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Comment by javanix | Hacker News Reader

Because ethics are to me something private. Whenever you use it as an argument for why somebody_else should do something, you're no longer being ethical, you're just being a sanctimonious dick-head.

For someone who is not a native English speaker, Linus really has an awesome way with words.

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At least it's clear what he's saying, but I was surprised at this -- it puts Linus well and truly in the postmodern camp. He says ethics are completely relative and personal. (Which of course is not the case: if I try to kill someone, the cops aren't being "sanctimonious dick-heads" when they stop me.) Anyway, all this is off topic, but I was just surprised at Linus's relativism when he seems so "absolutist" about many other things, for example, how much C++ sucks.

Edit: OTOH, Linus is talking in the context of software licenses -- I agree with him that it can get holier-than-thou the way some folks push the GPL (not least its original author).

To reiterate, even if murder is universally considered as being wrong, other issues such as property, copyright, profit and a lot of other things are treated extremely differently in different cultures.

So it's as easy to find something we all mostly agree on (murder) than something we all mostly disagree on (property).

Also taking the murder example is quite dishonest. Linus wasn't talking about murder issues. He was talking about intellectual property issues. Do you claim there is objective right and wrong in this domain ? Do you claim to know what it is ?

EDIT : Didn't see your edit, so correction about the "dishonest argument" part :)

He's a US citizen now so it's called targeted killing when it's not wrong :)

FWIW, even killing people is/was considered acceptable: if the victims have property X where X varies between having the wrong race, being the firs born girl, being physically impaired, being sentenced to death, being a sacrificial offer and plenty more.

He says ethics are completely relative and personal.

No. He did say ethics were personal but ethical relativism was not even hinted at. Those two ideas are not interchangeable.

He doesn't have a way with words unless "being rude" now means "having a way with words". Furthermore, his statement is logically incorrect (the best kind of incorrect): the sense of right and wrong is a general human trait, independent of race or culture. It can be altered by nurture, but it transcends it.

One can very well use it as an argument for why somebody else should or should not do something. e.g: One should not throw a hard-disk at Linus Torvalds because they might hurt him and that's just wrong...

> the sense of right and wrong is a general human trait, independent of race or culture.

If you're talking about the fact that every culture has notions of right and wrong, yeah sure.

If you're saying that what is right and what is wrong is universal and not cultural ... Well where to begin

Some of thoses traits are shared amongst most cultures (Murder is wrong, incest is wrong), but even there there are exceptions (ritual murder ?). For anything more complicated than that, this position is simply impossible to hold.

Most precisely, about property, intellectual or physical, and things like profit, the sense of right and wrong varies so wildly amongst cultures that i can't really think you're making this argument seriously.

I'm saying that the notions of right and wrong come firstly from our human nature, secondly from our society and so on. Last in this list is ethics as personal preference or "something private" as Linus likes to call it.

And even if it does vary wildly in current cultures, there is such a thing as a sense of morals that we can combine with rational thought to reach a fair solution. The fact that culture A considers ritual murder ok fails this morals + rational though test.

Even within a single culture, it varies widely. Just in the US, look at the opposing views toward capital punishment.

Well, by Linus' definition I would say this sort of attitude falls directly under "sanctimonious dick-head".

You are being downvoted only because you are criticizing the god-like-status Linus Torvalds.

No, he is being downvoted for calling people who disagree with the following logically incorrect: The sense of right and wrong is a general human trait, independent of race or culture. It can be altered by nurture, but it transcends it.

That sounds a lot like most theology I've heard, and I suspect that the HN crowd is not one that puts a whole lot of stock in theology.

If I understood right, he is just saying that moral capacity is innate. This seems to me pretty obvious.

"Dick" is a common nickname for people named "Richard". Considering who is most well known for making ethics arguments in the FLOSS world, could Linus be perpetrating a pun here?

Probably not.

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