Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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I think tax avoidance is morally justified. EDIT: Better phrasing - I think tax avoidance is not a moral problem. Laws are a moral problem, and tax avoidance is not against the law. /EDIT

The entity making the tax code (the government) and the entity that collects taxes (the government) are one in the same. If the government wants me, as an individual or business, to pay taxes at a certain rate X, they should write the tax code so that I need to pay taxes at X%.

I don't think it's anyone's moral responsibility to pay a certain percentage in taxes. From a moral perspective, people have different ideas about what percentage they should pay. If I'm a small business owner, I might believe that my contribution of providing employment to 50 people is enough, without having any moral obligation to pay taxes on top of that.

Or, I could be a hugely wealthy investment banker. I make $1mil a year. But I don't feel morally obligated to pay 30% in taxes because every year I give $300,000 dollars to charity instead. Or this one time I made a $500,000 endowment for the arts.

Taxes and morals are too separate to be linked so easily.

And I think that it is morally justified that I should be able to use roads, send my kids to school, and drink water that has been paid for by all those not smart enough or earn billions enough to avoid paying taxes. I think it is morally right that I shouldn't pay my fair share because I and my other well heeled chaps can lobby governments in some small country to pay 25 times less tax than others. I think it is morally right to do whatever I want as long as it is legal (in some country I can influence) regardless of how much it costs others. In short I think it is morally justified to be legally and unconscionably unfair to others.

Sir, in short, your moral arguments are non sequitur.

My point is that this isn't about morality. Taxes are not a moral problem. Tax evasion is a moral problem because breaking the law is a moral problem.

I don't think forcing people to pay any amount of money (taxes) is moral. Is it good for society? Yes. Is it moral? Who knows? How are you so easily making moral judgements when morality is so subjective?

I find the idea of forcing my morality on anyone else repugnant, except in the case where all parties have agreed to the moral code (laws).

I'll quote the first sentence from your post, "I think tax avoidance is morally justified."

But more broadly, laws are not always moral. If you equate laws with being moral (or equitable which is hopefully a subjunct matter), then personally I think your view of the world is far more black and white than reality.

In my view morality (and part of which is equality) should lead to legality not the other way around.

I don't think laws are moral. I think that, in a functioning democracy, laws are dictated by whatever views are currently held to be moral by the largest portion of participants in the democracy. Laws are what the largest proportion of people in a pure democracy have agreed is moral. If you think laws are consistently being put into place that don't reflect the morality of the populace, then you have an issue with your democracy, and that needs to be sorted out first.

I personally do not believe in objective morality. I'm not religious and without believing in a prime mover I think that's a very hard claim to make.

To not believe in objective morality, I'm assuming because you are not religious or maybe because it is too difficult to "pin down", to me seems to lack intellectual rigour and displays a lack of social empathy. Morality, even aside from the religious back and forth, is a difficult and nuanced subject but that is not to say that it lacks a strong core that most reasonable people believe in (even apart from religious beliefs). Organised social empathy, along with advanced intellect (the ability to conceptualise the subjective and objective aspects of morality), are probably the biggest fundamentals of human nature that separates us from other species on this planet. In my opinion giving those fundamentals short shrift only denigrates yourself.

Without a higher power you're left with diads that are impossible to resolve logically.

For example, "the ends justify the means" vs "the ends do not justify the means".

Two people can believe in some ultimate social good (your version of "objective morality"). That doesn't mean they'll get there in the same way (my version of "objective morality").

> I think that, in a functioning democracy, laws are dictated by whatever views are currently held to be moral by the largest portion of participants in the democracy.

Unfortunately, "participants" turns out to be decided by lobbying influence, not votes.

So yes, definitely an issue with this democracy.

> I personally do not believe in objective morality.

Then why is murder wrong?

Who says it's wrong?

If you truly question the morality of murder then it might not be far wrong to say that you are a sociopath.

If you don't question the morality of everything you haven't looked hard enough.

Most people who aren't murderers, and a few who are. Are you saying that murder is not wrong?

BTW, please don't troll. If you're just asking, "Who says murder is wrong?" to be rhetorical or make a point, don't. Instead, make your point explicitly in the first place, so that we can move forward in the discussion. I'm not interested in playing games, but I am interested in seriously discussing the topic.

So, either you think murder is wrong, or you don't--or you think that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, which boils down to isn't. So which is it?

Is killing in war murder? If not, why not?

Is killing in self-defense murder? If not why not?

If yes, how are they "objectively" wrong?

If you're a pacifist that believes all killing is wrong, fair enough. But that doesn't make your standards "objective". There are shades of grey to all morality, you pretending otherwise does you no service.

The same applies in this case. Having popular opinion on your side does not make your morality "objective". That's not how this works.

Yes, of course, the question is the definition of murder. How do you define it?

> There are shades of grey to all morality, you pretending otherwise does you no service.

I'm not pretending that. Please don't jump ahead in the discussion.

> Having popular opinion on your side does not make your morality "objective". That's not how this works.

