Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

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> One question you confront if you’re arguing for a single planetary moral philosophy: Which moral philosophy should we use?

The Golden Rule is practically universal. I'm surprised it doesn't get a mention. I'm partial to Hillel's version: "What is hateful to you, do not do to others—this is the whole of Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule

> It’s true that Greene is a utilitarian—believing (to oversimplify a bit) that what’s moral is what maximizes overall human happiness.

I prefer this formulation: what's moral is what minimizes overall human suffering, now and in the foreseeable future.

> The rift was mended by putting the boys in non-zero-sum situations—giving them a common peril, such as a disruption in the water supply, that they could best confront together.

It's tragic that Covid19 hasn't united us. How did we end up fighting over wearing masks? (This question is rhetorical.)

> Self-doubt can be the first step to moral improvement.

I mean yeah, but: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” — Bertrand Russell

This entire essay is premised on people wanting to get better. On having some degree of curiosity and willingness for self-examination. I don't see a lot of that in the world.

The idea that a universal moral system is preferable to a hierarchical or individually diversified one is itself a moral opinion which draws significantly from the Christian universalist conception of human value. That doesn’t make it right or wrong, but it certainly doesn’t make it culturally universal.

The reduction of suffering is also not a universal aspiration; many thinkers believe that meaningful suffering is desirable and necessary to form an identity and find meaning in the universe.

“Only the English [philosophers] want to be happy.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Personally I remain unconvinced that this drive to make everyone everywhere look, act, and think the same way is desirable or conducive to actual diversity. It mostly just makes the world less interesting; McDonalds and the western business suit replacing centuries of local cuisines and clothing. Solutions should instead focus on how to manage various ethical and cultural values under the banner of a secularized political state. Otherwise you’ll get secession and fracturing into smaller states, which are highly undesirable from a geopolitical perspective (see: Germany and Italy prior to their unifications in the 1800s.)

It's still possible to use decision theory and an utilitarian framework (and/or bounded rationality) to unify whatever two random people's morals happen to be. Sure, in theory people with infinite time on their hands will come to agreement about everything - Aumann's agreement theorem. But even if they don't, it doesn't matter, as they are still going to maximite their utility as best as they every point in time can, with all the complexities involved due to our neurobiology and path-dependence on personal experiences.

Now, that said, ignoring pathological cases (both abstract/hypothetical and real clinical - eg someone just on the verge of suicide) rational agents have instrumental goals, such as survival, gathering resources to be able to survive, keeping warm, but not too warm, etc. And this is where "the fun begins", or the complications. Because there are many possible strategies, just putting them on a predatory-cooperatory spectrum gives a sort of handle on them. (Obviously there are situations where otherwise even the most cooperative-minded person can end up selfish, and vice versa.)

And abstracting all this basically gets you Rawls' Theory of Justice, which says, that since you don't know what situations you can end up in (eg. you don't know if you get cancer in the next year or not), you should think through many situations and determine what would you prefer in them, and then try to find moral norms that are the most satisfiying in the most cases. (Eg. the most fair rules.)

Of course this is extremely handwavy, and naturally - as things in philosophy are rarely - the matter is not settled, but I think there there is a convincing argument to say that sentient minds can find a common moral ground, if they want to.

Diversity with ethical commitments to zero-oppression, avoiding arbitrary enforcement of power.. we do not need uniformity, only universality. To embrace suffering as meaningful is to extend suffering beyond the natural consequences domain into projecting it for power purposes/ control.

Suffering is not necessary, only useful to oppressors. Some suffering from learning is different from that being intentionally utilized for other purposes.

Without universality of commitment to reduction in suffering, there's "managed" suffering of some kind.

I think Nietzsche was a great man and not nearly as judgmental as he conducted himself. But I also believe the classical explanation that he had a problem with his mother and that is the reason why he had such strong expectations towards himself and others.

Nazis abused his writings but he wouldn't have like them of course. His dislike for christian morals is understandable because he saw them as a form of subjugation and contrary to emancipation. I think this grew to an unfortunate amount of hatred later on. He is partially correct as are the morals of Christianity in my opinion.

Well I only invoked the quote as a response to universalism, not necessarily as a reference to Nietzsche’s ideas in general.

But sure, I don’t agree with him on everything, and while I think his diagnosis of Christianity is in many ways correct, it also is flawed in others. Of course we have to differentiate between what Nietzsche actually wrote and what the popular culture notion of his ideas is.

Otherwise, I don’t think I’d agree that his high expectations come from a Freudian read of his childhood. For the most part they are pre-Socratic Ancient Greek cultural values, especially agon, which was a sort of competition.

Weird tendency in modern internet discourse of pseudo psychoanalyzing people in order to discredit them. Instead of say engaging in the discussion, talk about their ideas, etc.

We already have separate countries to contain conflicting cultures. Isn't that enough? They all want to impose their culture on each other but are held apart by the threat of war.

I suspect what the author is getting attempting to do is to get us to examine the criteria that determines suffering itself.

