Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by icebraining 4112 days ago
How is that objective? Why is something bad if it decreases your pleasure?
1 comments

What other meaning could there possibly be for words like "bad" and "good"?
Really? Self-sacrifice and penance are almost the basis of one the most popular moral theories in the world. Just go ask the closest Christian you might have.
> Self-sacrifice and penance are almost the basis of one the most popular moral theories in the world

You can't make those objective, though. That is my point. (It's not like I haven't actually heard of Christian morality before.)

Ultimately, the only thing that actually matters for any living organism is pleasure. Thus, only pleasure, ultimately, can be good or bad for an organism.

I mean "pleasure" in the broadest possible sense, but it's always either a physical sensation or an emotion.

Ultimately, the only thing that actually matters for any living organism is pleasure.

How so? Why can't subjective things matter to a living organism? You're jumping some logical steps there, I think.

Subjective things can only truly matter if they bring pleasure or cause pain. So my point is still correct. (We need a definition of subjective, though, so this probably isn't clear.)

It's true that someone could subjectively think, mistakenly, that something matters, which doesn't. So someone could be wrong about what matters. e.g. Someone could think that God's approval matters, when in reality, only pleasure and pain matter for their own sake.

I think the point was that "pleasure == good" is not any more obvious/provably correct/well-defined than something like "duty == good".