Hacker News Reader

Comment by jshevek | Hacker News Reader

> Try not to shoehorn something that has no consensus into every legal issue.

Issues can be moral, legal, neither, and both. Presuming an issue is strictly legal can preemptively invalidate efforts to address moral aspects of the issue.

If the moral aspect of an issue has universal consensus, there is little to discuss. This criteria shuts down meaningful discussion of ethics.

Edit: Laws follow from values, especially in democracies. As values change, eventually laws change, including the constitution. The gp was raising ethical considerations for us to consider. To me it seems like you discount and trivialize these concerns.

View on HN

Okay fine.

The person I responded to made arguments that were primarily about hypothetical legal capabilities of western countries, in a bid to make us empathize on an ethical issue. Their argument failed because their analogies would have actually have to look at what legal route each country individually chose to accomplish their censorship. Which means looking at how Pakistan accomplished this censorship first. Pakistan has a constitution that supports this and requires the rulers to be arbiters of what is and isnt represented as muslim.

The reality then is that I did not comment on an ethical issue at all because my comment was not about that and won’t be, because there is no mystery about the legal authority of Pakistan to do that and the path to consensus of changing that is so high (big assumption that I would care to do so or care about that discussion) that it is far outside of the scope of this particular discussion.

Usually, the assertive arguments on non-technical ideas are difficult to address.

It's easy to identify the fundamental misconception in the argument. But the proponent is always very fervent on that point from the very beginning. That makes the debate more ideological and less rational.

That's the conundrum of such debates. The balance heavily favors the first one who claimed the high ground, regardless what value that one actually stands for.

Can you elaborate on this? I feel like I grok 55% of this, and that it is probably worth grokking, if I could get there.

So rational arguments have to be based on the foundation that either or both of the opposite sides can and should change thoughts based on the information exchanged during the conversation.

Assertive non technical argument usually is based certain belief(s), which are often obviously wrong outside it's narrow scope.

But these arguments are held by people actually believe in them with a conviction that is clearly based on emotions therefore by definition irrational.

So when someone engaged in such argument and tries to argue otherwise, the discussion has to be like try to mold a steel cylinder with a bear hand. Sure you can wear down a steel cylinder with bear hand, through enough patience and time. But in the span of a discussion, that's impossible.

Thus, the one who stick the steel cylinder first is bound to win, or at least not loose, for example, the counterpart decide to stick their own cylinder and 2 sides appear no longer engage, until the circumstance requires the clash or some random side wire that causes the clash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com