Some aspects are universal--hunger, pain, disease--but once those needs are met, emotional suffering becomes manifest to take it's place. And emotional suffering is subjective; I suffer because I lack the time to explore my true passions, my friend suffers because they are unable to form lasting relationships. Which of us is suffering more?

It's doubly tricky because the things that minimize physical suffering often aren't the best way to minimize emotional suffering. Eating fast food every day ensures you won't starve, and staying indoors ensures you'll never get sick, but you certainly won't be happy with that lifestyle.

I do agree that many people lack introspective tendencies that would lead them to becoming better people. I think that's partly because it's difficult to be introspective without context. If you don't expose yourself to points of view counter to your own, you will never know what views to self-examine. People tend to gravitate to echo chambers, it seems.

That's a good point about emotional suffering and I hadn't really thought of it. I was definitely thinking of the basic needs in Maslow's hierarchy.

Echo chambers are self-sorting into tribes, so I think the essay addresses that.

There's another point which is that self-examination is a form of critical thinking and people looking to maintain power in any given society often don't want a whole lot of self-examination and critical thought... that sort of thing could lead to revolution or is at least de-stabalizing. The essay mentions the gay marriage issue, but a few years later and in America we're now arguing about, for example, teaching a more wholistic view of America's history.

This is more of a side remark, not a direct reply to your comment.

I'm a utilitarian for general policy making, especially when statistical data is at play, but I cannot understand utilitarians who believe that all of morality should be utilitarian. Even elaborate versions are flawed, even e.g. Harsanyi's utilitarianism where you are supposed not to know who you are in society (similar to Rawl's "veil of ignorance" but formally worked out in his framework).

It's way too easy to find counter-examples that do not match our moral preconception and it takes a huge leap of faith to just ignore these. For example, it is easy to find real-world and fictitious scenarios in which utilitarianism would tell us to torture or murder someone, yet existing laws and traded morality strongly go against these recommendations.

Another huge problem is that utilitarians rarely take into account human agency, but we do that all the time in our lives. There is a gigantic difference between risking your own life and telling someone else to risk his or her life. Most utilitarians don't even try to model these differences, and I personally suspect that there could be an impossibility theorem hiding in versions of utilitarianism that attempt to take agency formally into account. (Not that I have investigated this in detail yet, it's just a hunch.)

The biggest flaw of utilitarianism is my view that it oversimplifies values. It is often based on the assumption of value monism but in reality we base our judgments on multiple value categories that are often in conflict with each other.

Related to that, all utilitarians I know of suggest compensatory decision methods but there are many good reasons why we should sometimes use noncompensatory outranking methods. The idea is crazy that you can murder someone as long as that allows you to give n people $1 each, yet it is implied by any compensatory value aggregation method.

Utilitarianism and its hard problem of not killing your grandmother if she isn't contributing anymore.

> I cannot understand utilitarians who believe that all of morality should be utilitarian

Nothing to understand in my opinion, they just haven't thought it through. Same thing can be applied to rationalists and romanticists. Doesn't apply to everyone of course.

But intrinsic to utilitarianism is always the question of who the recipient for this utility should be. And it quickly disintegrates before that question in my opinion.

> Utilitarianism and its hard problem of not killing your grandmother if she isn't contributing anymore.

Doesn't seem that hard. When I'm old and feeble I'll be totally relying on social systems to protect me (respect for property rights, policing, etc). Ergo, I should be working as hard as possible now to make the system robust such that people can't hurt the elderly. If they aren't safe, I will eventually be wiped out.

If I'm in a position where I can kill my mother to benefit myself, the rational lifetime-optimum response is to improve the system of policing and investigation so I couldn't possibly get away with it. This will inconvenience me now but secure my comfort in the future.

The Golden Rule is too simple to be universal.

We'd hate to be treated ourselves as we treat our kids, what helps someone could handicap others. We all have different modes of behaviour, included how we treat pain, harshness and transparency.

Empathy would be a facet among many others for any moral system.

I would add that the Golden Rule is more on a personal (one on one) level. For that I agree it is universal. For one vs a population / a community vs an individual it may not apply.

> We'd hate to be treated ourselves as we treat our kids

Sounds like people should treat their kids better

Left to their own devices they make some decisions that harm them. So you have to prevent them but they hate this at the time. What do you do?

The flaw with the golden rule is that what is hateful varies by person, and what people like also varies.

A better rule is to treat people like they want to be treated. But this rule also has issues with people wanting something that isn't healthy for them.

> I prefer this formulation: what's moral is what minimizes overall human suffering, now and in the foreseeable future.

Which makes some people arrive at antinatalism. Suffering is too subjective to be a useful metric.

> I prefer this formulation: what's moral is what minimizes overall human suffering, now and in the foreseeable future.

Isn't that easier to find loopholes we wouldn't like, such as exterminating all humans to prevent any future suffering? Or generally doing all sorts of killing of people who suffer.

I think this is a bit too extreme but it's not difficult to imagine a world where everyone is taking anti depressants and pain killers on a regular basis.

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