Again, I haven't claimed this. It will be hard to discuss this if you ascribe to me positions I haven't taken.

  fastball - Who says [murder] is wrong?

  explainplease - Most people who aren't murderers, and a few who are. Are you saying that murder is not wrong?

I'm sorry if I took your response of "many people think this" as a serious response. You are not giving me much else to work with, I'm afraid. You have also failed to answer any of my subsequent questions about murder and killing. And if you can't answer my questions about murder, which apparently is such an easy moral issue for you, then how can you possibly think you have a handle on the nuance of taxation?

You're the one dodging questions here. You imply that you think murder isn't wrong, but you decline to define it. You raise strawman questions about "killing" when I specifically asked about murder.

It's very simple: do you think murder is wrong? Yes or no?

If your answer is yes, then we can talk about the definition of murder as opposed to war, justified homicide, etc.

If your answer is no, then we can talk about objective morality, and why it wouldn't be ok for me to kill you just because I feel like it--i.e. why there is objective morality, because if there isn't, then there is no moral reason for me not to kill you and take all your stuff whenever I feel like it.

> I'm sorry if I took your response of "many people think this" as a serious response. ... And if you can't answer my questions about murder, which apparently is such an easy moral issue for you.

You literally asked, "Who says murder is wrong?" I literally answered the question. Your question was obviously rhetorical, yet pointless, because you didn't make a point by asking it. So I then asked the relevant, next, serious question, to move the discussion forward. You then declined to answer it, instead making silly personal attacks, as if performing for an audience. Note, BTW, that I haven't said anything about taxation.

It seems to be you who is not interested in seriously discussing objective morality, yet it is you who raised the topic, and you obviously know that most people disagree. Therefore you seem to be trolling. A shame, because it could be an interesting conversation.

Please prove me wrong by taking the conversation seriously now.

My initial, poorly fleshed-out question was a measured response to your initial, poorly fleshed-out question. I was giving your question the response it deserved. If you wanted a more thoughtful response, you probably should've gone with something a bit more thoughtful than:

  "I don't believe in objective morality."

  "HA! WHAT ABOUT MURDER?! GOTCHA!"

What about murder? Explain, please. What about murder do you think so beautifully proves objective morality that you don't need to do anything except mention it? If anyone is trolling, if the burden of proof is on anyone, it's you. At the risk of "putting words in your mouth", you seem to be claiming that there is an objective morality. I am saying "I see no evidence to support that claim, and therefore reject it". My rejection does not then require evidence to support it.

If you really want me to spell it my thinking for you: I have no reason to believe in an objective morality, because the only things I think are objective in this universe are related to physical laws of nature, which happened by random chance. From there, I see no reason to link these physical and random laws with our human understanding of morality. If there was a prime mover that created these physical laws and ordered the universe, and was therefore "above" my conception of the universe, presumably any moral code this prime mover laid down would be "objective". However, I do not believe in such a being.

If you have a logical argument for objective morality without a higher power, lay it on me. But "what about murder?" is not an argument. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but just to be clear: plenty of people and cultures have felt morally comfortable with what you probably think of as murder. Please stop wasting our time if that's all you have.

Thank you, that is the kind of serious response I was hoping for (although a bit less snark would be nice, but, of course, without morality, what does it matter?).

I agree with you: without a higher power, there is no logical reason for objective morality. The closest that one may come is a purely utilitarian argument that society benefits as a whole if people refrain from actions such as murder, and that such societal benefits then pass to an individual who chooses to refrain from them. But, of course, that does not necessarily preclude an individual committing murder in a certain case if he calculates the benefit to himself to exceed that of refraining, if he thinks he can get away with it.

So, then, my question is this: if a person wants to commit murder for purely selfish reasons (e.g. revenge, financial, power, etc), would it be acceptable to you? If you were the only witness, would you turn him in and testify against him?

If there was only a single government in the world that would be true but really there are many governments making and collecting taxes, and their tax codes interact in unexpected ways. At this point I truly believe that it's not possible for a single government to unilaterally avoid such "optimizations" without some help from large multinational corporations leading the charge to coordinate tax codes across countries. I think letters like this are pressuring Apple, which has already claimed to be more morally inclined, to try to help in that effort.

You're not thinking simply enough. Watch - I'm going to write a tax code:

  If you are a business and sell a product or service in my country, you need to pay X% in taxes on that sale.

  If you live in my country, you need to pay Y% in income tax.

You get the idea. The issue isn't that making a loophole free tax code is super difficult. The issue is that every country thinks they can capture more mindshare/businesses/what have you if they have loopholes. The hard part isn't writing a tax code. The hard part is convincing all necessary parties in a democracy that it's good for them.

Ok great now I'm going toe the lines of the definitions of "sell", "product", and "service" to the point where even though in spirit the sales are all happening in your country, technically they aren't so you can't tax me for them. So again your country is fine if it's the only one in the world, but there only needs to be a single country in the world which lets me get away with fewer taxes and then I can avoid paying yours.

I agree that the hard part is coordination, but I stand by my belief that we will never see change on this issue unless a major multinational company decides to take it on for PR reasons. Which will only happen if there is pressure from the government, media and consumers.

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