution is to give Ukraine enough advanced weapons to exterminate all the orcs. If you have a feasible alternative then I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. The real world is an ugly place and sometimes there is no win-win solution.

[valval]

The actual situation is way more complex still than you claim. You take this weird stance where the Russian heads of state are evil, Ukrainian/US/NATO heads of state are not, Russian soldiers might or might not be, and Ukrainian soldiers are not.

In reality, the invasion phase of the war is justified from the Russian point of view, so their heads of state and soldiers are in the right. Same goes for western heads of state and soldiers. Me and you both live in the west and therefore have our own perspective on the war. People in BRICS states have their own perspective (that I’m quite familiar with due to having actually spent the effort on reading, unlike 99% of western commentators on this war).

Besides, don’t feel bad for Russian soldiers for being victims of the circumstances. Ukraine has been snatching people off the streets against their will for the past months and dropping them on the frontlines. This is happening in the majority Russian speaking cities and towns, not majority Ukrainian ones.

[beardedwizard]

I won't argue that, but there are cultures out there that disagree - so how can it be universal?

[sbarre]

I see lots of people getting hung up on the word "universally" so maybe that was the wrong choice (and also the least relevant part of my sentence but whatever).

I should have just said "wrong", plain and simple.

[j2kun]

What "culture" says it's okay to treat humans as if they are animals?

[ModernMech]

MAGA culture. Often frames people they don't like as "vermin", and it sets up a permission structure to cause violence against them by labeling them as diseased or inherently criminal.

[beardedwizard]

Whoever it is you think is out there doing it and promoting it. That's why we have phrases like "a culture of harassment", "a culture if lies", etc.

The point is things that appear as universal absolutes are not the same for everyone.

[Wolfenstein98k]

You're already doing it.

There are legitimate arguments on both sides of these issues.

Couching the Outgroup's opinion on X as "erasing" or "killing" or "dehumanising" just precludes understanding.

Religious conservatives do this with abortion for instance. Is it constructive to say that Freedom of Choice advocates actually "support murdering babies"? Does it help, or is it just in-group signalling?

[gopher_space]

> Right and wrong are largely a function of culture, not universal law.

Sure, but then you're handwaving away questions about why cultures align along similar axioms.

[hnthrowaway6543]

[flagged]

[gedpeck]

according to gedpeck, nearly everyone in Africa and Asia, and every single practicing Muslim, is a horrible person...

I said no such thing.

[mantas]

Do they? Different cultures have widely different axioms. E.g. compare Islam and Christianity. Not to begin with cultures far away geographically from each other.

[gedpeck]

Most definitely. Each person decides for themselves where the lines are drawn.

[jrflowers]

It only “doesn’t work” if your goal is to appear morally impeccable to everyone.

If instead of this worrying you

> you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.

you have a set of morals that centers something more or different than theoretical other people’s opinions, your example of the current “conflict in the Middle East” is still a good example just not for the reason you stated. It is a perfectly valid ethical position to think that genocide is bad and that people that advocate for genocide are also bad. To pivot to “actually the Really Bad Thing would be if you said that and someone somewhere disagreed with you” is weird and hollow.

“The truly wise know that everything is morally equivalent, except for the pursuit of unbounded approval which is Good for some reason, and believing otherwise is the same thing as getting your morals from comic book movies” isn’t a coherent or defensible moral position. The Marvel movie comparison is a thought terminating cliche.

[foxglacier]

[flagged]

[jrflowers]

[flagged]

[KPGv2]

> There is no ethical requirement, upon seeing something happen in the real world, to entertain a series of hypotheticals so tedious and exhaustive that you have to throw your hands up and declare all things to be equally good and bad. That’s a weird habit!

Yeah, and this is the crux of many philosophies, most notably small-l libertarianism, where it seems like the chief appeal is that it's a simple set of axioms that can be followed to their logical conclusions for any moral question with minimal thought and maximal aesthetic "symmetry" and therefore beauty. It's easy to reason about, and therefore it's good.

It extends quite trivially from that to the so-called effective altruism, which relies on a fundamental assumption that a unit of good done to strangers on the other side of the globe is morally equivalent to a unit of good done to your neighbors. It's beautiful and therefore it's good.

It's the moral equivalent of imagining a spherical cow.

Morality is what you do in practice, not what you invent in your head. Treating him only as a literary figure, the reason Jesus is appealing to so many is not because he said "do unto others" and stopped. It's because he actually fed the poor, advocated for social justice, lifted up the injured, spoke truth to power, and gave his life for others.

[foxglacier]

No it's because genocide is too simple and poorly defined a concept to apply appropriately to every situation. It's just the result of people trying to generalize from a few specific events that happened in the past which they already decided were bad for some other reason and ended up creating the label genocide to describe them.

Look at the disagreement people have over whether Israel or Hamas committed genocide in this current war. People can't even agree on the meaning of the word as it applies there. It's a novel situation that doesn't fit the mold of what this word was invented for. Are civilians really civilians if they're complicit in the fighting as in Gaza? Are they really civilians if they've done or are still doing compulsory military service as in Israel? It's just an attempt to draw a line in the sand so people will agree what's bad.

[KPGv2]

> People can't even agree on the meaning of the word as it applies there.

The fact that your average Joe can't explain it is as material as your average Joe being unable to write a Bash script is to computer science not being a real thing.

Essentially everyone on Earth except Israelis and religious sycophants agree what Israel has done is genocide. It is ludicrous to suggest Hamas has conducted a genocide against Israel because then you'd have to say that slaves in the US conducted a genocide against slave owners.