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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

What is considered ethical or unethical always depends on who you ask.

Ask most slave owners a few hundred years ago if it was ethical to whip slaves (or even own slaves, for that matter) and you'll get one answer, but quite a different answer from the slaves themselves.

You'll get different answers to this question whether you ask it of employers or employees, capitalists, socialists, or communists, people who feel exploited or the exploiters themselves, and so on.

I'm not sure how much one could make out of such a survey other than on controversial issues there are great differences of opinion.

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You're right that ethical axioms are subjective. But most arguments tend to center around the application of those axioms . I often find that people are in complete agreement in their axioms, but come to different conclusions in real world scenarios - due to flaws in their reasoning or refusal to consistently apply their own reasoning for personal reasons (I know this is wrong, but I really want to do it).

Maybe so, but I don't think that accurately describes the groups the parent post listed.

It doesn't. Which is exactly why I brought it up. I don't think that the groups that the parent mentioned necessarily cover the variety of opinions that we're talking about in this specific case. I don't think foundational differences in ethics fully account for the disagreement that we're seeing here.

>due to flaws in their reasoning or refusal to consistently apply their own reasoning for personal reasons

That's not the entirety of it. The problem is that these ethical problems exist within a certain societal framework, and that framework is made of multiple overlapping assumptions, habits, traditions, and expectations, some of them contradictory. Two people's axioms might be identical, but they may come to two opposite conclusions over whether these identical axioms apply to a given situation based on how they each subjectively weight the assorted related circumstances. They'll BOTH claim that the other's bad conclusion is due to "flaws in their reasoning", and can still both have perfect internally consistent reasoning for their own conclusion. Ethics isn't physics. There often ISN'T a right or wrong answer, only a variation in assumptions.

I know that's not the entirety of it. But it accounts for far, far more ethical disagreements than people are willing to admit. I've had a lot of discussions with people around ethics and the use of logical fallacies really can't be understated.

> I often find that people are in complete agreement in their axioms, but come to different conclusions in real world scenarios - due to flaws in their reasoning or refusal to consistently apply their own reasoning for personal reasons

… or, less cynically, because there's no reason to expect informal, philosophical reasoning from not-necessarily-consistent axioms always to lead to the same result?

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