This Christmas, give the gift of a blameless life to someone you love | Hacker News Reader

This Christmas, give the gift of a blameless life to someone you love

philosophersbeard.org

72 pointsnkurz42 comments

I genuinely can't tell whether this is a spoof, or is real.

If it's a spoof, I have to give credit: it is masterfully done. If it is real, then they should probably work a little harder on trying not to sound like a spoof.

It's a humor piece that attempts to get us to think about the issue. The quote is invented. The product is not real. But the ideas are -- hopefully -- thought provoking one.

EDIT. As user tremon noted, there is a word for this: the piece is satire.

Well said.

The CaaS (Confession as a Service) space is certainly heating up.

And no wonder. The Catholic Church has been giving absolution away for centuries, but what if you're not Catholic? Or what if you want a luxury/premium reconciliation experience, rather than the standard shuffle into a cramped, dark confessional booth on a Saturday afternoon?

The time is definitely ripe for disruption. Can't wait for the mobile app.

The presence of God's grace in the holy sacrament of Penance is what gives it a "luxury/premium" quality regardless of the physical environment. An app, which does not confer God's grace, can never be "luxury/premium" for this reason and can not "disrupt" the sacrament.

Parent is making a joke, but surely God can be present through an app, if he so chooses?

From the perspective of the Catholic faith, God can do whatever He pleases provided it's logical and consistent with His past promises. While God could decide to grant the pardon and grace of the sacrament through an app, the Church expects the Holy Spirit would inform us of such a decision. It also seems highly unlikely since it would be antithetical to the theological premise of Penance, in which the humility required to confess your sins directly to another human is central.

A list of ridiculous startup ideas I saw one day had "automated processing of confessional secrets" on it. I guess it's no longer ridiculous.

>The CaaS (Confession as a Service) space is certainly heating up.

This reminds me of a song by Momus which is about a "Catholic app", a smartphone app made by the Catholic Church to listen to prayers and confessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq7jg3OZc1g

There actually are a bunch of Catholic apps related to confession -- the most popular of which is http://www.littleiapps.com/confession/ -- but none is meant to take the place of the sacrament itself. They just walk you through the process of making a good confession.

I seriously disagree with this (assuming its not a joke, or that some people wont read it as such).

We live in an intensely interconnected world, and although its challenging to unpick those connections, to not do so is to become complicit in all manor of frankly very bad shit.

We only get to vote once every 4 or 5 years, but every time you spend (or earn) a dollar or pound, you are contributing to a system, you are channeling money in a particular direction.

Giant corporations have, without any need for anyone to plan it, slowly accumulated more and more power to themselves. e.g. check up on the series of judgements that were used to grant them personhood. They now stomp about the planet like huge immortal toddlers, with little oversight and not much in the way of conscience.

If you dont care, then fine. But if you do care dont let articles like this tell you not to bother.

And yes ethical consumption is complicated. A good starting point is to assume everything is tainted unless you know otherwise. And although none of the supposed 'good' ways are straightforward (there are complex arguments around Fair Trade, Organic etc), you should never let the perfect become the enemy of the good. That is, dont be pit off from trying to do one thing right just because you can't do everything right.

Buying stuff secondhand where possible is a good default position I find (although there are debates around that as well)

I would call it satire, i.e. putting a humourous spin on a serious subject. But I will respond to your post in a serious manner nonetheless.

Your second sentence perfectly illustrates the point the article is trying to make, that "the increasing moralisation of mundane choices is strongly associated with the phenomenology of interminable inescapable guilt". As the article argues, when we overload our moral judgements by making every single act a moral deliberation, one measurable effect will be an overall lessening of our moral convictions.

Yes, you only vote a few times every odd years. No, your tax dollars are not "channeled in a particular direction". Yes, business interests are still fundamentally at odds with environmental concerns. No, the few pennies you spend on products of a particular business do not affect the business' behaviour. The amount of moral deliberation that is reasonable to "demand" for such a simple act should be proportional to the ratio of your expenditure versus the entire business size.

> And yes ethical consumption is complicated. A good starting point is to assume everything is tainted unless you know otherwise

I don't think this is a useful starting point. If you start by assuming everything is tainted, you are already making a moral judgement about every purchase. Judgements and decisions cost mental energy, and we already know that mental energy is not infinite.

> That is, dont be pit off from trying to do one thing right just because you can't do everything right.

But that is exactly what's happening subconciously anyway: if we perceive (some of) our morals to be untenable (because of unrealistic demands, no way to actually make an impact, or general information/decision overload), that causes us to weaken all of our morals, even the ones we can affect.

Pick your battles, is what I'd take from this. And when evangelizing a cause, make sure the burden you're placing on others is realistic.

I'm not talking about tax dollars. I'm talking about peoples personal spending decisions.

No, the few pennies you spend on products of a particular business do not affect the business' behaviour.

Thats patently false. Its a small effect obviously, but its an effect. You could argue that recyling household waste is pointless from the same logic (and people do, I know)

Well, patently false... I think individual actions are negligible. In order to have an effect, you need a concerted effort from many people. I realise there's a chicken-and-egg problem here, because such efforts start with individual actions and need to gain critical mass from there.

I did not mean to say that such causes are futile. However, care should be taken that moral appeals are targeted and realistic, or they risk defeating both themself and other appeals.

> I would call it satire, i.e. putting a humourous spin on a serious subject.

