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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

> Morality is, unfortunately, subjective.

Genuine question: What do people who believe this use as their reason for refraining from harming others for personal gain? I understand that simple intuitive preferences against seeing others suffer will often work, but what do you do about instances where either the rewards of screwing someone over are very great or where your intuition tells you that you would get a lot of pleasure from seeing someone in pain?

I know that I don't really have anything to support my belief that there exists an objective morality which is hard-to-determine.

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"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." The Categorical Imperative and its weaker brethren like the Golden Rule are remarkably widespread.

> What do people who believe this use as their reason for refraining from harming others for personal gain?

This is an interesting and deep question! The game theory of life. I don't know the answer or if there is a clear answer, but I imagine there's generally a lot of risk involved in harming others for personal gain, and basic fear of individual or group retaliation (either mob or police) is a significant deterrent.

As I get older I've come to believe less and less that morality is subjective. I believe the NAP or non-aggression principle is as close to objective, universally-preferable morality as it gets. Certainly some people have other senses of morality, but they cannot be universally-preferable.

They don't mean "subjective" as in "determined by arbitrary selfish choice," they mean "not resolvable in objective, axiomatic, universal ways."

If you "believe" there's an objective morality, isn't that just another subjective position? You can't justify it, so why don't you abandon the notion and go with your selfish whims?

It's a flawed dichotomy. Morality is in your perception like how you know to respect other people's personal spheres. It's not based on rule based rationality or some axiomatic selfishness.

If you want to sleep well at night, you refrain from screwing people over in terrible ways. Probably you screw people over to the extent that you can get away with it in a moral-cultural sense, unless you're particularly saintly.

Recognizing that other people have different opinions than you doesn't stop you from preferring or advocating your own. Objective morality is nice to the extent that you can have an intellectual discussion and come to a resolution. More often you just fight it out.

Genuine answer: http://www.amazon.com/The-Virtue-Selfishness-Centennial-Edit...

Because people are not pure rational creatures. Most decisions are governed by emotion, and most people have empathy, so harming others directly is abhorrent. The rest is post-hoc justification.

Beauty is subjective, but that doesn't stop people in society from coalescing around norms.

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