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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

It's a classic example of where legality and morality aren't aligned

Back then it was perfectly aligned.

Homosexuality was seen as a perversion in the public eye.

Countless humans got their lives destroyed because of this perfectly normal variation of human sexuality, that's atrocious and so we should never forget what happened to Alan Turing because of essentially religious fundamentalism.

As a moral realist and liberal humanist, I agree, but the post highlights something important. Evil acts are often motivated by sincere moral systems. These people are mostly not sociopaths acting independent of a moral system. The feelings of moral disgust you feel towards their views are probably no different neurobiologically to the feelings of moral disgust they felt. This is important for us to recognize. Feelings of moral disgust should not be automatically given credence or respect just because they exist. We should also be careful and introspective of strongly held moral feelings that arise in ourselves.

I agree, but then what do you base a moral system on?

We should be introspective, and it helps, but it is far from being a solution. It is very difficult to get away from personal feels, or from you culture.

> I agree, but then what do you base a moral system on?

I've thought about this way more than I probably should. While I don't have any answers, I do think two very famous attempts are particularly worth studying (and IMHO, blending). Immanuel Kant's exploration, particularly his categorical imperative, and Jon Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism.

IMHO though, it's a very difficult task because we humans tend to base our moral judgments on our emotional reactions to things, and our reactions (such as disgust) are a complex combination of instinct from past evolution, and culture we are raised in. If the outcome from some system/principle disagrees with our emotional reaction, we tend to discard the system rather than examine and question our reactions. I actually find Robert Sapolsky's work (and others in that area) to be just as interesting/illuminating because while they don't provide answers themselves, they do a remarkable job helping us see the challenges involved with trusting our gut.

I think OP was talking about real morality, not perceived.

There's no such thing. All actions have consequences for other people, so any system of morality includes trade-offs where someone is disadvantaged for the sake of someone else.

What is real morality? How do you distinguish it from perceived morality?

There is no ultimate right or wrong, it's all perception.

I have written and deleted a few responses to this. Mostly because all of them turned out rageful, these kind of statements are in themselves harmful. If you only assign value to things which have inherent value then what's the point of society or civilization. Some things don't have to be laws of nature for us to treat them as such. If the only thing you recognize as valuable are things which are inherently valuable then none of any society works.

>If the only thing you recognize as valuable are things which are inherently valuable then none of any society works.

Moral and value are both subjective. I doubt there is a single value that all people share across the world and time. So it's always about perceived morality at a certain place and time.

> Homosexuality was seen as a perversion in the public eye.

Possibly, but the law was criminalising what happened in private. There's a big difference between prudish laws that ban public displays and intrusive laws that govern what consenting adults do in private.

We now recognize this of course, but I think the point being made above is that society at the time did not, and they thought they were acting morally.

Perhaps the lesson is that actions done out of a sense of moral righteousness should not be immune from challenge. Much evil is committed in the name of good.

Reminds me somewhat of this great C.S. Lewis observation:

> “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

This is exactly why I see virtually no difference between the desired tyrannies of the “woke” types today as compared to the religious right of the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the same shit with a slightly different script. That inherent desire to criminalize opinions and behaviors that might offend their chosen moralities whether or not it actually affects them individually or even others.

We're not on the good side of some clear morality dividing line. Plenty of consensual private actions are illegal today. The most obviously similar one is incest. But there's also consensual violence and euthanasia, as well as all the things you're not allowed to have on your computer, even if you created them yourself in some western countries.

People seem to thing us moderns are more moral but we're not really, we just changed our morals so other cultures look immoral in comparison - and we look immoral in comparison to them too.

Indeed. One of the most criminalized things today is taking any sort of drug (besides alcohol, and now cannabis in many places) even in the privacy of your own home where nobody else even has to know.

That’s arguably a fairly modern idea. Many western European countries had laws against homosexuality (generally ~dormant) until the 80s. Until 2003, 14 US states effectively criminalised male homosexuality; see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas

Lest you think this is totally confined to the past:

> In his concurring opinion [on Dobbs], Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, "In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. […]”

Those would be the court cases which legalised contraception, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage across the US. It would be a mistake to think of this sort of intrusive law as purely a thing of the past; the far-right will bring them back, given half a chance.

It's more a case of mainstream morality not aligning with ethics.

i’d like to add a counter point to your classification, respectfully: i felt like the comment implies that morality can be subjective (mainstream), but ethics is objective.

my point would be ethics is also subjective, and thus morality and ethics can be used interchangeably. in german, they are! (Ethik und Moral/Moralität)

My subjective definition of ethics is that they're objective :)

Of course if you define both words to be the same thing to the point where they're interchangeable then the meanings change, but that's not what those words mean to me. I don't define ethics to be a socially held belief.

What do words even mean?

Edit: I don't know why I'm arguing with you, I have no strongly held belief and don't care about this at all.

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