Ah, right. That's what it's called. Thanks for reminding us all about a sadly underused word.

My sarcasm detector is hitting red here, but I'm glad to be of help :)

Nope, not sarcasm. I couldn't figure out what to call it. Then you reminded me. Thanks. Really. :-)

EDIT. We need a standard symbol for "I'm not being sarcastic". (Of course, then people may start using it sarcastically.)

Here's the problem I have with this (I probably haven't worked this out well enough in my mind to pursausively argue for it on the internet, but this is what goes through my mind every time I encounter this):

- (all/most/many/some/ at least a few) problems are best solved locally, by treating the people around you as well as you can

- you have the most control first over your own happiness, then over your immediate family's happiness, then over close families happiness ....... etc etc etc

- you have almost no control over someone's happiness on the other side of the planet

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look, I don't want some kid in Côte d'Ivoire to be a child slave, but I'm relatively sure my chocolate consumption is a tiny drop in that bucket (though just typing that out made me want to use less chocolate)

moreover, even if I stop using chocolate, his happiness is still far more dependent on the people local to him than it is to me

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anecdotally, strikes me that the people I know who love to get on their high horse about normal western consumer patterns, don't put that much thought into being fairly miserable to the people that they actually directly interact with (I'll concede that that's not a fair generalization)

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TLDR, it strikes me that treating people better that you actually interact with is the best way to make the world a better place

Indeed. What you're describing is the principle of moral proximity: the closer someone is to you, the greater your obligation to help them.

Its not that hard to do both.

A drop in a bucket is still a drop. And if there are many drops, and they start falling in a different bucket ...

> "check up on the series of judgements that were used to grant them personhood"

Corporate personhood is a centuries old idea, and an important one at that. The idea that it was created recently is false.

http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/alumni/uvalawyer/f11/person...

I never said it was recent. It was done in the last couple of centuries via a series of legal precedents. That is, no-one ever voted for it or legislated it. It was done bit by bit by various legal judgements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Historica...

After the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868, there was some question as to whether the Amendment applied to other than freed slaves, and whether its protections could be invoked by corporations and other organizations of persons ...

I agree with you.

What I see (in this article and many other similar statements) is the rationalization of being part of evil and then the next logical step, the rationalization of doing it without feeling guilty or bad. "I have to do evil because I need to eat" and then "I have to forgive myself for this, otherwise life's unbearable". There are people - me included - actively applying strategies to don't feel bad about being part of evil. So, we know this, and we're spending time thinking about this; how do we channel the energy to revert instead of keeping the system as is?

I'm confused by the people who are confused whether this is satire, but (like most good satire) it raises valid points.

Being "moral" in how we live our day-to-day lives is complicated, and it would be great if we could somehow offload some of that complexity. We already do this to an extent with organizations that track the effectiveness of various kinds of charitable giving- CharityWatch, for instance. Along the lines of the article, something that monitors your purchases and lets you know things like "that brand uses child labor, this alternative is okay" or "this meat was obtained with an estimated ecological impact of $1.0245/kg" would really be useful (if only in a "now I don't have to google everything to feel safe" sense.) There's a real-live potential blockbuster app in that (if only because, aside from everything else, it would have lots of interesting info about your purchasing habits...)

The guilt machine has gotten so efficient, indulgences are looking like a desirable possibility.

And why not? Catholic indulgences were about making God feel good about you. This is more about making you feel good about you, which is already a huge market.

Indulgences were always about making you feel good about you. The Catholic Church merely took some money for the privilege.

Related: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/oxfam-unwrapped already exists; http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/04/ethics-offsets/ explores some of the (creepy) implications of ethics offsets.

Honestly one of the biggest reasons I don't donate more is I fucking hate how much junk mail and spam I get as a result. Oxfam has been sending us two or three letters a month for years. I wish there was some way to anonymously donate to charities, so they wouldn't ever receive any contact information for me. Maybe send them paper cash in the mail or something......

I recommend networkforgood.org. They give you the choice of how much of your personal information to share with the receiving charity. Since my dad died I sometimes donate in his name to his favorite charity, and I don't have to give them so much as an email address. Network for Good has never spammed me, either.

Thank you for the recommendation, I will check it out.

Anonymous donating would be fantastic.

My wife has a direct debit for UNICEF which sends a few pounds their way each money.

Yet several times per year they write to her and ask her to increase her donation or give a top-up sum. The next time she receives one she will be phoning them to cancel.

I really don't understand the psychology of charities.

As far as I can tell, the simplest cases here are 100% legit.

Your link.

This was fantastic. These are the kinds of articles that I read HN for. Keep up the great work Internet!

John Stuart Mill's ghost high fives Jeremy Bentham's UC London corpse

Bypass all the middlemen, order now! http://reserveaspotinheaven.com/

So somebody figured out a startup idea from ancient Catholic policy? I'm actually quite amazed that somebody didn't think up the idea of a secular indulgence system before!

I sincerely hope this is a joke.

I've already purchased several indulgences from the church.

Fuck what Marten Luther had to say on this.... I'm all set!

He forgot to mention the unethical practice of extreme consumerism.

Great to read this here.

Unbelievable... I sincerely hope it's a joke.

"As part of our own commitment to making the world a better place 10% of our profits go to providing blankets, electronic journal access and dental insurance to unemployed moral philosophy phds."

I don't think so, this guys are here for real!

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